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At 15:54 09/01/11 -0500, Mark Lause wrote:
>
>Please elaborate, Jeff.  I agree with you down the line on your rationale
>for making this point,
Well my rationale with respect to the article itself is that it was
unsourced, unsigned, and a bit far-fetched. But my judgement of the website
was based on skimming the other articles posted on it. In that respect I
would rather turn the question around: can you find a single article on
that site with information that you know to be accurate? If not, then I
don't think I'm hasty in judging this article as having no more credibility
than the website's health/medical misinformation  ("using sunscreen gives
you cancer", "don't take aspirin to lower your fever", "Detoxifying benzene
cures AIDS") or technology claims (government suppressed "invention which
supplies free energy" and the "200 mpg car invented in 1933") and other
familiar conspiracy theory material.

> but I don't find this listed at snopes, urban legend
>and the other sites identifying such fake news...
Well maybe those sites have a suggestion box you could write to. But
although this IS a conspiracy theory site, one funny thing about it: it is
not a right-wing site at all. It seems sort of geared to appeal to leftists
only, which IMO makes it yet more dangerous since it will just get people
on OUR side making fools of ourselves

Also:

At 16:04 09/01/11 -0500, Greg McDonald wrote:
>Perhaps Jeff will like this one better:
>
>http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175225/alfred_mccoy_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war

Well yes, much better inasmuch as it's basically believable (though I'm not
well enough informed on the subject to really judge its accuracy). For
instance, it makes the point that:

"In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by
its Afghan allies as the price of military success -- a policy of benign
neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world's number one
narco-state."

That's seems a lot more believable than "85% of Afghan heroin shipped out
by US aircraft," don't you think? Not as shocking, but I'd rather run with
the truth than a much more shocking statistic that someone made up and
wrote down for our misinformation.

- Jeff


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