Except by him
Nope. He met someone who he
thought might be the same person described as foreign in an earlier conversation. That the person he met
was said foreign person was not confirmed, even by his own testimony. In fact - his own statement doesn't even say that the person he spoke to was foreign, other than being black and having a funny name there is no reason given to suppose he was foreign. So even if it was Obama he met, there is no reason to suppose that it was the same foreign person alluded to in an earlier conversation which took place at some unknown amount of time earlier. And there's no reason to suppose Mary Ayers was being honest about the foreignness or existence of the anonymous foreign student.
Actually, he said very definitely that it was Obama.
No, he didn't. Here's the part where you provide his words to the contrary:
quote:
In the early 1990s, I spoke with Mary Ayers who told me she was
impressed with a foreign, black student. I do not recall from what country she said he
was. I recall that the student had an unusual, foreign sounding name.
...
A period of time, I am not sure of the exact period of time, after the
conversation with Mary Ayers, while delivering mail to the Ayers' residence, I was
approached by a young, black male in front of the house and struck up a conversation I
with him. The male introduced himself. He had an unusual, foreign sounding name.
The male stated he was there to thank the Ayers family for the help they had provided
him with his schooling. The male was young, tall, thin, had a light complexion, and
had ears that stuck out. He was polite, articulate and spoke with no foreign accent.
....
The facial and physical
characteristics, as well as candidate Obama's voice, matched that of the young black
male Imet at the Ayers' home. Iam positive that the black male I spoke with in front
of the Ayers house that day was indeed a young Barack Obama.
He met a black guy with a funny name and sticky out ears. That's not 'definitely' Obama. It's a person's opinion based on a decades old memory of a single encounter which he couldn't place the date of. It's not evidence.
Who else could it be anyway?
There a lot of black people.
What other young black man of the right age who knew Bill ayers did become President?
The mailman did not know he was going to become President.
Wouldn't you remember that odd "prophecy" yourself under the circumstances?
Not really. I've met lots of people who claimed they were going to be something great and improbable, I can't remember them in any particular detail. Especially the ones from decades ago.
But once a memorable event like this one occurs
I see nothing particularly memorable about meeting some guy once on the street. Given Hulton has no grip on when it happened, it clearly wasn't a strong memory. I can tell you the date of my first kiss, because that is a strong memory. I can tell you the years I won County Championships. I can tell you the years I went to the USA, Portugal, Holland etc. I can't tell you the year I had a conversation with a an actual woodsman who had an old dog - and I wouldn't recognize him again though I spoke with him for an hour and played with his dog and had a really positive and interesting experience.
No other direct verification, but there are circumstantial points we know about Obama that are independent of the mailman's testimony, his association with the Ayers family for one thing
True, but then the mailman knew of this association before making his affidavit. If he had been one of the many people motivated to discrediting Obama, like those who would stand in court and swear testimony, he may have consciously or unconsciously inserted Obama's face into the memory. THAT is how memory works.
Rape is a pretty memorable experience, right? What if I told you that shortly after a rape a woman, Mrs Y, was utterly positive that Mr X. was the rapist. What if I told you that years later Mr X was acquitted by DNA and Mr X and Mrs Y talked with one another and they realized that at the time of the rape she was watching a TV show in which Mr X was an audience member who was sat close to a camera and was visible to her. This is a true story.
I think that prophecy set the whole thing in his mind for all those years, caused him to remember the student's looks and all the circumstances that surrounded his meeting him. That's how MY memory works.
No, that's not how memory works. What is true is that people are convinced about the reliability of their memory regularly provide elaborate reasons for why they are sure, and still turn out to be wrong. Here is an article about memories surrounding
the September 11th Attacks. People would remember seeing the video of the first plane hit that day, despite video of that not coming out that day.
quote:
One week, six weeks or 32 weeks later, the students returned to answer the same set of questions. It turned out that the consistency of 9/11 memories was no different than that of mundane memories. In both cases, the number of consistent details about the event dropped from around 12 one day after it happened to about eight consistent details 32 weeks later, while inconsistencies rose. Nonetheless, people felt very confident in their total recall of that moment.
"We seem to be willing to admit that we might be forgetting something, or maybe misremembering details of other types of events," she said, but people remain unusually sure of their memories of 9/11 and similar events.
The resulting set of data contained responses from more than 3,000 people in seven cities. Following up with those same people one year and three years later, the researchers found a decline in flashbulb memory accuracy that gradually leveled off after year one. In the first year, people's memories were consistent with the initial responses only 63 percent of the time. After that, however, they only lost 4.5 percent of their accuracy per year.
"People began to tell what I would call a canonical story," said Hirst, who was one of the study researchers. "The error they made at 11 months and the error they made at 35 months was the same."
Surprisingly, Hirst said, people tend to be particularly bad at remembering their emotions from the time of the attack. It's hard to look back at an emotional event without coloring it with hindsight, he said.
People "tend to think that the way they felt about it at the time is the same way that they feel about it now," Hirst said. "But their emotions have changed, so they make errors in their memory You put your present into the past."
