All I know is it’s the first time I’ve heard Bush compared to Hoover.
Daniel
Ignore responsibility at your own peril. That’s how we got Bush/Cheney, btw, because enought people didn’t even care what’s right. 
*Spock: * Captain, with this Updike fellow; are you sure it isn’t time for a colorful metaphor?
Dude, I wrote that quiz. That quiz has a right and wrong answer as to who’s responsible. Did you take the quiz? If so, did you get a right answer?
I’m not ignoring responsibility. You’re not ignoring responsibility. The author’s not ignoring responsibility. You ARE ignoring the fact that the author told you who’s responsible in a form that you understood.
Daniel
Quite a bit. You are dodging and weaving all over, here, refusing to take responsibility for your decisions, just like the people you are criticizing.
A first person account by a person not trained to be a reporter is just that, personal testimony. It will be colored by their emotional state, their personal philosophy, their lifelong experiences, and the events they experienced. However, all of those aspects of their testimony will be made evident in their presentation. It is quite possible to challenge their description of their interactions with police or their attributing motivations to the police based on the fact that they demonstrated a left-wing, anti-authority bias in their presentation.
You, however, failed to do that. You have attempted to dismiss the entire account, first on the grounds that it was presented in the SW paper (with no corresponding claim that we should dismiss anything presented by, for example, the White House). When you dragged your complaints over to this thread, you have claimed that you should be allowed to dismiss all their testimony by consistently mischaracterizing the story on the SW site as bad reporting, when it is not reporting by a journalist, at all.
Now you are trying to pretend that just because they use language you do not like to hear, you should be allowed to dismiss their testimony.
And you continue to avoid the point that much of their testimony has been supported by other witnesses and even corroborated by the police.
Rather than find actual evidence that these two EMS trechs were lying, you have tried to poison the well by dismissing their testimony just because you do not like the way they talk.
I am sure that they have spun their version of events. However, your attempt to discredit them with nothing but your personal bias does not persuade me to ignore them when you cannot disprove anything they have said.
Quick! Challenge him to a duel!
updike just admit you over-reacted. A little humble pie never hurt anyone…even when served up by a shero or two.
OK tom, or is it debb, you (and Bobby Brady) win. The windows gave way, and the vase broke. :wally
Updike, which road will it be, then? A thousand eyes are watching. Will you be stubborn and sulky and pretend to cling to your ignorance? Or will you admit that
- the eyewitness accounts have been reported in reputable sources?
- everyone was able to deduce how and why “the windows gave way”?
What kind of Doper are you going to be?
- the eyewitness accounts have been reported in reputable sources?
Reputable sources like socialistworkers.org? No thanks.
- everyone was able to deduce how and why “the windows gave way”?
Bah, there’s nothing to deduce. Why are they using such obviously biased language? Why didn’t they say, for example, that looters broke the windows?Why the stupid, forced construction of “windows giving way”?
What kind of Doper are you going to be?
One who doesn’t believe everything I read on the internets, for example.
Why all the abuse here? Unless you have to agree with the hive-mind to be accepted as a Doper, that is. :mad:
Uh, for those who good writers, yeah. It’s just an expression.
Jesus Christ, you’re anal.
How about This American Life? The Sept. 10th show “After the Flood.”
Like it or not, these witnesses are actually saying the police fired into the air to drive people away from an escape route leading out of New Orleans. I don’t like the fact that a pathetic rag like Socialist Worker picked up the story and is using it for its own ends, but that’s the allegation. What’s more, the police do not appear to be denying that such behavior occurred. They’re merely saying it was the correct decision.
Excellent! An extremely wise policy :). Now can you look elsewhere and find what the witnesses are saying?
It’s been explained to you already that this was an independent account that just happened to be picked up and reported in the Socialist Worker.
By your logic, if you wrote an account of your experiences in New Orleans, and it happened to get printed in the Socialist Worker, that would automatically make your account suspect, even though it was created completely independently of the Socialist Worker, with no input from the newspaper.
Also, one without basic reasoning skills, it appears.
Don’t forget Snopes.com!
Why are they using biased language? Because they got shafted by the authorities on at least four occasions and they are going to describe their experiences from their (now, at least) anti-authoritarian perspective.
You are making way too much about their description of one incident of looting while you studiously hide from the fact that they reported being driven away by police from three separate locations where they had taken shelter, had their chartered vehicles confiscated by the National Guard, been refused exit from New Orleans by police operating outside their jurisdiction, and had food stolen from them by police.
