Readers interested in knowing more about the attacks on Paul Helm’s piece…
Is there any limit to the spin here? Responding to this is an attack? What? Like when the Texan colonists attacked the Mexican army at the Alamo?
Well, for those who are interested, here is another piece of aggression.
For the record, I am really happy that Dr. Helm, whether he has succeeded in making his case or not, has at least started constructing arguments for the verdict he originally pronounced (and for all I know at this point, there may be something to his case). But responding to those pronunciations is about as much an “attack” as shooting at a stranger who has broken into your house on a dark and stormy night. This should never have happened the way it did. Reason, truth, and objectivity would have been better upheld if the argumentation had taken place before shots were fired.
“Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has already defined them? Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about? And, if so, are you troubled because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous misunderstanding?”
–Dorothy Sayers, from “The Lost Tools of Learning”
This comment seems especially appropriate to the debate/argument at hand.