From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed May 07 2003 - 19:37:51 MDT
At 10:16 AM 5/7/03 -0700, Hal wrote:
>One of the problems with name calling is that it can backfire. If they
>turn out to be right about something that you said made them an "idiot",
>then it makes people think that they might be right about more than that,
>and you wrong.
>in the vitriolic exchange between John and Samantha, one of the
>issues was John's prediction that WMD would be found. At this point,
>it looks like that may well be incorrect. Fine; we all make mistakes.
>Certainly the war did not go as I expected, either.
>
>Here is where the name-calling comes in. Making a mistake is one thing.
>But calling your opponent an "idiot" for taking a position opposite to
>yours raises the stakes. As John said, messages get saved. When we go
>back and see that John was wrong (so far) on such a high-stakes issue, it
>makes him look extremely unreasonable to have called Samantha an idiot.
IIRC, Mike Lorrey informed us of the certainty that those terrified
American troops displayed on Iraqi TV were dead soon after the filming.
They looked quite chipper last time I saw them on the news.
Damien Broderick
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