Posts by HORansome
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That's just confused me more. The last / in the URL should become a |? Or do I add, as I thought I did, a | to the end of the URL?
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Excuse the link problem: here it is without PA's weird URL mark-up: http://books.scoop.co.nz/2008/11/18/no-to-nazi-pseudo-history-an-open-letter/
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And, if you're like me, you haven't done any more than glance at their "arguments", because you don't need that stuff in your head.
What is interesting is what happens when you actually do go read their evidence and respond accordingly. When Martin Doutré and Jon Myklejon were complaining about the bad press they were getting on the Scoop Review of Books No to Nazi Pseudo-History I went through and looked at the actual arguments they presented and refuted them one by one. The response, to me, was deafening silence, even though they continued to rebuke the other contributers to comments section.
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Ah, Conspiracy Theories...
Wishart's oeuvre, which started with the (somewhat) reasonable assertion of criminal conspiracy in "The Paradise Conspiracy", seems to have spiraled out of control. Like a lot of advocates of rejected knowledge, he seems to either completely misunderstand Peer Review (which is the charitable interpretation) or resent the fact that he cannot pass muster under Peer Review (which would be a fairly uncharitable thing to say, although it would explain his record of self-publication).
Given that Conspiracy Theories are my research area I keep up t date with Wishart's 'thinking' on these matters and his method, if you will, is typical for self-taught experts; rather than develop an argument you just cite 'facts' until such time that your opponent stops responding to them (thus declaring victory) or cite variants on a theme so that your opponent spends so much time on one strand of your argument that you can assure your fans that the opponent cannot reply to your other arguments. That's a fairly common technique amongst Climate Change Skeptics and Intelligent Design advocates (and Wishart is both). It's also pretty hard to argue against, because if you insist that the debate proceed in a polite and civil way, with arguments, responses, and so forth, someone like Wishart will throw a tantrum. And if you do the same... Well, you're obviously wrong.
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Ah, Jonathan Ross. A friend of mine refers to him as the BBC's publicly-funded millionaire.
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In re the assassination of Julius Caesar; the co-conspirators admitted to their act, which I assume we'll agree is equivalent to pleading guilty. They thought they were going to get away with it too, having made a deal for clemency, essentially, until Mark Antony turned the tables on them.
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I imagine that when Lawh's uses 'dirty, dirty country' that he can't but help have dirty thoughts.
Which means that he must find (most of) the Third World terrifically exciting.
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Will none of you think of the children?
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The old `Organic Onion' ruse, eh? I'm sure the editor at the NBR is already making vacuous connections between that and the onions that thrive in terrorist cooking.
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That's a nice example, actually, of what a lot of Conspiracy Theorists believe. Brian L. Keeley's `Of Conspiracy Theories,' published in the Journal of Philosophy (which is probably the premier philosophical journal) argues that there is something to such arguments; Conspiracy Theories are hard to falsify because most Conspiracy Theories predict the presence of Disinformation, data that has been fabricated to show that the Conspiracy Theory is false.