Re: Denying the facts means imputing false personal motivations to knowers of the facts
If, in fact, you held such a believe and did make witchery a criminal offense, do you think such a thing would be excusable? Because if so, you are pretty much proving the point.
The point was to make it understandable and appeal to whatever is left of anybody's honesty at EvC. Since most here don't believe in demons or supernatural witchcraft it's easy to vilify the Christians who do.
Namely that for you, Christian crimes are excusable. Didn't you claim in a previous discussion that James I lived a blamess life?
Probably not in the sense you mean it. There's a lot of propaganda out there against him that is simply false. But he did participate in the witch persecutions, and he did write a book about demonology, which may be a good thing. I don't know, I haven't read it. Maybe I should.
Well, the fact is that the RCC IS the biggest murderer of all time; the Protestants have been very small potatoes in the murder department, and they did correct their course through the Bible, which is not a corrective the RCC is capable of.
Re: memory is terrible, the documents are fake, the quotes have been mined
I respectfully, I hope, totally and strenuously disagree with just about everything you said which I consider to be a mixture of propaganda and bad reasoning. I made a really good case. Did I say anything to imply I think memory is perfect? No, I made the case based on the known facts that justify the man's memory. Perfection is not implied, but a very reasonable case is implied. Barring some future need, I'm through with this subject.
Re: memory is terrible, the documents are fake, the quotes have been mined
I believe I already made the case in the previous post that you are now asking me to make. Neither of us is going to convince the other of anything. I believe my reasoning on how memory works is correct and yours is wrong. I believe the documents of Obama's birth were faked based on my own study of them. I believe the literary agent or whatever she was and Obama's grandmother were intimidated into denying the truth they'd already told. Enough is enough. You are going to go on defending what I consider to be the indefensible forever; and I'm sure you see me as doing the same thing. What else is there to say?
Re: Denying the facts means imputing false personal motivations to knowers of the facts
Since most here don't believe in demons or supernatural witchcraft it's easy to vilify the Christians who do.
Let's not play the martyr card so quickly. Lots of folks, Christian are not, believe in evil spirits, voodoo, etc. and they are all pretty easy to laugh at. None of their stories make their murders sympathetic.
The Protestants, as I understand it, had court trials, so this wasn't "murder." Their standards may be indefensible by our current lights, but they weren't wholesale murder. And at least in Salem it was the clergy who stopped the proceedings on the basis of their not being fair.
Anyway, PaulK actually answered you with something I can appreciate. Lewis DID say what I remembered so your ridicule is as usual just your bias against anything I post. What I said was certainly not idi*otic and in*sane. (It seems that PaulK's own bias is suspended for at least a minute or two.)
The others who believe in such things as demons don't happen to be present at EvC, though perhaps I've missed a few instances, so correct me. The point was that it is the Christians here who believe in invisible spirits so it is the Christians who get vilified. It's a statement of simple fact, not playing the martyr.
Re: Denying the facts means imputing false personal motivations to knowers of the facts
Roman Catholics also had trials so their execution of Protestants was also not "murder".
You mean the trials such as the rack and the iron maiden? Did they try the Huguenots before slaughtering them at the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre? Did they conduct a trial before going to the Waldensian villages and slaughtering them? Perhaps there were some trials, of course.
It has not yet been established that where Obama was born wouldn't affect his eligibility and there are many who say it would.
Re: memory is terrible, the documents are fake, the quotes have been mined
I respectfully, I hope, totally and strenuously disagree with just about everything you said which I consider to be a mixture of propaganda and bad reasoning.
Your consideration is irrelevant. For this to be a discussion you have to show the poor reasoning and propaganda.
My consideration is my judgment of the argument, not the argument itself. I already gave all the evidence of the poor reasoning in the post you are answering. I believe the poor reasoning is basically a form of propaganda because of your pro-Obama bias.
Then you haven't persuaded me. Again, I gave you every opportunity and treated you with as much respect as I could. If you want to be persuasive, you have to work harder.
I would probably faint if anyone here got persuaded by anything I said. I made an excellent case. That's the end of it.
OK, I may be rested enough to attempt to answer your long post.
