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uhnope

(6,419 posts)
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 03:07 PM Feb 2015

Naomi Wolf loses it: conspiracy theories about Ebola + says ISIS Beheadings were fake.



God what a freak show.

From ISIS to Ebola, What Has Made Naomi Wolf So Paranoid?

She was the third-wave feminism firebrand, famous and lauded. But the author of The Beauty Myth has become a nonsense-garbling conspiracy theorist.


It wasn't really meant for me, considering the contours of my own midsection. But I nevertheless tried to read Naomi Wolf's excruciatingly bad 2012 book Vagina: A New Biography, more to confirm the unanimous critical opinion that it was an excruciatingly bad book than to explore the historic journey of the female sex organ.

But I surrendered rather quickly, hurling the book across the room when Wolf capped her introduction with this observation: “The vagina may be a 'hole,' but it is, properly understood, a Goddess-shaped one.”

No thank you.

But unlike so many other readers of Vagina, I never scratched my chin wondering when Naomi Wolf, Rhodes scholar, presidential advisor, and feminist icon, transformed from an unreasonable writer to an unreadable crank. That's because I had reviewed Wolf's previous book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, a slim volume brimming with the sort of crankery most of us stopped noticing during the Bush-era.

According to Wolf’s heavy-breathing, best-selling book (over 100,000 copies), America's leaders-cum-putschists were secretly being fitted for brown shirts, snazzy jodhpurs, and shiny jackboots. We had gone from late-Weimar period to the 1933-torchlight-parade stage of fascist takeover. Washington D.C. was our Welthauptstadt Germania.

The End of America was an astoundingly lazy piece of writing, full of historical reference points that Wolf thought clever but clearly didn't quite understand. But because the warning was so important–Nie wieder Krieg! Nie wieder Faschismus!–a dumb book was made into an even dumber documentary film, which a deeply serious New York Times reviewer judged to be occasionally overblown but with “enough here to make you shiver. Could it happen here? Maybe. A little fear — not the collective panic that followed 9/11 — can be a useful thing." (Let's pause to observe that invocations of impending fascism by film reviewers and polemicists who once skimmed William Shirer are not unlike those who know nothing about science waffling on about climate change conspiracies.)

“In 2006, Wolf babbled something to a Scottish newspaper about Jesus appearing to her while she was inhabiting the body of a young boy.”

Wolf produced another little media ripple this week when she posited on Facebook that those harrowing, terrifying videos of ISIS murdering Western hostages may have been faked. “It takes five people to stage an event like this - two to be 'parents' - two to pose for the cameras... one in a ninja outfit... and one to contact the media that does not bother checking who ANY of these four other people are...”

There was plenty more like this--every epistle dumber than the previous--but you get the general idea. When the online mockery turned to disgust, Wolf backtracked, claiming she only wanted the videos “confirmed” by “two sources” because this is what “reporters are supposed to do,” while failing to understand that this is what reporters actually did.

It’s quite something for Wolf to blather about journalistic sourcing. She regularly posts stories to Facebook from extremist conspiracy websites like Globalresearch.ca, the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV, and the Holocaust denial outfit Veterans Today. And beneath all of these stories, in the comment swamp, her fans obsess over Israel ("ISIS = Israel Secret Intelligence Service," one recently wrote) and “our fascist Nazi loving government.”

The halcyon days of Wolf, the third-wave feminist revolutionary and author of The Beauty Myth (1990), seem far, far away. Indeed, Wolf's journey to the crackpot fringe was completed a long time ago. Even when power was peacefully transferred from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, Wolf didn't back down from her grim predictions and remained vigilant against the new crop of Little Eichmanns entering the White House.

