I read the book a while back before Oprah recommended it and didn't care for it. Interestingly I might have enjoyed it more if I had known it was fiction--but then again, I probably wouldn't have bought it if it was fiction.
Well, I did read an article about James Frey on a recent issue of Poets and Writers magazine. He came off as a arrogant, piece of garbage. He came off a a know-it-all, he dissed a lot of the other successful contemporary writers of literary fiction, challenged them to fight him, etc. Having read that piece, I decided to not touch anything written by Mr Frey.
Richard Weaver said it best:
"If we attach more significance to feeling than thinking, we shall soon attach more to wanting than deserving."
just all part of the postmodern world where nothing is real anyway, so its ok to make up your own reality. At the rate this postmodern virus is spreading, soon everyone will need to be in asylums...or else they can just sit around responding to internal stimuli and ignoring the real world until they die.
Doc:
"You may notice that you never can quite get around to a real discussion of the issues and the facts of a matter because of this emotionalism, or--as I often prefer to call it--their hysteria"
Yeah...and they get so carried away echoing each others' hysteria, that sometimes they say this:
"Shorter Bilgeman:
My right to own a gun trumps your right to speak - so zip it if you know what's good for you."
Y'know, I've been at this for a pretty long time, but always the violent threats, the terrorism, comes from the Leftie blog partisans.
And I was a longtime poster on the gun-rights and militia boards...go figure.
Heinlein was right...an armed society is a polite society.
Regards;
Several points, Dr. Sanity:
1. Great series of articles on this topic. Thank you.
2. "Without realizing it, the Left--by shifting every argument to the playing field of the emotions..."
I'm not so sure all on the Left are oblivious to this phenomenon. Politicians have used emotion to manipulate people since the first committee meeting in a cave. Journalism schools now teach that a little "provocative" content in a news article is not only acceptable, but desirable (position statement borrowed from the head of the journalism school at Berkeley). And recall a [former] omsbudsman at the NYT saying he didn't want the newspaper to be the paper of record because - and I paraphrase here - "facts are boring." This also helps to explain the excessive and inappropriate use of "moving" anecdotes. They invoke the desired emotional response - mission accomplished, no thought required, move on (pun intended).
3. Critical thinking, or its demise begin early. I clearly recall grade school teachers who encouraged us malleable yound students to question everything. To think and make up our minds based on all the information available, not just the assertions (my word) of those in authority. Does anyone believe for a moment that this is a view currently espoused by the NEA, NOW, the Democratic Party or any other organization with a liberal agenda?
4. At some point, the Dims will find themselves in a position where they cannot behave rationally and retain their base. This might already have occurred, and being in a minority just exacerbates the frightened, desperate ("involving or employing extreme measures in an attempt to escape defeat or frustration" - Webster) behavior.
Damn, I hate spelling errers...
Doc,
I feel facts are necessary. Oh, man! Now I'm in one of those Catch-22 situations...
Is it a fact that facts are necessary? Or is it just necessary for me to feel facts are necessary. I mean, it's a fact that I feel they're necessary, but is it only a fact that I feel this way because I feel like this way about facts.
And what if I wake up tomorrow and I feel differently about facts than I do today. Is that a paradigm shift? And should you subject your reality to the fact that I feel differently about facts on any given day?
In any case, if tomorrow I do feel facts are unimportant, does that mean in spite of my having felt facts were important the day before, facts are in fact, not important, or is it a fact that facts were important before and they're not important now?
Please, you've got to help me.
Alan Dershowitz "give away the game"
That only:
"their self-indulgent reasons are the only things that matter. They can create their own morality and reality on the spot"...American Thinker
Read the Harvard Law Professor's own
words in this AT post:
Harvard Law Prof: The Law is an Ass
The Alito hearings are bringing some strange confessions out of the legal woodwork. I’ve long wondered what Alan Dershowitz really believes about the law. Dershowitz is routinely trotted out on CNN, PBS, and the alphabet channels as the Harvard Law professor who can comment on just about any legal issue. He is reliably a leftist, but always with some legal rationale.
Now we know what he really thinks. In a Forbes piece called “What Kind Of Justice Will Alito Be?” Dershowitz tells us the law is an ass. As you might expect, he is talking about his own approach to the law, which he has no doubt been passing on to generations of bright Harvard Law students.
“Almost all justices vote almost all of the time in accordance with their own personal, political and religious views. That is the reality, especially on the Supreme Court… Though … judicial nominees loudly proclaim that justices should merely apply “the law” in a neutral manner, every experienced lawyer understands that the best predictors of a justice’s actual votes are his or her personal, political and religious predilections.” ...
