I try to stay out of the truth thing, but...

The power of the myth that has been perpetuated has overwhelmed the necessity for truth, and the banality of the evil* remains undiminished.

Some of us actually had to mourn; as human beings some of us moved on where we could do more good in trying to prevent more death. If anything turns people off to your ideas, its the necessity you seem to feel to attack the people who actually experienced 9-11 as something real, not just a television event. I generally dismiss people who make such statements immediately without wanting to hear their "evidence". Attention is a limited resource, and the obsessive need of truthers to squander it generally makes me doubt that their sincerity.

Your poor liver--a 24 hour bender can take years off.

You've misunderstood. I didn't say I found you shocking. I said your intent was to shock. You tried to shock before by playing the frat boy neo-con. Now you want to play the non-interventionist. I find you pathetic, not shocking.

As for your opinion about Palestinians, I actually felt sorry for you, using a conflict you know nothing about to polish up your bigotry. It was as transparent a demonstration of a raisin-testicled coward as one can imagine.

At the very least, you must agree that reason is in critically short supply in our national discourse, as passion (more accurately anti-intellectual emotionalism) tends to produce the quickest satisfaction and greatest profits in this sphere.

....

I will say this, however. Reason should never be confused with the pernicious signature trait of most of our establishment media, which is empty-headed partisan "balance" and an unwillingness to stand up to abject falsehood.

Agreed, and agreed. I will only add that reason run amok is most often in evidence in the calculus of life and welfare, e.g., how many deaths from a policy is acceptable, what is the greater good in terms of resource allocation, the acceptance of legal structures that are inherently unjust but "constitutional".

I think there's a place for both views. Traditionally, I've been more a fan of the visceral, "I know they're racists" approach, with all the difficulties that entails. However, Glenn's empirical approach is a welcome relief for me from that mind-set. I suggest that the former without the latter is passion run amok, and the latter without the former is reason run amok. You can't always prove things like genderism or racism, etcetera, and sometimes you can prove it when its not really there. In the same vein, an empirical look at any problem often must ignore the context, i.e., centuries of racist policies and effects which may not be visible or active, but are in some way contributing. Or that calling Obama a Socialist is a code-word for something else. I certainly have never been able to prove that, but I would feel like a fool if I didn't wonder about it and keep it in mind. Politics is always that balance between empiricism and personal experience. Alone, I think neither survive. And with only the latter, you get tea-bagging.

He used to shock by writing things like this:

In fact Palestinians are stupid. They have decided it's better to remain terrorists and forgo peace and prosperity for their children. They have taken land and trashed it. They have provoked confrontation as a PR stunt with resultant casualties. Darwin is at work here, and the cognitively deficient shall die. Good riddance.

Now he shocks by pretending to be a non-interventionist libertarian, when he was so obviously a pro-war authoritarian just a year and some odd months ago.

read it at sig...

that Ledeen used the incident to take the "media" to task for "fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered" instead of asking the President "about words that he did write."

Incredibly, Ledeen just grabbed something he saw off the internet, without fact checking, to make a point about the media's lack of rigor.

Ledeen of the "push a country up against the wall" fame was caught looking pretty stupid today. He decided to run with a fake college "thesis" from Obama, noting what a horrible commie he is, because he wrote this:

“… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

I saw nothing very controversial in that statement; the document categorizes certain humans as 3/5 the value of others. The constitution, indeed, sought to institutionalize certain income redistribution, from slave and indenture to master. But Ledeen, of course, and other conservative douchebags thought it was the holy grail of Obama-ism and practically sprayed themselves with joy. Its not that Ledeen was punked, he indeed suckered himself, like the guy chasing the dollar bill on a string all the way down the street. If this guy can't even check his facts, is he even any good to the idiots who read him?

http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2009/10/21/obama-and-the-constitution-he-has-his-doubts/

http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2009/10/23/the-obama-thesis-hoax/

What you're saying has absolutely no truth to it. "Incitement" requires both immediacy and specificity (standing outside a house yelling to a mob: "Let's go burn down that house now"). Otherwise, it's protected speech (see Brandenburg v. Ohio).

You read me the riot act once because I claimed that because a Venezuelan tv station, had, in fact, told their viewers to come [immediacy] and overthrow the government[specificity]they had engaged in incitement. How was I wrong?