Post by ktesibios on Sept 6, 2005 21:15:45 GMT -4
hoosiers said:
I posted this Rex 84 thread before the damage from hurricane Katrina was known, just as a topic of interest. At no time have I suggested that any hurricane victims were taken to any of these camps or that there was any thought by anyone of taking them there. Please read my posts more carefully before responding. It would save me a lot of time in correcting misunderstandings. But you have made a specific affirmative claim that the "feds" had cut power to areas where it was restored, and that the citizens were guarding their power sources against the feds. Are you or are you not prepared to support that claim with evidence?
Let me state that a couple of the sites I'm about to post links to are considered to be "conspiracy" sites (but not all). Try to suspend your prejudices for a few minutes and actually pay attention to what you are reading and what the sources are. There are eyewitness accounts, small town paper accounts, and, most importantly, the Times-Picayune accounts.
Very nice. The nola.com site has been doing yeoman work in keeping people informed and helping them reunite. Now, where exactly in that extremely crowded site can we find a credible support for your claim about the power- or anything else for that matter? I've been searching their forums (they don't seem to have a news search feature) for anything that might support that claim, but so far without result. It's not my job to prove your points for you; if you want to make a factual claim it's your task to provide the evidence in support.
I will not respond to any jeering. If you can't figure out what is or may be a legitimate news source from total fantasy, I have no time for you.
Judging from the conspiracist sites you link to, the difficulty in distinguishing a credible source from fantasy does not lie with us skeptical types.
If you have information contradicting these reports, please post them.
Shifting the burden of proof gets tiresome after a while. Insisting on being proven wrong instead of proving a claim correct is a standard conspiracist argument. To illustrate how it's an invalid argument, consider my assertion:
There is a mile-long soda fountain on Titan- and the ice cream is free.
If you have information contradicting this report, please post it. If you can't prove I'm wrong, then it must be true.
I already have access to and read credible (i.e. government controlled) news sources.
Your evidence for the claim that the media are government controlled? It's funny, but TPTB have lately been coming in for quite a lambasting from "government controlled" media all across the political spectrum. I'll agree that the quality of news here in the USA leaves much to be desired, particularly in the area of fact-checking claims made by official sources and in depth of coverage, but if you're going to claim that its faults are the result of government control, I expect to see some direct evidence.
I do not dismiss all the information from the major news stations but I'm primarily interested in the news that isn't being reported by the major media, especially from independent, unofficial sources.
Try the blogosphere. If you read a good assortment of current events-oriented blogs, you'll likely come across quite a few links to credible sources outside the USA (and outside the government control you assume) when these provide relevant information which isn't widely available in the domestic media.
Now, as for your "FEMA Concentration Camps" link- the stuff below the list of executive orders is basically a laundry list of unsupported assertions. The list of Executive Orders is where the meat is, because those are fairly readily checkable, without having to go gallivanting all over the country to look at what some patrionoid claims are "major U.N. bases" or suchlike.
But, looking over some of the E.O.'s cited, I can't seem to find the language which would justify the conspiracist claim that the government is poised to haul us off to concentration camps.
This is where your burden of proof comes in. Do you want me to take these claims seriously? Then dig through the citations and show me exactly where these E.O.'s give the gummint these powers.
Two things you might want to know about in advance: Executive Orders are issued to provide guidance and direction to the parts of the Executive branch in executing the laws. They do not enable a President to pull new law out of his posterior. Pick an E.O. at random and read it. You'll find that they always cite the laws which provide the authority for the E.O.
Also, your conspira-site is sadly out of date. To aid you in your quest, it turns out that E.O. 10995 was revoked by 11556 which in turn was replaced by 12046 which was amended by 12148 and 12472; 10997 through 11005 and 11310 were revoked by 11490, which in turn was revoked by 12656.