Re: Historical evidence

It sometimes seems that the secondary purpose in the Intarwebz ( in addition to creating a Pronz of anything ) is to create a historical denial of anything.

The claims of moon landing skeptics have been analyzed to a fair-thee-well; and like most conspiracy theories demonstrate a massive amount of scientific illiteracy.

But yeah, folks who know nothing about albedo make claims about faked moon landing shadows.

Folks who know nothing about bullet exit wounds make claims about the direction of JFK's shooter.

And folks who know nothing about structural collapse make claims about that of the WTC.

Of course conspiracy theory is very romantic and very reassuring. I'm not a little cog ( please refrain from the BC Mod jokes ) who matters only to a small social circle; I'm the guy with the secret that our lizard overlords wish to suppress. And if the world can be controlled to the nth degree ( by our lizard overlords ) then if we can get the word out and wrestle control away, we will have a fully controllable world with no flaws.

Instead of denying history to make ourselves seem important, we ought to study history to learn about our capabilities and our limits.

Yes, there are actual conspiracies. Neither Gaius Brutus nor John Wilkes Booth acted alone; Fawn Hall wasn't shredding documents accidentally....

But a large number of those real conspiracies came to light because they were conducted by flawed human beings for human reasons ( many of those flawed too. )

"Your ability to be impartial is in question since you appear to be unable to believe the extent of CP simply because you haven't seen any"

There is an important distinction between "haven't seen any" and "forbidden to have seen any."

We can only come to an informed opinion by evaluating evidence. The evidence we haven't yet evaluated may make us regard claims about it in a different light. The evidence we cannot evaluate should make us doubt any claims about it. "You'll have to take my word for it" is not a claim about evidence, its a claim about belief.

"I couldn't give a flying F about adult porn so don't expect me to bother answering any of the comments related to that."

So Pronz is magically transformed when the subject is 17 1/2? And anything which can be verified about legal Pronz becomes untrue when we aren't allowed to verify? And further, that the potential legalizing of KP could not do what legalizing has done for any other kind?

It requires too much unmerited exceptionalism to pretend that lessons learned from Pronz have no relevance for pronz.

"I've sometimes thought there was cadre of "guard dogs" here at GC whose main purpose was to rubbish those coming to the site with opposing views to the "consensus" and defending those who are simply here for the ride and your behaviour makes me think it is quite likely."

And yet this is the forum in which both of us can put forward our views. We don't remove opposition views unless those holding them start resorting to behaviour we've told them is unacceptable; like unsubstantiated defamatory comments about other posters. If we were having this convo in a forum more favorable to the received wisdom, I expect that you'd be alone and your debate partners would have had their accounts closed by now just for questioning the received wisdom. Its certainly how the blogosphere works, how Wikipedia works....

And if we "defend our own;" how come those who criticize the logical errors of your arguments call their fellow Peds out when they employ the same error to bolster a pro-argument?

Consensus doesn't make truth no matter how small the society.

Dante