Lies, damned lies, and appeals to authority (Re: [chat] Lies?)

[Mary Gardiner <mary-slug@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2004, Terry Collins wrote:
> There is a hell of a lot of chemists worldwide that recently caused a
> revision of new US laws on this very specific point because they needed
> to keep communication open with chemists in that part of the world.

See also the IEEE's problems with publishing academic works by residents
of countries sanctioned by OFAC (Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan). The
problem was that writing by residents of these countries was not allowed
to be edited, and academic publications are almost always edited and
revised extensively before publication (unless they're truly outstanding
pieces of work to begin with).

http://www.ieee.org/portal/index.jsp?pageID=corp_level1&path=about&file=ofac.xml&xsl=generic.xsl

[This may be the same case you're referring to.]

> That whole document is a load of crap that looks to be written by
> someone who is still at high school.

It's been interesting to see the authorities flung up in this thread as
alternatives to Michael Moore: Christopher Hitchens, who in his youth
was a British socialist and is now a committed advocate and defender of
the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, and Steven Den Beste, a very
widely read blogger who is notoriously on the US right, and whose
position on the worth of Islamic civilisation is notoriously negative.

Now I'm a committed innocent in this thread: I haven't read or watched
anything by Moore, Den Beste *or* Hitchens, except for his public letter
to Martin Amis a few years after the publication of "Koba The Dread:
Laughter and the Twenty Million". Nevertheless, it looks to me like
participants would be better off playing the facts and arguments rather
than the "authorities".

-Mary