The ISIS beheadings are fake!
- Thread starter Busybody
- Start date
SigShooter
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2010
- Posts
- 151
Where did you find this? Must be the most interesting quote I've seen in a long time!
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2011
- Posts
- 55,323
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2011
- Posts
- 55,323
Well respected feminist” author suggests ISIS beheadings were faked, other interesting theories
I’m not sure how many of you remember Naomi Wolf, author of the once widely touted book The Beauty Myth more than twenty years ago. Thinking back, the last time I recall hearing much about her was during the 2000 election cycle. (She worked for Gore.) But apparently she’s still out and about, staying active in public policy and sharing her various opinions on social media. And some of her most recent theories are certainly… interesting.
Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.
The post has since been deleted – apparently on the advice of an old friend and mentor from the New York Times – but the internet never forgets, as they say. Here’s a captured image of it with the details behind this fascinating theory.
Wolf1
But Wolf doesn’t limit her interests to ISIS. She’s also keeping close track of the Ebola crisis. In particular, she’s keeping tabs on the way the United States is sending thousands of troops over to Africa to assist with the humanitarian effort. But she seems to have some reservations about… oh, just read it for yourself.
Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society…
She also posted at great length on Ebola, including a post arguing that the US troops traveling to Liberia were not actually sent to help fight Ebola, but rather to further the aim of a “militarized Africa” and because this “creates a direct vector into the US” for Ebola, meant “to justify military condoning [sic] of US population.”
Just to add some spice to the stew, in the same day she also accused Great Britain of some sort of conspiracy, saying the vote on Scottish independence had been faked.
Not knowing Ms. Wolf personally, and without any sort of first hand testimony from those who do, it’s impossible to say what’s happened here. There’s room for healthy debate on every topic of public policy, but this is pretty far off into the twilight zone. (And this is coming from somebody who watches Finding Bigfoot every week, so…) If this was a single day’s work for Ms. Wolf which is not repeated, I suppose it’s possible that she was just having a bad day. But if this represents a body of work that she’s been amassing for a while now, she may be in need of some help and some friends.
I’m not sure how many of you remember Naomi Wolf, author of the once widely touted book The Beauty Myth more than twenty years ago. Thinking back, the last time I recall hearing much about her was during the 2000 election cycle. (She worked for Gore.) But apparently she’s still out and about, staying active in public policy and sharing her various opinions on social media. And some of her most recent theories are certainly… interesting.
Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.
The post has since been deleted – apparently on the advice of an old friend and mentor from the New York Times – but the internet never forgets, as they say. Here’s a captured image of it with the details behind this fascinating theory.
Wolf1
But Wolf doesn’t limit her interests to ISIS. She’s also keeping close track of the Ebola crisis. In particular, she’s keeping tabs on the way the United States is sending thousands of troops over to Africa to assist with the humanitarian effort. But she seems to have some reservations about… oh, just read it for yourself.
Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society…
She also posted at great length on Ebola, including a post arguing that the US troops traveling to Liberia were not actually sent to help fight Ebola, but rather to further the aim of a “militarized Africa” and because this “creates a direct vector into the US” for Ebola, meant “to justify military condoning [sic] of US population.”
Just to add some spice to the stew, in the same day she also accused Great Britain of some sort of conspiracy, saying the vote on Scottish independence had been faked.
Not knowing Ms. Wolf personally, and without any sort of first hand testimony from those who do, it’s impossible to say what’s happened here. There’s room for healthy debate on every topic of public policy, but this is pretty far off into the twilight zone. (And this is coming from somebody who watches Finding Bigfoot every week, so…) If this was a single day’s work for Ms. Wolf which is not repeated, I suppose it’s possible that she was just having a bad day. But if this represents a body of work that she’s been amassing for a while now, she may be in need of some help and some friends.
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2011
- Posts
- 55,323
The Fevered Delusions of Naomi Wolf
Liberals surprised by her latest conspiracy theories seem to forget the Bush years.
