Saturday, April 25, 2009

Guilt by association

by Smitty

Here's a provocative reply from John, over on the Pam Geller thread:
Guilt by association isn't fun or fair when it's happening to you, is it? See Obama/Ayers
Let's follow this through. So, Pam Geller is to a neo-nazi as Barak Obama is to Bill Ayers?
  • Pam Geller had a neo-nazi mentor.
  • Pam Geller worked with that mentor on various projects.
  • Pam Geller lived near that mentor for a substantial period of time.
  • Pam Geller was systematically evasive about her associations with that mentor.
Ah, yes: as long as we take the deceptively simple premise at face value, John's equivalence works well.
Often, use of the 'f' word is the first indication that the subsequent assertion is anything but fair.

7 comments:

  1. Can we add?

    Pam Geller had a neo-nazi babysit her kids.

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  2. @geoffb:
    You may pile on ad nauseum.

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  3. Plus: Pam Geller is running for President.

    ReplyDelete
  4. BTW, Stacy, apparently Charles Johnson has "a lot of stuff to use against you and Michelle Malkin"

    http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/04/evil-meltdown-charles-johnson-threatens-michelle-malkin.html

    Apparently, he doesn't like people fighting back against his nastiness. Sounds like he is a liberal, eh?

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  5. The only problem with this post is the mentally disordered will see it and say "OMG, ya see! I told ya! Geller had a neo-nazi mentor.
    Geller worked with that mentor on various projects.
    Geller lived near that mentor for a substantial period of time.
    Geller was systematically evasive about her associations with that mentor.
    A tight wing blogger even said so!"

    That's how da shiz gets spun by the disinformationists.

    :)

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  6. @Pamela:
    Too true. How can someone be so dishonest about context and still wake up in the morning?

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  7. I have only read a little of the "LGF vs. countless other bloggers" dispute, but while we are rightly repudiating the tactic of imputing guilt by association, it is worth revising lines such as this:
    "just because the Pope pretends not to recognize the uniform [of the keffiyeh]..."

    I seem to remember Pamela, whom I admire, taking LGF to task for making inferences about stylized Celtic crosses.

    I could just as easily imagine the Pope being persuaded to wear a Glasgow Rangers football scarf.

    Come to think of it, looking at the sample photos, the only similarity I can see between the scarf given to the Pope and that warn by Nasrallah is the colour scheme. The latter looks honeycombed while the former has wavy stripes.

    If it's just a black-and-white thing then fans of Newcastle United, Juventus and PAOK, to name but three European soccer teams, would be out of luck.

    ReplyDelete