Dr. Ford’s testimony and Deborah Ramirez’s testimony are two pieces of direct evidence that corroborate each other.
There is zero direct evidence that Omar married her brother.
I didn’t.
By “the accusation,” I was referring to Ford’s accusation. Which was very credible.
I believe Kavanaugh lied his way onto the Court.
I also believe there’s something very hinky about Omar’s marriage history, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (no right wing rag) has said as much, in journalistic terms. (I have already used up my monthly allotment of free articles on Minnesota Vikings stories, but do a search and you’ll see what I mean.)
“Something hinky” could be true, depending on your definition of “hinky”, without necessarily equating to “married her own brother”.
We know that Omar apparently had a religious marriage with no civil legal validation in 2002 to Ahmed Hirsi, a subsequent separation from Hirsi and a civil marriage with Elmi, and within the last two years a formal petition of divorce from Elmi and reconciliation and civil marriage with Hirsi, who is said to be the father of all three of her children, including the youngest born after their initial separation. Plenty of room there for possible “hinkiness” of some kind, although by Trumpian or even Spitzerian standards of scandalousness it looks pretty damn boring, and I have seen zero actual evidence so far that there’s anything there that’s anybody’s business but hers and her family’s.
Link? Even if you can’t read the article(s) in question anymore because you’re over your quota, can you point us to the URL(s) so we can in fact see what you mean without having to guess?
Is it as hinky as an Uber driver who drives Eastern European woman with a questionable legal status from a strip club to a hotel room?
Wait, how many Vikings players do you think she was married to? Serially or all at once?
I’ll point out for the umpteenth time that Manson (and by the way I gave someone a ride home from his Fargodome concert last week, lol) is desperately spinning my doing what every other Uber driver does on a regular basis (and there are about a million of us just in the US alone). IOW, grasping at straws for dirt on me. :rolleyes:
How would that work? 
I would have to scan through articles to look for the one I mean, and I can’t do that. If I remembered specific verbiage from the article I could Google that — but I don’t, sorry. I just remember that I was reading the Strib about her (probably the dead tree version at my in-laws’ house, because I wouldn’t waste a free online article on that) and her marriage and that it all seemed rather dubious. And I don’t agree with you that when someone is running for public office, it’s none of the public’s business.
If I’m saying, “Don’t be lazy.” Then asking me, “What does this prove?”, is a strange follow-up. And particularly not if you’re also quoting me as saying that I don’t believe that there’s proof.
I’m not interested in this thread beyond to get people to either stop nagging me elsewhere or to get them to stop being intellectually lazy.
To also not be a lazy asshole and actually do some work or find a better hobby than trolling people if he thinks that Omar is boinking her brother or whatever else. None of this topic seems to be anything but idiots parading around on both sides.
My stance on Omar is that I’m glad she’s in Congress, in general. If it were just people like her, not so much (I’m not progressive) but Congress wildly needs more diversity.
But as I’ve said, the question was raised, I investigated, I issued a determination. I was willing to debate the quality and import of the evidence. I’ve since stopped caring and migrated into simply being annoyed at the quality of human on the site (in the Pit). Maybe I’ve just spent too much of my SDMB career in Great Debates, arguing against conspiracy theorists, but seeing a bunch of people who are meant to be dedicated to fighting ignorance practicing denialism is disappointing. If you’re looking at a picture of text written in Somali and telling me that the image was faked, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether that image is proof of X, Y, or Z, there’s a predicate issue that I’m talking to someone who thinks that a right wing idiot spent three years learning fucking Somali so that he could fake a conspiracy against a specific Congressperson.
No, they did not spend 3 years learning fucking Somali. Or, if you believe that they did, you need to show me some better evidence than simply telling me that “Omar is innocent ergo that’s fake.”
Awesome. Well you know what, that’s what the people on the right are doing with Trump. “He’s innocent ergo that’s been faked.”
There’s a difference between evidence, proof, and what I’ll call “credence”.
If a woman claims that Trump molested her, that claim has credence. Saying that her accusation has credence is not the same thing as saying that Trump is guilty of molesting that woman in specific. It means that there’s sufficient evidence in that case or in other cases (or the simple number of similar accusations) that pretty much any new accusation has credence. But she could also be a complete liar. Saying that a hypothetical has credence is a different thing from saying “This is what happened. I have proved/disproved it.”
There is no such thing as proof. There is only evidence and evidence doesn’t mean proof, it means a thing that can be used to reduce the spectrum of hypotheticals.
If your brain only accepts the idea that you can support a person (or idea) or be against a person (or idea), and can’t handle the concept of spectrums of eventualities, and to genuinely not care where on the spectrum the ultimate answer ends up, then your brain is broken. Your condition saddens me about the fate of our species if you exist even here.
:rolleyes: There is nothing “intellectually lazy”, or “denialist”, or “assholish”, or anything else objectionable about continuing to be skeptical about a poorly supported accusation that even its own most ardent supporters have not managed to come up with any factual evidence for.
