Patterico's Pontifications

5/18/2018

Is It Possible for a Minister and an Atheist to Have a Polite and Rational Conversation?

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:55 pm



Sounds almost like a joke, doesn’t it? And yet, here it is: my favorite polite rational atheist, Sam Harris, in conversation with Dr. R. Scott Colglazier, Senior Minister of First Congregational Church of Los Angeles.

Instead of the “Othering” that happens online every day, maybe this approach is better. Just a thought.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

Uh-Oh: There’s a Rudy Loose in the China Shop and He’s Contradicting Trump Again

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:18 am



So Trump has taken to Twitter to allege, apparently based on stuff he saw on the teevee, that DoJ had a spy in his campaign:

Now Rudy’s gone on Chris Cuomo’s show to do that thing that Rudy does, which is usually to admit stuff that contradicts what Trump has said.

Uh-oh. The Donald’s not gonna like this.

GIULIANI: Here’s the issue that I really feel strongly about with this informant, if there is one. First of all, I don’t know for sure, nor does the President, if there really was one. We’re told that.

CUOMO: Told that by whom?

GIULIANI: We’re told that by people who — for a long time, we’ve been told there was some kind of infiltration. At one time, the president thought it was a wiretap. There were some FISA applications. But we’ve never been notified that he was on a tap or an intercept.

CUOMO: There’s never been any proof that he was on a wiretap either.

GIULIANI: No.

CUOMO: But he did say it as fact, many times.

GIULIANI: I think he thought that.

CUOMO: I know. But that doesn’t make it true.

Cuomo is right. He did say it as fact.

And Cuomo is also right that the fact Donald Trump thinks something doesn’t make it true.

Last September, I comprehensively took apart all the B.S. “evidence” that was being cited by Trump superfans to say that Trump had always been right about the “tapp” on his phones. I have maintained from the very beginning that Trump had no sooper sekrit evidence of a “tapp” — he was just repeating stuff he saw on Fox News. And I was right. As I said in my first post on this, the day after Trump said he had been the subject of a “tapp”:

If that guy has a Twitter account, it doesn’t make his ravings any more plausible. Now, here’s the tough part: if he is President of the United States, it still doesn’t mean his ravings are responsible commentary.

There’s Good Trump, who nominates great Justices and rolls back regulations, and Crazy Trump, who is uninformed and TV-obsessed and has a short attention span and goes around saying bizarre things. The fact that we like Good Trump doesn’t mean we have to defend Crazy Trump’s insane rants.

People did, of course, to their embarrassment. And people will defend this. Who knows? It could turn out to be true. But the point is, you can’t conclude it’s true simply because Trump said so.

And Rudy Giuliani just confirmed that.

Countdown to the walkback in 3…2…1…

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]


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