Thanks to Lisa Pease and everybody else who participated in the debate about whether it appropriate for JFK Facts to include John McAdams’s JFK Assassination Page in its list of “Best JFK Web Sites.” WIth one exception, nothing I have read persuades me to change anything on the site.
Reader Clarence Carlson expressed my point of view precisely when he commented:
“In any important intellectual activity it is important, even essential, to explore and understand dissenting viewpoints. Likely we might find little to agree with, but will be “armed” , as it were, with more information and knowledge as we continue to explore the truth.”
The clinching argument came from Pease herself when she acknowledged she had learned from McAdams.
“McAdams taught me, perhaps more than anyone else online, how to look at evidence with a critical eye,” she wrote.
That is reason enough to recommend McAdams’s site.
Other readers suggested I recommended MdAdams’s site to increase traffic. That is not a bad reason to link to someone’s site but its not relevant here. I get infinitesimal traffic from the JFK Assassination Home Page. JFK Facts gets most of its traffic from MaryFerrell.org, which I should reiterate is the very best JFK Web site.
One reader said that including Black Op Radio in a poll of Worst JFK Web Sites was “provocative,” and I have to agree. I created that poll for the same reason I created the site: to try to encourage consensual critical standards of thinking on a subject that has often lacked them. But if I was going to subject Black Op Radio to that kind of judgment I should have included JFK Facts as a candidate for worst site as well.
Instead of doing that I am just eliminating that question from the site. As I have written on JFK Facts, Len Osanic’s “50 Reasons for 50 Years” is a worthy feature that people should bookmark it. Going forward I prefer to focus on the positive.
I believe I’d be ready to tangle with John on his website. By that, I simply mean I’d argue whatever points on which I disagree with him(presumably many)in a professional, debatable style.
That’s a shoddy misrepresentation of my point. I learned from his lies, not from his honesty. Your ranking his site as one of the “best” on JFK makes you complicit in his dishonesty. I would say his site is a “must see” in terms of understanding the disinformation present on the net, and how cannily it can be presented. But to simply list it as one of the best, without qualification, makes me question your character.
“Handle John McAdams with Care Indeed”
A little information on John McAdams’ worldview might help to put it all in perspective for folks not familiar with his thinking. He is a global warming denier, and belongs to the Heartland Institute. One of the things that this organization did was to set up “Operation Angry Badger” to post harassing remarks on pro-state union websites in Wisconsin. The idea behind this operation was that by posting lots of ‘angry’ and snarky replies to stories on these blogs, it disrupts the flow and polarizes the debate, turns people off to the entire blog. My source for this is a George Mason University study, “The ‘Nasty Effect: Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies” cited here:
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/angry-badgers-trolls-sceptics-and-distracting-voices-in-the-climate-discussion/
And although Photon accuses me of making a comparison to global warming deniers when I talk about the JFK assassination, John McAdams made the very same comparison, from the opposing side in the debate when he responded to a poster on his blog, Marquette Warrior, his blog post entitled: “Global Warmists Lie, Cheat and Steal.”
Here is that response by McAdams:
clip from poster:>>> never even suspects that the climate change deniers are equally nonsensical <<<
McAdams:
Do you even suspect that the warmists are wrong? Never had a doubt in your mind? A lot of their arguments sound like JFK assassination conspiracists. They think there is an evil conspiracy to deny anthropogenic warming. When their theory doesn't work (no warming in the last 15 years) they concoct ad hoc arguments to justify their claims (warming deep in the ocean, which we can't observe reliably).