Nor is there anything particularly meritorious about continuing to engage with assloads of unsubstantiated gossip and speculation in order to have the fun of deciding what parts of it seem plausible or implausible to you personally. Feel free to carry on with it for all time if you enjoy it, but trying to scold other people into imagining that they have some kind of intellectual responsibility to participate in it is bullshit.
You’re not fighting ignorance, you’re playing a pointless neverending game of pattycake with ignorance and trying to dignify it with serious-sounding terms like “work” and “investigating” and “the spectrum of hypotheticals”. The fact that other people are making fun of you for this rather than trotting off obediently to help faff around with further inconclusive information about additional unsupported speculations does not mean they’re “lazy assholes” or that their “brain is broken”.
Dear Sage Rat,
Firstly, kindly stop wagging your finger.
Secondly, rather than typing a half-dozen or so paragraphs scolding me and my fellow sloths, how about just answering the question: “What , if anything, do YOU think they [are evidence toward]”? *
*[“proof” being but a figment of lesser minds.]
I *haven’t *said the images are faked!
Let alone make some bonkers claim about precognitive right-wing trolls enrolling in 3-year Somali language courses.
I’m just curious why YOU think they’re so pertinent to the accusation that Ilham Omar married her brother.
Again, the context of this discussion is that, as you acknowledge, a lazy asshole (not me, Annoyed) posted a spurious accusation and then buggered off.
A bunch of folks said “well that looks like bullshit.”
And then you come along with gumboots and shovel saying “Don’t be lazy! Let me show you how it’s done!”
After some vigorous shoveling, you declare “Well, on a spectrum of herbaceous digestion, it currently appears to be bullshit . . . OR IS IT?”
Ok, I’m being silly.
Please tell me what you think those social media posts and photos indicate, and where on your spectrum of evidence you feel they lie.
Thank you, Kimtsu.
You have articulated my feelings much better than I could have.
Nevertheless, for my part, I am curious why Sage Rat thinks those social media posts and images are such a big deal. (Or if he doesn’t, why he’s spent so much time insisting that we give them especial consideration.)
This claim about Omar does not have credence.
It isn’t made by someone who purports to have actual knowledge about her and her family. The claim is counter to what is openly known about her family and circumstance. The claim also requires a series of bizarre actions to be taken, not the least of which is a father abandoning his 5 year old son while fleeing Somalia with the rest of the kids, and that son choosing to become a US citizen via a felonious sham marriage rather than just doing it legally, which was his right to do.
Since the claim is made by someone with zero personal knowledge of the situation, in order to HAVE credence they need to present evidence, and they have not.
As far as I can tell, no one has made this claim. The only one bringing this up is you.
IOW, the only person making this claim is Sage Rat’s strawman.
My apologies Not Carlson. I meant to post that the only one making any claims about anyone learning the Somali language was Sage Rat. I accidentally quoted your post when I meant to quote one of his.
Because denialism annoys me. As said, it doesn’t matter if all they prove is that Omar has nasty feet - which doesn’t even have anything to do with the topic - if the people that I’m talking to are telling me that the images are falsified and refuse to look at them.
I’m not going to explain this again. If you read the words that I write to mean, “I think that Omar is guilty of malfeasance” when I’m writing “Stop being mentally lazy” because you’re inferring that I’m calling you lazy because you don’t agree with me, then stop inferring. That’s another level of you trying to convince yourself to be lazy. There is no subtext. I don’t care whether Omar is guilty or innocent, has wonderful feet or nasty feet.
Trust that what I write exactly what I mean with no deeper nor malicious nor argumentative angle pro nor con of Ilhan Omar. We could be arguing about whether cheese is a good natural deodorizer and if you’re refusing to investigate and refusing to consider even really crappy evidence, using bizarre and outlandish reasoning, I’m going to be just as much telling you that you need to see a neurologist.
The “bizarre and outlandish” is the issue, not the deodorizing qualities of cheese. Cheese just isn’t something that excites me one way or the other. Widespread mental illness, on the other hand, is something that concerns me and worries me.
What I’m seeing is the same thing I saw with 9/11 Twoofers: the piling up of a bunch of relatively innocuous grains of sand, pointing to the pile, and asking “What about all of this?”
Without solid evidence, it’s a all just a pile of sand.
This is where your problem lies.
The deodorizing qualities of cheese is the claim. It’s a shit claim. It has no credence, and no basis in reality. The fact that you have “crappy evidence” to support it does not generate a responsibility on my part to investigate your crappy evidence.
I am only required to consider your claim if you have “good evidence” to support it. Good evidence suggests there is something worthwhile to investigate, crappy evidence suggests nothing.
The only thing bizarre and outlandish is the expectation that people are going to take an anonymous claim about a public figure, provide no reliable evidence that it is correct, and demand that everyone else do the work to disprove it.
And, I’ll repeat, we saw this whole thing play out before, with all the same assholes making claims, and no amount of evidence made a difference, because it was never about the claim, it was always about having a scandal to talk about.
I certainly hope that this has been has been brought to the attention of the appropriate authorities, as this administration is notably lax and lenient on regards to immigration issues.
For someone who is so annoyed by denialism, he sure is into that very thing, isn’t he?