http://www.eppc.org/Conferences/eventID.121/conf_detail.asp

I suspect we’d all agree D’Souza made some fallacious but very effectively demagogic or college-debate-point-scoring arguments, while Hitchens seemed to indulge in too many tangents and mumbled seeming-evasions.

And I told Daniel that Hitchens seemed to do a worse job of staying on the supposed topic — whether Christianity (not Islam) creates problems — though Daniel said he’s OK with changing the parameters of a poorly-structured debate, or as he put it: “Kobayashi Maru.”

When a debate ranges across millennia of changing cultures and differing standards, it’s pretty hard to give a single utilitarian verdict on everything that was done or ought to have been done in all that time — but D’Souza’s _epistemological_ arguments against atheism were juvenile and at times shocking (he _really_ can’t think of reasons the human brain might find natural patterns explicable without recourse to God infusing the world with Reason, like something out of…well, Hegel??). Despite Hitchens’ generous comments about D’Souza, I really have to wonder sometimes whether D’Souza believes some of his own arguments or merely deploys them for strategic gain (amidst a receptive King’s College audience full of young Christians).

And I know that sounds like I’ve just contradicted the admonishments above to assume your opponents’ motives are the best — but D’Souza makes that much harder than a lot of other public figures. And note that I’m still not saying he’s a _jerk_, just that he may be a debater first and believer second or third.

In the end, though, D’Souza’s the one — regardless of the ostensible debate topic — making the bizarre, unproven claim — that there is a God — against whom the Hitchenses of the world are not really obliged to say anything more than “Why, why, why should we believe this ridiculous, fanciful, utterly evidence-free claim?” And if the best D’Souza can do is say “Well, you can’t absolutely prove I’m wrong,” I have an invisible bridge to the moon to sell him, an army of intangible monkeys who’d like to live in his house, and an aura-realignment I can give him at 50% off.

Contrary to your suggestion, 1) a “5% increaes in poverty” based on policy or (2)”blackheard people…” etc. are NOT THE ONLY TWO POSSIBLE reasons I might have for my dating preferences.

I don’t believe I’m obligated to explain (on your very public blog) what my very personal reasons are for not wanting to date a certain type of person. But my choice not to explain doesn’t mean you get to be authority on what’s happening inside my head.

And so, unsurprisingly, it seems to me that your wouldn’t-date comments have usually been inspired not so much by concern that your hypothetical GOP fellas would actually cause a 5% increase in the poverty rate or whatever but that they are just nasty, blackhearted people who want the poor to suffer so that they can laugh at them while sipping martinis and objectifying oppressed women.

There’s a difference between saying “I couldn’t date a hateful, callous person” — which is surely attribution of a basic mental state/emotional attitude — and saying, for instance, “I couldn’t date someone whose misconception of how bond markets work, if turned into official public policy, would make it much harder to fund irrigation projects, with possible increases in food prices resulting, to the detriment of poor populations,” and saying the latter sort of thing is much rarer, with good, common-sense, amateur-psychological reason, I think.

But what makes you think those reasons come from assigning a “mental state” to Republicans (beyond what’s reasonable to conclude about people’s values based on their own stated values)? What makes you think you know my reasons at all?

You make a statement about my mental process in deciding whom to date, in a post decrying the practice of attributing mental states to others!