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The Perils of Pop Philosophy
ThousandStars tips a new piece by Julian Sanchez, the guy who, in case you missed it, brought us a succinct definition of the one-way hash argument (of the type often employed in the US culture wars). This one is about the dangers of a certain kind of oversimplifying, as practiced routinely by journalists and bloggers. "This brings us around to some of my longstanding ambivalence about blogging and journalism more generally. On the one hand, while it's probably not enormously important whether most people have a handle on the mind-body problem, a democracy can't make ethics and political philosophy the exclusive province of cloistered academics. On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to find myself thinking: 'Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.' This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."
You got a troll penis in your mouth.
FP
Eat my goatse'd penis!
Niggers
Obongo just seized GM and raided your retirement portfolio to prop up the benefits of UAW retirees. GM bondholders got soaked to the tune of 70% (90% if you accept a more reasonable valuation of the new GM than what the Obongo camp pulled out of their ass), while UAW retirees will only see a 25% reduction in benefits. As we saw with Chrysler, an implied threat was made against the bondholders so that they would give up more than what they were entitled to receive in bankruptcy court, presumably because the bondholders are invested in a broad portfolio and can afford to absorb the losses. In other words, the bill just got passed on to you, the non-UAW retiree taxpayer. The US and Canadian governments now own about 72% of GM because they strong-armed the debt-holders of that company. Also, the legal claims of people injured by defective GM products were wiped out (as was done for Chrysler). And the company won't be profitable selling their new government-mandated environmentally-friendly putt-putt cars unless gas goes up in price by 2x. But have no fear, Team Obama is coming to the rescue on that front as well. What you're seeing here is the largest Democrat union vote-buying effort in history. Next up - "Free" health care for "all." I expect by the time Team Obongo finishes demolishing the US health care system and distributing the pieces to his cronies, I'll have to fly to India if I ever need a major operation that won't bankrupt me. Welcome to Hugo Chavez's America - where only a select few government sycophants are allowed to possess personal wealth and the rest of you are content to beg for scraps from their table like the family dog.