“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.

Comments

[TGGP]

Irving was the one who sued Lipstadt. It seems rather backward to have her be the one threatening to have people stand trial.

[Chip Smith]

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.