Re: Speaking of facts ...

"Sanity" <sanity-clause@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:eec646f4-cd43-490a-9e0a-dd3df788deb1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Feb 21, 9:59 am, "Connie" <tucson.con...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
This "Ken Thompson" sounds just like some posters here on agr. If the shoe
fits, Pitts has a message for you!
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Ignoring hard facts won't make them go away

Leonard J. Pitts Jr. Mcclatchy Newspapers / Miami Herald | Posted: Sunday,
February 21, 2010 12:00 am

I got an e-mail the other day that depressed me. It concerned a piece I
recently did that mentioned Henry Johnson, who was awarded the French Croix
de Guerre in World War I for singlehandedly fighting off a company of
Germans (some accounts say there were 14, some say almost 30; the ones I
find most authoritative say there were about two dozen) who threatened to
overrun his post.

Johnson managed this despite the fact that he was only 5 feet 4 inches and
130 pounds, despite the fact that his gun had jammed, despite the fact that
he was wounded 21 times.

My mention of Johnson's heroics drew a rebuke from a fellow named Ken
Thompson, which I quote verbatim and in its entirety:
"Hate to tell you that blacks were not allowed into combat intell 1947, that
fact. World War II ended in 1945. So all that feel good, one black man
killing two dozen Nazi, is just that, PC bull."

In response, my assistant, Judi Smith, sent Thompson proof of Johnson's
heroics: a link to his page on the Web site of Arlington National Cemetery.
She thought this settled the matter.

Thompson's reply? "There is no race on headstones and they didn't come up
with the story in tell 2002."
Judi: "I guess you can choose to believe Arlington National Cemetery or
not."

Thompson: "It is what it is, you don't believe either ..."

At this point, Judi forwarded me their correspondence, along with a
despairing note. She is probably somewhere drinking right now.

You see, like me, she can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This
is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it
was permissible to ignore or deride as "biased" anything that didn't support
your worldview.

If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative
source to back me up, you couldn't just blow that off. You might try to
undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn't
just pretend my facts had no weight.

But that's the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by
all the people who still don't believe the president was born in Hawaii or
that the planet is warming.

I could send Thompson more proof, I suppose. Johnson is lauded in history
books ("Before the Mayflower" by Lerone Bennett Jr., "The Dictionary of
American Negro Biography" by Rayford Logan and Michael Winston) and in
contemporaneous accounts (The Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times). I
could also point out that blacks have fought in every war in American
history, though before Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1948, they
did so in Jim Crow units. Also, there were no Nazis in World War I.

But those are "facts," and the whole point here is that facts no longer mean
what they once did. I suppose I could also ignore him. But you see, Ken
Thompson is not just some isolated eccentric. No, he is the Zeitgeist
personified.

To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online
message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged
from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective
truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not
echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to
believe.

I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own
decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather to the world
as it is. That's the story of the Iraq war.

But objective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The
fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that
it's a wall.

And you shouldn't have to hit it to find that out.

http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/article_12ce7949-8a7c-5f58-a431-312...

<snip/troll>

.

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