To see this, suppose two shopkeepers set up their booths at a 10-day county fair.
And the abundant ill will has obscured potentially interesting questions, such as this: suppose Burnham, et al. are correct?
The equation goes like this: Suppose Israel discovers that 10 Palestinians from Nablus are planning suicide attacks.
The argument goes like this: Suppose your doctor sends you to an imaging center to get a thousand-dollar MRI.
The idea is this: Suppose that you had messed up very badly with someone you loved and who had once loved you.
So you get a picture something like this: Suppose we ask what rational expectations would imply — I know, I know, but rational expectations is a useful gadget for clarifying your thoughts as long as you don't take it too seriously.
The point he was particularly eager to make was this: "Suppose Jesus of Nazareth did rise from the dead — what would that prove, anyway?" It's a line whose sheer cussedness cuts to the heart of Hitchens's charm.
TO paraphrase Rod Serling, consider this: Suppose Steven Spielberg's 1982 sci-fi classic "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" had ended with little Elliott climbing up the ramp toward the light to join his big-headed buddy on the alien mother ship.
"Every time you start fiddling with one set of variables -- suppose I do this, suppose I do that -- the other set of variables is moving along with you," Monsignor Placa said.
(Hey, let's invade Syria! Then he might move them to Iran. We could look there afterwards!) The peacenik question before the war went like this: suppose Saddam destroys all his weapons tomorrow, do we still invade on humanitarian grounds?
Blogger Chris Goode cites Haskell Wexler to illustrate this: Suppose a guy says, "I make films where I make the best bucks... I'm most interested in entertainment and screw all this ideology stuff".
