RAH writes:

...

I see not a single denial.

Ah. Prove to you that he didn't say it?

At least I'm not trying to refute it by claiming it was debunked in the media two days before it was said. :) This is not simply a case of reporting something, and then tossing the burden of proof on the opposition to prove it wasn't said. This is a case of something pretty widely disseminated on the Net, to which not a single official voice of opposition has been raised. In a general subject area where the slightest dissent generally makes one a big target. I mean, you'd at least expect the Weisenthal Center to come up with a press release decrying the unfair slandering of poor Prime Minister Sharon with the horrible antisemitic libel of Jewish control of the US government. This strongly suggests to me that the "Occam's Razor" scenario here is that Sharon said something that made his advisors soil their Depends, and everyone is busy pretending it didn't happen.

Not that I care either way, though I expect Peter's probably right on this one.

He very well may be. I will not suffer any decrease in my happiness, nor my appreciation of Peter, should that be proved to be the case.

If Sharon said it, there are enough people who hate his guts in the mainstream press that we'd have heard all about it by now.

To paraphrase Golda Meir badly out of context, this would require that one not love ones paycheck more than one hated Sharon's guts. A hard test, given several recent journalist and editor firings for publicly articulating truths about mideast history some find unpleasant.

...

I certainly don't wish to adopt the position that nothing is credible that doesn't get mainstream media coverage. But you are right that it's a bit suspicious.

There ya go. *That* makes a whole lot more sense, now, doesn't it? "Never attribute to conspiracy that which can easily be explained by stupidity", or whatever Pournelle said.

In this case, I think it's never attribute to conspiracy or stupidity that which can be easily explained by herding and schooling behavior. Kind of like when the totality of mainstream journalism decides at the same moment in time that the "Tiananmen Square Massacre" is now the "Tiananmen Square Crackdown" and probably later, the "Tiananmen Square Tea-Time Unpleasantness."

But then, a good thing never lasts, does it?, viz,

...

I see no denials of this even more widely reported story, and I find that suspicious too.

Whoops. There you go again, Britney -- or "Eric", or whatever your name is...

"Laugh while you can, Monkey Boy." Seriously, though. If anyone can cite an unimpeachable source on whether the words in question were uttered by Ariel Sharon, I'm sure we'd all be overjoyed to be pointed to it, so we can get on with our lives. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

At 11:32 PM -0500 on 1/11/02, Declan McCullagh wrote:

Not that I'm a huge fan of what the Weisenthal Center has done in terms of Internet regulation, but I'm also insufficiently credulous to accept all extraordinary statements as fact.

Right. As Mr. Nye the Science Guy -- or anyone else with a skeptical neuron in his head -- says, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Video/audio tape would be nice, for instance... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

James A. Donald writes:

For example lots people on usenet have posted all sorts of things about me, that I am a nazi, was a Stalinist, and so on and so forth, and for the most part I usually do not deny it. If I do not deny such stuff, and for the most part I do not, why would you expect Sharon to deny such stuff?

The Internet is a big bathroom wall and everyone has a crayon. I learned long ago that trying to apply meatspace standards for libel and slander to the Internet was a futile exercise.

Thus it is far more likely that those words were invented by an antisemitic bigot, and attributed to Sharon to give them added plausibility, than that those words, or anything resembling them, were spoken by Sharon.

I still think it's more likely than not that Sharon made the comments, but I learned long ago that seeking absolute truth in anything other than discrete mathematics was also a futile exercise.

Semitic bigots do not believe that Jews control America. Rather they believe that America and Americans are part of the antisemitic encirclement of Israel, and that Americans cackle with glee every time terrorists knock off a few Jews, and that American schools teach that the Jews murdered christ.

Some do. Some don't. Oddly enough, the "We control America" slogan seems to be gaining popularity in Israel. There are now reports in the Palestinian press of workers with American peace organizations, investigating the treatment of the Palestinians, being taunted by IDF soldiers shouting "We control America." Either a clever propaganda campaign to sour relations between the US and their Zionist client state, or Israeli cajones that need to be beaten back down to normal size. Perhaps Sharon could seize the moment, and print up "We Control America" bumper stickers for his re-election campaign. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

On 11 Jan 2002, at 21:26, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

At 2:10 PM -0800 on 1/11/02, "Eric Cordian" makes an actual appeal to ignorance...:

...

I see not a single denial.

Ah. Prove to you that he didn't say it? <http://gncurtis.home.texas.net/ignorant.html>

:-).

That's not a bad page, but it makes what I consider to be an error in that it attempts to distinguish between the fallicy of appeal to ignorance and the more valid line of reasoning called the auto-epistemic (an example given being "If there really were a large and unusual type of animal in Loch Ness, then we would have undeniable evidence of it by now We don't have undeniable evidence of a large, unfamiliar animal in Loch Ness.  Therefore, there is no such animal.".) But actually, these lines of reasoning are formally the same. The difference is whether or not you are willing to accept the premise "we've looked enough that we'd find it if it were there" as valid. My point is that this really isn't a question of good or bad reasoning, it's a question of disagreement over fact. We all agree that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". But just how extraordinary is the claim that Sharon said something incredibly stupid? Declan rejects Eric's claim that if the quote were false then there would have been an official denial, but it appears that this is based on the fact that the quote only appeared in a couple small papers, and that he would accept Eric's reasoning as valid if the quote had appeared in more, larger papers. Eric's idea that the US media is all afraid of the pro-Israel lobby suggests that we should look for this quote in papers published outside the US. I was curious about this alleged quote, and in fact I was able to find a citation in a large well-known paper published outside the US. That publication is known as "Pravda". The reader must draw his own conclusions. Personally, I think Eric is going way out on a limb for no good reason on this one. Evidence for the quote appears to me to be shakey at best, whereas I think there's pretty solid evidence of Saron doing far worse than making that stupid statement anyway. For example, on a lark I typed "crimes ariel sharon" into google just to see what it would come up with, and by one of life's little amusing coincidences, among 20,000 other hits was this one from amnesty international urging Sharon be tried for war crimes allegedly commited during the occupation of Lebanon http://www.web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/recent/MDE150892001?OpenDocu ment What's so funny about that, you ask? The date is Oct 3 2001! George .