Quote: Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom
Jimmy Carter just stated:

Quote: "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American."

I admire Carter in some ways because he's championed some important issues regarding non-militarism and several civil liberties, but he's quite possibly going senile.

Were Obama as white as driven snow democrats and republicans would still be in there fighting for their given special interests. Were ACORN predominantly white organizers dealing with predominantly white citizens republicans would still do everything they can to discredit and defund them. AARP anyone?

So if you don't support strengthening the government/corporate health care cartel you're a racist. Just thought you should know.

Please parse his statement again. Or see the part I bolded.

"overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity".

He's not saying the overwhelming portion of all animosity; he's saying the overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity. For the most part I believe he's right.

The people who have valid counterarguments against the democrats are making them in calm and orderly manners. The people who are going batshit insane more often than not have no point whatsoever and accepted equivalent and worse behaviour by the previous administration (funny how they didn't have a problem with bailouts until Obama was elected!). What else can it possibly be? They didn't go this nuts when Clinton tried making the same reforms...


So I agree with his statement. Of course that won't stop every simpleton and his mother from simplifying it to "antiobama = racist"; but let's be honest, that ain't what he said.

Quote: Original post by Mithrandir

Quote: Original post by LessBread
They used to attack it for voter fraud (really voter registration fraud), neglecting the fact that when it comes to voter registration fraud the criminals work for Republicans [1], [2], [3].

The stupidest part about the whole fraud thing is that there was virtually no fraud on behalf of ACORN itself. Federal laws mandate that when given voter registration forms, even if you know the information is false, you are still required to submit them. Yes, ACORN was following the law by submitting those fraudulent forms; they had no other choice!

It's supposed to stop organizations from pretending to register people and then tossing all the forms out. Personally I don't see a problem with the system; we found the forms to be fraudulent, and therefore they weren't registered, and no one was ever able to actually vote under the fraudulent aliases.

What's the big deal?

Having worked in a few voter registration drives myself, fraudulently filled out cards are not submitted, that is, they aren't turned in with the intent of creating phony registrations. They are turned in with the intent of preventing abuse and possibly investigating the person who filled the card out for fraud. The semantics are important because they are easily abused by partisans who would use these episodes to make bogus claims.

Those links above, on the other hand, tell how Republican operatives were changing the party affiliation of people they had registered to vote. The law says that if you're registering people to vote, you have to let them pick their party affiliation and even though they may not pick the party you want them to, you're still obligated to turn their cards in. The people in those stories were changing people's party affiliation to Republican before they turned the cards in.

Quote: Original post by Mithrandir
Please parse his statement again. Or see the part I bolded.

"overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity".

He's not saying the overwhelming portion of all animosity; he's saying the overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity. For the most part I believe he's right.

The people who have valid counterarguments against the democrats are making them in calm and orderly manners. The people who are going batshit insane more often than not have no point whatsoever and accepted equivalent and worse behaviour by the previous administration (funny how they didn't have a problem with bailouts until Obama was elected!). What else can it possibly be? They didn't go this nuts when Clinton tried making the same reforms...


So I agree with his statement. Of course that won't stop every simpleton and his mother from simplifying it to "antiobama = racist"; but let's be honest, that ain't what he said.

I understand it can be parsed that way Mith. Hell, most of us here are smart enough to parse the English language to support whatever position we draw from a hat. But if you've read the entire text of his statement his meaning is clear.

It's a cynical and backhanded attempt to intimidate opposition to the health care debate. That seems a popular tactic these days.

To Obama's credit he distanced himself immediately. I've frankly admired Obama's ability to not get drawn in to the race baiting business. It can't be easy when his own political side is the one prompting him to do so. But he's very politically astute, and must realize there's a reason he won the presidency while Sharpton was never more than a circus act.

The reason is because he had the balls to run for president of the United States, not black president of the United States.

Whenever Obama made his "acted stupidly" statement about the professor Gates ordeal I was gratified. Disorderly conduct is a catch all tool to encourage police abuse and regardless of color it's safe to assume the arresting officer acted stupidly.

