Discussing "heavily edited" ACORN tape, WaPo's Leonnig asks if tape was "doctored," doesn't think O'Keefe's "got the goods to say that ACORN lied"

The degree of individual behavior is irrelevant. If an ACORN volunteer killed someone and buried them in their backyard, it still wouldn't show that the organization itself had anything to do with it.

First off, advising someone to do something illegal is not in and of itself considered illegal in this instance - notice that employee was fired but no criminal charges were filed against her. Its not like she told the kids to rob the closest convenient store and handed them a gun...

Second, its hillarious that the right is deciding to call a community service organization who fights for the rights of minorities and the poor, a criminal organization completely and conveniently ignoring the too big to fail on wallstreet using tax payer dollars to dole out billions in bonuses despite massive 2008 losses and being on the brink of banruptcy. Those arent criminal - thats capitalism right? I dont remember the part where adam smith says failing corporations should be saved by government social programs. bUT OF COURSE, fox would rather keep their viewers focus on ACORN because there malicious intent is to promote "better housing and wages for the poor, more community development investment from banks and governments, better public schools, and other social justice issues." - wiki

Sound like a bunch of criminal terrorists trying to detroy America from within?? More like a scapegoat. Plus, this video showed one bad apple, ONE BAD APPLE in a group with 400,000 members are 12000 chapters. Find me a single group with that many people in which not a single one will do something wrong or unethical...

...a criminal enterprise like acorn is evidence of their lack of ethics and their blind partisanship.

Please show a single piece of evidence that ACORN is a "criminal enterprise." Try to not let your own blind partisanship get in the way of answering the question.

Didn't you see the acorn representative in San Diego offering advice on where it would be best to smuggle the teen in?

Is this the same employee who contacted the National City Police regarding his interaction with O'Keefe, and was later contacted by a Federal Human Smuggling officer? Isn't this the same person I asked you about in the other thread where you brought him up?

and the other rep advising to keep the kids in school to keep up appearances. And how not to call themselves prostitures but performance artists

I'm not certain, but weren't these employees terminated from ACORN for having done so?

And as Bertha Lewis herself states, they do it as to not be judgemental. How noble of them, what a fine group.

I am guessing you think she should have stood up and spit on them for the filth that they are and then detain them for the police to haul them off like so much human trash.

Question for you. Why are you so suprised that people who work for and amongst the poor are not shocked by meeting a woman who claims to be a prostitute? It seems you would have these people curse them as animals rather than try to help them in some way.

And like clockwork, there's Faillib , suckered into being outraged about ACORN.

Faily, did you see that Franken bill ? the one that wants to exclude military contractors who force arbitration in rape cases? A bunch of republicans voted against it, despite real evidence of actual rape occurring against American women working overseas who have been pressured to settle in cases of rape committed by people funded by our taxes.

You seem to shy away from the child prostitution charges leveled at Halliburton and Dyncorp, but always have an ignorant word or two about ACORN.

How about those republican rape enthusiasts? I believe you're a torture fan, can we add rape to your list of hobbies?

Hasty Generalization:
Also Known as: Fallacy of Insufficient Statistics, Fallacy of Insufficient Sample, Leaping to A Conclusion, Hasty Induction

Description:
This fallacy is committed when a person draws a conclusion about a population based on a sample that is not large enough. It has the following form:

1. Sample S, which is too small, is taken from population P.
2. Conclusion C is drawn about Population P based on S.

The person committing the fallacy is misusing the following type of reasoning, which is known variously as Inductive Generalization, Generalization, and Statistical Generalization:

1. X% of all observed A's are B's.
2. Therefore X% of all A's are B's.

The fallacy is committed when not enough A's are observed to warrant the conclusion. If enough A's are observed then the reasoning is not fallacious.

Small samples will tend to be unrepresentative. As a blatant case, asking one person what she thinks about gun control would clearly not provide an adequate sized sample for determining what Canadians in general think about the issue. The general idea is that small samples are less likely to contain numbers proportional to the whole population. For example, if a bucket contains blue, red, green and orange marbles, then a sample of three marbles cannot possible be representative of the whole population of marbles. As the sample size of marbles increases the more likely it becomes that marbles of each color will be selected in proprtion to their numbers in the whole population. The same holds true for things others than marbles, such as people and their political views.

