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Equivocation

Equivocation exploits the ambiguity of language by changing the meaning of a word during the course of an argument and using the different meanings to support some conclusion. A word whose meaning is maintained throughout an argument is described as being used univocally. Consider the following argument: How can you be against faith when we take leaps of faith all the time, with friends and potential spouses and investments? Here, the meaning of the word “faith” is shifted from a spiritual belief in a creator to a risky undertaking.

A common invocation of this fallacy happens in discussions of science and religion, where the word “why” may be used in equivocal ways. In one context, it may be used as a word that seeks cause, which as it happens is the main driver of science, and in another it may be used as a word that seeks purpose and deals with morals and gaps, which science may well not have answers to. For example, one may argue: Science cannot tell us why things happen. Why do we exist? Why be moral? Thus, we need some other source to tell us why things happen.

(The illustration is based on an exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll'sThrough the Looking-Glass)

Street Justice

In a way, I don't like the fact that I still get a kind of zesty feeling inside when something like this happens.



There's an element of Instant Karma to it that I think is not completely unjustified.  I guess what I worry about is that people seem to take a small-ish incident like this one and then try to apply the principle to every situation.  Over time, we start to lose not only our sense of proportionality, but we get further and further away from the basic tenet of Due Process itself.

David Frum

Frum has been trying to pull his guys back from the brink. (and btw: that shouldn't make anybody think I consider him any kind of hero - he's not)

But when the guy gets one right (IMO), I think it's OK to say he got one right.

Mr Frum's tweets:

Today's Pix

Lying Liars

...and their doofus constituents - this is practically the very definition of Co-Enabling.

From The National Memo, via Little Green Footballs:

The deficit is down 37.6 percent for the first 10 months of the 2013 budget year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But a new survey conducted by Google at Paul Krugman’s request finds that more than 50 percent of Americans think it’s still growing.

Just another solid example of Deliberate Ignorance, fueled by the cynical manipulations of certain Coin-Operated Politicians who say they only want the very best for us - and have managed to convince significant numbers of people that volunteering to wear the shackles is what sets them free.

When almost 60% of us believe exactly the opposite of what is true; when the facts can be discovered by spending a lousy 90 seconds with Google; don't we have to think maybe there's something wrong?

St Ronnie Exposed(?)

Well, no - not really.  This is just a pic of Reagan meeting with some of our Mujahideen buddies in the 80s - way before a whole fuckload of 'em morphed into The Taliban and then re-morphed into al-Qaeda (which is bullshit of course, because these guys were assholes back then too; it's just that they were "our assholes" so we pretended they were cool).  But hey, geo-politics gets pretty weird and complicated.  Sometimes ya gotta sleep with dogs and deal with the fleas later.

So anyway, none of that matters because if Obama did this, we'd never hear the fucking end of it, now would we?

Are we beginning to understand why Obama never seems to have anything in the tool kit but bombs and drones?

Can we see now why Kerry and Obama made nice with Putin - because the Repubs are totally unreliable partners when it comes to...well, fuck; when it comes to anything?

Today's Eternal Sadness

Another white neighborhood, another white cop, and another dead black guy.

Addicting Info:

At this time there is no evidence to suggest that this was anything more than a terrible accident. However, once again it raises questions about racial attitudes in America. Jonathan Ferrell was black. From the information and photos available on the Bradfield Farms HOA’s website the community appears to be a middle class, mostly white neighborhood. Based on reports there is no evidence that Ferrell attempted to enter the residence of the woman who called police, or that he attempted to accost her in any way, yet apparently she did not try to communicate with him, even through a locked door. Instead she hit her “panic alarm” and called police. Just as George Zimmerman decided that Trayvon Martin was out of place in the community where he was killed, could both the woman and the police officers have assumed that Ferrell was “up to no good” because he was “out-of-place?”

As the Trayvon Martin case proved, the media created myth of the criminal young black man is alive and well in supposedly “post-racial” America. While we will never know for sure, there is a good chance that had Jonathan Ferrell been white, he would still be alive.

Yesterday's History

Think IEDs and Ethnic/Sectarian Violence are either new or somehow run contrary to our glorious American heritage?  Think again.

Wikipedia:

In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton,[1] Herman Frank Cash, and Robert Chambliss, members of United Klans of America, aKu Klux Klan group, planted a box of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the church, near the basement.[2] At about 10:22 a.m., twenty-six children were walking into the basement assembly room to prepare for the sermon entitled “The Love That Forgives,” when the bomb exploded.[3][4] Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14), were killed in the attack,[5] and 22 additional people were injured, one of whom was Addie Mae Collins' younger sister, Sarah.[6] The explosion blew a hole in the church's rear wall, destroyed the back steps and all but one stained-glass window, which showed Christ leading a group of little children.[7]

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 2005

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Birmingham was a violent city and was nicknamed “Bombingham”, because the city had experienced more than 50 bombings in black institutions and homes since World War I.[8] Only a week before the bombing Wallace had told The New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals."[9]

A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested but only charged with possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On October 8, 1963, Chambliss received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.[10] At the time, no federal charges were filed on Chambliss.[11]

The case was unsolved until Bill Baxley was elected Attorney General of Alabama. He requested the original Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the case and discovered that the FBI had accumulated evidence against the named suspects that had not been revealed to the prosecutors by order of J. Edgar Hoover. The files were used to reopen the case in 1971.[12]

In November 1977, the seemingly forgotten case of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing was brought to Court, where Chambliss, now aged 73, was tried once again and was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.[13] Chambliss died in Lloyd Noland Hospital and Health Center on October 29, 1985.[14]

On May 18, 2000, the FBI announced that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan splinter group the Cahaba Boys. It was claimed that four men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had been responsible for the crime.[15] Cash was dead but Blanton and Cherry were arrested, and both have since been tried and convicted.[16]

It seems like the calendar is filling up with anniversaries of the incredibly shitty things we do to each other - mostly done in the name of something that's supposed to be holy or honorable or in our best interests as one "nation" or another.

God Bless Jon Stewart

And welcome back, big guy.

Here's a good takedown reaction on the thing I posted a few days ago.  I wish I could do this:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Olbermann

Give us this day our daily Keith: