Show me the picture!
Some years ago, some academics with lots of time on their hands demonstrated that the most hazardous sort of stupid people are the ones who are so stupid that they don't know they're stupid. There were plenty of examples at the time. Today we have so many more, chiefly found in the comments section of any online news story.
These are the stupid people in the West who latch onto any conspiracy theory, such as the one that runs "Osama ain't dead because I ain't seen the pitchers."
Never mind that another significant group of whack jobs, called al Qaida, accept that death as fact.
DNA evidence is extremely hard to fake. Facial recognition matches are hard to fake. Photographs? Child's play, even before PhotoShop. Let's drift back in time about 75 years, to a seminal conflict unknown to most Americans today: the Spanish Civil War.
The photograph below, by Robert Capa, became the single most representative image of that war.
In the 1970s, British journalist Phillip Knightley examined the entire tale of the
"moment of death" photo, as it was called, and concluded it was faked. His evidence is persuasive, and the followup (at the link) is interesting. Here, we encounter the idea that the public, not Capa, was responsible for the legend of the photograph. In his initial discussion of the photo, Knightley made the point that is relevant to the "proof" that the imbeciles demand today: context is all, especially context provided by captions. Had this photo's caption said "Republican soldier slips during training exercises," it would have been forgotten in a heartbeat. But this is what the clown class considers evidence.
If, or when, we see the pitchers, we'll see an image of a human head hit at short range by a high-velocity projectile. It may not look enough like the innumerable file photos to satisfy those people too stupid to recognise their own stupidity. It is a pitiful commentary on today's media that we must act to make our own fools happy almost ahead of any other consideration.
The evidence--especially that offered up by al Qaida--tells me the sonofabitch is dead. I am perhaps un-American, because I am ambivalent to find myself happy over the death of another human being, no matter how vile. I recall the words of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so."
These are the stupid people in the West who latch onto any conspiracy theory, such as the one that runs "Osama ain't dead because I ain't seen the pitchers."
Never mind that another significant group of whack jobs, called al Qaida, accept that death as fact.
DNA evidence is extremely hard to fake. Facial recognition matches are hard to fake. Photographs? Child's play, even before PhotoShop. Let's drift back in time about 75 years, to a seminal conflict unknown to most Americans today: the Spanish Civil War.
The photograph below, by Robert Capa, became the single most representative image of that war.
In the 1970s, British journalist Phillip Knightley examined the entire tale of the
"moment of death" photo, as it was called, and concluded it was faked. His evidence is persuasive, and the followup (at the link) is interesting. Here, we encounter the idea that the public, not Capa, was responsible for the legend of the photograph. In his initial discussion of the photo, Knightley made the point that is relevant to the "proof" that the imbeciles demand today: context is all, especially context provided by captions. Had this photo's caption said "Republican soldier slips during training exercises," it would have been forgotten in a heartbeat. But this is what the clown class considers evidence.
If, or when, we see the pitchers, we'll see an image of a human head hit at short range by a high-velocity projectile. It may not look enough like the innumerable file photos to satisfy those people too stupid to recognise their own stupidity. It is a pitiful commentary on today's media that we must act to make our own fools happy almost ahead of any other consideration.
The evidence--especially that offered up by al Qaida--tells me the sonofabitch is dead. I am perhaps un-American, because I am ambivalent to find myself happy over the death of another human being, no matter how vile. I recall the words of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so."
Labels: bin Laden, media criticism, Robert Capa
posted by Uncle | 21:28
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