Since Hasty Generalization is committed when the sample (the observed instances) is too small, it is important to have samples that are large enough when making a generalization. The most reliable way to do this is to take as large a sample as is practical. There are no fixed numbers as to what counts as being large enough. If the population in question is not very diverse (a population of cloned mice, for example) then a very small sample would suffice. If the population is very diverse (people, for example) then a fairly large sample would be needed. The size of the sample also depends on the size of the population. Obviously, a very small population will not support a huge sample. Finally, the required size will depend on the purpose of the sample. If Bill wants to know what Joe and Jane think about gun control, then a sample consisting of Bill and Jane would (obviously) be large enough. If Bill wants to know what most Australians think about gun control, then a sample consisting of Bill and Jane would be far too small.

People often commit Hasty Generalizations because of bias or prejudice. For example, someone who is a sexist might conclude that all women are unfit to fly jet fighters because one woman crashed one. People also commonly commit Hasty Generalizations because of laziness or sloppiness. It is very easy to simply leap to a conclusion and much harder to gather an adequate sample and draw a justified conclusion. Thus, avoiding this fallacy requires minimizing the influence of bias and taking care to select a sample that is large enough.

One final point: a Hasty Generalization, like any fallacy, might have a true conclusion. However, as long as the reasoning is fallacious there is no reason to accept the conclusion based on that reasoning.


Example #1:
Smith, who is from England, decides to attend graduate school at Ohio State University. He has never been to the US before. The day after he arrives, he is walking back from an orientation session and sees two white (albino) squirrels chasing each other around a tree. In his next letter home, he tells his family that American squirrels are white.

Example #2:
Sam is riding her bike in her home town in Maine, minding her own business. A station wagon comes up behind her and the driver starts beeping his horn and then tries to force her off the road. As he goes by, the driver yells "get on the sidewalk where you belong!" Sam sees that the car has Ohio plates and concludes that all Ohio drivers are jerks.

Example #3:
Bill: "You know, those feminists all hate men."
Joe: "Really?"
Bill: "Yeah. I was in my philosophy class the other day and that Rachel chick gave a presentation."
Joe: "Which Rachel?"
Bill: "You know her. She's the one that runs that feminist group over at the Women's Center. She said that men are all sexist pigs. I asked her why she believed this and she said that her last few boyfriends were real sexist pigs."
Joe: "That doesn't sound like a good reason to believe that all of us are pigs."
Bill: "That was what I said."
Joe: "What did she say?"
Bill: "She said that she had seen enough of men to know we are all pigs. She obviously hates all men."
Joe: "So you think all feminists are like her?"
Bill: "Sure. They all hate men."

And the fact that checking facts no longer factors in to presenting fixed fascinations that fellatially fascinates the fawning fundamentalists tells us all we need to know about fox's role as a "news" organization!

Oh fairliberal, you keep using terms like "criminal enterprise" or "criminal organization" to describe ACORN, but you don't seem to understand what those terms actually mean.

A criminal organization is not an organization with some members who behave badly, unethically, or even illegally. A criminal organization is an organization that actually sets out to break laws as an organization. Drug cartels are criminal organizations. Companies that are set up for no other reason than to serve as a way to break tax laws are criminal enterprises.

But you must know that. After all, others and I have explained this to you before. You didn't have a counter-argument or even a reply then, and I have no reason to believe that you have one now.

If you're only going to repeat the same demonstrably false statements over and over again without listening to people who take the time and effort to engage you in conversation and correct you, why do you bother?

ACORN, not a criminal enterprise, because as an organization, they have been shown to not have committed widespread systematic criminal activities.

You really do need to turn off the television and LEARN more. Repeating talking points does not indicate knowledge or intelligence.

Didn't you see the acorn representative in San Diego offering advice on where it would be best to smuggle the teen in? - fairliberal

You can find the transcripts from the San Diego videos in two parts here and here.

No where in those transcripts do you ever see the ACORN workers giving direct advice on smuggling in girls. That suggestion comes entirely from the off-camera voice.

The situation is very similar in the interview in which the advice to keep the girls in school is given. All of the outrageous statements come from the off-camera voices. The responses from the ACORN workers are non-specific. It strains credibility to think that NONE of the ACORN workers in any of those sites would make direct reference to those outrageous questions from the illegal videotapers. And yet, that seems to be exactly the case. I don't believe that the workers were actually responding to the questions that we heard from off-camera.

Can you support your argument? Can you show me where I'm wrong?