Friday, August 06, 2010

The reviews are in

Dan Gardner decides to match the Cons in their philosophy about facts and evidence. And the result is the best column anybody's yet written on the topic:
A slim majority of Conservative party members believe homosexuals should be arrested and imprisoned in federal dinner theatres, where they would perform The Sound of Music and other wholesome entertainment for children and seniors. Twenty per cent of the Conservative caucus dropped acid with the Grateful Dead. At least three cabinet ministers have outstanding arrest warrants in Nepal; one is a former member of the Manson family.

In the past, I would not have presented these claims as facts because they're not "true," in the narrow sense of an assertion supported by logic and evidence. That stuff mattered to me. I was a "member of the reality-based community," as a Bush administration official famously said about people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."

But no more. "When we act," that official said, "we create our own reality." That's where I am now. Stephen Harper, the Conservative government, and me. Creating our own reality. And dropping acid with the Dead.
...
Facts, evidence, logic. Irony. We're moved beyond that. I might even say we've evolved, but some of the guys in the purple van might not like that. So let's just say we've opened the doors of perception. We make reality, man.

Hey, here's something most people don't know. Stephen Harper has a tattoo. Really. It's a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche. "There are no facts, only interpretations." He got it one crazy weekend in Tijuana. It's on his right buttock.

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