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Natasha Lennard in Being Numerous. wrote:The new atheists, such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, or social critics Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—the worst of all ghostbusters—demand the universe, however physically massive, be as small and legible as possible. They would do well to consult some better empiricists. Willard Van Orman Quine, a twentieth-century American logician and philosopher, had little time for ghosts, but even less time for the sort of bad thinking that organizes the world into stable, immovable categories that could never allow for ghosts. Quine thought our theories of the world should be considered webs of belief, with centers and peripheries. At the center of the web are propositions we might call analytically true, or a priori—for instance, 2 + 2 = 4; or all bachelors are unmarried. On the periphery are beliefs that can be changed based on some recalcitrant experiences; for example, if one believes there are no red-haired French people, but then meets a few red-haired French people, the original belief is easily revised. Quine rejected that these are actually two different types of truth, epistemologically (i.e., really). Given the right, albeit dramatic, alterations to a belief web, 2 + 2 = 4 could be false, and not just by swapping around the meaning of words.

Stephen Cohen wrote: "You and I have to ask a subversive question: are there really three branches of government, or is there a fourth branch of government—these intel services?"

Joe Biden wrote:"I've condemned [violence] across the board," / "If we were in high school, I'd take [Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,'"