"Obama has done things like Hitler did,"
she muttered to some poor journalist who, just hours before, had mistaken Wolf for a serious person.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/11/from-isis-to-ebola-what-has-made-naomi-wolf-so-paranoid.html
16 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Naomi Wolf loses it: conspiracy theories about Ebola + says ISIS Beheadings were fake. (Original Post) uhnope Feb 2015 OP
"The point was to eventually have compliant hostages on camera," jakeXT Feb 2015 #1
These guys were killed but and the shadows show its fake Ichingcarpenter Feb 2015 #4
Wasn't this IntelCenter ? Maybe both at the same time jakeXT Feb 2015 #5
This message was self-deleted by its author mother earth Feb 2015 #6
This passage about Katz is lifted from an anti Semitic site, alp227 Feb 2015 #7
where, exactly, are you cutting and pasting this conspiracy theory from? uhnope Feb 2015 #10
Speaking of cranks... The author of the piece you've cited: Cooley Hurd Feb 2015 #2
As disheartening as it is... gregcrawford Feb 2015 #3
yet a lot of idiots keep posting her videos here and promoting her Adenoid_Hynkel Feb 2015 #8
what's up with that? Why are the morons, the nuts and the compromised preferred? uhnope Feb 2015 #9
Naomi Wolf is jewish Ichingcarpenter Feb 2015 #11
um, your point? uhnope Feb 2015 #12
What does her religion have to do with anything? Cali_Democrat Feb 2015 #13
If the choice is NOT quesioning anything.. LiberalLovinLug Feb 2015 #14
who says that's the choice? uhnope Feb 2015 #15
I can't believe you actually said that LiberalLovinLug Feb 2015 #16

jakeXT

(10,575 posts)
1. "The point was to eventually have compliant hostages on camera,"
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 03:15 PM
Feb 2015

ISIS Hostages Likely Faced Mock Executions Before Beheadings, Officials Say

After scrutinizing intelligence and every frame of videos featuring high-profile ISIS hostages, many counter-terrorism analysts and experts have concluded that some captives appeared compliant before being killed because they had already faced repeated mock executions on camera, current and former counter-terrorism officials told ABC News.

The staged executions were possibly made under the guise of an effort to scare their families and governments into meeting the terrorists' demands, the sources said.

Since ISIS slaughtered Japanese journalist Kenji Goto in a video released Saturday -- its seventh high-profile hostage beheaded -- government analysts have been looking for clues in the images about the location of other hostages and the British spokesman called "Jihadi John," who has presented himself as each victim's executioner wielding a notched blade, officials said.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/isis-hostages-faced-mock-executions-beheadings-officials/story?id=28661536

Did ISIS doctor the footage of Japanese hostages? Experts point out that shadows of the three men point in different directions... suggesting they were filmed separately as ransom deadline passes



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2922827/Japan-captives-mother-asks-Islamic-State-release-ransom-deadline-nears.html

Ichingcarpenter

(36,988 posts)
4. These guys were killed but and the shadows show its fake
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 03:40 PM
Feb 2015

its interesting that the person or agency that reports on these videos is the same group that put out the Ben laden videos.

Rita Katz, 52, of Bethesda,Maryland, is the Source of the ISIS Foley-Sotloff-Haines-Henning Headchopper Videos. She Released the ISIS Videos Before ISIS Did. Her Company SITE is also the Source of the 2004 Fake Bin Laden Videos. An Israeli Citizen, Her Company “Finds” Jihadi Videos on “Terrorist Forums”

jakeXT

(10,575 posts)
5. Wasn't this IntelCenter ? Maybe both at the same time
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 03:51 PM
Feb 2015

Question of authenticity

Neal Krawetz did an image-compression analysis of the As-Sahab and IntelCenter logos on "a 2006 al Qaeda video of Ayman al-Zawahiri". He originally told Kim Zetter of Wired News that the logos had "the same error levels and that this indicated they were added at the same time" (Zetter's words). IntelCenter boss Venzke subsequently denied that his organization had added the As-Sahab logo. He commented: "just because the error levels are the same for two items in an image, that doesn't prove they were added at the same time, only that the compression was the same for both items when they were added" (Zetter's words). Krawetz then went back on his original statement, saying that "the error levels on the IntelCenter and As-Sahab logos are different and that the IntelCenter logo was added after the As-Sahab logo" (Zetter's words again).[13]

IntelCenter has not revealed how it acquires these videos or explained the discrepancies of the As-Sahab and IntelCenter logos.