Of the previous accusations, their claims to have had police break them up into smaller groups (making each group less safe from actual criminals), being prevented from leaving the city with gunfire, and having their property confiscated by police (operating outside their jurisdiction) have all been confirmed by separate reports including the police. Yet you petulantly want to dismiss all their testimony because when they describe a separate group looting a grocery for perishable food, they do not portray the looters as the worst scum of the earth.
And you continue to hide from the fact that you initially dismissed the claims simply because their testimony appeared in a socialist publication.
I do not believe everything I find on the internet. I do consider all evidence instead of dismissing it because I have a personal distaste for the messenger.
Why the abuse? Because you opened a Pit thread to whine about people accepting testimony from a site that you did not happen to like, distorting the nature of the evidence presented and deliberately ignoring independent confirmation of the events narrated in that source while whining about the language used by the authors as though that negated every bit of testimony they presented. (And this after deliberately identifying the refugee group as arsonists without providing any evidence of your own in the other thread.)
This is the Straight Dope. When you post nonsense and then open a Pit thread to declare that everyone should bow to your illogic, you are inviting abuse.
Updike, I agree with you on one thing: “sheroes” is an embarassingly stupid neologism. It’s the product of people who obsessively parse even the simplest statements to death, desperatly looking for some excuse to get offended. It’s kind of a shame that you don’t recognize that you’re doing exactly the same thing when you complain about the phrase, “the windows gave in.” I’m very serious here. It’s the exact. Same. Thing. You’re putting yourself in the same boat as people who spell “woman” with a “y”. Don’t be in that boat, dude. That’s not a good boat to be in.
In answer to the title. I don’t know. But I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has posted a cite (including me) and it’s been dismissed with something to the effect of “yeah right, that’s from an ‘X’ website, like they count”. Etc.
Updike, given your political beliefs, I can understand your distrust of the source you mentioned. But you’ve been given other sources both in the other thread and in this one. United Press International is fairly reputable. The Chief of Police that was accused has admitted that it was true and has been interviewed on television and the interview has been rebroadcast. I guess it’s appropriate to ask you what you require for a cite.
I hope that you don’t feel that I have abused you. I have tried to reason with you and to challenge you to be honest with yourself.
At SDMB, you are not required to agree, but you are expected to be logical and straight forward.
Frankly, I think the word sheroes is dumb and insulting. I understand why you might want a source other than the original one. But once other sources began to come in and the Chief of Police was admitting to the incident, your insistence that the story was unreliable no longer had the ring of sincerity to it. That is not even an issue anymore.
I can even understand your objection to the way the sentence about the windows was structured. You feel that the sentence should have been written in a less passive description. That’s a fair criticism. I agree with you somewhat. Can you agree that we all know that looters broke out many of those windows?
I did hear in one report that the hurricane broke out over 100 hotel room windows at the Hyatt Regency and I do remember photographs of shredded blinds flapping out those upper story windows. It’s possible that the person writing the story you objected to wanted to be careful not to blame all of the broken windows on looters. I don’t know; that’s just a guess.
One thing is almost a given. If you post in the Pit, someone will come after you sooner or later. It is to be expected. You have to know how to deal with it. (Hey, don’t look at me…)
Because you’re being an evasive tit. There is no “hive-mind”; even people who would tend to agree with you that SW is far from the best source (e.g. me) think you are being a tit. You are hanging your indignation on two stupid turns of phrase, and the fact that you don’t like commies, while ignoring the rather more pertinent point that the story has been at least partially corroborated by the fucking police.
What do you want? For everyone to say “yes, Updike, you are officially allowed to ignore this entire story because it’s dirty stinking commies who wrote it”? Sorry, doesn’t work like that. Especially not when you avoid every attempt to rationally discuss the source, and instead focus on the word “shero”.
Forget all this cock about hive-minds, being “accepted as a Doper” and debate in good faith. Would it really kill you to entertain the idea that a socialist might not be a complete liar?
True dat, especially in abortion threads.
On the other hand, phrasing it as “the windows gave way” instead of “they smashed the windows and started grabbing TVs” gives an indication on how reliable the reports might be on other, related matters.
But the idea that commondreams.org or the Socialist Worker’s website get the same scrutiny as FreeRepublic.com is not quite accurate. Most people will realize the contentious and biased nature of both sites. It’s just that the much higher proportion of lefties hereabouts means that there is a much higher number of people who will believe Socialist Workers anyway.
Have a look at this thread for an example of how a Doper was misled by his own political bias not only to accept the interpretation of a website as Gospel (a leftwing source, it need hardly be said) but to misrepresent what his own cite said. And it passed unremarked until somebody came along who did not share the same bias - and pretty much blew it out of the water.
Regards,
Shodan