Horoscope--Liberal agenda

Today's Advice from the Stars: "Now would be a good time to get more work done. Go back and check your premises; you'll find one of them is subtly flawed. Are you sure you've covered ALL the relevant literature? A deadline looms large in your mind."

It's supposed to be a lighthearted play on the stressful life in university. but today I'm not laughing. How can I write an essay in the Social Sciences without using subtly flawed premises? I've done my best to hide that fact, except that I always end up making conclusions that are safe to make, which in this case means nearly nothing at all. This naturally brings into question our ability to be objective at all. But I'll set that aside, I've got to write with an agenda. (Yes, there is a liberal agenda, a scary agenda where we want to sacrifice your babes to the Wiccan Goddess. We want to burn the monasteries and bring down the cathedrals with earthquake machines; we want your blood for genetic experiments. The first tower of Babel failed, but our new biological effort will fix that. Give us your weak and sick as a source of renewable energy. We will sell your grandparents to third-world countries for meat.)

Bah! Ignoire this essay anxiety. Pity the essays, for they are misbegotten creatures, hated from conception, hated through the grading, and hated for their miserable failures to prove what they set out to do. In addition, they are hated by the printers that have to process them, the librarians who file the more important of them, hated by future grad students who may have to read them. The only ones who would appreciate it would be the academics cited in them, whose citation count increases (a process similar to a chain letter). Of course, this only applies to higher academic ranks; nobody cares who I cite or how many citations I make up.

Consider: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."