On Thursday 21 Dec 2006 10:17 pm, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: > but does it matter who owns/funds the site? if it is pakistan owned, it > may make one more sceptical of its views, but the article looked > reasonable enough, so countering it would require facts to the contrary.
Rishabh - this is correct in absolute terms, and it works well in scientific and technical circles. But not so in political/religious circles. For various reasons I have been in the business of refuting or supporting various articles or viewpoints for several years now and I have found that facts (or indeed fiction) can be used in clever and not so clever ways depending on who is using them (i.e author dependent or language-skill dependent) If an article is embellished with rhetoric that is used to support a few facts, countering those facts with other facts tends to require powerful counter-rhetoric. Mere facts are nowhere near as convincing as facts buttressed by rhetoric. The best writers rarely tell outright lies, they merely buttress a facts with powerful rhetoric. "Rhetoric" as a subject has gone out of vogue in modern education - but it used to be a subject of study in ancient Greece AFAIK. But I believe rhetoric is still a subject that is taught in the training schools for Islamic scholars that produce Ayatollahs and the Ulema. You tend to find these people powerful users of rhetoric if you read their words. I wonder if rhetoric is taught in Law schools. shiv
