[eDebate] Lies
Michael Korcok
mmk_savant
Wed Aug 11 15:03:11 CDT 2004
Yah yah yah.
Want to pick 1 or 2 of them and argue the merits? Cause just linking to
Barrett's site isn't diddly.
I mean that in a good way: Parcher = smarter/wiser/betterdebater than
"Politex"
It seems to me that I presented a fair 3-prong test and that guy doesn't
try to meet those elements.
To be fair to Polly, he doesn't know about the throw-down but still.
OK, I'll pick one for you. I think this is the toughest one for me to
answer but if you disagree pick another one.
Jerry "Politex" Barrett of Austin, Texas, writes:
"[Castro] welcomes sex tourism," Bush told a room of law
enforcement officials in Florida, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"Here's how he bragged about the industry," Bush said. "This is his
quote: 'Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the
world.'"
"As it turns out, Bush had lifted that quotation not from an
actual Castro speech but rather from a 2001 essay written by then
Dartmouth University undergraduate Charles Trumbull. In the essay,
Trumbull did appear to quote a Castro speech about prostitution. Sadly,
the student made the quotation up.
"According to officials, the actual quotation from Castro's
1992 speech reads as follows: 'There are hookers, but prostitution is
not allowed in our country. There are no women forced to sell themselves
to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their
own, voluntarily. We can say that they are highly educated hookers and
quite healthy, because we are the country with the lowest number of AIDS
cases.'"
"...And this isn't the first time the Internet has baffled
Bush. Back in 2003, the President cited another student's thesis when
making a case to go to war. The student's [plagiarized and "sexed up"]
work ended up in a government document describing Iraq's weapons
capability. Not exactly the kind of hard intelligence needed to justify
an attack on another country." The Register
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/28/bush_sees_clean_cuban_hookers/>
, 07.28.04"
Element 3: believed it to be false at time of utterance. NOPE, try
again.
No attempt to establish this element. In fact,
"Politex" writes that Bush (a speech writer) relied on an undergraduate
essay in which the Castro quote was "made up" by the undergraduate
author. That means that
Bush almost certainly DID believe what he was saying
to be true. The best you have here is that Bush was mistaken or relied
on bad information.
Claiming that he LIED is unethical in this context:
there is no evidence Bush was intending to DECEIVE rather than being
incorrect.
Perhaps you wanna try for "extreme negligence": Bush
should have known that Castro didn't say that, in fact, no reasonable
person would have used that quote.
Well, that doesn't get very far. The White House
got the paper from the web site of the Association for the Study of the
Cuban Economy ( http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/asce/ ) which has a
great McLean, VA
post office box. The Trumbull paper won the best
student paper of the year prize in 2001. Short of a standard that
requires a debater to personally hunt down every footnote, that's pretty
good for research. True,
a GREAT debater would have gone to the original, but
a normal, average, reasonable debater would not. So give it up now.
Just in case you are still tempted to make something of this. the
Dartmouth News on
October 28, 2000 bragged that: "The paper he produced
upon returning to Dartmouth will be published this January in the
journal Cuba in Transition. In August Trumbull spoke at the annual
conference of the
Association to Study the Cuban Economy in Miami,
earning not only scholarly attention (and even a few job offers), but a
cash award for the best undergraduate or graduate student article."
(
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2000/oct00/trumbull.html )
OH! a pre-empt in case you wanna go for Charles
Trumbull's silly and tangentially-related claim that the White House
took his work "out of context": Trumbull said to the Los Angeles Times
on July 20, 2004
that:
"I don't know why I don't have a footnote for
that," said Trumbull, 24, who is clerking this summer for a federal
judge in Puerto Rico. "That was before I was in law school and
understood that you have to
footnote everything."
Trumbull says the quote was probably a
paraphrase of comments the Cuban leader made in 1992, which have been
oft-repeated and seem to have taken on a life of their own.
But regardless of the exact wording, Trumbull says
the president's speech misconstrued the meaning, which he says should
have been clear from his paper.
"It shows that they didn't read much of the article,"
Trumbull said in a telephone interview.