Herewith, for your betterment and diversion, are a handful of dispatches from the dark depths of the digital front.
Driven by a desire to crack down on the people it serves — and to justify its actions abroad — the United States military is inventing crimes against humanity and attributing them to the Islamic State.
In Australia, a grateful government has jumped on these fabrications, and is employing them to justify a “draconian loss of freedoms.”
Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, America’s interest in the international Ebola outbreak has little to do with concerns about a lethal pandemic and more to do with the country’s establishing a convenient pretext for the imposition of martial law.
And, finally, the true results of September’s Scottish independence referendum were suppressed by that country’s electoral commission.
So sayeth the writer and activist, Naomi Wolf, on her Facebook page.
It should come as no surprise that these missives have attracted attention and condemnation from critics on both the left and the right. And yet the rank astonishment that has accompanied the criticism has been a little disconcerting. Compiling the most “unhinged, damaging, and dangerous” examples into a pseudo-explainer yesterday, Vox’s Max Fisher expressed bewilderment that Wolf would peddle such nonsense. Many Americans, Fisher proposed, continue to operate under “the assumption that Wolf is a respected and authoritative figure to be taken seriously.” This is a problem, he noted, because her “record of respectability gives her a platform and helps advance her conspiracy theories further than they would travel otherwise.” Later, Fisher attempted to set Wolf’s folly in context:
I was taught parts of Wolf’s 1990 book “The Beauty Myth” in school and admit that, until researching her more recent views more fully for this post, still mostly associated her with this and other well-respected work. . . . I can only assume that I was not alone in this.
“It is important for readers who may encounter Wolf’s ideas,” he concluded, “to understand the distinction between her earlier work, which rose on its merits, and her newer conspiracy theories.”
That we should examine individually each example of a person’s output strikes me as an eminently sensible rule. Nevertheless, I might quibble a little as to where we should draw the line of demarcation between Wolf’s earlier offerings and her newer theories. I understand that it has become something of a cliché for critics on the right to observe that, for many within the political press corps, modern history began with the election of Barack Obama in November of 2008, but, at the risk of playing to type, I cannot help but notice where Fisher’s analysis stops. Indeed, had he taken a little more time to research his post, he’d quickly have learned that, far from being a development of the last couple of months, Wolf’s considerable talent for delirium has been on display for years now. Of course she’s accusing President Obama of faking beheadings and coveting domestic military rule. Of course she believes that the Scottish referendum was faked. This is what she does.
Back in 2008, before Obama had been inaugurated, Wolf was touring the country warning anybody who would listen that the republic had fallen and that the citizenry should be preparing a resistance movement. “Americans are facing a coup, as of this morning, October 1st,” Wolf told Seattle’s KEXP, before promising listeners that she would soon be posting to her website a comprehensive set of instructions outlining “how to arrest the president.” “I’ve been saying for months,” Wolf insisted, “that leading up to the election you’re going to start seeing instability, hyped threats, hyped emergencies, hyped crises in order to create an atmosphere of urgency in order to justify a crackdown.” “I feel,” she explained, “like this is my one chance to alert America.” She wasn’t joking. Adopting a hysterical tone that would have prompted even Alex Jones into a period of self-reflection, Wolf warned that “we have almost no time” to push back against the “emergency.” And then she hawked her book to the audience.