The institutional racism, that is much alive today didn't come from "birthers" and "rednecks", it came from mainstream media, both parties, and the vast establishment that chided him for making what should have been construed as a civil liberty statement.

Carter's race baiting is the ugly twin of racism and is a symptom of the institutional racism that both parties perpetuate.

Well, that was fast

House votes to cut ACORN funding

Quote: It's been a costly week for ACORN.

The House of Representatives just voted 345 to 75 to prohibit any federal funding for the community organizing group. The vote follows on the heels of a similar prohibition added to a spending bill in the Senate on Monday, which was approved by a vote of 83 to 7... snip

Quote: Original post by Rycross

Quote: Original post by superpig
How many employees in an organisation have to exhibit bad behaviour before you'd consider it 'evidence' that there is something wrong with the organization as a whole? Seriously, I think that's a useful question to answer for the general case.

It depends on a lot of factors. If its 6 employees in an organization of 20, then yes, that's indicative of corruption. 6 in 100? Maybe. 6 in 1000? No, its not really. What is the size of ACORN anyway?

Good question. From their homepage: "ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in about 75 cities across the country." So far we've seen videos from 5 of those chapters, or 0.42% of them.

Quote: More relevant is whether they received orders, or whether compensation is set up, to specifically encourage fraud over legitimate canvassing. That's not an easy thing to prove.

Yes! Very good. To make statements about whether ACORN is corrupt purely based on sampling their offices is to reason inductively. Pattern-based inductive reasoning like that is unsound: by the same reasoning, the sun has risen every day in recorded human history, so we could conclude that it will continue to do so for every future day; but we already know that's not true! Observations like this are useless without an explanatory theory - such as, "there is insufficient oversight in some aspects of ACORN such that some chapters behave unacceptably," or "ACORN is a fundamentally and criminally corrupt organisation that endorses behaviour like this."

Quote: Original post by BerwynIrish
You're telling me that you never consider the source? You think O'Reilly is going to wake up one day and decide to become honest?

I said that I'm not basing my judgement on O'Reilly, I'm basing it on the videos and on ACORN's statements and behaviour. Do you think the videos are fake?

Quote: There's the possibility that you or others with the same degree of familiarity will walk away from this latest smear effort with vague recollections of a child prostitution ring, just as you and others have with the voter registration fraud smear. There's two audiences for this smear: The crazies who relish in it and the regular folks who don't pay that much attention but will probably end up with a vague negative connotation associated with ACORN. And with smear after smear, the vague negative connotations accumulate.

This is actually a complaint about the behaviour of the right-wing media, no? It's not relevant to whether ACORN is actually corrupt or not. The former is not what I'm interested in talking about here; the latter is what's interesting to me.

Quote: Such things help me determine who I should spend my time giving serious consideration to. I suppose you make such decisions based on other criterion.

I'm going to be questioning and trying to refute what I'm told regardless of whether it's true or false. So, I'm more interested in whoever's making arguments I haven't heard before.

Quote: If you look back at the full context of what I said, it's not too hard to see that my point wasn't that ACORN's goals could possibly excuse criminal behavior.

Then was your point relevant?

Quote: My mistake. I was only aware of the one at the time. But I still haven't seen the rest myself and don't intend to waste my time with them. So if you don't mind, spell it out clearly for me: All seven of these employees were apparently willing to assist with child prostitution, yes or no?

Yes.

Quote: Let us also note that one of these employees told these clever sting operatives that she killed her husband, which she in fact did not do, so it is safe to say that this one was definitely humoring these bozos.

I agree that she told them she killed her husband and that the police have determined that she did not. I don't think it's sound to conclude therefore that she was 'humouring' them - she might just as easily have been trying to impress them.

Quote: Absent any other evidence, it would have to be huge. They don't have any memos from ACORN saying "it's dandy to offer up our organizational resources for criminal activity", do they? They don't have any ACORN employees saying "we were trained to welcome child prostituters with open arms", do they? They don't have any kind of paper trail linking the organization to criminal activity, do they? They don't have any evidence that ACORN has profited, even indirectly, one cent from any criminal activity, do they? They have nothing but a handful of low-level employees who were conceivably playing along with a gag.

