[a press release on D'Souza's latest - Billy Moyers?]
[WS:] I am over the limit for today (apologies), but I am curious what purpose is being served by reposting this drivel. The guy is clearly a hired pen (or rather keyboard), writing what people in the position to pay for it want. He is no different than the scores of unnamed writers toiling in the advertisement industry and diligently producing a deluge of highly questionable if not blatantly false and misleading statements about various products. Scrutinizing or debating those statements is not only pointless, but also counterproductive as it generates exactly what the advertisers want - drawing more attention to what they are saying.
Same with this Dinesh guy. He seems to be a clever entrepreneur, a crafty word processor who merely compiles a large volume of text already written by others into his own logorrhea without adding much value to it (judging from my perusing of his earlier product _The End of Racism_), and unscrupulously exploits hot-button issues to sell this logorrhea. It does not matter whether you like or hate that logorrhea, because in either case you buy it, and its producer is laughing all the way to the bank. A better way of dealing with it is to mark it as spam and dispose it off without even opening it.
I think this dove tails with my earlier posting on information overload. In the era when the production and dissemination of any archived material is easy and anyone can easily produce and disseminate anything, the main effort should be directed not on the old fashioned verification or falsification of claims, but on filtering bona fide claims from noise for further debunking or verification. Even if our cultural anti-spam filters are set a bit too tight and a good idea get occasionally filtered out, nothing is really lost. Given the sheer volume of cultural production, the chances are that this idea will eventually enter our consciousness.
That is it for today.
Wojtek