ORIGINAL: Perot
ORIGINAL: Mike Bahr
As for that posted quote from Perot, the moment it had the phrase " American plan for Global Domination" , it lost all credibility.
Why? Because you can' t accept that those running your country could be so vile in their intentions? Why don' t you try throwing all pretenses aside and giving an objective look at the data?
No. HERE is why I say it has lost all credibility:
The presentation of facts or statistics, however " hard" the data may be made to appear, is nonetheless subject to the editorial razor of the person doing the compiling. In this way, statistics can be made to " lie" , and facts can be warped by presenting bits of corroborating information and selectively omitting contrary information. In statistics especially, and stats are used often to make argumentative points and to back up assertions... researchers can jump between mean and median results depending whether the data skew supports or refutes their hypothesis, or they can use careful assembly of the sample sets and dependent variables in order to yield statistical outcomes that tell a very different story than the real-world reality on a given issue.
In order to gauge the veracity of something presented as " fact" , then, one must take a serious look at the integrity of its provenance. By using the phrase " American plan for Global Domination" , the authors of your linked article made their bias on the issue very clear. A logical person would then conclude that their " facts" and " statistics" , as explained above, will be carefully pruned and sculpted to tell their side of the story while omitting or minimizing or straw-manning any other possible intepretation. Your authors destroyed their own credibility as an authoritiative source on the information they presented. This makes the entire article' s value as a useful document negligible.
If the premises of the article you linked were put forth and asserted in a research document by an institution with real credibility - say, by a doctoral dissertation from a Cambridge or Notre Dame scholar - then they would deserve genuine attention and scrutiny. However, it is unlikely that those same conclusions would be reached by a credible author, because their carving up of the data would be different in approach and result.
By posting that link, you fall victim to the same intellectual suicide as yellowtimes.org, which was caught using a fictitious " political think-tank" to generate references, when that thinktank was found to be actually a fabrication by the YT web staff. It does no good to qualify a liberal proposal with references deriving from the liberal gestalt. The best thing a writer can do in order to give the weight of impartiality to their document is to use as many unbiased sources as they can in the assembly of such a document.