Right, agreed.

Quote: As I said in the Beck thread, throw these undercover assholes at any organization of ACORN's size with enough persistence and you're going to get similar results.

Mmmmmh... ACORN claims to be 400,000 people. I'm having a hard time coming up with many orgs of similar size that I'm familiar with, so it's tough to provide you with a counterexample. Microsoft's about 90,000 people and I don't think that you'd get similar results given enough persistence, but maybe they're just not big enough.

Quote: Surely six [...] out of what must be over a thousand doesn't even come close for you, does it?

It's not proof of anything, certainly. It's six known-bad cases, and (over a thousand - 6) indeterminate cases. It'd be even less notable if it were 6 known-bad cases, "hundreds" of known-good cases (where they tried and got kicked out), and (over a thousand - 6 - "hundreds") of indeterminate cases.

Quote:
(subtracting the fake husband killer and very generously granting that the other six were genuine in the moment, and would have gone through with it - did it ever come to that in your videos?)

"would have gone through with it" - well, they did give advice, and they did look up tax codes and start filling out forms and so on. That seems to be like going through with it. This doesn't really cover the very latest video in San Diego, btw - the guy they spoke to there collected lots of information and asked lots of questions, and made promises to get back to them, which would be consistent with him gathering intel to give to the police.

Quote: Maybe I wasn't giving you enough credit, but the bottom line is that you are taking seriously accusations originating from Fox News, accusations which don't hold up well to critical thinking, much less investigation.

Actually, the accusations originated from biggovernment.com - the place the videos were originally posted, I saw it there before I knew Fox were reporting it. But anyway, I want to improve my critical thinking. Can you tell me what I've missed here? As far as I can tell it hinges very much on how many offices they tried and failed at; is there another, more substantial problem in their story?

Quote: What I realize is that if anybody is familiar with O'Reilly and Beck and takes them seriously, then they are beyond reason anyway.

I'm not familiar with them. I'm a Brit, I don't watch American news channels on a regular basis.

Quote: The only sane response to them is to point and laugh.

That's very pessimistic. The people I was watching it with are familiar with the network, and they're very much open to a reasonable argument.

Quote: Their pattern of lying is relevant and needs to be pointed out on a regular basis, if not for the love of truth, then at least to counteract the cumulative negative connotation effect I noted above.

Pointing out the pattern is fine, but it's not persuasive unless you also demonstrate that the pattern is being continued, and have an explanatory theory for why the pattern exists (which you sort of do).

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Are Republicans as a group racist? Not explicitly.

So then are you saying they are implicitly racist?

My point is not the issue, it's the attitude with which you speak on the issues. If you haven't noticed (not that I think anyone should notice my absence), I haven't been posting anywhere near as much as I used to around here. I haven't decreased my participation in discussions on politics in any way -- in fact it's probably increased -- I've just been elsewhere doing it, with a much more diverse spectrum of people than just "left and right" (a false dichotomy that ignores the diversity of opinions. Boolean ideology is artificial). This foray into other forums makes this sort of rhetoric incredibly... jarring in its divisiveness.

When you talk about "Republicans", you talk about the group as a whole, which includes many people here. I'm personally registered Republican, for various reasons. When you intimate a belief that being a Republican make a person in some way a racist, then you say to your fellow forum members, "you are a racist".

That's why I made the "robots" comment, to contrast against what I thought was an equally ridiculous statement to "republicans are racist".

It feeds nicely into the discussion on Carter's comments, "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man". Mith says, "What else can it possibly be [than racism]? They didn't go this nuts when Clinton tried making the same reforms..." Really, when was the last time anyone went this nuts about anything? Code Pink with war protests comes to mind*. It's been a steadily growing trend, this loud thrashing of signs and protests at the drop of a hat. So busy yelling about teabaggers and hitlers and brownshirts and racists that there is no listening. This is a fundamental theme of President Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope" (yes, I'm reading it). It's too easy to call it racism and dismiss the lot. I don't think its racism at all. I know a lot of racists; they are dirt-poor bottom feeders. The impact that these people (at least the ones I have met) have on society and policy is infinitesimal at best. Why even give them and their opinions the time of day in such discussions? It's not racism, it's just plain noise making, with no intention of ever listening, and it's coming from the right AND the left. In these discussions, they are strawmen.