But studies have certainly shown that flashbulb memories are subject to contamination. In a 2004 study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, scientists suggested to Russian study participants that their previously reported flashbulb memories of a 1999 bombing of two Moscow apartment buildings had included visions of a wounded animal. None of the 80 participants had actually reported this, but five were convinced by the suggestion, even creating false memories of bleeding cats and enraged barking dogs. In the case of 9/11, people will sometimes claim to have seen live video of the first plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Talarico said, despite the fact that such video was not broadcast until days after the attack.
So even if a mailman meeting a black guy in the street once is as big a deal as September 11th, we can see a single witness' memory is massively unreliable, subject to false memory implantation (deliberate or otherwise). People swore they could remember graphic images of dying animals, just because it was subtly suggested to them after the event.
That's how memory works, it's well observed it's not a video recording - it's emotional, it's associative and is constantly revised based on our present circumstances. If there was some evidence that Hulton had written about this event in a diary or had been recording talking about it at the time, *maybe* we'd have something to work with. As it is, a memory of meeting some guy whose name you can't remember once twenty years ago (though the year was lost to memory) is completely unreliable and cannot be used as evidence in any reasonable sphere of discussion.
He couldn't even say 'Oh yeah, it must have been 1991 because it was after I had bought that new van, but before I'd moved house'. There was no evidenced association that could even be used as a reason to suppose the memory had the potential to be well preserved - and even those events which do have that potential get worse year after year. 20 years is hopeless.
The very singular very peculiar circumstances point to Obama
He was black, had sticky out ears, studied and had some association to some of the same people. Not peculiar, not pointing to Obama. Even it if it was, there is no reason to suppose that he was foreign other than the fact that Mary Ayers knew a black foreigner.
Not at all "clearly." There's no reason why even the most vivid memories have to include the exact time of when they occurred.
Not absolute time, but relative time is almost inevitable. Relative time can help create quite a narrow range of dates. I don't remember the time I learned of September 11th, but I had been doing chores that day and was not working, it was light outside and the people I lived with were out at work - so it must have been mid to late afternoon.
Obviously I have reasons to know the year and date, but I could definitely say what year it was. I know what job I had, what house I lived in, who I was in a relationship with, what website I was on when I learned. All of these associations could tie me to the year very easily.
I remember I first won the County Championship while the Euro 96 competition was on. I remember the songs we sang.
I remember the year when I scratched an RAC van, over a decade ago, and the name of the road I was on, and the time of year.
Associations get me to these things to at least within a year. This guy describes things in a very vague way, with no associations. In fact, he says it was from the mid-eighties to early nineties. That's at least a 5 year window.
This is a weak memory, I have no reason to give it any credence. If YOU do, do you also give credence to women who claim Donald Trump raped or assaulted them? They are surely strong memories that you'd remember. Or do you suppose that some people have reasons to attack or discredit Trump and given the lack of confirming evidence to back them up, do you dismiss them?
I don't need qualifications to be able to make a case about mismatched fonts and that sort of thing which as I recall were the sort of thing that gives away the fakery of some of the documents.
Then your judgement is irrelevant isn't it? Your 'recall' is insufficient. Find some actual experts, and provide their reasons and evidence. You've been told it is fake, you want to believe it, your memory could be clouded with your own biases about how strong the case you 'recall' actually is.
In general I believe the mailman, I believe the documents were faked because of my own study of them even if I don't remember the details, and I believe that the blurb on his book that said he was born in Kenya couldn't possibly have been a mistake, so I have to believe the writer was intimidated into saying that. I also believe the Kenyan grandmother said truthfully that she witnessed his birth but that others around her forced her to deny it.
Beliefs are not evidence. You can believe what you like, but if you claim you have very strong evidence that it is OBVIOUS there is a problem, you need more than this hodge-podge of nonsense. Especially when the sources you rely on still rely on evidence that has been definitely disproven such as the fake Kenyan birth certificate, which I *have* give you evidence for.
But I've got so many other problems with Obama this one is almost irrelevant. Except I get SO tired of all the bad reasoning that goes into trying to debunk the very convincing evidence.
I'd be happy to let this stand as my Summary Statement.
Very well.
In that case here is mine.
The right spread Obama's grandmothers recording, but excised the VERY next sentence she utters which is explicit regarding the birthplace of Obama to rely on the innuendo that could be mined from an ambiguity.
There is no evidence the literary editor had knowledge of Obama's birthplace, and the book that would eventually be published, over a decade before he would run for president does not claim Kenya.
The birth certificate has been examined by experts on the right and the left and the consensus is that it is legitimate. There is corroborating evidence for it.
Your sources spread fake documents around, years after they were discredited.
There just isn't any evidence. Not a bit. Just desperate smears and innuendo. You made some sideways references to other evidence you think exists but you didn't provide that evidence so instead of doing even more work on this for you, I will treat them with the contempt they deserve and dismiss them as more lies. If you want me to take you seriously, you'll need to put some effort in. Your assertions have not credibility, your sources have been repeatedly shown to be untrustworthy. You don't treat evidence consistently, instead your assessments show clear and unhealthy bias against people you consider 'the left'. You have nothing.
I tried to take you as seriously as possible, to hear you out, to allow you to make your case. In the end it fell apart. Don't feel bad, people with lots of education and smarts also had their cases exposed as nonsense. However, since they are long discredited you should feel ashamed at posting them all uncritically, without even mentioning the well known and public rebuttals when you do.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.
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