“It was biography rather than precedent that determined the entirely predictable votes of the justices in Bush v. Gore (the 2000 presidential election case), Roe v. Wade (the abortion case), Lawrence v. Texas (the gay rights case) and so many other critical cases decided by the High Court. ...”
So Roe v. Wade has nothing to do precedent, law and the facts. Neither does the Bush 2000 election case, and all the gay rights decisions that are even now changing marriage laws all around the country.
So next time we see Harvard Law’s Professor Dershowitz on national TV, telling us the legal rights and wrongs of some controversy, we will know how his mind really works. There is no law. There are no relevant facts, and precedent means nothing.
Moral relativists like Dershowitz can rationalize anything, since their self-indulgent reasons are the only things that matter. They can create their own morality and reality on the spot. But they mustn’t give away the game, or the rest of us will know what’s really up.
Well, Professor Dershowitz has just given away the game. His article is a straight confession of the Left’s simple arrogation of legal power. This is everything the US Constitution was not supposed to be.
Isn’t it past time for a total intellectual revolution at our top law schools?
Click here: The American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/
c...omments_id=4185
Your feelings one way or the other are irrelevant to the facts or to truth or to reality. Tough luck, Jephnol. 
I still contend that 'hysteria' is exclusively found in women... whatever their gender.
Anonymous 5:25 pm,
Thanks for the feedback. I feel comfortable with your answer.
Doh!
"A person's visceral response to another individual is usually based on mostly unconscious factors..."
Discussion question: Suppose that George W Bush pursued precisely the same policies that he has been pursuing, but that he spoke with his father's accent instead of his own.
Would he be as despised by "progressives," particularly academics, to nearly the same extent that he actually is?
Jephnol
It reminds me of Luke Skywalker whining "But Master Yoda told me to be mindful of my feelings!" So just let go, young Padawan, put away your flight computer and just do what feels right.
To the Original Post. A fellow social worker recently said to me "I think George Bush just developed this program so he could confuse old people." Despite the use of the verb "think," it doesn't sound like a whole lotta thinkin' goin' on.
according to oprah: jim frey's AUTOBIOGRAPHY is FAKE BUT ACCURATE.
this is classic post-modern Left gibberish; they claim that there is no such thing as truth; that everything is subjective,and that all history is just a creative narrative.
Assistant Village Idiot,
Use the farce, Dupe?
Touchy feely reporter asks a Marine sniper "What do you "feel" when you shoot someone?"
Marine response: "Recoil, Ma'am."
Accurate and definitely not fake!
Deliberately sloppy use of words causes me to wonder at the motives of the speaker - what motivates them to say that? Feel means to sense, to have an emotional response to outside phenomena or to have an emotional response to an internal mental or physical phenomenon.
What most of these delusional folks mean when they say they "feel" something is that they "believe" something. And, in their "view" (meaning here is their world view or their belief structure about how the world functions) such and such is true.
We've all been taught that feelings are owned by the feeler and can't be assailed as "wrong." Therefore, feelings are an iron clad argument for or against something. If the speaker is compelled to use the more accurate "believe," their argument becomes much weaker. If, on the other hand, they were to substitute the word "sense" for feel, their argument sounds very contrived - "I sense President Bush lied..."
> "If we attach more significance to feeling than thinking, we shall soon attach more to wanting than deserving."
Uhhh, Bob, I think The Left past that bugaboo a long time ago...
DOH! "...passed..."
> It reminds me of Luke Skywalker whining "But Master Yoda told me to be mindful of my feelings!" So just let go, young Padawan, put away your flight computer and just do what feels right.
Yoda wanted Luke to experience Zen, which is good and admirable in many ways. It's not the only state of mind to use, however, as R.M.Pirsig demonstrated in the excellent "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". People always try to shoehorn all of life's experiences into one thinking pattern or the other -- Zen or MMaintenance, depending on their own individual predilection. It's stupid, not all things fit into the same slot. Some problems are square, some are round.
larwyn:
When there is no law, the only law will be the Law of Thelema, originated (satirically) by Rabelais and applied (seriously) by Aliester Crowley:
"DO WHAT THOU WILT."
Peggy Noonan would disagree.
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luxury watch read the book a while back before Oprah recommended it and didn't care for it. Interestingly I might have enjoyed it more if I had known it was fiction--but then again, I probably wouldn't have bought it if it was fiction
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