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PRETENTIOUS ACADEMIC DISCUSSES POULTRY
Historian Christopher Sheil:
Actually, it is easy to make a mistake about whether a turkey is fake or not, because it is not only trivia, we cannot know for ourselves, for we merely have an image, and the suggestion that it was fake has been repeatedly published as such by countless sources all over the world. Very few know whether the turkey was fake or not, and virtually no one could care less. The point is meaningless, approximating, at best, the significance of a typo.
Fake but unknowable. As such.
Okay, Important Note for all Postmodernist Historians and Very Important Journalists:
Unless you were there YOU ARE NOT A SOURCE. Sources are the people WHO WERE THERE that you talked to.
Every journalist and historian in the world can repeat a lie, and it is STILL a lie.
There will be a quiz on this, people, unless you are tenured, working for the Age, or the Sydney Morning Herald…Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 03 10 at 10:30 PM • permalinkhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9005566792811497638&q=The+Great+Global+Warming+Swindle&hl=en
I wonder what he’d sayt about the fact that AntLowensteinpomorphic gerbil worming is a fake?
What an imbecile. It has been repeatedly shown that fact-checking-impaired columnists attempt to make enormous hay, and prove some sort of point, out of the fact that they are certain the turkey is fake. If they weren’t misinformed about it being fake, none of those self-deluded halfwits would ever have mentioned the turkey. So, no, pace cretan Sheil, it does not have the significance of a typo.
Posted by Crispytoast on 2007 03 10 at 10:36 PM • permalinkVery few know whether the turkey was fake or not, and virtually no one could care less.
So how come leftards keep screetching that it was fake, and do it so earnestly and endlessly? Sounds like they care a pretty fucking lot, doesn’t it, Chris?
The non-retarded segment of humanity thinks it was a just a run-of-the-mill cutesy photo-op taken before Bush served up turkey to the troops on a morale-boosting holiday visit.
If one more long url without coding appears on this blog, I will turn all formatting off and delete all links in comments.
Mother’s got a stick and she knows how to use it!
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2007 03 10 at 10:52 PM • permalinkDoes the TBC (Turkey Bird Community), know the amount of consternation and hand wringing, that one of its sacrificed brethren has caused the leftists in the media and academic circles. Maybe, the good professor quoted above, is trying to prove a link, that Turkeys in general are neocons, trying, through devious means and self sacrifice to suppress and exploit other bird species. No doubt, Hugo Chevez will be looking closely at Turkeys in Venezuela’s proletariat. Jihadists, will of course, see an opportunity for more recruits.
Dear Mr. Shiel… in case you hadn’t noticed, this is the Internet. We’re ALL virtual here. Some of us, like Glenn Greenwald, serially so.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 03 10 at 11:18 PM • permalink‘it is not only trivia, we cannot know for ourselves’
we can know for ourselves- we can ask questions as i showed in an earlier thread when i spoke with the caterers
if very few people care why is the story repeated ad nauseum by leftards?
are all leftard lies now merely trivia or typos?
Posted by eeniemeenie on 2007 03 10 at 11:24 PM • permalinkIf, as Sheil says, the reality of the turkey is trivial, then why is it seen by the left as the defining moment of Bush’s presidency. It has been mentioned hundreds of times as the left has attempted to illustrate its case that the Bush administration is superficial, inept, criminal and deceptive.
Sheil’s reassessment of the turkey doesn’t get the left off the hook. All he has done is turn it from a lie to an inconsequence. He has done nothing to strengthen the left’s turkey-based (basted?) attacks on the President. If anything, he has diminished them even further. What a turkey.
...the suggestion that it was fake has been repeatedly published as such by countless sources all over the world. Very few know whether the turkey was fake or not, and virtually no one could care less. The point is meaningless, approximating, at best, the significance of a typo.
Where can you start? Are these the silliest couple of sentences ever to be spilled across the blogs from an academic on the public payroll? Well, you’d certainly have to enter them in the annual Professional Goofballs Gymkhana.
Hmmmm.
Is it too damn hard for people to google the damn thing? Even google has it right.
I swear the number of twits in this world is growing exponentially.
Posted by memomachine on 2007 03 11 at 12:57 AM • permalinkOne more nail in the coffin of academia.
To think it was once a respected profession ...
Posted by Evil Pundit on 2007 03 11 at 01:11 AM • permalinkHeres’s a first attempt:
- It is not easy to make the mistake that the turkey is fake. At a minimum you need to have a reckless disregard for whether the fact is true or not. But say it anyway. That’s not a mistake. That would meet most working definitions of a lie.
