Mitchell Hackett

Recovering certainty addict.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Lewis's trilemma is garbage thinking, and it undermines any objective case for how Christians revere him.

Any ordinary 12 year old knows that liars don't always lie, and lunatics are not mad about everything.

Therefore, showing that a man told the truth sometimes about some things doesn't prove him not a liar, and does not prove everything he said to be true. You must examine the credibility of each statement.

Similarly, showing that a man said a sane thing now and again does not prove he is not mad. You must examine the sanity of each statement.

Something else that every 12 year old knows is that hearsay is not evidence. We are pretty sure Jesus existed. We are not sure at all that he said everything exactly as it was written in the book. This adds a fourth leg to the trilemma... Liar, Lunatic, Lord, or Legend.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, in the mouth of his character, Sherlock Holmes, that when you remove the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be truth.

This makes for a good story, and it tempts people to reason this way... by elimination. But reality doesn't work that way.

You don't know what's impossible. And if you do, and you eliminate it, you're left with more than one possibility.

No, there are no short cuts. No neat little essay you can write which proves god exists, and makes him appear in a puff of logic.

You have to do the legwork, and examine the evidence.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

C.S. Lewis's religious writing is weirdly mixed because he combined a positive trait with two negative ones:

1. He was capable of great psychological insight.

2. He was very poor at logic and reasoning.

3. He was very good at emulating the superficial verbal forms of reasoning convincingly enough that you can be fooled if you're not very bright or motivated not to examine the argument closely.

He can observe well but not think well.

When he was playing to his strength, he could produce "The Screwtape Letters", which even this unregenerate pagan considers to have serious moral depth. When he tried to actually think, he produced laughable disasters like "Lewis's Dioemma".

When I was a teenager, many Christians held Lewis up as the best Christian apologist of his time. What this mainly did was convince me that those many Christians were idiots incapable of spotting even obvious logical flaws.

Years later I read the Screwtape Letters and developed a bit of respect for Lewis's powers of psychological observation. Without however needing to alter my judgment that he was basically a glib dimwit.

[Notsocrazy @notsocrazy24]

"But it's so simple! All I have to do is divine from what I know of you-- are you the sort of man who would choose a hotter picture when she's 17? A clever man would choose the picture in which she's less hot, because only a great fool would reach for what is in front of him, so I clearly cannot choose the picture in which she's less hot. But you must've known I'm not a great fool, you would have counted on it! So I clearly cannot choose the picture where she's hotter."

"You've made your decision then?"

"Not remotely! Because Watson was born in Paris, as everyone knows! And Paris is entirely peopled with nonces, and nonces are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, and so I clearly cannot choose the picture in which she's hotter."

"Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."

"Wait til I get going! Where was I?"

"Paris"

"Yes, Paris. And you must have suspected I would've known Watson's origin, so I can clearly not choose the picture in which she's not as hot."

"You're just stalling now"

"You'd like to think that, wouldn't you!"

[Aella @Aella_Girl]

Based shaggy

[Laura Robinson @LauraRbnsn]

I keep thinking it would be interesting to pitch a project about the way Christian Nationalists and their tribe think of "patriarchy," and how it never existed. Quick pitch.
The reason Brian Sauve can imagine a world where he's always supervising his wife is because he's lazy. He

[BostonWriter @bostonwriter]

My Dad used to say: “when someone shows you who they really are, believe them.” I know it’s an old saw, but it feels tailor-made for moments like this.

When all is said and done, I think the events of the past week will backfire spectacularly for Macklemore and everyone else who bailed on the tour.

Remember: they weren’t taking a righteous stance against something he said or did. He wouldn’t bend the knee so they tried to take him down.

How many times have we seen that play out - in the media, in the arts, and in companies large and small - during the past few years?

After his “friend” jeopardized the tour by dressing in Jewface and tried to pass off antisemitism as political commentary, Ed made the right call.

No matter how much the folks who bailed on him try to spin this is as their free speech being violated, it’s just a case of some people acting like spoiled, ill-informed children and one person acting like a sane adult and a professional.

I was never really an Ed Sheeran fan. I am now. https://t.co/VNnTMjRGZM

[Gina Milan @ginamilan_]

I hope people realize what an absolute piece of shit Macklemore is and what he did to Ed Sheeran. It was one of the grimmest things I’ve seen, especially when HE WAS THE ONE WHO ASKED ED TO OPEN FOR HIM.

I’m genuinely starting to wonder if they set Ed up and if this was all intentional.

I’ve been a fan of Ed for years, and he has never been someone who seeks out drama. He’s always just been about his music. He got rid of his phone over a decade ago and is famously disconnected from social media, using an iPad to communicate through email and FaceTime.

If you know anything about Ed, you know that’s the kind of person he is. He loves music. He loves performing. He loves being around people. He keeps to himself and stays in his own lane.

That’s why seeing him dragged into this is so infuriating. To the people who did this to him, I wish you nothing but karma. You deserve every bit of it that comes back around.

[Juliet Moses @JulietMosesNZ]

The moral narcissism of this guy.
People don’t generally pay to go to concerts (certainly not Ed Sheeran ones) to get lectured by a dropkick about geopolitics, and objecting to that doesn’t make them bad people.
It’s like giving a speech about cancer at someone’s wedding and then saying well cancer is more important than your feelings and so it’s my right and duty to give a speech about cancer and if you complain about it you obviously don’t care about cancer. There are layers of logical fallacy here.
As I’ve noted before, sufferers of Israel derangement syndrome think that everybody else should be as deranged as they are, and that those who are not are morally inferior.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Colin is merely saying what many of us who used to listen to you with great respect are thinking privately.

