House of Eratosthenes

As I’ve said before, I disapprove of the practice that has come to be known as “fisking.” I think it gives the appearance of fostering a positive atmosphere for productive deliberation and debate, while in actuality accomplishing exactly the opposite. And it’s time-consuming to read, with a modest payoff, to say nothing of the time-expense involved in putting it together.

Some things are just built to be fisked, though. Like this…which out on FARK, even the liberals are referencing in less-than-flattering ways.

If you have ever breathed clean air or drank clean water, thank a liberal.
:
If you’ve ever driven on an interstate highway, thank a liberal.
:
If your workplace is safe and you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights without being lynched, thank a liberal.
:
If your children go to school instead of working in coal mines, thank a liberal.

If someone else wants to take a crack at fisking it, I wouldn’t mind poring through that for a chuckle or two. I think the fisking would practically write itself.

I will take on this one myself though, because it made me do a double-take:

If you are glad that the Nazis don’t control half the world (conservatives opposed joining World War 2 until it was forced on them) thank a liberal.

I’m not in a good position to chastise someone else for having an obsessive-compulsive list-making complex, but Good Lord. If ever there was an example of this habit getting someone into some real intellectual trouble. Granting the utterly simplistic notion that liberals were in favor of joining the War in Europe and conservatives were opposed until Pearl Harbor — just skip over the logical step where we argue that, and give it to ’em — stop and think what this means.

Liberals insist in 1939 we have got to do something to stop that madman. We should have listened to them. We also should have listened to them in late 2002 and early 2003, when they were asserting precisely the opposite. And so throughout the generations madmen will pop up, and our liberals will tell us to go after some and not others. Sometimes they’re isolationists, sometimes they’re not, but through it all they have the answer that will be “correct.”

In 2007, the “wrong” answer has something to do with servicemen dying. Our liberals have pontificated at length about what exactly is wrong with the war in Iraq, and it seems a primary singularity has emerged from all the answers given, something to do with troop deaths. From 1941 to 1945, we had troop deaths, did we not? Alright, so what makes something wrong in the 21st century, fails to make something wrong in the 20th.

The correct answer changes. What makes it correct, likewise, changes. The position of the liberal changes. Only the marriage between liberals, and correctness, endures. Are our liberals magical oracles into what is correct, or is correctness redefined according to expediency?

The reader may form his or her own opinion about the answer to that. I’ve formed mine.

Are our liberals magical oracles into what is correct, or is correctness redefined according to expediency?

It’s the former, of course. Just ask one.
- philmon | 07/16/2007 @ 09:53
[…] I don’t want to be too hard on the SNULs, because I have some very good blogger friends who’ve been known to SNUL from time to time and some of them do it in a way that it can be entertaining. I hope none of them come by, see this, and get their knickers in a twist about it…I don’t mean any offense to the individuals. But overall, I see this as a form of pollution. It’s like having a dog in a super-dense suburban neighborhood (more on this below). Or fisking, or phlacing, or WAGTOCPAN, or letting your child push around a shopper-in-training grocery cart at the store. These things all have it in common that they involve a magnitude of environmental damage on a curvilinear relationship with how many people are doing it. Two adorable moppets in a trendy upscale grocery store pushing “shopper in training” carts, cause four times as much destruction to an “environment” of sorts, as just one them would. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/13/2007 @ 06:23

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Sunday, July 15th, 2007