Anti-Climacus

LINK: I'd hate to be Stanley Fish right now. When TAPPED thinks you've gone off the deep end, you're in trouble. To wit:

" In the symposium, Mr. Fish seems to backpedal a bit, arguing that pomo might actually have an effect. It might, he suggests, teach us to understand the opponent not as an evil abstraction but as a fellow human being with his own motivations. Mr. Fish, for example, says that when Reuters stopped using the word terrorism because "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," this policy was mistakenly attacked as pomo-style cultural relativism. Actually, he argues, Reuters saw that the word was "unhelpful" because, in Mr. Fish's words, it "prevents us from making distinctions" that might allow us to get a better picture of whom we are fighting.

But this explanation is disingenuous. Mr. Fish is really saying that he prefers one set of distinctions over another ? distinctions that, in this case, emphasize resemblance, or perhaps even symmetry, between the terrorist and his opponent, while ignoring the central differences, including the fact that this is a war against Islamic terrorism and its totalitarian ideologies."