'E’s probably not going to reply here as he’s probably ran off with some nutcase WILLINGLY. I just bet he has. :dubious:
What Monty doesn’t seem to get is that there are two sides to this story.
One: that Elizabeth Smart met Emmanuel, and was enamored with him. The night he came by, she put on her running shoes, told her sister to be quiet, and left. She remained with him for months and bypassed every opportunity to escape or to reveal her identity to people.
Two: that she was kidnapped by a guy who left no forensic evidence, broke into a room with two girls who didn’t scream or run (but rather, one of them got her sneakers on and the other one didn’t tell her parents), “brainwashed” (let’s see some evidence of the existence of ‘brainwashing’) her so well that she didn’t even leave when he was IN FREAKIN’ JAIL, and didn’t even tell the COPS who she was when she was in their custody.
Just because everyone in America THOUGHT she was kidnapped for a year, Monty wants you to think that anyone who says she wasn’t kidnapped is a crackpot.
If you start from zero, there is no more evidence of her being kidnapped than there is of her running away, and really less. Basically the only thing that points to a kidnapping is the tale of the little girl who faked sleep, couldn’t tell you if it was a gun or a knife and two hours after the fact told her parents, “Elizabeth is gone”.
Monty seems a little confused about the burden of proof here, demanding evidence of a “non-kidnapping”, of a person running away. The evidence is the events themselves, entered into without the bias one has after being told by the media and parents for years that this was a kidnapping.
Once upon a time in the kingdom of Grid in the nation of Stripes, there lived a beautiful young princess. She lived in a beautiful castle with her beautiful parents and her beautiful brothers and sisters. The princess had golden hair, and she played the harp.
One day as the the princess’s mother travelled through the kingdom of Grid, she spied an ogre on a street corner. The ogre was ugly and dirty and smelly and appeared to be insane, but as it is the custom in the kingdom of Grid to be kind to ogres, the princess’s mother spoke to the ogre, and the ogre agreed to repair the castle roof in exchange for nectar and gold.
When the princess saw the ugly, dirty, smelly, insane ogre, her heart leapt forth. She cried to her parents, “Oh mother, oh father. I love the ogre. I must forsake my harp and this castle and go with the ogre.”
At first the princess’s parents were dismayed, but soon they too grew to love the ogre. “This is not the life we had planned for you,” they said to the princess, “but you are fourteen now, and we must bow to your wishes. We take comfort knowing that the ogre’s ugly, dirty, smelly, crazy wife will help care for you. Go live in squalor and have sex with your beloved ogre, for it is God’s will that you do so.”
So the princess and her parents devised a plan, and one dark night the princess slipped from her room to join the ogre. The next morning, according to the plan, the princess’s parents alerted the kingdom that the princess had been stolen from the castle by an unknown fiend. They did this because . . . uh, because . . . [insert reason here]. Soon the kingdom, and indeed the entire nation of Stripes, was searching everywhere for the princess. But the princess donned a cloak of invisibility and spoke to no one, and she and the ogre and his other wife roamed the kingdom in blissful, carefree abandon.
Ugly, dirty, smelly, insane ogres everywhere rejoiced and began to stand on street corners, knowing that someday they too would find a beautiful underaged princess to have sex with.
All was right in the kingdom until one day the princess’s sister, in a fit of jealousy (for she was now 11 and wanted an ogre of her own), spoke the ogre’s name and broke the spell that made the princess invisible. The black-hearted guardsmen of the kingdom of Grid seized and imprisoned the ogre, and they forced the princess to return to the castle of her parents, where she sits and waits forlornly, venturing forth only occasionally to visit the White House, appear on Oprah, or play the harp with Toby Keith.
And ugly, dirty, smelly, insane ogres everywhere weep and gnash their teeth, and they strive to tell the true story of the princess and her ogre so that the magic of true love may once again be restored to the kingdom of Grid in the nation of Stripes.
I get perfectly well that there’s more than one side to any story. Regarding the Smart kidnapping case, there’s the truth and then there’s the garbage you spout.
Prove the basic assertion there.
Fear. Look it up. Then get back to those of us dwelling on Planet Earth in the Realm of Reality.
You have no idea of what I want or don’t want anyone to think. What I expect, though, is for you to provide some proof of your asinine assertions regarding this case. You might notice, though, that I’m not the only one who’s asked you to provide such.
Funny line from you, unless, sadly, you actually think that makes sense: “there’s more but there’s less.”
First: See above regarding fear.
Second: There’s testimony from people more involved in the case than you.
I’m not confused at all. You are the one who made the positive assertions that the young lady didn’t run away, that she went with her kidnapper to “be one of his wives,” and that every Mormon in the state of Utah knew it. It’s on you to prove those assertions you’ve made.
Ah, so you pretend that your viewpoint which you admit is based on exactly nothing (which I gues makes sense since you think that less is more, thus making nothing into infinite proof) is Truth with a Capital T, but those of us who’ve followed the case, and more importantly, the law enforcement authorities who have also followed the case are wrong because we, and more importantly, said authorities are operating on fact.
Look, I don’t really care that you’re such a bigot when it comes to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That doesn’t mean you have to post moronic and asinine blurbs about a victimized little girl.
