(December 25, 2014 at 6:31 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: As much as I dislike Faux News, I like authoritarian suppression of speech even less.Indeed. The problem with handing the government that kind of power is that it assumes that someone with a supportive point of view will take over and be in a position to wield it. What happens if we give the president sweeping executive power over the media and the nation elects a far-left/right candidate and an equally nutty VP? In scenario A, Fox News gets shut down and Bill O'Reilly gets deported. In scenario B, Fox News becomes your only news source and Bill O'Reilly becomes the next Ed Sullivan and Koch TV becomes a thing.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
