320 Years of History
Gold Member
Did someone recently open the gates and let a group of "knuckle dragging" idiots out of their pens? Over the past few weeks, in particular in association with the Wikileaks disclosures, I keep encountering discussions wherein folks seem very quick to lambaste, sometimes via nothing more substantive than innuendo, Mrs. Clinton or her campaign.
Now I'm not saying don't challenge a politician or speaker, be it Mrs. Clinton, her campaign or someone else, on matters for which there's a strong and credible basis for doing so, but if one is going to do so, one needs to at least know what one is talking about. To know what one is talking about, one must check the details before lashing out with one's recriminations.
To illustrate:
Now the point of this thread/post isn't the accuracy of the content found in the leaked emails. The point is that if one is going to "dis" someone, it's incumbent upon them to make sure the details bear out their claim. In each example, very basic and readily observable details make the member's claims dubious at best and flagrantly false at the worst.
Looking only at the "headline" is sloppy and slovenly. When one does that and then remarks based solely on the "headline," it reflects more poorly on the accuser than it does on the accused. We see that truism borne out in daily each time Trump attacks someone -- the women accusing him, Mrs. Clinton, Ted Cruz, etc. -- or makes a claim about himself, only to then have the details and context behind his claims prove out to be unsupportive of the claim he makes. Quite simply, the "headline" is not the whole story, and if one is to assail another, one has to know the whole story, because the accused most certainly will.
P.S.
What is the "headline?" It's the tiny snippet of information that is a mere shadow, if that, of the whole story in all its detail.
Now I'm not saying don't challenge a politician or speaker, be it Mrs. Clinton, her campaign or someone else, on matters for which there's a strong and credible basis for doing so, but if one is going to do so, one needs to at least know what one is talking about. To know what one is talking about, one must check the details before lashing out with one's recriminations.
To illustrate:
- There's a thread on USMB that aims to highlight a connection between the Clinton campaign and Moveon.org. The basis, per the thread, is a Podesta email in which MoveOn asked members of a Google group to reach out to TV station and ask it to ceases and desist with an ad it was running. Now, there may well be some degree of concordance between MoveOn and the Clinton campaign, but the date of the email cited is in 2010 when there was no Clinton campaign!
How does one miss the date on an email? It's the fourth thing down from the very top of the email message.
How does one overlook the fact that Mrs. Clinton was SecState, not Candidate Clinton in 2010?
- There's a thread in which it's asserted that the DNC chair shared with Mrs. Clinton's campaign "questions" for the second debate. Here again, the basis for the claim is a Wikileaked Podesta email. There is one detail that invalidates the USMB member's credibility and there are at least two that call into question the authenticity of the leaked email.
- The member asserts "questions" were shared, but the document s/he provides to support that claim discusses exactly one question.
- There is nothing indicating that Mrs. Clinton was given the information in the email
- Though the leaked email appears to be one that wasn't at all and without question sent to or from Mr. Podesta's email account. The "normal" view of the email doesn't mention Mr. Podesta as part of the distribution, yet the "code" view of it does. It's simply not possible to say which version is accurate. If you've ever seen a situation in which a programmer altered a piece of code that was supposed to be reflected in what a user sees, but that doesn't do so, you'll know exactly why I said it's not clear which "version" is to be accepted for the hacked/stolen email.
- In a post today, a member who was challenged to opine on the data used in a study that s/he had previously questioned declined to do so writing, "Obviously I am not privy to the input data used by this simulation." Well, that just isn't so. The member has 100% unfettered access to the data.
Looking only at the "headline" is sloppy and slovenly. When one does that and then remarks based solely on the "headline," it reflects more poorly on the accuser than it does on the accused. We see that truism borne out in daily each time Trump attacks someone -- the women accusing him, Mrs. Clinton, Ted Cruz, etc. -- or makes a claim about himself, only to then have the details and context behind his claims prove out to be unsupportive of the claim he makes. Quite simply, the "headline" is not the whole story, and if one is to assail another, one has to know the whole story, because the accused most certainly will.
P.S.
What is the "headline?" It's the tiny snippet of information that is a mere shadow, if that, of the whole story in all its detail.
