People Die In America Because People Die In America

File this one under "shaped like itself." (TVtropes link).

Frothy-mix Santorum (do not Google that man's last name) got an ear full from a young college student - two of them, in fact - and the results of the confrontation highlight the reaction that one gets when you expose a Republican to cold, hard reality.

I suppose I could go for the potassium/water analogy, as chemistry jokes aren't nearly as popular as they should be. However, I figure watching the chemical reaction unfold is more interesting than actually reading about it from a third person perspective. Behold - what happens when you expose a Republican to reality:

The Right-Wing Language Deconstruction Fleet

I'm a armchair linguist, and I enjoy studying linguistics and the way language is used. One of the things I find most fascinating is how language is used on the Political Right - to the causal observer it can seem like they're speaking English, but to anyone who pays attention, it becomes apparent quickly they're not.

I've said that they derive a great deal of what they do from postmodernism. This is no different; in fact, this is an example of them using postmodernism without even realizing it (their leaders do, I'm almost certain of it, but the average sheep on the street doesn't have a clue that they're using postmodernism. It makes the irony all the more delicious because they rail against postmodernism as sinful, whereas if it weren't for postmodernism, they wouldn't have the muddled, crippled thinking they suffer from).

Wishing Doesn't Make It So...

Your God does not exist.

It's a bit of a bold and sweeping statement, to say the least.

People will say, "Wait! You have to know everything to know that!"

No, I don't.

I can know absolutely nothing and still be right. See, the way skepticism works is this: I don't need proof to make a claim like that. It's called taking the position of negative evidence. Negative evidence means I don't have evidence.

Epistemology means that I'm in the err to believe unless I have sufficient evidence to support my belief based on previous experiences. I have no evidence, I have no previous experiences, I have nothing to base a sound belief on.

Which is why I can say your God doesn't exist.

Skepticism and Epistemology: It's Not What You Believe, It's What's You Know...

For a while now, I've considered myself a skeptic. I'm a proud James Randi-style skeptic; I approach everything with a open mind for all possible conclusions, not just the ones that people desperately want to be true. Guarding against confirmation bias is the first rule of being a real skeptic, as opposed to the ones that get played on television, since the human mind is naturally inclined towards patterns. Skeptics are a misunderstood group of people; the way we get portrayed in fiction is often as an ironclad believer in this mystical religion known as "Science", always with a capital "S". The first order of business here is to clear this up - skepticism is not a religion. If a skeptic is dogmatic, they're straight up doing it wrong.

Observations For the Day

Debunking the Genesis Creation Myth in four easy observations:

Observation 1:  It's all in God's hands. God is omniscient and omnipotent. He created the world in six days, and he created man by blowing into dirt (Genesis 2) or simply willing him and woman into existence at the same time (Genesis 1).

Observation 2: God plants a tree in the garden of Eden. This it the Tree of Knowledge, and it grows apples. Side observation: God apparently hates Avalon and King Arthur.