Agreed, it is a common trap of people who are 'smart' to assume their own reasoning is valid even without external confirmation. I appreciated that they included sources for their reasoning but I expect that if that was posted to the politics list inside Google it was probably sliced and diced several times. It apparently generated quite a bit of conversation there and my guess is a couple of 'centithreads' at least. It would be interesting to see the full discussion.

There were two very interesting discussions with similar sorts of intellectual gymnastics when I was there, one involved whether or not getting rid of bottled water helped the environment and the other how the phrase 'free tibet' was such a trigger for Chinese nationals.