While Geo Allen was praying to the confedacy , hating blacks and draft dodging

[Amianthus]

I thought they were bullshit, primarily because they were demeaning the heroism of somebody who had put himself in harm's way.

And yet, they are a similar testimony to Allen's drunk hunting buddies.

I think that you believe one and disbelieve another for purely partisan reasons.

At least I have doubts about both sets of testimonies. For similar reasons - neither of them can provide corroborating evidence. I also know that "eyewitness" testimony is usually far from accurate. Indeed, it's usually the worst of evidence.

[Jwmcc]

"To this day Kerry has still not released ALL his military records."

Source?

[Amianthus]

Source?

Yeah, actually, he finally did last year. Well after the election.

Here's an article about it.

[Michael Tee]

<<And yet, they are a similar testimony to Allen's drunk hunting buddies.>>

You must be drunk yourself.  How could you compare the recollection of men under fire, in combat, the most stressful sequence of rapid-fire (no pun intended) events possible, the fear of imminent death everywhere, all noise and screaming and scared shitless, to the recollection of two guys on a hunting trip?  You're making an idiot of yourself.  There's nothing similar at all between guys recalling combat and two guys remembering a hunting trip.  That is just nuts to even suggest such a "similarity."

Besides which, one of Kerry's buddies remembers that Kerry saved his life under fire, the other guy remembers Kerry didn't even get off the boat.  Everybody remembers something different, which, considering the stresses of combat, is not surprising.  The two hunting guys seemed to have remembered pretty much the same story with only one exception, which could easily be explained by the fact that the second guy was re-telling the story second-hand.

<<think that you believe one and disbelieve another for purely partisan reasons.>>

Figures.  Notwithstanding that I never said I disbelieved the Swift Boat Veterans, only that I found them incredibly sleazy AND irrelevant since Kerry's courage was established in my eyes just by the fact that he went into a combat zone.  But you have it your way - - I believed the hunting party and I disbelieved the Swifties.  Why should mere facts get in the way of your preconceived ideas?

 <<neither of them can provide corroborating evidence.>>

OHHHH-   KAY.  Have it your way.  There's no corroborating evidence.  I haven't posted anything here in this thread about corroborating evidence.  There was none.  Doesn't exist.  Feel better?

<<I also know that "eyewitness" testimony is usually far from accurate.>>  
Good thinking.  Eyewitness evidence is very fallible.  So it has to be totally disregarded.  Let's make it inadmissible in all the courts of the land.  Eyewitness evidence?  Fuck that, counsel.  We don't admit that kind of shit in our courts no more.  Show me what tea-readings you have in your favour, otherwise I'm going to have to dismiss.  In Allen's case, I think we should hold out for nothing less than a signed confession, without that we have no way of knowing if this happened or not.  A confession plus videotapes of him committing the actual act.  We can't be too careful here.  A Republican's reputation is at stake.  

<<Indeed, it's [eyewitness evidence is] usually the worst of evidence.>>

Oh, totally.  Worse than anonymous accusations scrawled on the backs of envelopes by grade-school children.  Worse than the death-bed ravings of intoxicated mental patients pumped full of pentothal and translated from the Albanian by incompetent and inexperienced interpreters.
Worse than Patriot Act findings of anonymous bureaucrats handed down in secret to judges who aren't allowed to show them to defence counsel.  Fucking eye-witnesses!  They're the bane of the legal system.

[Amianthus]

Figures.  Notwithstanding that I never said I disbelieved the Swift Boat Veterans,

You said that their claims were "bullshit." Is there a definition of "bullshit" that means "true"?

[BT]

Worse than Patriot Act findings of anonymous bureaucrats handed down in secret to judges who aren't allowed to show them to defence counsel.

I see where the ACLU dropped all its lawsuts against the Patriot Act. Seems it wasn't unconstitutional after all.

This on the heels of the NY Times saying they never should have published the story about the SWIFT financial tracking program. Seems that wasn't illegal either.

You think both orgs are getting a bit cocky pre-election?

[Michael Tee]

<<You said that their claims were "bullshit." Is there a definition of "bullshit" that means "true"?>>

I was using bullshit in the sense of the complaint itself not being genuine, whether it was true or not.  In the sense that a civil rights worker in the Deep South might suddenly find himself under arrest for a 2-year-old parking ticket.  The parking ticket might be "true" in the sense that the guy really was illegally parked two years ago, but the arrest is bullshit. 

With the Swiftboaters, some of the allegations might be true.  At least in theory.  (I didn't really follow the actual facts too closely because the whole thing was bullshit, in the sense that there was no real issue even if the allegations were all true.)  For instance, if they claimed that Kerry put himself in for a Purple Heart for a very trivial wound that other men would not demand a medal for.  I don't give a shit, that's bullshit.  Bullshit in the sense the guy is a hero, wounded or not, for putting himself in the line of fire.  (Again I want to emphasize I am not saying this in an admiring way, because his cause was an evil one - - he's a hero in the same sense that one of Hitler's soldiers would be a hero, i.e., physically brave.)  So it's bullshit to impeach the guy's heroism on grounds which have nothing to do with heroism - - that he was, allegedly, a self-glorifying medal hound, or put in for early exit from combat, etc.  He put his ass on the line once, and that's more heroism than all of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wofowicz, Perle and the rest of the chicken hawks put together.

