"The worst I think or say of Mr. Shaw is that his many brilliant gifts do not include the power of weighing evidence; nor has the that quality -- call it good taste, humanity, or what you will -- which prevents a man from needlessly hurting the feelings of others."
THIS quote, from the seniscient one one himself, regarding Shaw, creates a beautiful case for rejecting anything Doyle had to say, later, about spiritualism.
Shaw was speaking the truth. The disaster DID provoke an orgy of romantic lying. The captain was NOT particularly heroic, the band playing DID help foster a false sense of security, and the entire affair WAS treated like some grotesque drama by the general public.
Shaw weighed the evidence. Conamn-Doyle did not.
>You ask why George Bernard Shaw would bother himself with such a discussion - well, he and Arthur Conan Doyle were actually friends.
I did not ask if there was a social connection between them. I wondered why someone of Shaw's status would bother to discuss anything with someone of Conan-Doyle's status. It's like the kitchen staff at the Crillon swapping recipes with McDonalds....
>Perhaps, but in it he has created probably the most enduring fictional character of all time. Not a bad effort for something so "simplistic", eh?
The two Holmes stories I tried reading simply did not engage. I managed to get thru them, but was left with no desire to complete the series. They do not function well as detective work in our era and, I tend to suspect, did not function particularl;y well as such in their own era either. They had the same quality of DETECTIVE LITE that suffused the TV show Murder, She Wrote...I can understand why people enjoyed them on a pop culture level, but I cannot believe that anyone took them seriously.
>the most enduring fictional character of all time
Oh...well...no...there was that Dickens guy, who created a few fictional characters who have endured longer, and in better books, too. That Shakespeare fellow apparently dabbled in fiction, Walter Scott may have tried his band at it, Goethe; Jane Austen...and, if we want to get technical, there's that entire Beowulf thing to ponder.
>Not correct. Some of the photos had already been published before the experts examined them
I am correct. I never SAID they were first published by Spiritualist magazines. What I said was that the investigations were LAUNCHED by Spiritualist magazines; the experts were selected and presumably paid by Spiritualist magazines; the evidence is about as trustworthy as medical reports about smoking in tobacco industry house journals.
>Much of the investigating of the photos was done, aside from Doyle who was a qualified doctor in his own right
What does being a doctor have to do at being qualified to examine photos? As I have already said, the drawn on paper and cut flat quality of the fairies is so poor that one can make a case for believers being afflicted with either mild retardation...
...or such a pathetic will to believe that they would overlook something glaringly obvious. The fairies were paper, and their features two dimensional.
Now, I will give Conan-Doyle the benefit of the doubt and concede that he probably wasnt mildly retarded. I will allow that he was a naive creature who when confronted by something he WANTED to believe in, was able to suspend ctritical judgment and rush in with a whole hearted, and completyely wrong, defense. His take on the fairies was moronic; his take on the Titanic bordered on pathetic. Either can be used to negate the other.... his wholehearted public endorsement of cardboard fairies undeerscores the lack of critical thinking that makes his take on the Titanic disaster the losing side of the debate, and his pompous dismissal of Shaw's valid points (above) is great evidence of why he should not be trusted on either fairies or mediums.
>but there is absolutely no harm in easing the suffering of those people.
There was a HUGE amount of harm in emotionally manipulating grieving people.
>Plus, this is without mentioning the many other brilliant things he did during his lifetime
All are tainted by his endorsing fraudulent mediums; publically coming out in favor of fairies, and supporting the GLORIOUS TITANIC myth. Particularly chilling is your first example:
>fighting for people who were falsely convicted of crimes
One sees many a JACK HENRY ABBOTT case lurking there. If he brought the same level of analytical brilliance to social crusading as he did to the Titanic, fairies, fraudulent mediums and his fiction, suspects that a lot of cons with heartwarming cock-and-bull stories won his favor, while a lot of cons with sloping foreheads didnt.
Going back to the Titanic...if one examines the evidence, there is SCANT support for anything approaching glory, while quite a mountain of material which fairly shrieks "disgrace." Woolner and Steffanson essentially killing the "cowards" at C by pulling them out of the boat, and then crossing to port, seeing empty seats in D, going down to the submerging promenade deck and jumping into the spot(s) that should have been occupied by Edith Evans, about captures the sordid quality of the entire affair. I could probably rattle off twenty easily documented disgraces for every GENUINE moment of heroism, but this will suffice. The point is, the evidence was THERE. Shaw saw it and commented on it. Conan-Doyle got swept up in the BE BRITISH CRIED THE CAPTAIN orgy of sentimental rot, and chose not only to ignore the evidence, but also to get snippy when Shaw pointed it out.
One might also point out that it was Conan-Doyle who withdrew from the debate, with the lines at the top of this posting. They REEK of the standard "I know that my opponent is actually correct and I cannot win this discussion, so I will very quickly wrap myself in the shroud of moral superiority and then withdraw" dodge....