paralepsis

As a short counter to the recent exercise in triviality, how about I encourage us all to do something of consequence? Namely, help free Sami Al-Arian , an actual political prisoner in America, currently held in Howard County, Maryland. I first heard of Al-Arian because I briefly encountered his son Abdullah, who was a student at Duke when I taught there. Back in 2002, Abdullah Al-Arian was smeared in the Duke Chronicle as "the son of a widely suspected terrorist," and I was among those who wrote outraged letters in response. Sami Al-Arian's story is complicated, but the recent history is this: he was arrested in 2003 along with three other men but the government's case against him was poor; according to Wikipedia , "Of fifty-one charges against the four men, not one resulted in a conviction." He pled guilty to a single charge but is still in prison in violation of the government's agreement. He's been on hunger strike since March 3, 2008, and h...

Added: Wow, this post got long. It's like kairosfocus gives everything he touches a proximate case of his own logorrhea. Warning: do not read this post. It is by definition without consequence, as it's about a character what goes by the name kairosfocus , whose blog, though astonishingly voluminous, is even less important than mine . Although his own blog is but a filibuster in an empty room, kairosfocus also spends a lot of time posting on other (mainly Christian) blogs. As Jon Rowe puts it , he's in the habit of writing "book-length ponderous posts" in strident defense of his strange views. kairosfocus typically doesn't really win an argument. He simply wears his opponent out. In the process, he inevitably accuses them of some combination of the following: "selective hyperskepticism" ad hominem red herrings strawmen These accusations are often couched as painful observations and noted with a characteristic "sadly." But there...