Doubting Skeptics
Urban legend debunkers and historians show how their skepticism is BS
Geoffrey Hamilton
December 03, 2005
Historians who doubt the stories of witnesses like to play the reasonable patrician. 'Come, come'
they say to the poor little people who are so credulous as to accept eyewitness testimony.
Two examples of this was a P.O.W. camp for German prisoners in Texas and the use of exploding shells
in 1281 against Japan by Kubla Khan's invasion fleet. Both stories had first hand accounts and
contemporary illustrations and both were dismissed as improbable. These
historians go so far as to make up elaborate tales to explain these stories as honest mistakes.
In the end both stories has archaeological proof to back them up and both are accepted now. However,
this does not let this pack of whelps off the hook. They need to apologize and start over again in
regards to their methodology. Improbability theory is their biggest area for reform.....
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TO MYTH OR NOT TO MYTH
Geoffrey Hamilton
January 16, 1995
Parenthetical comments rarely have a content startling enough
to outweigh an entire piece of writing which surrounds it, but one by
Thomas Mann may do more than that, ". . .can one live and die more
significantly or worthily than in the celebration of a myth
". Here Thomas Mann describes, with a rhetorical question, what is
the highest aim for humanity, celebrating (honouring) a myth. He implies
that living and dying should be done for
a myth
because
it
is the most significant and worthy (valuable)
aim. His use of "a" means he does not intend to point to any
specific myth. He does not ask why it is so but he has, without perhaps
intending it, summed up the meaning of life, despite any potential
moral implications of the comment.
Mann wrote his summation
in a timely period for testing it, in 1936, in the midst of the
greatest struggle humanity had up to that time experienced -
if the rise of communism, fascism, and their respective
reactionaries' rise is seen as the beginning. No part of
the world was immune from the consequences of this prep
war given how imperialism had laid the .....
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