-The fact that the US President served turkey at a Thanksgiving Dinner to servicemen and women in a war zone during a surprise visit four years ago is trivial. It was perhaps hardly worth reporting at the time.
-The fact that the event is still being reported years later, with the “fake turkey” lie included, is not trivial. As evidenced by it being “repeatedly published by countless sources all over the world”.
-Anybody who has done two minutes research, or thought about it for twenty seconds, knows there was nothing fake about that meal.
-Many people care quite a bit about the casual contempt for objective truth and facts that permeates academia and journalism.
-The “fake turkey” lie has come to be something of a barometer of a much wider and more sinister phenomenom.
-Sheil’s whine about the point being “meaningless”, a “typo”, says alot about what is wrong with that crowd. It is meaningful enough to keep on saying it. His irritation is entirely with those who point out it is wrong. He wants to keep on telling a lie, and offers as his defence only that the fact is “trivial”. It frustrates him half to death that he can’t get away with that.
-And that last point is a serious matter indeed.
“To think it was once a respected profession ... “
It still is. But the contempt for the self absorbed posers that hide behind the profession grows.
Posted by armageddon on 2007 03 11 at 03:08 AM • permalinkThe importance of the “fake” accusation was that it was intended to diminish the success of Bush’s visit to the troops at Thanksgiving. It was not just a typo, it became and remains propaganda until it dies. So far it has so many lives and has been skewered so many times it resembles the battling skeletal hordes in “The Mummy”.
Very few know whether the turkey was fake or not, and virtually no one could care less.
Well, if no one could care less, please tell your fellow lefties, CS. I for one am sick of hearing about a fake turkey in Baghdad, so have ‘em cease and desist with their jabbering.
As for “very few” knowing if the turkey was real or fake, how about the soldiers that were there? You know…..eye witnesses?
I see CS hasn’t lost his touch for underemphasizing meaningless points.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 03 11 at 04:05 AM • permalinkThe other guy’s truth is a ‘construction’ or a ‘myth’ or ‘relative’, mine as real as taxes.
A ploy dressed as a philosophic position. The ploy is transparent and the position was proposed and exploded by the Greeks thousands of years ago. Trendoids think it a devastating relevation but it couldn’t be easier to rebut.
Sheil attempts a little Baudrillard-style playfulness here and it goes clunk.
And yet another writer of turgid prose. Isn’t English taught anymore in English-speaking countries? I suspect that turgid prose writers lose whatever knowledge they had of the language when they go to teacher college.
He does go on and on about something he deems trivial. Isn’t there some applicable oft-used phrase about protesting too much?
I thought you told us that Baudrillard guy was dead.
Posted by Paul Zrimsek on 2007 03 11 at 08:57 AM • permalinkAnd yet another writer of turgid prose. Isn’t English taught anymore in English-speaking countries? I suspect that turgid prose writers lose whatever knowledge they had of the language when they go to teacher college.
Orwell wrote about that phenomena; “Politics and the English Language”. Basically, people more concerned with getting their politics correct than with expressing themselves clearly write in dense, confusing prose in order to disguise the vacuity of their thoughts.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2007 03 11 at 09:01 AM • permalinkNo more important than a typo, yet repeated fortnightly at least for years, each time with a new twist on Little Miss Can’t be Wrong
Forgive me if I post this again on a Pelosi thread.
“...meaningless, approximating, at best, the significance of a typo.
I reckon he’s describing how others see his blatherings.
Posted by Harry Bergeron on 2007 03 11 at 09:53 AM • permalinkThe “significance of a typo”?
Oh no, my friend. Not when every 2-bit lefty hack writer uses it as a device to characterize Bu$hhitler as a fraud and his administration a sham.
Nice talk from a historian, btw. I wonder how many other “typos” his work has produced through the years.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2007 03 11 at 12:25 PM • permalink1. A typo is wrong, isn’t it? and is easy to correct or interpret correctly.
So this twit doesn’t want to bother with correcting the erroneous views of millions about the Truth of a well-recorded historical event.
2. There is NO history if the past is unknowable or its accuracy doesn’t matter.. Orwell said that in the 1940s.3. Ask Bush or anyone there if they smelt and tasted this turkey.
That’s fact checking - almost as easy as spell checking, if you’ve got a mind for it.I’m sure that others have commented on the parallel between the left’s certitude about the plastic turkey and earlier, widely held opinions regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If journalists and social commentators can’t even manage the provenance of a well cooked bird, I’m not sure that we should respect their clamor about a concealed Iraqi defense program.
Posted by pastrami44 on 2007 03 11 at 11:18 PM • permalink
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‘virtually no one could care less’
He wrote that just before calling someone else’s writing ‘silly.’
I believe Tim has documented that a great many people care a great deal.