What the media did not show about WrightFollow

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The "No true Scotsman" fallacy

What's up with capitalizing random words for emphasis? That's why we have the italics and bold command

No I just memorized a lot of the logical fallacies and I am an ******* so I tend to point them out whenever I can. it maks i sim smert

Oh my God! Who said that?

This is almost as a bad as that uppity Jew Ginsberg. We better assign some FBI to the guy.

Edited, Mar 21st 2008 5:47pm by baelnic

It appears there are a number of people out there that, based on their comments, must hold one or more of the following beliefs:


A) God exists and actually takes orders from ministers, and is now going to condemn all Americans to hell.

B) God doesn't exist or doesn't take orders from ministers, but Wright actually desires for all Americans to be condemned to hell.

C) Obama is influenced by Wright's sermons, and is now running to be president of a country he hates and condemns to hell.

D) The equal and opposite of a black man expressing anger over racial injustice levied against his people would be a white KKK minister expressing views that blacks are an inherently inferior race and don't deserve human rights.

Thanks Catwho, but you're late to the party. We covered the Godwin a few times now.

Since I don't watch Fox and get all my news from reading the OpEd page of the Washington Post, watching The Daily Show and Colbert Report, and lurking on Alla, it seems to me that the group of people deeply offended by Rev. Wright's comments are focusing on the "God DAMN America" comment, the "chickens coming home to roost" and the idea that the U.S. government invented and spread the AIDS virus with the intent of killing black Americans. I have not seen the video clip of the third, but I did like his little fluttering chickens hand gestures.

I have no problem with "God DAMN America". It really doesn't mean much to me other than he's angry in general and I know that a lot of whites and blacks are angry at "America" in a sort of abstract sense, although it is often hard to define exactly what it is that we/they are angry about. If I needed an excuse, my ancestors being dragged from their homes, bought and sold, chained and abused, raped and lynched by "white America" would probably be a good one. Perhaps, if he has said "God damn the legacy of racism and injustice that we suffer under" there would be less acrimony? But it sure doesn't sound as good thundering from the pulpit as the original.

Rev. Wright is far from alone in thinking that the terrorist attacks were in some ways the bitter fruits of our nation's own policy. As I mentioned earlier, conservative white preachers blame it on "the gays" and other socially progressive groups. Many liberals have blamed our foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. None of these people deny the senseless loss of life, the personal tragedy of every victim and their family, or agree with the motivation of the terrorist.

The most disturbing to me is the idea that he may believe the AIDS conspiracy theories. We cannot deny the prevalence of such thinking; from those who believe the moon landings were faked to the surprisingly large portion of the American (and foreign) public who believe that the U.S. Government or President Bush personally were involved in either planning or permitting to proceed unhindered the tragedy that was September 11th. Nevertheless, if Rev. Wright believes these that still does not imply that Sen. Obama believes them, or that he would come to believe them because his pastor claimed it to be true.

On a side note, if World War II had never happened, would we reduce arguments to "Genghis Khan hated homosexuals" or "Hannibal was a great public speaker"? Personally, I say no true **** would support a Jew to be Minister of Information!

God forbid a country holds itself responsible for the consequences of its actions.

Thing is, there are many white liberals like me that ALSO think the US is at fault for a lot of **** that went down in the last decade. We think America has strayed way too far from what the founding father's intended, and we're looking to someone to fix it. The attitude that we need to improve in a lot of areas is exactly what we need in a presidential candidate right now.

If Wright was such a horrible person, why was he at Hillary's right hand during that meeting? A new photo has been unearthed that showed Hillary and Wright sitting next to each other at the same speech that Bill and he shook hands at. Now, I don't know about you, but you don't sit an America-loathing white-resentful pastor next to the first lady of the US. Either they had no idea who Wright was, and they were told to invite him by someone more familiar with the religious elite at the time, or they were deliberately trying to play of the "Bill Clinton is the first black president" meme. Either way, they trusted Wright enough not to poison Hillary's food.

It's not as far fetched as you might think, in the light of the Tuskegee experiment.

Anyway what I got from that is very similar to what a lot of gay guys said at the time: as long as it's just killing off the underclass, why stress about it? Who cares about gays, and blacks, and drug users? So what if the collateral includes hemophiliacs and surgery patients? Odds of it affecting me or my precious Muffy are very low, so let 'em die.

Nothing quite like backing up your own sockpuppet in an argument

I completely agree.

I saw the 10+ minutes bit of his sermon that contained the "chickens coming home" bit. It's nothing more than what a lot of right and left wing newspapers and commentators have asked themselves in Europe. He never said America was responsible for all the ills in the world, nor did he say it deserved to get attacked. Analysing how certain aspects of one's foreign policy have affected different nations and people around the world is not anti-american, it's the basics of international poltics.

When he mentions the conflicts the US was involved in, he's showing the devastating consequences of war on ordinary civilians. He's saying that the innocents killed in 9/11 are the same people as the innocents killed in other conflicts. Ordinary people, that had nothing to do with it, victims of forces far beyond their controls. The world makes a lot more sense if you don't just divide it into "evil-doers" and "good-doers".

As a religious man, he warned that spilling other people's blood won't make up for the blood they've spilt. That's a pretty basic fundamental of Christianity. Calling for revenge and payback isn't. Nothing controversial there. When Jesus was struck, he turned the other cheek, he didn't get his knife and ***** the offender. Preaching this message, as a Christian Reverend, doesn't seem very controversial.

I disagreed with a lot of things he said. But having a debate, saying things which are not in the mainstream, questionning assumptions, all these things are not "anti-american". Implying that these carefully chosen extracts from over 20 years of sermons somehow mean that this Minister's congregation is engaged in an anti-white, anti-american, black power, subsersive conspiracy is paranoia at its finest.