The alien hypothesis?

[Mike Weaver]

Isn't this whole discussion falling down the hole created by the excluded 
middle, which is to say, in the case of scientific practice, that one 
spectral description would put curiosity and the sense of wonder at one end 
and military industrial motivations at the other and what's being ignored 
here is that most of what goes on is generated not by the extremes alone, 
but interplays or tensions between various motives of which those extremes 
are distillations which rarely exist alone for more than fleeting moments.
Plenty of MI money ends up funding unprofitable elegance. Plenty of 
innocent explorations provoke the growth of monsters.

Same gap is appearing in the opposition of pomo and scientific facts. What 
Rob seems blind to is that the unlearning of facts Blake(?) referred to is 
rarely their complete negation but the realisation that previous 
generalisations  are only accurate within certain limits. Likewise pomo 
cannot be dismissed out of hand because it is only relevant within certain 
limits. Could it be that such perspectives have a through and through 
application and a metaphorical application and confusing the latter with 
the former is where trouble can arise.