I tried starting a discussion with a few new acquaintances on the healthcare proposals. I presented fairly standard Libertarian views on the role of the state in the lives of people. It ended with these folks literally calling me a "dick", and that I "must hate poor people and want them to die." Whether you agree with the Libertarian viewpoint or not does not change the fact that Libertarians hold their views because they believe it to be the "least evil" or "greatest good", not because they want "old ladies to choose between eating and buying medicine". Is it so much of a mystery why people get defensive when this sort of things happen?

If these people are not the mainstream opinion, are "astroturfers" or whatever, then why do people pay attention to it? Regardless of the trends of the media, if it's supposedly not important, then just ignore it. By bringing it up in discussions like this, it comes across as attempting to marginalize other dissenting opinions by association.

I'm not trying to say that we should all be friends and hold hands and "try to work this out." But come on, give a little consideration to your opponents. They don't actually eat babies.



*speaking of, where have they been? It turns out, they are still very much active. Can we not show dissent amongst the ranks of the liberal left? I wonder how many of them voted for Obama and are now sorely disappointed

Quote: Original post by superpig

Quote: Original post by BerwynIrish
You're telling me that you never consider the source? You think O'Reilly is going to wake up one day and decide to become honest?

I said that I'm not basing my judgement on O'Reilly, I'm basing it on the videos and on ACORN's statements and behaviour. Do you think the videos are fake?

No, I don't think they are fake, but I know four things about them: 1) It's possible (although I can't say how likely) that the incriminating words/actions may appear less incriminating inside of a context the videos omit. 2) The sincerity of employees in at least some is questionable. 3) The videos constitute entrapment, and there's a good reason that actual law enforcement is not allowed to do this. 4) They represent a laughably small sample size of low-level ACORN employees. And bonus #5: Fox has always been a welcoming soapbox for extreme liars.

Quote:

Quote: There's the possibility that you or others with the same degree of familiarity will walk away from this latest smear effort with vague recollections of a child prostitution ring, just as you and others have with the voter registration fraud smear. There's two audiences for this smear: The crazies who relish in it and the regular folks who don't pay that much attention but will probably end up with a vague negative connotation associated with ACORN. And with smear after smear, the vague negative connotations accumulate.

This is actually a complaint about the behaviour of the right-wing media, no? It's not relevant to whether ACORN is actually corrupt or not. The former is not what I'm interested in talking about here; the latter is what's interesting to me.

But you are interested in ACORN precisely because conservatives (not necessarily just conservative media) have targeted it for smearing. I went to the web site you said you learned about the tapes from, and right now the home page is headline after headline about how ACORN is getting theirs. They love how effectively their smear campaign is working. You agree that these videos are flimsy evidence, but as far as biggovernment.com is concerned, ACORN may as well be guilty of child prostitution. Three headlines refer to the "ACORN prostitution scandal" and one headline reads "It’s Not Just ACORN; SEIU’s Underage Sex Scandal." They are clearly up to their hateful little chests in the vendetta. I defy anybody to go look at that site and tell me with a straight face that these guys are interested in the truth. You're being played. Not in the sense that you're being duped about the facts (in spite of the fact that they desperately want you to believe that the organization is guilty of something, preferably child prostitution), but in the sense that you've been convinced that there's shady enough dealings going on that ACORN requires further investigation.

Quote:

Quote: Absent any other evidence, it would have to be huge. They don't have any memos from ACORN saying "it's dandy to offer up our organizational resources for criminal activity", do they? They don't have any ACORN employees saying "we were trained to welcome child prostituters with open arms", do they? They don't have any kind of paper trail linking the organization to criminal activity, do they? They don't have any evidence that ACORN has profited, even indirectly, one cent from any criminal activity, do they? They have nothing but a handful of low-level employees who were conceivably playing along with a gag.

Right, agreed.

