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I'm going to repost something I posted there:
I think that Scott is looking at Phil Robertson’s literal words and ignoring context, implication, and connotation. It is possible to parse what Phil Robertson said as a thought experiment which questions the logical consequences of an atheistic position.
But even though his literal words have the form of such a thought experiment, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s stringing together a set of applause lights meant to tell his audience that he fantasizes about the outgroup getting punished for being the outgroup in a way that is their own fault.
It is a scourge of the Internet that people are too literal. Scott is falling victim to this trend here. The way Phil Robertson phrased that, and the circumstance surrounding it, make it very clear that it is not just a thought experiment even if you can take it apart and say “well, a thought experiment has A, and B, and C, and Phil is also using A, and B, and C and in exactly the right order."
Yes, people can use extreme scenarios when they are legitimately trying to argue a point. No, this is not a case of that. It's not even a case of atheists in the audience getting mindkilled. It's a case of atheists in the audience correctly understanding what he's saying. In the real world outside LW, most hypotheticals of this sort are attacks and not sincere attempts to make a philosophical point.
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It's not worth reading that, unless you're interested in a case study in deceptive reporting.
The case is extremely clear-cut. The major US media often got minor details wrong (especially details having to do with how the Italian legal system works), but seldom did they get the important evidence wrong. Their "one-sided presentation" was accurate.
By contrast, the linked article completely distorts the evidence. It reads like the stuff you read at pro-guilt hate sites. Example:
"The murder weapon"? The whole dispute is about whether the knife in question is the murder weapon!
The statement that "contamination was ruled out at the latest appeal" is the kind of willfully ignorant claim that only a cynical propagandist could possibly make. The fact is that contamination is extremely likely, as the court-appointed experts determined at the appeal in 2011. It's true that the more recent appeals court, unlike its predecessor, decided not to listen to this finding. But they didn't commission their own expert review (on this point); they just sided with the prosecution's arguments. You might as well say that contamination was "ruled out" at the first trial.
I'm not going to bother going through the rest of the article; I suggest that anyone curious about the details have a look at the pro-innocence sites (and the pro-guilt sites, if they want to compare).
Claiming that Guede implicated Sollecito and Knox as a part of a plea bargain and got his sentence cut down for that sounds quite major to me.
Likewise there's a major disagreement with regards to the interrogation where Knox implicated Lumumba (whom the police later cleared, by the way, the same bad police); Knox claims it was after many hours long interrogation and she was literally hit on the head by some policeperson, police says she did this right away and denies brutality.
How the fuck is it a clear cut question that an American girl got hit by Italian police, on basis of her words alone? There's nothing clear about allegations like this.