Except by him
Nope. He met someone who he thought might be the same person described as foreign in an earlier conversation. That the person he met was said foreign person was not confirmed, even by his own testimony. In fact - his own statement doesn't even say that the person he spoke to was foreign, other than being black and having a funny name there is no reason given to suppose he was foreign. So even if it was Obama he met, there is no reason to suppose that it was the same foreign person alluded to in an earlier conversation which took place at some unknown amount of time earlier. And there's no reason to suppose Mary Ayers was being honest about the foreignness or existence of the anonymous foreign student.
There is every reason to suppose it was Obama, and the same foreign person Mary Ayers told him about, and that she was being honest, for the reasons I gave. Your doubts are the poor reasoning I was talking about. I believe I made the case and your answer is inadequate.
Actually, he said very definitely that it was Obama.
No, he didn't. Here's the part where you provide his words to the contrary:
Hulton the mailman writes:
...Iam positive that the black male I spoke with in front of the Ayers house that day was indeed a young Barack Obama.
As I said, he said very definitely that it was Obama.
He met a black guy with a funny name and sticky out ears. That's not 'definitely' Obama. It's a person's opinion based on a decades old memory of a single encounter which he couldn't place the date of. It's not evidence.
This is the kind of poor reasoning I find a lot at EvC, this supposed bastion of evidence-based reasoning. I described the accumulated evidence that supports the mailman's testimony. His opinion is his conclusion based on all the evidence he had at his disposal, the facts from his memory in combination with facts publicly known about Obama. It's a reasonable conclusion, in fact it's a really really reasonable conclusion. Again, it's not "evidence" it's his conclusion BASED on all the accumulated evidence. Your attempt to make the date important is poor reasoning, for the reasons I gave in my previous post.
Who else could it be anyway?
There a lot of black people.
Not young black foreign students who are light-skinned with ears that stick out, who are coming to thank the people who supported him through school, people who were related to Bill Ayers who is known to have been a big influence in Barack Obama's life, people who lived in the house where a Mary Ayers, whose name Hulton remembered so well probably because of this incident that fixed the whole scene in his mind, had previously told the mailman about the foreign student they were supporting, a young black man who happened to say this very weird thing about how he was going to become President of the US, which, again, would make the guy stand out in anyone's memory IMO. Trying to reduce this to "a lot of black people" is an absurd answer to all these known facts. What I meant by "poor reasoning."
What other young black man of the right age who knew Bill ayers did become President?
The mailman did not know he was going to become President.
Of course not. He thought the idea so strange and implausible he couldn't get it out of his head. It was only when a black man of the right age with an odd foreign name, and light skin and ears that stuck out, who knew Bill Ayers, comes to run for President, that the statement would take on an even stranger significance.
Wouldn't you remember that odd "prophecy" yourself under the circumstances?
Not really. I've met lots of people who claimed they were going to be something great and improbable, I can't remember them in any particular detail. Especially the ones from decades ago.
But it would be crazy for a foreign student, who didn't have anything of the demeanor of an irrational or cra*zy person, to say such a thing. It would stick out in MY mind I'm sure. I'd have to wonder where he got such an idea, especially if he said it with complete conviction.
I consider such a strange combination of circumstances to be memorable. You don't. Shall we call this a wash because of our respective prejudices?
No other direct verification, but there are circumstantial points we know about Obama that are independent of the mailman's testimony, his association with the Ayers family for one thing
True, but then the mailman knew of this association before making his affidavit. If he had been one of the many people motivated to discrediting Obama, like those who would stand in court and swear testimony, he may have consciously or unconsciously inserted Obama's face into the memory. THAT is how memory works.
He probably did insert Obama's face into the memory, but his face fit well enough to BE a fit, the light skin, the stuck-out ears. The memory in combination with the known facts about Obama makes for a far better fit than the situations you describe such as the memory of a rapist, where there is ONLY the memory and nothing else known about the rapist to go on. But in this case there are known facts about Obama that are completely independent of anything the mailman could make up that corroborate his memory, such as Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, his foreign name and known time spent in foreign countries. This plus his coming to thank an Ayers family for putting him through school, after Mary Ayers had told Hulton about the foreign student they were putting through school -- this fit is way too good to be dismissed as you dismiss it: poor reasoning.
I'm getting very tired, I'll have to come back to this.
believe the literary agent or whatever she was and Obama's grandmother were intimidated into denying the truth they'd already told.
