Slims

I don't think you were out of line, and I would have challenged the professor following his rebuttal.

You are in a classroom where you are paying (a lot) of money to be taught fact. Seeing as it was a Political SCIENCE class this is especially true because an event either happened or it didn't (I get that some things are unknown, blurry, etc. but this is not one of them). Your role as a college student is two fold: first, to learn as much as possible; second, to learn how to evaluate available information and correctly arrive at the right conclusion. It is the professors job to teach you how to do both these things and by defending someone who is obviously capable of neither he is doing both of you a disservice.

As Douglas Adams so succinctly put it:
"I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue.

...Well, in history, even though the understanding of events, of cause and effect, is a matter of interpretation, and even though interpretation is in many ways a matter of opinion, nevertheless those opinions and interpretations are honed to within an inch of their lives in the withering crossfire of argument and counterargument, and those that are still standing are then subjected to a whole new round of challenges of fact and logic from the next generation of historians - and so on. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others."


Those who have a problem with Walter Sobcak's willingness to voice his own opinion seems to have made him a target for online criticism only because he was correct. Otherwise his opionion would be just as valid as the brain dead ditz he corrected in class. If the professor isn't willing to police his own class then the students need to do so themselves.

We need only tolerate the opinions of others, not respect them.

__________________
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence