Transcribing reality with meticulous care is enough to create the impression of extravagant irrationality.
–Martin Esslin, Theater of the Absurd, p. 301
I don’t know why this quotation popped into my head this morning. I remember that forty years ago it was one of a number of pithy quotations I used to write on the blackboard of my high school in between classes.
I just finished watching a zdf clip of Günter Verheugen pointing out the UK has produced no evidence in the Skripal case, and I realized that his position will be seen as having some political component in its motivation. This reminded me of a year ago a Facebook „friend of a friend“ telling me „if you believe that Putin is so pure, there’s nothing stopping you from moving to Russia“ when I pointed out neither the US government nor the New York Times had offered any evidence in support of claims made about the provenance of the DNC e-mails released by WikiLeaks. Podesta and Schiff of course initially claimed some of the e-mails were forgeries, this proposition was dropped in the following months without the mainstream American press (or liberal Americans) seeming to notice or care.
This month is the fifteenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, an invasion and on-going occupation very demonstrably based on lies for which no one has been jailed.
Why is the proposition that arguments be based on evidence contentious?