Ian Clark, director of AHC, stated in an interview with a Norwegian blog that "IntelCenter for years has forged Osama bin-Laden video tapes" and that "IntelCenter is not a credible intelligence source".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelCenter

Response to Ichingcarpenter (Reply #4)

alp227

(32,050 posts)
7. This passage about Katz is lifted from an anti Semitic site,
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 05:18 PM
Feb 2015

Godlike Productions. Why did you post this?

 

Cooley Hurd

(26,877 posts)
2. Speaking of cranks... The author of the piece you've cited:
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 03:17 PM
Feb 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moynihan_(journalist)

Due to interpretations of particular comments that Moynihan has made and some of the imagery he has employed, Michael Moynihan has been a controversial figure.

Matthias Gardell[edit]
Swedish professor Matthias Gardell writes in his Gods of the Blood: "Featured in different contexts, Moynihan projects many different faces and has been classified as an "extreme rightist" (Coogan 1999)[27] an "extreme leftist", (Wulfing One 1995)[28] a Nazi, a fascist, and an anarchist."[29]

Gardell also writes about Moynihan, that he had "developed an early interest in things beyond the ordinary, from extremist politics to occult sciences. Intelligent, energetic, and creative, his inquisitiveness soon began to manifest in music, art and writings."[30] As people to whom Moynihan is attracted in his ideas, Gardell lists Charles Manson, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Mikhail Bakunin, Julius Evola, James Mason and Miguel Serrano.[31]
In accordance with one of the main theses of his book (that "the conventional left wing-right wing binary has become increasingly insufficient to map out the scene of contemporary politics&quot ,[32] Gardell concludes that Moynihan may "best be described as a heathen anarchofascist, with all the paradoxes and ambiguities that follow from such a categorization."[33]

Mattias Gardell further writes that: "While certainly [Moynihan] does not care about the majority of mankind, he cares even less about building gas chambers" and that "Moynihan is hardly anti-Semitic or a White Supremacist and is definitely not a radical right 'leader' of anything".[34]

Kevin Coogan[edit]
The investigative journalist Kevin Coogan has linked Moynihan more explicitly with the extreme right but states that Moynihan does not fit into a "conventional definitions of fascism". Coogan has classified Moynihan unspecifically as an "extreme rightist".[27]

Coogan states about Lords of Chaos:
Yet what really makes the book fascinating is that its main author, Michael Moynihan, is himself an extreme rightist whose fusion of politics and aesthetic violence shapes a not-so-hidden sub current that runs throughout LOC.[27]

Coogan states that Lords of Chaos "itself, however, is not a "fascist" tract in the strict sense", since Moynihan co-wrote it with Didrik Søderlind and Feral House editor Adam Parfrey wanted to publish a popular book on black metal, not a "political polemic."[27]

Coogan then points out: "Nor does Moynihan himself fit easily into the more conventional definitions of fascism."[27]

Coogan continues with an account of Moynihan's biography and mentions "rumours" about Moynihan having a "blood fetish" and that he was suspected "of setting fire to a manger scene on the Cambridge Commons" in 1987,[27] and further gives an account of Moynihan's involvement with the Church of Satan and industrial music. Coogan views certain tendencies of the industrial music subculture as similar to a phenomenon of the time before World War II: "The sense of despair felt by industrial culture was not unique. A similar heroic/pessimistic worldview appeared in Europe after World War I."[27] Coogan describes this worldview as "counter-cultural fascism," and in this milieu he says Moynihan is said to have operated, too.[27]

