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...
I think Sullivan is basically right, but (a) he should have provided links so we can make sure he's being accurate in his summaries and (b) the guy who proposed sending all the guys back to their country and then hitting them with a missile (I think it was Mark Steyn) was obviously kidding. I'm not saying Steyn would actually oppose that in reality, but in his article he was obviously kidding.
ReplyDeleteSo I wonder if NRO actually supported smearing fake menstrual blood on people's faces etc. as Sullivan claims.