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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chartseer who wrote (90665)	9/9/2010 11:03:44 AM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 224718

One of the problems with countering lies (at least if the lies are out in the broader world, rather than a relatively small group like the posters on this thread), is that when people hear a counter to a lie, they are exposed to the lie itself, and sometimes public arguments against the lie actually cause more people to believe the lie since it causes more people to become aware of it. They don't pay much attention to the details of the refutation, they merely hear one claim (the lie, which the debunker mentions in the context of showing it to be false), another (that the first claim is false), and some of them will decide to believe the lie. Also people who politically disagree with or otherwise don't like the debunker may (based on ad-hominem "reasoning") assume that the opposite of what the debunker says is likely to be true.