The performance was a tour de force. Funnily enough, though, Wolf did not discuss what had become of her previous exhortations. She never does. Instead, she just keeps on going: auguring a coup here; predicting martial law there; and, all the while, heralding a glorious resistance movement that never quite needs to be arranged. There are, Wolf argued in the Guardian in 2007, ten inevitable steps that serve as the pre-requisites to fascism. Fair enough. And yet precisely how these are playing out in America seems to depend upon her mood. Sometimes, she argues that these steps have already been taken: If voters were only “willing to look,” she proposed in 2007, they would see that “each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.” At other times, they are just around the corner: In the last days before the 2008 election, she claimed to have noticed that the United States was coming to resemble other “closing societies” in which “the leader or the president will send military — especially during an election — to beat or harass or arrest voters and opposition leaders”). And, on occasion, she has even argued for both propositions at the same time, contending simultaneously in September of 2008 that the election was going to be canceled and that, if John McCain beat Barack Obama, Americans would be swiftly subjugated under a tyranny run by Republican mastermind Karl Rove and the “designated muse of the coming American police state,” Sarah Palin. Such, I suppose, are the burdens that our modern-day Nostradami bear.
Worse, perhaps, was her tendency to drop the abstract talk of “closed societies” and instead to unabashedly accuse President Bush of channeling Adolf Hitler. Americans, Wolf advised earnestly in 2007, should be on the lookout for the Nazi “tactics and strategy” that were “being reproduced exactly right now by the Bush administration.” “When I saw the recycling of so much Nazi language, Nazi tactics, Nazi strategies, Nazi imagery in the Bush White House,” Wolf exclaimed, she was moved to investigate further. Sure enough, she found her smoking gun. “Belatedly,” she revealed, “people brought to me this history of Prescott Bush’s attempted coup and Smedley Butler’s revelations”:
There was a scheme in the 30s and Prescott Bush was one of the leaders of this scheme, an industrialist who admired fascism and thought that was a good idea — to have a coup in the United States along the lines of the coup they saw taking place in Italy and Germany.”
More recently, Wolf has transcended political prognostication and ranged into self-indulgence, too. In 2012, having suffered a diminishment in her sex-drive, she wrote an entire book about her vagina. The experience evidently wasn’t easy. After attending “a dinner party celebrating her book deal where a male chef [prepared] ‘vagina-shaped pasta,’” the Los Angeles Times recorded, Wolf was afflicted by “six months of writer’s block.” One can only suspect that it would have been better for everybody if this incapacity had been permanent. “Naomi Wolf,” a science blogger for The New Statesman concluded in a review, “you sound like you’re on crack.” Almost to a man, the neuroscientific community concurred with the assessment, prompting the publication of some startling headlines. “Neuroscientists take aim at Naomi Wolf’s theory of the ‘conscious vagina,’” readers learned from io9. “Naomi Wolf’s ‘Vagina’ Gets More Public Criticism And Faint Praise Than Any Vagina We Know Of,” declared the Huffington Post. The tech website, Wired, meanwhile, lamented the pernicious influence of “Naomi Wolf’s ‘Vagina’ and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help.” Even Slate’s Katie Roiphe — no prude she — announced that Wolf’s book was “as ludicrous as you think it is,” representing an explosion of “faux academic language, and science, and personal confession mingled with a new-age idiom.” “I doubt the most brilliant novelist in the world,” Roiphe wrote, sticking in the dagger, “could have created a more skewering satire of Naomi Wolf’s career than her latest book.”
At what point, though, does the satire become the reality? Over the last eight years, Naomi Wolf has written hysterically about coups and about vaginas and about little else besides. She has repeatedly insisted that the country is on the verge of martial law, and transmogrified every threat — both pronounced and overhyped — into a government-led plot to establish a dictatorship. She has made prediction after prediction that has simply not come to pass. Hers are not sober and sensible forecasts of runaway human nature, institutional atrophy, and constitutional decline, but psychedelic fever-dreams that are more typically suited to the InfoWars crowd. I understand well that the gentle among us would prefer to shine a kind light on the descent, casting Wolf as having had an illustrious career blighted by a few giddy indiscretions. But we have probably now reached the point at which it would be more honest to conclude that the opposite is true. How should we respond when see a Naomi Wolf byline? By noting that she is an eccentric who was once involved in politics and rode the third wave of feminist thought, or by muttering under our breaths, “there goes that lunatic who once wrote a critically acclaimed book”?
