Links With Your Coffee - Thursday
In the interest of fostering rational arguments, I'm going to present a common fallacy with each day's links. Today's fallacy is: Hasty Generalization
- Op-Ed Contributor - Oaf of Office - NYTimes.com
In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.
- The Satirical Political Report - An Offbeat Look at the Hot-Button Issues of the Day » Chief Justice Explains His Constitutional Theory of ‘Strict Split Infinitive Construction’
- X marks the whatsit
David Deutsch gives a very nice reply to the fucking fine tuning argument according to Chris. And yes, I certainly agree.
- Essay - You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book - NYTimes.com
Maybe there is a reason to prefer a book to a Kindle. You'll never find someone's porn stash hidden in the pages of their Kindle.
- Super Eco: This planet means the world to us.
It certainly can't hurt.
- ATHEISTS AND SECULARISTS FOR GAZA
How much longer will it remain possible to elide outrage against the Israeli siege of Gaza with support for Hamas? How far can the semantic band linking these two be stretched before it simply snaps?
And wouldn't it be useful if there were a concerted effort on the part of those of us who could not possibly be Hamas sympathizers, to the extent that we think all religion is childish, to vigilantly watch for and loudly denounce attempts to conflate our opposition to the Israeli assault with sympathy for Islamic jihad? Let us make that effort, by calling into existence a loose confederation of likeminded "Atheists for Gaza."
Atheists for Gaza will announce themselves as having as little in common with Hamas as they do with Jerry Falwell, the pope, Vojislav Šešelj in Serbia, the BJP in India or the Shas Party in Israel.
Atheists consider them all cavemen. . .
- LRB · Henry Siegman: Israel’s Lies
- Bookninja » Blog Archive » High school lit in an Obama world
A teacher in the US thinks books like Huckleberry Finn should be left off reading lists now that there’s a black president. I believe I can respond to this with just three letters: W. T. F. ?! Here’s the original op-ed piece.
- Language Log » The last Bushism?
- The Believer - The Sentence Is a Lonely Place
- Sarah Silverman Says Goodbye to President Bush | Indecision | Comedy Central(video)
- This is interesting: Amazon has author stores
Comments
i thought atheists LIKE cavemen. i know i do. oh, wait, you don't mean atheists. you mean social darwinists. that would explain your preference for these cavemen over those cavemen.
re: sara silverman- peed my pants again. thanks. still waiting for my ipod. oh, you mean i have to pay for it? after all that? wtf? :)
Re: English Lit - The op ed reads more like an english teacher who is getting tired of explaining to his students the implications of the books he wants to get rid of. yes the framing is "because we're supposedly in a post racial world, time to read the books that are more pertinant" as a basis for the essay, but the justification he uses is more of "get off my lawnisms" about "kids these days".
If he doesn't like explaining Huck Finn's use of language, use a damn daily show clip that uses similar language as satire to illustrate the point, there are hundreds of clips that do this.
And his wanting to get rid of "mockingbird" is completely misplaced and shallow. There are other themes in Mockingbird that make it a classic novel rather than just "racism is bad mmkay". Themes of death, groupthink, injustice... etc.
Time for the op-ed writer to start teaching shop... he sounds tired and it's his turn to ignore the kids enough for them to chop a finger off.
Re. "Oaf": I remember being criticized by my board on my Master's thesis, that my writing contained too many violations of said adverbial positioning rule. This was in the early days of online discussion groups, so I found a grammar forum where the experts there ridiculed my profs for their antediluvian grammatical rigidity. I quoted the most diplomatic of these replies to my adviser, and the matter was dropped. Still, he protested that the rule in question was straight out of "APA (American Psychological Assn.) Writers' Guidelines."
And now my daughter's running into the same nonsense in high school. Cults die slowly, but die they will.
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