I really hate extremists

I had the pleasure of viewing a screener of Bowling for Columbine last night. It's been a while since I've laughed so hard at the violence of modern America. But, being the kind of guy I am, I wanted to know what others were saying about the show. I'm what one might call naive... From time to time, however, I can admit to this and begin a slight investigation into what the real facts might be. This is hard. Very hard. I'll explain this in a minute.

After a bit of googling, I found this site: Bowling for Truth. This fellow exposes most of the claims made by Moore in his film. The nice thing about this site is that he provides sources for a lot of his claims (something Moore leaves out of his films). Sources are A Good Thing (tm). The problem is that, like Moore, he is an extremist. There is no middle ground. If Moore made an accurate claim, it's conveniently left off of the site. Not too disimilar from Moore's ability to leave certain facts out of his film.

The other problem comes when you see the fellow's other sites: Richard Bushnell and Richard Land. It's here that you begin to wonder just what kind of person is behind the rebuttal. It's kind of like in high school, when they tell you to be on your best behavior at other schools because you're representing the entire school, or when you go in for a job interview and everyone recommends you represent yourself well. If you can't represent yourself well on one site, why should anyone care about your others? I don't mean to say I'm any better at doing this (see this blog as an example), but I'm at least smart enough to not link to my bad sites from my good sites.

So why is trying to find the truth an NP hard problem (I like CS nomenclatures, don't you?)? Facts and details that cover the middle and present both sides of the extreme are far and few between. This is why I utterly despise extremists. A quick look at a statistics text will show that extremes cover truth. That's not to say they don't have their advantages, after all it is the extremes that uncover a lot of the lesser known facts about events. It's just somewhat depressing that both tend to tout their righteous adherence to presenting a fair and truthful view that is really just as tainted as those they run against.

On the plus side, coming across that site brought me to this site: Britney Clone. If that doesn't make you think about all those times you wanked to a Britney pic, I don't know what will.