MacCruiskeen » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:58 pm wrote:Robert, fwiw, you're one of the posters here whose posts I nearly always read (when I see them), nearly always agree with (in all essentials), and whom I actually like and respect. Fwiw.
FWIW, I like and respect you too, MacCruiskeen. I always try to read what you post, particularly when some deep state "terror" event has occurred, you always dig deep to try to uncover the truth. I appreciate your tenacity and insight. And I appreciate you engaging me in an intelligent manner on a variety of subjects.
You might be right about it being beneath me. Sometimes when I try to employ my wit, I get a bit sophomoric in my smart-assedness. And I agree with you that America is going insane. But I don't think what I wrote is nonsense.
MacCruiskeen » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:58 pm wrote:A friend of mine, a very intelligent and well-informed American woman of around my age, was telling me recently (in a state of rare glumness) that she thought people's actual ability to think had been seriously damaged over the last couple of decades - mainly by TV, but also by the Web (especially since it became mobile and ubiquitous) and by the Spectacle as a whole. Actual cognitive damage. Actual inability to pay attention to anything except what the Spectacle instructs them to pay attention to. (And no, she did not except herself from this. And no, she is certainly not the only one to have noticed this and to be seriously worried about it. Whole books have been written about this phenomenon.)
I concur with your friend. I would expand that beyond America and say that it includes the entirety of Western Civilization - basically anywhere where TV and the internet and the tentacles of the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Media Complex reaches - and that it is most likely not accidental. I certainly don't exempt myself from this predicament. I certainly don't exempt you either, or anyone else here. We have our good moments, but we're only human.
MacCruiskeen » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:58 pm wrote:Here's the only line in your post that is worth responding to:
I would never watch any of his fraudulent shit,
So you too have not watched it. That is worth knowing.
I think you're leaving out an even more important line that I wrote right before that:
Seriously, beyond ideology, O'Keefe is a proven fraud.
It goes to
why I would never watch it. If someone who has a proven history of making fraudulent videos keeps making videos, why the
hell should I give them the time of day just because they've set the internet ablaze piggybacking on an event (the election) that nobody can look away from? Goes to the Charlie Brown football analogy. Also goes to your American friend's theory, if you think about it.
MacCruiskeen » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:58 pm wrote:You go on:
I would never watch any of his fraudulent shit, especially when snopes is around to do it. To quote them:
"Project Veritas' October 2016 election-related sting videos (embedded above) reveal tidbits of selectively and (likely deceptively edited) footage absent of any context in which to evaluate them. Unless his organization releases the footage in full, undertaking a fair assessment of their veracity is all but impossible."
Emphasis added. They are blowing smoke out of their ass.
Snopes is a handy resource, but it has to be handled with care, and it is anything but a depository of guaranteed truth. If you doubt this, check them out on the topic of 9/11, just for instance.
I've got no beef with you on that point regarding snopes and 9/11. But in that link I provided, snopes points out where time after time after time, O'Keefe has used fraudulent methods to make his videos. After documenting this sordid history, I wouldn't characterize their guess that this video was likely deceptively edited as "blowing smoke out of their ass", I would say it's a case of "fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me."
MacCruiskeen » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:58 pm wrote:There is no point in arguing about this with you or with anyone unless & until you actually watch the video. Do or don't, as you wish. But I will tell you (and Snopes) this: One undeniable truth about that video is that there is a counter running in the top left-hand-corner of the frame throughout. Those "tidbits" (sic) are no mere 5-second snippets but often a minute or more of unbroken conversation. The fact that so many people are so desperate to ignore what Foval and his cronies said and did -- and to have everyone else ignore it too -- is not just depressing but deeply symptomatic. "Bury it! Bury it!"
Since you haven't watched it, here (
fwiw) is what I got from the first twenty minutes of O'Keefe's video
MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:07 pm wrote:Progress report:
In the first video, Foval brags about how he hires (i.e., bribes) homeless and mentally ill people to turn up and disrupt Trump rallies. The goal is to provoke fights and get them on camera, and then feed those videos to the media. He managed to get a seriously-ill 69-year-old woman punched by somebody at a Trump rally.
Mission Accomplished. In the first few minutes of the second video, Foval's describing how to bus voters in from other states, yet avoid being charged with conspiracy.
It's October 20th, 2016, and this is Rigorous Intuition or its walking corpse. Three weeks before the end of this sinister farce of an "election", nobody even here can bear to admit anything so banal and
obviously, demonstrably true as that Dem Party operatives are sometimes scumbags, and that the whole "election" process is hopelessly corrupt. They'll go apeshit if you even try to bring it to their attention. QED. They'll accuse you of wanting a rapist in the White House.
There's a lot of overheated rhetoric on both sides on RI. By both sides, I don't mean pro-Clinton vs. pro-Trump. I don't think there's a single poster here who supported Hillary during the primaries and there's only two posters I can think of here who actually support Trump. No, the sides here are those who think Trump is worse than Clinton vs. those who think Clinton is worse than Trump. That said,
of course "Dem Party operatives are sometimes scumbags",
of course "the whole "election" process is hopelessly corrupt." In the big picture, the USA is a cronyistic plutocratic kakistocracy that is creeping toward fascism. Hillary Clinton will keep fascism creeping while Trump will employ the Michael Ledeen dictum towards it: "Faster, please." Not much of a choice, but I prefer to delay the onset of fascism as long as possible.
I think it was for the same reason people from ACORN were fired: their sloppiness made the organization look bad. Even California's then-attorney general Jerry Brown castigated ACORN representatives for showing "terrible judgment" in the video - and that was after an investigation showing what a fraud O'Keefe was.
So I've got a question for you, MacCruiskeen: can you name one time in the past when O'Keefe
hasn't used fraudulent methods to make his videos? Unless you or someone else can, then I stand by my assertion that O'Keefe has the credibility equivalence of Sorcha Faal.
