Tuesday, December 19, 2006

"Cornucopia of Hostility"

Since Shea has said yet another flat-out, no-ifs-ands-or-buts lie -- that's L. I. E. ... LIE -- about me today (see Torq's previous post), I decided to make a truth-teller of him for once in his life. He described our site recently as "a cornucopia of hostility!" (scroll down to the paragraph beginning "Now the Coalition guys...").¹

Since Rumsfeld has been hounded out of the Godhead, suffered died and was buried, but without rising again in fulfillment of the Protocols of Zion, our old logo is no longer usable. So here is the new one, so that Mark Shea can say one truthful thing about us beyond spelling our names right. Here is The Cornucopia of Hostility:
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¹ That, by the way, is what people call a "citation." It allows others to look up X's claims about what Y has said. And it actually does in fact conform to what Y has said, hence what people call "quote marks." And the quote marks surround words that Y has said. Not X's false characterization of what Y has said, which happens to be something Y has specifically said he's not saying. With most people, this is elementary, but some people are apparently still stuck in intellectual kindergarten.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quotes marks will not avail thee. Mark knows what you really mean.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and the Three Cockroaches of the Apocalypse--nice touch.

Anonymous said...

From your citation there is more classic Mark:

"Similarly, the question "What is torture?" tends to fall prey to the same difficulty as "How many grains of wheat make a heap?" Saying "Stand over there" is not torture. Saying "Stand over there for 48 hours" is torture. Attempts to parse this out by law are nonsense. And in a situation where we are already practicing torture, the longer the question remains in the fog, the longer we torture since the status quo will remain unless people can argue against it effectively. As Tom Kreitzberg wisely says concerning his brilliant post on the problem of trying to create legislation based on just where the bright line is between legitimate coercion and torture:


The point of my post is that "bright lines" don't exist.

They do not exist.

Of existence they have none.

There are no bright lines. There are no dim lines. There are no lines.

The lines you insist on do not exist. They are not.

I recommend against constructing laws based on these bright lines, since they don't exist."

Of course Tom Kreitzberg in subsequent posts on his blog moved away from the assertion that such things can not be effectively defined. This is a sign of Tom's intellectual integrity. When challenged, Tom reformulated his approach recognizing that the ability to make distinctions is part of our everyday moral existence.

Of course Mark is not into discerning the truth. He is only into asserting the same points over and over again even while those around him (i.e. Jimmy Akin) develop the discussion on torture in an authentically Catholic fashion.