“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to your death your right to be given summary justice by a howling mob.”

From the annals of forbidden satire, Legalienate interviews Deborah Lipstatic and  Michael Schlermer. 

Here's one clip:

LEGALIENATE: I see. You're sure there's no point in debating your opponents?

LIPSTATIC:
If you try to argue with a person who is committed to a completely
illogical premise, then you're lost to begin with — you're already
sucked into their world of fantasy.

LEGALIENATE: So, it's like
imaginary numbers in mathematics. They don't really exist, can't exist.
After all, what's the square root of a negative number?

LIPSTATIC: Exactly.

LEGALIENATE:
So math teachers who force kids to study that stuff are nutcases who
can't face reality. The kids have ample reason to turn them in.

LIPSTATIC:
Right. They're defaming the rational numbers. Have them call the Simon
Wiesenthal Center. They have a program to extradite them to Israel to
stand trial for numerical anti-Semitism.

Here's another:

LEGALIENATE: I see. Isn't it interesting that whenever someone wants to
use false or unrelated evidence to support a favored conclusion he
talks about how it “converges” on that conclusion? Theology professor
David Ray Griffin used that method to “prove” that the twin towers in
New York were brought down by pre-planted exposives.

SCHLERMER: That’s not really fair . . . I oppose Griffin . . .

LEGALIENATE:
But not his method. Now how do the existence of cremation ovens carry
implications of murder? Aren't dead bodies cremated in every country?

SCHLERMER: Of course.

LEGALIENATE:
So can I ask why cremation ovens are always mentioned in the same
breath as gas chambers, as though cremating corpses were the same as
murdering people?

SCHLERMER: You certainly may.

LEGALIENATE: That’s all you have to say?

SCHLERMER: Yes.

So very unfair.

Memento mori.

2 thoughts on ““I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to your death your right to be given summary justice by a howling mob.”

  1. Deborah Lipstadt’s obnoxious and exasperated campaign against historical inquiry was revving along years before Irving’s libel suit, and she continues to play the ludicrous HD-as-intellectual-pollution angle in her writings and on the lecture circuit. Her intellectual illiberalism — epitomized by her famous insistence that revisionist arguments should never be openly engaged since they represent the “apotheosis of irrationalism” — is the real and proper subject of Mike Smith’s satire.

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