Too funny!

This is great:

Anyways, the other day on “The View” I nearly fell off the couch when I heard Ms. Elisabeth Hasselbeck start talking about Michel Foucault. Now, I loves me some Hasselbeck like I love no other crazy bottle-blonde right-winger, but girlfriend made some serious mistakes talking about the guy.

I’m borrowing a fellow blogger’s paraphrase of Hasselbeck’s words: “I think it’s enough just for people to have a sense that they’re being watched in order for them to behave. I mean, it’s like how back in the 17th or 18th century these guys Bentham and Foucault– they were these philosophers– they built this prison and they put up these high towers… they told the prisoners that there were guards up in the towers, even though there weren’t, and they, like, behaved much better.”

Ok, not to be all grad-schooly, but Michel Foucault was a 20th Century theorist. He died in the 1980s, not in the 17th or, “like,” 18th century. Foucault wrote about Jeremy Bentham in one of his books, Discipline and Punish. They didn’t hang out together, nor did they build a prison together. Their lives didn’t exactly overlap, you see. Bentham lived from 1748 to 1832. In his book, however, Foucault did reference a prison that Bentham built, and Foucault used this as a way to explore his ideas about knowledge and power. So, the Bentham prison served as a symbol for Foucault’s theories, not something he actually helped build.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Even funnier if you know what the hell The View is or who Elisabeth Hasselback might be (should I look her up? naaaah. CBA as they say in England).

Hey isn’t that the TV show where they believe in the earth is flat?