Stretching Things

By -
I understand the urge to relate historical episodes to current events. But isn't calling the fight against the Barbary Pirates America's First War on Terror pushing the urge ludicrously far? Terrorists blow up symbolically important targets to try to change a government's policies. Pirates steal stuff from ships. Piracy is bad, and terrorism is bad, but that doesn't mean that they are the same thing!

Comments

  1. Anonymous12:36 PM

    Piracy is bad? Why?

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah12:42 PM

    How is one to respond to comments like the above?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous2:48 PM

    Well you've already repudiated trespassing as a crime, so I'm trying to figure out how you're picking and choosing what's bad and what's not. You're not using any standard anyone I know of has ever heard of, because that would constitute circular reasoning and question-begging. You're not just arbitrarily picking and choosing, because that would be non-scholarly.

    Maybe you're using Socrates' "Right Opinion".

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah3:49 PM

    "Well you've already repudiated trespassing as a crime, so I'm trying to figure out how you're picking and choosing what's bad and what's not."

    And just when did I do this repudiating?

    "You're not using any standard anyone I know of has ever heard of, because that would constitute circular reasoning and question-begging."

    Well, I suppose it is easier to deal with my remarks if you just make up your own version of them. But it's not very polite, is it?

    ReplyDelete
  5. TokyoTom4:24 AM

    Just a shallow effort to market to idiot neocons....

    ReplyDelete
  6. gcallah10:43 PM

    OK, ikilled007, you claim I said trespassing is no crime, and when I ask you where, you just disappear?

    ReplyDelete

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