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

[mlh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 08:57:04AM +1000, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> It's been interesting to see the authorities flung up in this thread as

I'd hardly see them as authorities and I for one am not offering them
up as such.  They're just people who have done some research and write
well about what they've read.

> 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

Hitchens is on the left socially and politically and den Beste would take
particular issue with being described as on the right.  The real right
in the US are as against the war as the left, isolationists that they are.

> position on the worth of Islamic civilisation is notoriously negative.

I'm not sure where you got that from.  You write below that you haven't even read him.

Quote, from that same url I referred to before:

	"None of this has anything to do with historical
	Arab culture at its height, which was rich, powerful,
	and very impressive. It produced great literature and
	poetry, great science, and amazing architecture. It
	adopted and regularized place-value numbering, developed
	arithmetic and invented algebra. But that all largely
	ended several hundred years ago. All of the discussion
	above refers to the current culture of the region,
	and the people living there now."

> 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".

Thanks for putting authorities in quotes :-)

Hitchens in particular is an excellent writer, and I think he's worth
reading on anything. SdB I'm not so crazy about.

One of the reasons I give references to others rather than make the
arguments myself is to make it less confrontational.   I find some of
the messages in this thread tediously rabid and predictable.

--
Matt