Feb 032021
 

Lots of people love Snopes. Lots of people hate it. I find it to be usually useful as a first check on something, when that somethign is a clear binary choice: did X say Y, soemthgin like that. but sometimes thigns are gray. And sometiems Snopes *decides* that things are gray when they’re really not. Attend:

Did a ‘Convicted Terrorist’ Sit on the Board of a BLM Funding Body?

That would seem to be a binary choice. Did a group have a convicted terrorist on their board or not? Simple to determine a yes or a no. But Snopes… they had some difficulty and decided that the claim is “mixture.” Why?

What’s True

Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.

What’s Undetermined

In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of “terrorism,” it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of “domestic terrorism.”

Holy doubletalk, Batperson! Someone who was an active member of a political extremist group that used bombings and armed assaults and who stockpiled and attempted to transfer a battle rifle, a submachine gun, a sawed-off shotgun, three pistols and *740* *pounds* of explosives (the merest fraction of this list would get a right winger labeled as the owner of an “arsenal”), all in the service of intimidating the public and forcing the government to change policies, would seem to be a textbook example of a terrorist.

Gotta wonder who Snopes thinks they’re fooling.

 Posted by at 5:49 pm