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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 ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com