The Push For Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" Rally

jamie writes "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent 'Restoring Honor' event. The would-be rally has been dubbed 'Restoring Truthiness' and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own Colbert Nation.'"

Comments

Re:Ignore the Troll

[spun]

You stopped watching during the Bush years, didn't you? Comedians tend to make fun of those in power. Comedy Central ridicules Obama and the Democrats plenty, now that they are the ones in power.

Re:Journalism

[NiteShaed]

than "serious" (for lack of a better term) journalists like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly

There's your mistake. Beck and O'Reilly aren't journalists at all, serious or otherwise. Their shows are opinion pieces, start to finish. They're "serious journalists" in the same way that professional wrestlers are "serious athletes".

on what's supposed to be a news channel

FOX should just give up the word news and start calling themselves a "political commentary" channel. That's what they really seem to want to focus on, and what they want to be. Why not just go with that? Note to FOX fans who take this as insulting, this isn't necessarily intended to be a negative thing. If anything, it would probably eliminate a lot of the criticism aimed at FOX News. There's nothing wrong with being a political commentary channel, and you don't need to pretend to hold to some kind of "Fair and Balanced" standard.

Re:Truthiness

[natehoy]

In order to understand the difference between the term "truth" and Colbert's made-up word "truthiness", you'd have to, you know, actually watch the show at least once.

Colbert is a comedian who openly uses lies and manipulative humor to get laughs among his followers. He mocks everything in sight, with a double helping reserved for himself. He's in the business of entertainment, not news. He's a complete attention whore because that's what pays the bills.

I don't know the term for the opposite of "comedian", "tragedean", maybe? Whatever the term would be, that's Beck. He openly uses lies and manipulative tragedy to get outrage among his followers. He derides everything in sight, with a double helping reserved for anyone who he thinks his followers might agree with him on. He's in the business of entertainment, not news. He's a complete attention whore because that's what pays the bills.

Re:A more accurate count

[amicusNYCL]

you could instead argue against the calculation to come by the range of estimates (low end was 90k)

The low end was 78k, from the guy in Arizona who is a "crowd estimation expert". His estimate was 87k +/- 9k, so from 78k-96k.

Now, I'm more willing to believe a guy who has a system and method for accurately estimating crowd sizes than I am a website who is analyzing several low-resolution oblique photos and trying to apply a single formula to the entire crowd. The photos the researcher from Arizona used were taken by a company flying balloons from high overhead to lower down, for the specific purpose of taking pictures for estimating the size of the crowds.

Their site is here: http://airphotoslive.com/.

Here is an article describing the guy's methodology with examples:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20015214-503544.html

I'm much more willing to trust that guy to come up with a reliable estimate versus someone trying to guess at the average croud density and offering a range between 86k and 200k.

Re:Count me in

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't find him funny. It's not that I don't have a sense of humor, it's that I no longer find a joke funny after hearing it over and over and > over and over again. We get it. Colbert thinks Bill O'Reilly and what he believes are conservative talk show hosts are ignorant, racist,
> bigoted, self serving, pompous asses. I got it in the first ten minutes the very first time I saw his show. After that, it's been the
> predictable telling of the same joke over and over and over again.

yeah, I expected this sentiment, and it's pretty obvious that you were offended with the stripe of this show, the political bent, and tuned out.

Which is too bad, because when Colbert gets going, he gets going, and his range is far more versatile than you let up above..

For example, here was his take on the supreme court case to strike down restrictions on corporate spending - 'let freedom ka-ching':

http://vodpod.com/watch/2198494-colbert-the-word-let-freedom-ka-ching

Extremely incisive, informative, and yes, funny. Or his take on the BP oil spill..

http://www.in.com/videos/watchvideo-the-colbert-report-put-the-cursed-monkey-paw-down-8414401.html

I'd say that in both cases he's dead on accurate, and dead on clever. It stays fresh precisely because of the creativity and range; if it were what you say, it would have died off long ago.

Ed

Re:Count me in

[Romancer]

I suggest you read over your comment again and see if you can spot the hate in your own posts before commenting again. You are making it too easy to show what the problem is.

Here's the wiki:
A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

Here's the specific types:
1.Presenting a misrepresentation of the opponent's position and then refuting it, thus giving the appearance that the opponent's actual position has been refuted.[1]
2.Quoting an opponent's words out of context - i.e. choosing quotations that misrepresent the opponent's actual intentions (see contextomy and quote mining).[2]
3.Presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, then refuting that person's arguments - thus giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position itself) has been defeated.[1]
4.Inventing a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.
5.Oversimplifying an opponent's argument, then attacking this oversimplified version.

Without asking for details on why the poster used an adjective that's not a completely factual representation of "some kind of dental infection" you go off about how he/she has committed "what I'd call a hateful attack" and use that logic to condemn a group of people by generalizing a post or posts into a representation of the group which you disparage in a conclusion of "proof that it's not the right that are the "hate mongers", but the left." Finally using the name calling that you are supposedly denouncing.

Try reading this:

Strange that every time I see an argument against (group A), it is almost always based on how hateful (Group A) is.

See any similarities between your own (generalized) statement and what you are trying to prove in your posts?

By your own words you were participating and instigating that process. You based your post on how hateful a group is and used an example of someone using an adjective to give visual power to their opinion without asking or participating in a discussion based on facts, You purposly misconstrue it to suit your own hatefull indignation.

Now you're in a bad spot because you have to avoid the recursion of having the original poster and yourself on the same path of having called the other side names. To leave your straw man misrepresentation a straight example: Do you think that by describing shows or people on one side as having "festering mouth(s)" is more accurately about claiming that they had a "dental infection" or that they were "spouting disease", as in hate or fear mongering? Now compare that to your own finger pointing and name calling and see how much better you and your side are for not spreading hatred without waiting for or wanting the facts or a discussion thereof.