alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

November 9, 2007

It’s Time to Play: “Is that true?”

by AltHippo @ 2:14 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Via TPMCafe, probably the highest kind of discussion we can have. Susan Faludi posits that gender notions in a post-9.11 world are causative to actions such as the invasion of Iraq. An intriguing hypothesis, but as a commenter points out: How would you verify or disprove it?

There’s something to be said for the original thesis. Violence and crowd emotions are tied up with this notion of machismo. There is, for example, a reason why you never see anyone reading Chekhov at a Redskin’s game. At the same the commenter is just right: that’s the kind of thesis that you need to be able to translate to empirical phenomenon. He poses a thought experiment where Al Gore, and not the Arbustomeister, was elected in 2000. Would that have led to a different historical outcome?

Doesn’t this process put the lie to what lovers of truth everywhere find so objectionable about the National Review, Powerline, Instapundit, David Brooks, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Gerson, Fox News, … just stop me when you’ve heard enough. The problem is that they throw out things like “Candidate X is too left-wing” “The American people will reject X’s quasi-Socialist views on healthcare, ” or “Democrats are cutting and running just when the surge is working,” or the ubiquitous “This will help the Republicans.” These are just loose formulations that the Theocrats for Plutocracy that currently run our military-industrial-banking complex hope to beat into your cerebral cortex by repetition.

To all of them the proper response is: That thing you just said. Is it true?

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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95. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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