Crap 'Buzzwords'

how do you know it's a mistranslation? don't like it? take it up with aristotle. fact is, the concept of petitio principii, or in its more familiar guise, 'begging the question' continues to be of use, and we'd do well to point it out when the very same people that are fond of using the phrase incorrectly are guilty of its true meaning. Remember when tony blair and chums asserted that we had to invade iraq, because we didn't want the smoking-gun proof of their weapons of mass destruction to be a mushroom cloud over one of our cities, they were claiming as the premise of their argument the idea that the iraqis had or were on the verge of having nuclear weapons. But whether or not they had such weapons was precisely what needed to be proved in order to justify the invasion, so it could not be itself used as proof of the need to invade to preempt their use of such weapons. (i have paraphrased some of that statement but you get the idea.)