And now my feeling on salt in wounds
(Written by kencraw)
In my previous post I focused pretty much solely on the ruling itself and ignored the “controversy” over both sides declaring victory and particularly that the very first news reports reported it as a huge and DECISIVE victory for the tree-sitters.
What I have a very hard time getting my head around is how people can be as disingenuous as they clearly are. I mean, I understand how the news media, particularly when they’re rushing to get something on the 5:00 news doesn’t do the due-diligence to understand what the ruling says before reporting on it. I even understand how the protestor crowd who was celebrating could not understand the all the details of the ruling and just understood “the injunction is still in place”.
But what I don’t get is statements like this from Stephen Volker:
“We are ecstatic,” said Stephan Volker, attorney for the California Oak Foundation, which sued the university two years ago. “We believe this project is now dead.”
Say WHAT!?!
I mean, this guy is a lawyer. He KNOWS (or should) that the project is in NO WAY dead. Even if my analysis is correct and they’re going to try and show that Memorial stadium is value-less and they believe victory is theirs once they prove that, that hasn’t happened yet. At a minimum he needs to put in some future tense in his statement like “this ruling allows us to kill this project”.
Going beyond the being disingenuous, perhaps even with himself, I further loved his victory statement:
“The university’s petty provocations are no match for the rule of law.”
I can’t help but snicker at that one. There was page after page after page after page in that ruling where the judge said, in legal terms, that the ‘petty provocations’ came from Volker. With just about every instance the judge said his legal arguments were pretty ridiculous. The difference is that in a legal document you don’t say “that’s stupid, you numbskull!” you instead say “legal precedence X made it clear that the court did not have to consider Y” or something like that.
Today starts where the tree-sitters pick up their disingenuous tactics. They’ve of course got a long history of it. Lying about what the cops and the University are doing. Purposefully provoking an incident and then claiming they were attacked. Lying through their teeth about the nature of the grove claiming it is whatever they think will sway public opinion (native burial ground, old growth, WWI memorial, etc.).
I’ll go on record and predict that they meme they’ll be using starting today will be along the lines of “The University lost in court and is directly violating the judge’s order by (doing whatever they’re upset about).” Yesterday I can forgive them for thinking they’ve won. I don’t expect them to understand the legal nuances in such short order particularly when they’ve got a lawyer who is disingenuous.
Today they’ve got no such excuse.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Excellent analysis!
You can bet that even after we meet the final requirements in the ruling, and even after the judge lifts the injunction and gives us the green light to tear down the trees, the tree-sitters will STILL claim that we are breaking the law by cutting down the trees. The actual ruling is irrelevant to them. In their minds, they’ve won… reality should not dare interfere with their fantasy.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Did you see the photo of one of their banners that CBKWit put up?
It said “Save The Oaks: Overthrow Capitalism”
That absurdist juxtaposition, alone, is enough to show the decided lack of common sense here.
June 24th, 2008 at 10:47 am
What I have a very hard time getting my head around is how people can be as disingenuous as they clearly are.
Really?
You seem like a man of logic and you obviously attended and/or are familiar with U.C. Berkeley. I was numbed long ago by the sheer gall of the people who give their lives meaning through, ironically enough, meaningless protests. I love trees and I love Cal Football, but I’m so disgusted with the actions of the City (who immeasurably benefits from the University that hemorrhages money into the local economy); the uber-rich “hill people†of the PHA, and these trespassing protestors who have far exceeded everyone’s good graces, that I want the trees to come down just to indulge in a little bit of schadenfreude.
June 24th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Southbay, obviously you’re right.
I guess I just want to believe that people can’t be that evil. It’s one thing to be seriously misguided. We all risk that on a daily basis because we are flooded with contradictory information and we’re forced to filter it and come up with a world-view. Once we have that world-view, it’s easy to assume the conflicting reports are bogus because we can find enough affirming information to give us confidence.
I’ve met plenty of people with that sort of ignorance with HUGE blind spots to obvious truths. So it doesn’t surprise me at all to find people who are massively misguided and continue to spout their propoganda thinking it is the truth. I would like to believe that the majority of the tree-sitters and their supporters fall into this trap in the most extreme sense.
What I find more troublesome and have more difficulty believing is that people can be this evil and to directly lie, not just for an end (like trying to convince the public they won) but seem to genuinely believe the lie that they clearly know to be a lie.
But obviously all evidence shows me what I have a hard time believing.