The real difference, as was noted at the time, was the difference between those who have scholarly backgrounds and those who didn't. The breakdown was pretty much exactly along those lines.
People with scholarly backgrounds -- those who have taught, particularly at the university level, those who publish scholarly work, and the like -- are trained to examine facts dispassionately, to question, to demand proof. (I don't consider those who have Masters or professional degrees to be scholars by virtue of that, but those who have taken full PhDs probably can be counted as such.) Those without are more often -- not universally, of course, no human rule of behavior is universal, but generally -- prone to decide on the basis of emotion, of group think, of following the crowd, and the like.
I don't know the backgrounds of everybody on BB, but of those I know, nobody on BB who had followed the events and who had a university teaching or other scholarly background was on the "guilty" side. |