Further accounts[edit]
Schobert (1998) considers Moynihan a musical lightweight who profited from association with Rice and successfully managed to style himself as a provocative "cult figure". Examples for such provocative behaviour include a 1994 interview with No Longer a Fanzine (no. 5, p. 8) which led to activist allegations that he was "a major purveyor of Neo-Nazism, occult fascism and international industrial black metal music."[35]

The controversies stirred Moynihan as a topic of interest in industrial music, experimental music,[36] metal music,[37] Satanic, Neo-Nazi, and Neo-völkisch movements, and the album The Gospel of Inhumanity released at the same time met with favourable reception from an amount of these quarters; the US Nazi skin journal Resistance (no. 6, 38) praised it as a "fascist symphony". The album also brought Moynihan to the attention of the German Neo-Nazi scene, a favourable review appearing in Einheit und Kampf. Das revolutionäre Magazin für Nationalisten (no. 18, p. 29, Aufruhr-Verlag, Bremen). As a consequence, Moynihan was targeted by anti-fascist activists in the late 1990s. Blood Axis performances attracted protesters, on one occasion in 1998, "about 75" San Francisco protesters mobilized by a flyer denouncing Moynihan as "a fascist and a hatemonger" succeeded in preventing his appearance.[38] Moynihan dismissed activists labeling him a Nazi or a Fascist as misinformed hysterical alarmism.[39]

German social scientist Christian Dornbusch remarks that Moynihan's work "evokes a mindset which wants to design a future based on völkisch and fascist respectively national socialist thinkers. It's the same goal that the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley rants about for minutes in the sample at the beginning of the live album Blot – Sacrifice in Sweden: »... we are fighting for nothing less than the revolution of the spirit of our people ...«".[40]

SPLC report[edit]
Consequently, Moynihan was listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center's 1999 Intelligence Report as a "leader of a new generation of hate mongerers" amongst convicted felons and right wing activists. The section in the report regarding Moynihan was criticized by Decibel Magazine in 2006, who stated that:
The main problem with this particular part of the article—besides being totally misleading—is that Blood Axis is not a black metal band. Rather than interview Moynihan, the authors of the article excerpted quotes from an issue of Compulsion zine published in 1998.[41]
Moynihan responded to the report:
“Regarding their attacks on me, these too have been packed with misinformation and outright errors,” Moynihan adds. “They ignore my artistic work as whole—it’s clear they’ve never even listened to the records they’re condemning—and merely focus on a few provocative statements selectively culled from interviews done nearly 15 years ago. These statements become far more ambiguous when contextualized into everything I’ve said and done over the years. From the very beginning I have said that Blood Axis represents a grey area of Nietzschean amorality and paradox; the inability of people to handle it, or even grasp it on these terms, only proves how successfully it embodies this.”[41]

Moynihan's response[edit]
Moynihan has repeatedly denied political ties.[42][43] In response to the various political accusations leveled against him, Moynihan calls the Far right "a bunch of isolated losers" and further that:
Whether they're the Marxist/Communist/Socialist people who think that humans want to get along on a grand scale, or whether it's the Nazis, who think that if everyone was just of the same race, they'd all get along perfectly, or the anarchists, who think everyone would love to live this way if you just took away the police.
They're all deluded. People should worry about what happens on their block. They should get along with their neighbors before they worry about the great ills of society and about telling someone who lives 200 miles away what to do.[4]

gregcrawford

(2,382 posts)
3. As disheartening as it is...
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 03:27 PM
Feb 2015

... that idiots and mental defectives like Wolf, Coulter, Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, ad nauseum, get paid a toilet-load of money to spew their inane theories and bilious lies, it is even more sickening that intelligent and insightful people who may well have brilliant solutions to some of our most potentially catastrophic dilemmas cannot be heard.

