Thieves and Killers

By -
In an effort to convince voters that they can kill just as well as the Republicans, Democrats hosted a we're-against-the-Bush-war-but-don't -get-us-wrong-we-aren't-going-to-pull-the-troops-out party. As usual, critics said that it's inappropriate to criticize the Pentagon in the midst of a war. (I think I'll write a whole article ranting about this...)

But here's a good line:

"Today's stunt may rile up the liberal base, but it won't kill a single terrorist or prevent a single attack," Sen. Mitch McConnell said.

I just love how the goal has been transformed--note Kerry's campaign promises--from defending America to killing terrorists. In the economic realm, it would be as silly as Teddy Kennedy saying, "These supply-side antics won't get a welfare check to a single unwed mother, or get a single household head a job."

(P.S. The more I think about it, the more analogous I think that example is.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more