November 9th, 2011 — Book Thoughts, Series on Beliefs
Plain and simple, beliefs come from experience.
Some like to make it complicated. They want to distinguish between beliefs that are based on reason and facts, and those that are not. Is that important, if all beliefs come from experience? Are one person’s experiences more legitimate, or worthy than another’s?
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December 9th, 2010 — Book Thoughts, Media Reviews, Politics Blogs
Now that MSNBC has exploded over President Obama’s “compromise” with Republicans, I want to return to Jon Stewart’s claim that MSNBC and Fox News are guilty of the same kind of biased journalism. In my earlier False Equivalency blog I asked readers to compare how often Fox News and MSNBC commentators prop up a “straw man,” which is the debating technique that distorts an opponent’s belief, and then ridicules the distortion.
In the earlier blog I claimed MSNBC does this much less than Fox News, making a false equivalency of Jon Stewart’s claim that the two channels do the same thing from opposite perspectives. I told Stewart that political discernment makes him funny, and he needs more discernment before making MSNBC the liberal equivalent of Fox News.
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