I’m not vouching for the veracity of this site, but it has most of the information about the case. It seems to me that, since we’re still waiting for the facts to come out at trial, there is a lot of speculation going on. Personally, I’ll need more facts before I decide the issue either way.
Nationmaster simply re-formates Wikipedia articles in their “encyclopedia” section. The site is no more or less authoritive/reliable than Wikipedia(being the exact same content and all).
Enjoy,
Steven
[Johnny Carson voice]
I did not know that.
[/Johnny Carson voice]
Thanks.
I think that it is a possibility that Elizabeth Smart ran away, maybe not knowing what she was getting into, but to state it as a fact is dumb. Trunk doesn’t know any more than any of us what actually happened the night she disappeared. Therefore I say unto Trunk: Shut the fuck up.
Well, I don’t think I’ll shut the fuck up.
I mean, read my post in this thread and my last post in the linked thread. Clearly, I’ve backed off my initial assertion that “obviously, she ran away and every Mormon knew about it” (and that’s about as concilliatory as I’ll get).
But freak or not, I’m not for railroading Brian Mitchell just because he’s an ogre, and Elizabeth was a beautiful young princess living in a beautiful castle. (If there’s a difference between that kind of thinking that Laina outlines and the kind of thinking that led to lynchings, I’d be interested in hearing it.)
Just because the “default belief” in this country is that she was kidnapped, there’s no burden of proof to show she ran away. The “proof” for her running away is the lack of evidence of a kidnapping, the lack of an escape attempt, the lack of desire to rejoin her family.
And what’s holding all that together?
Apparently the mind-control/brainwashing/fear-tactics of the mastermind Brian Mitchell. Someone around here might not be on planet Earth, but it sure isn’t me.
Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome? Do you believe Patty Hearst voluntarily joined the SLA? Just curious.
The magnanimous nature of your intellectual honesty is awe inspiring :rolleyes:.
And, damnit TYM!!!, I was gonna say:
While you’re at it, google for Patty Hearst or stokholm syndrome.
And, so there, I still will! Nyeh nyeh!
I don’t think my comments were asinine. I also think there’s something fishy about Smart’s story. I’m not saying the entire thing is a big fat lie but there’s something strange there. Maybe I’m just too suspicious and expect too much brainpower from a 14-year-old. Maybe she’s developmentally slow and that’s why she didn’t take any opportunity to get away. In any case, I don’t think the whole story has been told.
not that I give a crap one way or the other if she ran willingly or not but
its not like it would be the first time a 14 year old girl acted like, well a 14 year old girl. I am posative a few of the women on this board will tell you some of the guys they had a crush on at 14 were ogres…well at least in retrospect. that little story of fairy tale castles is just that, young girls do foolish things all the time and alot of it involves innapropriatly older men…trust me on this, I work with 15 year old girls all the time. getting hit on by a girl that should be interested in you son is weird.
This is a joke, right? Stokholm syndrome has already been refrenced in this thread, and is a much more likely reason than that she’s developmentally retarded.
I don’t know how Mormon girls are socialized (I have read a few things, but know nothing up directly–I don’t know if one can even generalize to that degree) but ES’s passivity is striking, to say the least. I don’t know if Stockholm syndrome covers it.
I don’t think we know enough about any of this story to say definitively one way or another.
Actually re-writing it as a fairy tale highlights some of the mythological themes and makes me wonder if we(as a culture) want her to be abducted, rather than a girl who might have made a poor choice.
Not saying that she went willingly, but want to look at all possiblities.
For all of you who believe that the Illuminati threat is true, and that a girl cannot be forcibly coerced by her kidnapper, I give you the tale of The Girl in the Box. For another telling of the Elizabeth Smart story, try Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, pages 44-51.
I know for those of you who feel the Illuminati and the Masons are battling covertly for our souls, Sir William of Ockham’s shaving implement means nothing. To those of us with rational thought, it serves.
I laughed.
The simplest answer is that she was abducted. Guy breaks into the house, wakes the girls up by saying something like "If you make a sound I’ll kill you and your parents. Tells the other girl that once he’s out of the house, if he hears her scream he’s going to kill her sister. Little girl is so terrified, and young, that she doesn’t have a good sense of time and merely shivers for a couple hours.
I see no more proof for the claim that she wanted to marry this dude than that she was hoping they’d start up a drug smuggling ring with her serving as a coke mule.
[Die Hard]
By now they’re going through the early stages of the Helsinki Syndrome.
As in Helsinki, Sweden…
[/Die Hard]
I’ve heard the Stockholm Syndrome mentioned a lot over the years ever since the Patty Hearst thing. I must say, I don’t understand it. But I am perfectly willing to accept that just because I don’t “get it”, it doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
And if you think the Elizabeth Smart case is a wee bit odd, what about the case of Bobbi Parker, who was kidnapped and held captive by an escaped convict for over ten years?
Do these sorts of cases sound strange to me? Sure. I just can’t imagine begin in such a situation and not trying to escape at every opportunity. But then again I haven’t studied it, I’m not a psychologist, and I certainly haven’t read all the police reports, so I’m willing to concede that I really don’t understand what’s going on here.