[WS:] I am with you on this, but I would also like to point out that there are two different kinds of "knowledge" in political and public discourse - one that is grounded in factual information and one that is logically derived from principles assumed to be true. You need a right balance of both to form an informed, rational opinion. Obviously knowledge based on factual information is generally superior to that logically derived from principles, but in the world when facts are often manufactured to show what is meant to be seen, you need to balance what you see with logical deduction. Finding this balance is art rather than science or deduction.
This was an informed way of reading facts in Eastern Europe. When the media told you, for example, that "everything is peaceful in X and people are going about their daily business" you needed to ask yourself "why are they telling me this?" and balance it with a logical conclusion that they must by lying to cover something up, because that is the nature of the media in an authoritarian state. Then you would dig deeper into it and find that there were anti-government riots in X and the media are covering this up with manufactured facts consisting of footage of people going about their daily business.
Of course this kind of thinking can go haywire into either conspiracism or systemic determinism if the balance is lost and the logically derived knowledge becomes totally detached from facts instead of used to separate "true" facts from manufactured ones. Oftentimes, "motivated cognition" such as perceptions tinted by a visceral hatred of the regime, or more often, the emotional need for certitude in the world of constantly changing smoke and mirrors would lead to losing that balance between the factual and logical knowledge in favor of the latter. As a result conspiracism was widely spread in Eastern Europe in the final years of the Communist regime.
I recall people believing the wildest hearsay and rumors that were at best highly suspicious and often totally improbable to a neutral observer, as long as they came from "unofficial" sources. What is more, if you tried to point out inconsistencies in the story, you were automatically labeled as an "agent of the regime" and discredited.
I think that this is the case of viewpoints that you are debating in this thread. Your opponents' knowledge is derived from "systemic principles" and thus independent of facts. If facts support the conclusions derived from these systemic principles they are seen as corroborating evidence, if they don't - they are dismissed as irrelevant. In a nutshell, this is how idealism operates.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."