With regards to the lie about Obama's grandmother, see here
Yes, I heard the whole thing already. But I'll copy out your reference:
The claim is based on an Oct. 16, 2008, telephone call between Bishop Ron McRae of the Anabaptist Churches of North America and Sarah Obama of Kenya, Barack Obama's elderly step-grandmother. The interview is complicated by the addition of at least one translator, because Sarah Obama, then 86, spoke Swahili.
The translator was fluent in Swahili according to the You Tube video I posted earlier.
The edited portion that often makes the rounds on the Internet includes this part of the interview:
McRae: "Could I ask her about his actual birthplace? I would like to see his birthplace when I come to visit Kenya in December. Was she present when he was born in Kenya?"
"She says yes she was. She was present when Obama was born," said the translator.
Smoking gun? Only if you stop the tape there and don't listen to the rest of the interview.
It is the smoking gun even after you've listened to the rest.
McRae immediately followed up by saying, "Okay, when I come in December, I would like to go by the place, the hospital where he was born. Could you tell me where he was born? Was he born in Mombasa?"
The translator can be heard translating, and then, he said, "No. Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America."
Uh huh, this is after someone who was with the grandmother had reminded her that she wasn't supposed to tell anyone he was born there.
Said McRae: "Whereabouts was he born? I thought he was born in Kenya."
The response came back, "He was born in America, not in Mombasa."
"Do you know where he was born?" McRae continued. "I thought he was born in Kenya. I was gonna go by and see where he was born."
"Hawaii. She says he was born in Hawaii," the translator said. "In the state of Hawaii, where his father, his father was also learning there. The state of Hawaii."
Yup, she's now elaborating the story as she was reminded she was supposed to.
"I thought she said she was present," McRae said. "Was she able to see him being born in Hawaii?''
Reasonable question of course since he knew she'd said she was present. But now the lie gets elaborated:
"No, no," the translator said. "...She was not ... she was here in Kenya. Obama was born in America ... Because the grandmother was back in Kenya and Obama was born in America, where he is from, where his father was learning, learning in America, the United States."
This is ridiculous. They are trying to pretend she was really saying SHE was in Kenya, but why on earth would she have to say THAT? This is just the sort of absurdity that happens when someone tries to change their story midstream.
Listen to the full conversation yourself. The parts in question begin about the 4:20 mark.
McRae -- who we should emphasize was not the translator -- has kept the theory alive. In a Dec. 5, 2008 article, Salon ran an affidavit from McRae in which he maintains Sarah Obama confirmed she witnessed Obama's birth in Kenya:
Well, that is the impression one gets from the early part of the interview, that she did indeed say she witnessed his birth in Kenya. That she changed her story under pressure didn't impress McRae.
"Though some few younger relatives, including Mr. Ogombe (one of the translators), have obviously been versed to counter such facts with the common purported information from the American news media that Obama was born in Hawaii, Ms. Sarah Hussein Obama was very adamant that her grandson, Senator Barack Hussein Obama, was born in Kenya, and that she was present and witnessed his birth in Kenya, not the United States. When Mr. Ogombe attempted to counter Sarah Obama's clear responses to the question, verifying the birth of Senator Obama in Kenya, I asked Mr. Ogombe, how she could be present at Barack Obama's birth if the Senator was born in Hawaii, but Ogombe would not answer the question, instead he repeatedly tried to insert that, "No, No, No. He was born in the United States!"
That's not what we heard on the tape. What we heard was a very rough translation in which an elderly woman agreed to the leading question that Obama was born in Kenya and that she was present. But it was immediately and clearly corrected -- repeatedly.
Sure, cuz somebody with her nudged her to remind her she was supposed to lie.
Funny how it's a "rough translation" when she says she witnessed his birth, but then becomes clear as crystal when she tells the "correct" story.
I'll go listen to it again though. abe: later, unable to load the video from your link. ABE: I went to find the one I'd heard earlier and can't locate it. Could be me but lately I've found it to be surprisingly hard to find things I just saw or heard. Oh well, I did find this one:
Evidence: that she did say she was present at his birth.
Evidence: the accumulation of evidence from many sources.
