[CitizensTruth] "9/11 DEBATE" offer is hogwash

[Hal Snyder]

On Mar 31, 2008, at 6:56 PM, Chuck Minne wrote:


> Anyway, IMO debate is not needed, exposure of what has been said is  

> needed.



I was going to condemn the notion of debate as a means of settling  
matters of fact. It reminds me of what passes for journalism today in  
panel shows, where one person tells the truth (perhaps not even that)  
and the others lie, distort, and obfuscate, and we are told we are  
getting a balanced picture.

In this country, people question whether there is scientific  
consensus on global warming, whether the Lancet studies of Iraqi  
mortality are credible, whether the earth is billions of years old,  
etc. Don't get me wrong; one should be ready to let go of any belief  
in the face of *evidence* to the contrary.

But then I remembered a famous dialogue about scientific fact.

from Wikipedia:

The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i  
due massimi sistemi del mondo) was a 1632 book by Galileo, comparing  
the Copernican system with the traditional Ptolemaic system.

In the Copernican system the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun,  
while in the Ptolemaic system everything in the Universe circles  
around the Earth. The Dialogue was published in Florence under a  
formal license from the Inquisition. In 1633, Galileo was convicted  
of "grave suspicion of heresy" based on the book, which was then  
placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, from which it was not removed  
until 1835 (after the theories it discussed had been permitted in  
print in 1822). In an action that was not announced at the time, the  
publication of anything else he had written or ever might write was  
also banned.

A dialogue by one author is not the same as a debate between persons.  
Nevertheless, revolutionary ideas may need rhetoric for their  
defense, as well as rational argument.

Hal


P.S.: Yesterday's Worldview program included discussion of measures  
taken by WSJ editorial staff and persons in the American Enterprise  
Institute and Bush CDC to discredit the Lancet studies. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/citizenstruth/attachments/20080401/d143c453/attachment.html>