Liberals surprised by her latest conspiracy theories seem to forget the Bush years.
Herewith, for your betterment and diversion, are a handful of dispatches from the dark depths of the digital front.
Driven by a desire to crack down on the people it serves — and to justify its actions abroad — the United States military is inventing crimes against humanity and attributing them to the Islamic State.
In Australia, a grateful government has jumped on these fabrications, and is employing them to justify a “draconian loss of freedoms.”
Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, America’s interest in the international Ebola outbreak has little to do with concerns about a lethal pandemic and more to do with the country’s establishing a convenient pretext for the imposition of martial law.
And, finally, the true results of September’s Scottish independence referendum were suppressed by that country’s electoral commission.
So sayeth the writer and activist, Naomi Wolf, on her Facebook page.
It should come as no surprise that these missives have attracted attention and condemnation from critics on both the left and the right. And yet the rank astonishment that has accompanied the criticism has been a little disconcerting. Compiling the most “unhinged, damaging, and dangerous” examples into a pseudo-explainer yesterday, Vox’s Max Fisher expressed bewilderment that Wolf would peddle such nonsense. Many Americans, Fisher proposed, continue to operate under “the assumption that Wolf is a respected and authoritative figure to be taken seriously.” This is a problem, he noted, because her “record of respectability gives her a platform and helps advance her conspiracy theories further than they would travel otherwise.” Later, Fisher attempted to set Wolf’s folly in context:
I was taught parts of Wolf’s 1990 book “The Beauty Myth” in school and admit that, until researching her more recent views more fully for this post, still mostly associated her with this and other well-respected work. . . . I can only assume that I was not alone in this.
“It is important for readers who may encounter Wolf’s ideas,” he concluded, “to understand the distinction between her earlier work, which rose on its merits, and her newer conspiracy theories.”
That we should examine individually each example of a person’s output strikes me as an eminently sensible rule. Nevertheless, I might quibble a little as to where we should draw the line of demarcation between Wolf’s earlier offerings and her newer theories. I understand that it has become something of a cliché for critics on the right to observe that, for many within the political press corps, modern history began with the election of Barack Obama in November of 2008, but, at the risk of playing to type, I cannot help but notice where Fisher’s analysis stops. Indeed, had he taken a little more time to research his post, he’d quickly have learned that, far from being a development of the last couple of months, Wolf’s considerable talent for delirium has been on display for years now. Of course she’s accusing President Obama of faking beheadings and coveting domestic military rule. Of course she believes that the Scottish referendum was faked. This is what she does.
Back in 2008, before Obama had been inaugurated, Wolf was touring the country warning anybody who would listen that the republic had fallen and that the citizenry should be preparing a resistance movement. “Americans are facing a coup, as of this morning, October 1st,” Wolf told Seattle’s KEXP, before promising listeners that she would soon be posting to her website a comprehensive set of instructions outlining “how to arrest the president.” “I’ve been saying for months,” Wolf insisted, “that leading up to the election you’re going to start seeing instability, hyped threats, hyped emergencies, hyped crises in order to create an atmosphere of urgency in order to justify a crackdown.” “I feel,” she explained, “like this is my one chance to alert America.” She wasn’t joking. Adopting a hysterical tone that would have prompted even Alex Jones into a period of self-reflection, Wolf warned that “we have almost no time” to push back against the “emergency.” And then she hawked her book to the audience.
