On 5/3/06, Luke Weiger <lweiger at umich.edu> wrote:
>... On Dafur, I think Daniel Davies' comments are well-worth paying attention
> to. Yoshie's aren't. This might seem like an odd position given that
> there's so much overlap between Daniel's and Yoshie's views. The
> distinction is as follows: Daniel's musings are reflections. Yoshie's are
> talking points. Many leftists are fond of comparing Bush's fundamentalism
> with Bin Laden's, and they inevitably find that there are no differences
> worth paying attention to. Comparisons of this sort are seriously misguided
> and obviously so--the difference in degree (if perhaps not kind) between
> Bush's nutty religious fanaticism and Bin Laden's is as large as the gap
> between an unfortunate child's two front teeth. On the other hand, Bush
> actually is _just like_ Yoshie in a very important respect. As Colbert
> frequently pointed out, Bush doesn't really care about facts. Neither does
> Yoshie. She obviously takes Marx's dictum that the real goal is to change
> the world very seriously, and when it appears instrumentally useful to
> misrepresent the world, that's what she'll do. As Harry Frankfurt would
> recognize, Yoshie's a masterful bullshitter. This doesn't mean she's always
> wrong--bullshit needn't be false--but it does mean she's never worth a
> serious listen. ...
-- Jim Devine / "Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists." -- John Kenneth Galbraith.