[Amianthus]

I was using bullshit in the sense of the complaint itself not being genuine, whether it was true or not.

Well, I find the claims of deer heads in black people's mailboxes to be similar bullshit.

I'll give a you a hint for my minimum qualifications for testimony to be even somewhat believeable. It needs to be specific enough for documentation to potentially be located. If it includes documentation of some sort, it's even better.

Vague claims that can't even nail down a year, much less a month or day, pretty much peg my bullshit meter.

[BT]

Yeah, actually, he finally did last year. Well after the election.

Did he include his original discharge papers?

http://www.nysun.com/article/4040

[Michael Tee]

<<It needs to be specific enough for documentation to potentially be located. If it includes documentation of some sort, it's even better.>>

Apart from the silliness of expecting this terrorized black guy to go with the deer's head to some racist southern sheriff for protection, what documentation would be appropriate for a severed deer's head left by a drunken hunter in a black man's mailbox?

I think at some point you have to come to grips with the simple facts of everyday life, which is that the old deer's head in the mailbox crime is rarely extensively documented.  There are such things as undocumented hate crimes that occur in the dead of night.  Whether you choose to believe in them or not is of little relevance.

<<Vague claims that can't even nail down a year, much less a month or day, pretty much peg my bullshit meter.>>

When twenty years have passed, it is not surprising that the exact year of an event like this can't be recalled.  We have many cases of really traumatic events like sexual assaults on minors coming to light twenty years later and if the case turned on whether or not the victim could pinpoint the year, a lot of fucking perverts would be laughing.  This event was nowhere near as traumatic as a sexual assault and, again, if anyone wanted to fake the whole event, faking a year and keying it to a life event (the year Donny was born, the year of our 20th anniversary, the year the Challenger blew up) would be the easisest thing in the world.

Once again, your position indicates complete lack of common sense, no experience with real human beings in real-life situations and an abnormal reliance on theory as opposed to experience.

[Amianthus]

Apart from the silliness of expecting this terrorized black guy to go with the deer's head to some racist southern sheriff for protection, what documentation would be appropriate for a severed deer's head left by a drunken hunter in a black man's mailbox?

The silliness is in the assuption that the local law enforcement were all racist.

And any documentation would suffice. None seems to be forthcoming, however.

When twenty years have passed, it is not surprising that the exact year of an event like this can't be recalled.

Again, it does seem surprising to me, as I can always work out the year that anything important enough to remember happened. But then, perhaps my memory is just a bit more efficient than yours. If the event were so minor to the involved persons that they did not remember the year, I find it hard to believe that they remembered the event at all. And after all, it happened during college. They don't remember what year of college they were in when it happened?

[Michael Tee]

<<The silliness is in the assuption that the local law enforcement were all racist.>>

Too bad you weren't there at the time, Ami.  You could have spoken to the man, reassured him as to how foolish and silly he was not to seek help from the white police force.  He would have listened to you, Ami, because you seem like you really know what you are talking about.  And then he would have taken his deer head down to Sheriff Bubba (probably never to be seen again alive.)   You're hilarious, second-guessing some black guy from down south with a lifetime of experience dealing with white racist police - - but Ami knows better.

<<And any documentation would suffice. None seems to be forthcoming, however.>>

Which of course is conclusive proof that nothing happened.  In the great United States of America, no crime ever goes unreported or undocumented.  Lack of documentation is all the evidence you need that a crime never occurred.  NEVER MIND that an eye-witness corroborated by the hearsay statement of a deceased eye-witness claims that it did - - it COULDN'T HAVE, because there is no documentation for it.

Do you have ANY IDEA how stupid that is?

<<Again, it does seem surprising to me, as I can always work out the year that anything important enough to remember happened. But then, perhaps my memory is just a bit more efficient than yours.>>

Oh, you're WAAAY too modest, Ami.  Your memory is MUCH more efficient than mine.  200 gigs of memory compared to my measly 200 KB.  You are the giant of remembrancers, Ami, a living legend of total recall.  And that's really what it's all about, isn't it?  It's all about Ami, the measure of all things, Ami the universal standard of comparison.  If Ami could remember the date of an incident twenty years ago, then the hunter could remember it as well.  Some people could have gone to college for twice as long as you went to college, ever think of that?  I don't find it at all hard to believe that the guy DOESN'T remember the year even if he WAS in college at the time.  Go figure.

[Amianthus]

[snip]

A post full of insults. Nothing cogent to contribute?

[Xavier_Onassis]

There's a place for intellectual rigor, but that place is not a forum like this, where one's interlocutors are likely to ask for documented proof that shit runs downhill and the sun rises in the east.  I'll bring as much intellectual rigor to the debate as the debate deserves, and frankly, I've already invested way too much.  It's just completely ignored and I hear "with no evidence, Tee says . . . " as if nothing I ever dig up is evidence.  Fuck that.  I'm upset with myself for falling for that bullshit more than once.  Your request for "evidence" is made in bad faith.  You don't recognize it when it's produced and a few posts down you don't even admit any of it was produced.  Fuck that.  In the future, I will decide whether production of sources is warranted based on who is asking for it.\
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I agree with this remark.

Anyone that doubts a statement can easily look it up.

[Amianthus]

Anyone that doubts a statement can easily look it up.

So much for debate, which usually requires a person to provide sources for his / her claims.

Guess if we're not gonna worry about the truth, this area will just become a flamefest.