Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely headspinning excuse:
>Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.
It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.
The case in point was about legal immigrants accused of eating their neighbors pets and taking their jobs. Neither was true.
Your factcheck needs to be factchecked. Accusing me of being dishonest and acting in bad faith is a hoot. I may be ignorant of certain things but I'm only interested in the truth as I can best discover it.
I would love to have debate with someone from "your side", but you are, at best, a troll and haven't demonstrated any good faith.
I know this is not a new post at this point, but these claims are always wild to me from educated people. How on earth can you seriously believe that something is 100% not true, or debunked, when the claim could cover thousands of people in an environment over many months or years? Do you have video evidence of every second of every persons life over this timeframe that is indisputable? How can you possible know without a shadow of a doubt that this never happened? It's ludicrous.
What if you flipped the scenario and you heard of Americans living in India and locals claimed they have seen them killing and eating local cows? Would that just be incredibly unbelievable to you? Its just absurd to suggest that it just absolutely, 100% never happened, and everybody who has anecdotal evidence is just some racist idiot making stuff up.
And I know you won't believe me, but I actually live adjacent to one of the towns that received a large influx of Haitian migrants. Not Springfield, but a city that was also regularly mentioned on the news, and I saw evidence of the claims that were being spoken at those town halls myself. Our town literally had to put out city notices to ask people to refrain from shooting blow darts into the geese down at our local park, a place where the Haitians were known to loiter all day long for months on end, since they had nothing else to do or anywhere else to go. All of this shit was not just made up, I guarantee it. These were not all model citizens.
Now I am sure this is the part where you call me, a mixed race person who has a child with a minority mother, a racist.
There was a biography that came out, I believe roughly around 2004, that was revealed to have significant fabrications. The excuse making for it revolved around the notion of "lying to reveal a greater truth".
This is the same mentality some people have for coming up with hate crime hoaxes (if it isn't for attention seeking).
I personally find it to be intellectually bankrupt and counter-productive; people willing to blind themselves to a problem will use such examples as evidence that all such claims are false.
Wholeheartedly agree, and if you can remember any more about the biography, I'd be curious to know.
I feel like I have a little essay brewing within me about these various examples of indifference to truth and the way they're rationalized. One example is this particular episode of This American Life. Another is Hassan Minaj's Notion of Emotional Truths. Another is Samsung's Faking moon photos and how they tried to blur the lines between image processing and fake photos.
>Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.
It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.