Evidence: Such as the video of the Kenyan ambassador saying yes they have already set up a memorial to his birth in Kenya.
Evidence: Such as the sign that says "Welcome to Kenya, birthplace of Barack Obama." I just saw it yesterday I think in a video about Obama, but I looked at a lot of videos and can't find it, can't find it by searching at You Tube either. A big roadside sign saying exactly what I quoted.
And the literary agent ... tell us, Faith, if she was telling the truth, how could she have possibly found it out? Did she have psychic powers too?
How could she have made it up? She had to have had some source, it couldn't have been a mistake. What the source was I don't know. It's probably been purged too. Saying it was a mistake just makes no sense. It WOULD imply she dreamed it up, which would be an impossibly precise dream, akin to psychic power as you suggest. So she had a source, she trusted it, she used the information. Then when it was challenged she was intimidated into finding some excuse for it and she came up with that highly implausible explanation.
It fits none of the known facts, since Obama is not foreign, was not a student in Chicago, and does not have magical powers of precognition, THAT BIT DIDN'T MAKE YOU A TINY BIT SUSPICIOUS?
The truth is it fits none of the propaganda. Obama spent years in Indonesia. Obama was obviously told by Ayers or others in his Communist circles that they were going to engineer his becoming President. You know, a conspiracy, probably planned out in some detail, and financed by somebody like Soros.
The mailman is very credible. His testimony is what an honest person's testimony would sound like, obviously spontaneous, without any programmed or canned elements, including gaps where his memory was incomplete, such as not remembering the student s name etc.
You're all bending over backwards to discredit really good evidence, simply out of bias.
Well that isn't true. It doesn't even make sense to identify Obama as a foreign student.
The evidence that the mailman gave amounts to every reason to suppose it was Obama, whether you dispute the evidence or not. From the evidence given it is quite right to conclude that it was Obama. FROM THE EVIDENCE GIVEN... It had to be Obama, his memory dovetails with the known facts. You dispute his memory, but that's something else.
The man's testimony is so credible you should be correcting the information YOU are trusting by it. If he remembers Mary Ayers describing the student as a "foreign student" then you have to give up your insistence that he couldn't have been.
Why are you trusting people who have a vested interest in denying inconvenient facts about his history? There are LOTS of such inconvenient facts in Obama's history, far beyond the location of his birth. We could be here for years sorting them all out.
I didn't miss his having a foreign name, where are you getting that? The mailmain remembered him as having a foreign name, he just couldn't remember the name itself. Turns out the name "Obama" happens to be a foreign name, corroborating his imperfect memory.
Since it would have been very important in Obama's Presidential campaign to play down his association with Ayers, I wouldn't trust anything they said about when they met or how close their relationship was. If there weren't tons of other evidence of Obama's associations with radicals and Communists throughout his life, I guess we could let it go. But I find the mailman's testimony very credible, so the truth has to somehow fit into his testimony.
I suspect that even if the Occidental document is false, that it contains true information such as that he applied for aid as a foreign student, an Indonesian foreign student. But yes, that's just my supposition.
There's good reason to distrust the establishment stories about Obama that you all buy so uncritically, so you can't use them to convince me to give up my own good judgment pf tje facts as I've encountered them.
YOU are the one who has to account for Goderich's writing that he was born in Kenya, not I. Mistake doesn't cut it. This was a blurb about the author of a book where accuracy would have been lots more important than a forum post.
And sorry, it's just not the sort of thing one could make a mistake about even allowing for the implausible idea that a mistake about such a thing could have occurred.
MY mistake is just what happens in internet discussions. I'd heard the source was Harvard documents. For all I know that is actually the truth, but since it's been debunked I have no reason to argue about it. But she had to have a source. It's not something she could have made up.
My mistakes are irrelevant. I'm not responsible for an author sketch in a book which said Obama was born in Kenya. Funny how that "mistake" stayed in print for some years without anyone making an issue of it until it was recognized that it had to be dispensed with because it was so inconvenient for this author who was now a big political figure. It could not possibly have been a mistake, not that kind of statement in those circumstances, uh uh, sorry, and your scenario is just silly. She had to have a source she considered trustworthy and of course she did and of course when it became inconvenient for the truth to be out there in actual print she had to make up something and it was a totally unlikely something. Sorrrrry.
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