Talk:Committee on the Present Danger

thanks a bunch - never would have guessed that Bayard Rustin was a neocon plant. great source material and editing.

About those sources.. For a moment there I thought I was actually reading a substantive critique of the group in question. And seeing as I just became aware of the organization therefor have no deep understanding of or investment in it. I'm open to the possibility that they could be one extreme or another or anything in between. With that said, and with a certain degree of frustration, i must tell you that my ability to be open to the specifics as presented on this site collapsed upon my own "sourcing" of your sources. For all I know everything you state could be the absolute truth. Unfortunately, what life experience has shown. Is that, in pursuing the truth, being overly reliant on people who see the world the same way as I is as productive in that endeavor as would be making decisions with the aid of an army of "yes men". Personally the thought of going through life trapped in a subjective echo chamber of my own design revolts me. But with due respect that is what it appears you've created here by getting the overwhelming majority of your information from sources that have a perspective consistent with your own. Human nature being what it is, then logically they will more than likely share your same prejudices and you'll all equally be made blind by the same ignorance. Things that afflict us all to be sure. But as it pertains to the pursuit of the truth. Allowing yourself to do that will act as a filter preventing you from experiencing objective reality. A perspective that has no relationship what so ever with absolute or objective truth. While what you presented was compelling, until its presented using using sources that have no interest in seeing and portraying the world in the same manner as you. It wont really be perceived as informative in the non propagandistic sense.

This critique was made with an understanding & respect for the time and effort put into the project.

Cheers M

Thanks to M for those thoughts. I am certain that the project will welcome the addition of additional sources to this, and other, articles.

I'm not sure what "M" means about our sources. The sources for this article from what I've seen include:

• The Washington Post, a very mainstream and widely read newspaper
• The New York Sun, also a mainstream newspaper
• THe Committee on the Present Danger's own website
• Executive Intelligence Review, a LaRouchian publication. (The LaRouchians are right-wing conspiracy theorists, and I don't think this article should rely on them.)
• The Interhemispheric Resource Center, a left-leaning research group (but one that has a track record of doing careful research).
• Justin Raimondo's AntiWar.com. Raimondo is an anti-war libertarian whose views on many topics would be considered conservative. His style is opinionated and abrasive, and I wouldn't want to rely on him either (although his writings are sometimes interesting and insightful).
• The Hill, a newspaper whose primary readership consists of Washington, DC politicians and other inside-the-beltway folks. In the U.S., the Hill would be seen as centrist politically.
• OpenDemocracy.org, which I would describe as a left-leaning "open source" website (using a different "open source" technology than ours).

There are a couple of sources on this list that seem iffy, and moreover the article in its current state relies too heavily on extended quotations from other places without adequate identification of sources so that it is sometimes hard to figure out who is being quoted. It could certainly use improvement. However, I don't think it is accurate to suggest that it all comes from sources sharing a common viewpoint or ideology. --Sheldon Rampton 10:35, 16 Oct 2004 (EDT)