>Doesn't inspire confidence, and shouldn't. Having qualified university expertise on something should inspire SOME confidence, all else being equal. But I wro

>Doesn't inspire confidence, and shouldn't. Having qualified university expertise on something should inspire SOME confidence, all else being equal. But I wrote that for another reason: to show that one doesn't have to be an "idiot" to argue that, as the parent implied. >Correct. They can (and should) be dismissed by observing that they contradict reality. They should be dismissed IF they are found to contradict reality. And that's not as clear cut as the existence of gravity or the water becoming ice at 0 oC. >The guy was alleging that there exists a small cabal of uber-rich who control the world. That's pretty clearly not the case. Well, it depends on your definition of "small" and of "control". If I remember correctly, a small number of people do have a disproportionate amount of the total wealth, in the US and globally. A power-law distribution basically, right? And that wealth surely asserts lots of control. Surely SOPA and PIPA, for example, weren't proposed/passed with the insistence and for the benefit of Joe Sixpack or Joe Hacker.