The performance was a tour de force. Funnily enough, though, Wolf did not discuss what had become of her previous exhortations. She never does. Instead, she just keeps on going: auguring a coup here; predicting martial law there; and, all the while, heralding a glorious resistance movement that never quite needs to be arranged. There are, Wolf argued in the Guardian in 2007, ten inevitable steps that serve as the pre-requisites to fascism. Fair enough. And yet precisely how these are playing out in America seems to depend upon her mood. Sometimes, she argues that these steps have already been taken: If voters were only “willing to look,” she proposed in 2007, they would see that “each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.” At other times, they are just around the corner: In the last days before the 2008 election, she claimed to have noticed that the United States was coming to resemble other “closing societies” in which “the leader or the president will send military — especially during an election — to beat or harass or arrest voters and opposition leaders”). And, on occasion, she has even argued for both propositions at the same time, contending simultaneously in September of 2008 that the election was going to be canceled and that, if John McCain beat Barack Obama, Americans would be swiftly subjugated under a tyranny run by Republican mastermind Karl Rove and the “designated muse of the coming American police state,” Sarah Palin. Such, I suppose, are the burdens that our modern-day Nostradami bear.
Worse, perhaps, was her tendency to drop the abstract talk of “closed societies” and instead to unabashedly accuse President Bush of channeling Adolf Hitler. Americans, Wolf advised earnestly in 2007, should be on the lookout for the Nazi “tactics and strategy” that were “being reproduced exactly right now by the Bush administration.” “When I saw the recycling of so much Nazi language, Nazi tactics, Nazi strategies, Nazi imagery in the Bush White House,” Wolf exclaimed, she was moved to investigate further. Sure enough, she found her smoking gun. “Belatedly,” she revealed, “people brought to me this history of Prescott Bush’s attempted coup and Smedley Butler’s revelations”:
There was a scheme in the 30s and Prescott Bush was one of the leaders of this scheme, an industrialist who admired fascism and thought that was a good idea — to have a coup in the United States along the lines of the coup they saw taking place in Italy and Germany.”
More recently, Wolf has transcended political prognostication and ranged into self-indulgence, too. In 2012, having suffered a diminishment in her sex-drive, she wrote an entire book about her vagina. The experience evidently wasn’t easy. After attending “a dinner party celebrating her book deal where a male chef [prepared] ‘vagina-shaped pasta,’” the Los Angeles Times recorded, Wolf was afflicted by “six months of writer’s block.” One can only suspect that it would have been better for everybody if this incapacity had been permanent. “Naomi Wolf,” a science blogger for The New Statesman concluded in a review, “you sound like you’re on crack.” Almost to a man, the neuroscientific community concurred with the assessment, prompting the publication of some startling headlines. “Neuroscientists take aim at Naomi Wolf’s theory of the ‘conscious vagina,’” readers learned from io9. “Naomi Wolf’s ‘Vagina’ Gets More Public Criticism And Faint Praise Than Any Vagina We Know Of,” declared the Huffington Post. The tech website, Wired, meanwhile, lamented the pernicious influence of “Naomi Wolf’s ‘Vagina’ and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help.” Even Slate’s Katie Roiphe — no prude she — announced that Wolf’s book was “as ludicrous as you think it is,” representing an explosion of “faux academic language, and science, and personal confession mingled with a new-age idiom.” “I doubt the most brilliant novelist in the world,” Roiphe wrote, sticking in the dagger, “could have created a more skewering satire of Naomi Wolf’s career than her latest book.”
At what point, though, does the satire become the reality? Over the last eight years, Naomi Wolf has written hysterically about coups and about vaginas and about little else besides. She has repeatedly insisted that the country is on the verge of martial law, and transmogrified every threat — both pronounced and overhyped — into a government-led plot to establish a dictatorship. She has made prediction after prediction that has simply not come to pass. Hers are not sober and sensible forecasts of runaway human nature, institutional atrophy, and constitutional decline, but psychedelic fever-dreams that are more typically suited to the InfoWars crowd. I understand well that the gentle among us would prefer to shine a kind light on the descent, casting Wolf as having had an illustrious career blighted by a few giddy indiscretions. But we have probably now reached the point at which it would be more honest to conclude that the opposite is true. How should we respond when see a Naomi Wolf byline? By noting that she is an eccentric who was once involved in politics and rode the third wave of feminist thought, or by muttering under our breaths, “there goes that lunatic who once wrote a critically acclaimed book”?
U