You continue to puzzle me with your willingness to accept that ACORN might be guilty of... something, I don't know what, but anyway, your willingness look to for more evidence of ACORN's whatever-they're-up-to when the evidence you've been given so far can charitably be described as flimsy (actually, it's charitable to call it evidence) and comes from an obvious smear campaign is just puzzling. Your time is your own to spend, but I'll bet you real money with 20 to 1 odds that you're wasting it completely, to be determined by whether or not ACRON is convicted of anything in the next year or two.

Quote:

Quote: As I said in the Beck thread, throw these undercover assholes at any organization of ACORN's size with enough persistence and you're going to get similar results.

Mmmmmh... ACORN claims to be 400,000 people. I'm having a hard time coming up with many orgs of similar size that I'm familiar with, so it's tough to provide you with a counterexample. Microsoft's about 90,000 people and I don't think that you'd get similar results given enough persistence, but maybe they're just not big enough.

Do you really think that a fraction of one percent of any organization, or of humanity in general, couldn't be entrapped like this? Shock Jock DJs have no problem making prank phone calls which get their victims to overlook fake deviant or even criminal behavior, especially when their target is functioning as a customer service rep or otherwise serving in a fairly thankless capacity which entails servicing people.

Quote:

Quote: What I realize is that if anybody is familiar with O'Reilly and Beck and takes them seriously, then they are beyond reason anyway.

I'm not familiar with them. I'm a Brit, I don't watch American news channels on a regular basis.

That's good news.

That was more time than I wanted to put into arguing against a smear campaign that isn't going to end any time soon. To be complete, and because it irks it me when others do it to me and don't acknowledge it: I know that I skipped some of your points. Addressing them would have required more time than I'm willing to put into this.

[Edited by - BerwynIrish on September 17, 2009 11:33:39 PM]

I just figured out the most accurate way to categorize Fox "News". It's Fox "Political Gossip".

Giving it some more thought, I don't think that I adequately addressed a main point of disagreement between superpig and myself. I've been explaining the rotten motivations of the guys promoting the videos, but not the rotten motivations and attendant investigative incompetence of the actual video makers themselves. He gave me biggovernment.com as his source, but they were really promoters of the videos just as Fox News is. Some small bio information is at the biggov website. The guy is a veteran right wing activist (and claims to have uncovered stauatory rape at Planned Parenthood - let's see the coviction, Woodward) and the girl is only 20 so she doesn't have much of a history, but I found this from her to be very interesting

Quote:
1) Ask A Question: What if a “prostitute” and her alleged law school boyfriend walk into ACORN seeking housing for an underage brothel to fund his future congressional campaign?

2) Do Background Research:

1. Learn as much about ACORN housing procedures and protocol as possible.
2. History of ACORN and their effect on the United States

3) Construct a Hypothesis: ACORN is corrupt and it is in their nature to promote and disguise illegal behavior.

4) Experiment: Baltimore, DC, Brooklyn, San Bernardino, and…

5) Analyze and draw a conclusion.

How embarrassing for her and the ACORN haters. Numbers one and three are a real hoot. I kid you not, I just looked this up, and before I saw this, I already intended to point out that the video makers ran their "sting" operation not because they had any insider information that ACORN is involved in illegal activities, not because they had a hot tip that ACORN is systematically supporting/enabling/dabbling in prostitution, but because they hate ACORN.

Perhaps this is your first real introduction to the American conservative smear machine. Maybe a continued investigation on your part would be productive. Just keep in mind the pattern of lies (take a look at the bogus voter fraud claims and how quickly they reported as fact the fake murder and how they are taking it as a given that these videos, which you recognize as flimsy evidence, constitute proof of ACORN's corruption) and the motivations of these people you are now taking seriously. And one, two, and three years down the road, when ACORN still has not been convicted of anything despite this intense scrutiny, look back at how they cultivated a concern in you that ACORN is shady, and learn to respond to the smear machine with derision instead of letting yourself get played.

[Edited by - BerwynIrish on September 18, 2009 12:46:53 PM]

The filmmakers claim that every office that they have been to was complicit. At least one turned them away and filed a police report.