According to Trumbull, who conducted field
research in Cuba, prostitution boomed in the Caribbean nation after the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, providing an important source of
currency for the
Cuban economy. Castro, who outlawed prostitution
when he took power in 1959, initially had few resources to combat it.
But beginning around 1996, Cuban authorities began to crack down on the
practice.
Although prostitution still exists, Trumbull said,
it is far less visible, and it would be inaccurate to say the government
promotes it.
Even when Castro made the remarks, Trumbull said, he
was not boasting about Cuba's prostitutes as sex workers.
"Castro was merely trying to emphasize some of the
successes of the revolution by saying 'even our prostitutes our
educated,' " Trumbull said. "Castro was trying to defend his revolution
against negative publicity.
He was in no way bragging about the opportunities
for sex tourism on the island."
And the trouble with that whole thing statement is
Trumbull is clearly backtracking. THIS is from the Dartmouth News 4
years ago, at the time he wrote the paper:
"In 1959 Castro spoke out adamantly against
prostitution, and for 30 years, there wasn't any," he says. "In the
'90s, it returned. Castro could eliminate it again, but he doesn't. He
knows sex tourism brings in a
huge flow of U.S. dollars."
This, Trumbull says, is a huge slap in the
face to socialist morality. "It shows socialism failing. I want to
understand why Castro allows it."
But that question will just have to wait for now.
After a sophomore spring in Argentina on the Spanish Foreign Study
Program, Trumbull is again leaving the States, spending fall term in
Edinburgh, Scotland, on the
philosophy FSP.
SO. NO LIE. Fails number 3 miserably. Not even
an "out of context". Shabby vetting, maybe. NOT good work, no, but
UNETHICAL? Naw.
Element 2: the statement is false.
Yes it is. That was NOT a quote of Castro. He did
NOT say those words. In fact, Castro, no doubt, spoke Spanish in that
1992 speech so Bush's claim was, on face, false.
But does Castro promote sex tourism which was the
point of Bush's comment?
HERE read this and LEARN SOMETHING dammit!: (
http://www.protectionproject.org/main1.htm )
This is what the Johns Hopkins Protection Project
report on Cuba: has to say about it:
"Cuba was once known as the "brothel of the
Caribbean" due to its reputation as a haven for wealthy Americans
looking for sex, gambling and wild night life. After the 1959
revolution, this element of Cuban
society was drastically cleaned up.2
<http://www.protectionproject.org/commentary/re.htm#2#2> Sex workers
were offered housing, education and employment in order to assist them
with rehabilitation into mainstream society.3
<http://www.protectionproject.org/commentary/re.htm#3#3> Sex tourism is
"back with a vengeance" now
in Cuba.4
<http://www.protectionproject.org/commentary/re.htm#4#4> Several
factors have been noted for their contribution to the re-emergence of
the sex tourism industry on the island. First, the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the economic crisis that resulted left many
Cubans suffering from a drastic decline in their
standards of living.5
<http://www.protectionproject.org/commentary/re.htm#5#5> Second, the
promotion of foreign tourism to bring in hard currency fueled the growth
of the dual dollar economy. In the 1990s, Cubans began to
sell a range of goods and services to foreign
tourists, including sex. Third, Cuba's popularity as a foreign tourist
destination grew, mainly due to "racialized stereotypes, low rates of
HIV, and, quite simply, low
cost."6
<http://www.protectionproject.org/commentary/re.htm#6#6> Finally, the
government's "initial attitude of general indifference to the activity"
sent "a message to the global sex tourist community that Cuba was open
for business."7 <http://www.protectionproject.org/commentary/re.htm#7#7>
thank you for reading,
Michael Korcok
-----Original Message-----
From: edebate-admin at ndtceda.com [mailto:edebate-admin at ndtceda.com] On
Behalf Of Jeff Parcher
Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 11:31 AM
To: Michael Korcok; edebate at ndtceda.com
Subject: Re: [eDebate] Lies
http://www.bushwatch.com/bushlies.htm
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