 

Adenoid_Hynkel

(14,093 posts)
8. yet a lot of idiots keep posting her videos here and promoting her
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 05:45 PM
Feb 2015

probably 50 percent of the time because they get her mixed up with Naomi Klein.

She's the female Alex Jones (who is a close friend of hers) and is a moron.

 

uhnope

(6,419 posts)
9. what's up with that? Why are the morons, the nuts and the compromised preferred?
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 06:44 PM
Feb 2015

There are so many intelligent and responsible people to cite. Yet we get more Wolf or Wilkerson than Maddow, more Pilger than Klein, more RT than TYT.

Is it just the internet?

Ichingcarpenter

(36,988 posts)
11. Naomi Wolf is jewish
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 07:16 PM
Feb 2015

Wolf was born in San Francisco, to a Jewish family.[5][6] Her mother is Deborah Goleman, an anthropologist and the author of The Lesbian Community.

[4] Her father is the Romanian-born gothic horror scholar Leonard Wolf.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf





LiberalLovinLug

(14,176 posts)
14. If the choice is NOT quesioning anything..
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 08:12 PM
Feb 2015

..or overquestioning too much

I'll take the latter.


Personally, I think she's gone a little off the deep end. One of her new views seems to be wavering on the legitimacy of Snowden and his revelations. Calm down all you anti-Snowden/Greenwald haters...its not for the same reasons as you'all. Its not that she believes he's a thief, or a traitor, or an asshole, or a Soviet spy, or whatever other reactionary authoritarian attacks you want to saddle him with. In her case she questions whether Snowden is perhaps a government set up in order to propel the normalization of mass surveillance on the population. That he is paid to put his foot in the door. The first and painful point in the process of eventually having the American public at last finally accept the inevitability of total mass surveillance in everything we do online. To give it all a push towards that tipping point.

I do not agree with that bizarre theory. There are too many problems with that. Like why would Putin and Russia go along with this and it also seems like a very very convoluted and overly complicated way to do this. Having Clapper lie to Congress and then forcing him back to admit he lied. If their goal is to create acquiescence, it seems to be only galvanizing those that are in opposition.

But I appreciate anyone that is not afraid to ask tough questions, even if seemingly bizarre in the present day, including stalwarts like Abby Martin of RT. It only helps propel the discussion and may just open up threads of truth that lead us to the greater truth in any story.

 

uhnope

(6,419 posts)
15. who says that's the choice?
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 08:34 PM
Feb 2015

How about the choice of informed, intelligent, responsible questioning or whacked brainless probably clinical baloneyizing?
I'll take the former.
Ever heard of "Just Asking Questions" = JAQ = JAQing off? That's the kind of thing that leads to the Obama birth certificate insanity, and it's what Wolf has gotten into.

LiberalLovinLug

(14,176 posts)
16. I can't believe you actually said that
Mon Feb 9, 2015, 09:30 PM
Feb 2015

Asking questions is the same as masturbating. So in other words...its pointless and ultimately unsatisfying so why even bother?

But beyond that...Don't you understand that by having a knee jerk automatic acquiescence to a story that the MSM along with the Washington bubble has championed as the be all and end all answer...is nativity of the highest order? Or that you and you alone should be the one to determine if one story is "informed, intelligent, responsible questioning" but another is "whacked brainless probably clinical baloneyizing" is just as pointless? It of course is your personal choice to have an opinion, but to blithely dismiss new ideas based on who is the messenger and/or how far from the status quo they fall in line with paints yourself into a corner.

A tobacco executive in 1997 claimed that “Cigarettes are no more addictive than gummy bears.” The tobacco industry had for decades already ridiculed any person or group that questioned the safety of tobacco products. There are countless examples through history where questioning something that was taken as fact in greater society was ridiculed as "baloney".

Funny that someone who has a Solidarity logo as their signature, who's leader was the epitome of challenging the Status Quo of his time, is so anti confrontation of the State/Corporate definition of the truth.

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