I loved your contributions to the public debate because you were a scientist who articulated ideas with extreme clarity and care, offering an evolutionary biologist's insight into human behaviour, culture and society. You did this with kindness, grace and moral courage.

Today, much of your time appears to be spent insinuating the existence of unspecified conspiracies which you do not elaborate on. Your timeline is full of references to "they", "dark forces" and "psyops". When asked to clarify what it is you're saying, even by friends, you act as if the question itself is evidence of the conspiracy. In the process, you appear to give the cover of your good name to ideas spread by some of the most narcissistic, despicable, unprincipled, immoral and vicious people in existence who exhibit none of the kindness, grace or morality I used to associate with you.

As an outside observer and former admirer of yours, the public person you were and the public person you are now are not the same. Take absolutely no pleasure in observing this. On the contrary, it's painful and disappointing.

And so the question for many of us, Bret, is what has gotten into *you*?

[Brianna Wu @BriannaWu]

I’m so ashamed this man is the standard bearer of my party.

No matter which way you slice it, Israel is the Jew’s land. In the West Bank, I went into the caves they describe in the Bible where Jews would watch their feet. In Jerusalem, I stood on the literal stones Jesus walked on in Biblical times.

It was the Jews land now, and it’s their land today. And any project to erase that is based in Jew hate.

I don’t understand why Arabs hate Jews this much. The one bright spot after October 7th has been really getting to know Jewish culture, which is deeply inspirational to me as a trans woman. They refuse to be victims, refuse to see the world in terms of easy lies, and somehow keep a cheerful spirit. They have a fraction of the bitterness I do, and it makes me want to be a better person.

Why is why this Arab project to convince Americans to redo the holocaut seems insane to me. Why? It’s clearly based in their pride. They can’t handle that these people they enslaved eventually became so powerful though sheer force of will, they cannot be conquered.

I am a Democrat, but if my party doesn’t wake up and reject this plainly evil ideology, even I will leave. I will not be part of a political project to reenact the Holocaust.

[tetsuo @tetsuoai]

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.

Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.

And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.

You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

[Heather C. @Ducati_Chic]

@GOP_is_Gutless Mr. Sowell NEEDS to be REQUIRED reading in every public education school. BAR NONE!!!! 😤😤😤😤

[Mitchell Hackett @MHacket1]

@revenant_MMXX I think this is projecting how you feel about violence onto Tarantino. Some of us just think that sometimes violence is necessary and good. I could be wrong though, has Tarantino ever given an interview where he suggests the Inglorious Basterds were the bad guys?

[Mitchell Hackett @MHacket1]

@bizlet7 I don’t think Tarantino views violence as immoral though. Violence in the service of good is noble, and in the service of evil is not. The audience cheering just violence against Nazis are not “no different” from the audience cheering on Nazi violence.

[Aaron Pete @Aaronpete_]

I'm prepared to go to jail over this.

My grandmother Rita Pete went to St. Mary's Indian Residential School. She experienced terrible abuse. As a consequence, she struggled with alcohol use most of her life.

My mother was born with FASD as a consequence of her using alcohol to cope with her trauma.

I am Chief of my community Chawathil First Nation. I am working to address the longstanding impacts of these past policies through renovating homes, building new homes, creating childcare, and growing businesses through economic development.

I have interviewed people who went to Indian Residential Schools. I have interviewed people who believe Indian Residential Schools were awful, horrible schools, meant to remove the Indian from the child.

I've also interviewed people who believe they were well intended, generous investments by Canadian taxpayers meant to assimilate a society and had shortcomings.

Like with many things, the history is dark, complicated, and with any policy that existed for a long time, across a whole country - there were different experiences.

No one story tells us everything. No report shares the full experience of the individuals who went. No commentator today can disprove someone's lived experience with statistics.

The path forward is not to criminalize speech, questions, or debate.

The path forward is empathy for past attendees.
The path forward is truth based on facts.
The path forward is real conversations.
The path forward is to lean into complexity.

If the government criminalizes this, then I will be a criminal for having these conversations.

If I am a criminal by the laws definition, then I am committed to going to jail over this.

[Aella @Aella_Girl]

@estherzelda0514 I think this is called employment. This is actually different from slavery in a couple pretty important ways.

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

Much has been written today about the concept of suicidal empathy, but nobody else, as far as I know, has connected that concept to the 2005 incident where a chimpanzee ate a man's lips, nose, and testicles

[Destiny | Steven Bonnell II @TheOmniLiberal]

She demonstrated my argument in real time lmao

[bitchuneedsoap @uneedsoap]

This is what socialism looks like.

Promise everything. Free buses. Free childcare. Rent freeze. City owned grocery stores.

Win the election on the promise.

Take office and discover the math doesn’t work.

Demand someone else pay. The governor. The legislature. The wealthy. Anyone but the voters who were told this would all be free.

When that fails, blame the structure. “We need a structural reset.”

Socialism never fails. It only ever gets betrayed by reality.

New York is about to learn what every other city that tried this already knows. The bill always comes due. And it never comes due to the people who promised it would be free.