Wednesday, December 23, 2015

The rest of the story that the Post's Kevin Thompson and CBS12/WPEC's Lauren Hills don't know. . .or don't care to know

[The blog post below was posted on December 19th, 2015, in response to the online 'news' by Kevin Thompson on the "too white" mural at La Joya Villages in Lake Worth. . . interestingly leading up to the March 2016 elections. That absurd 'news' made the print edition on December 23rd but the public remained kept in the dark on some crucial facts. So, read on about that "one woman" who is trying to create racial disharmony and the media who is aiding her:]

Now that the City of Lake Worth is 87 days away from election day we've been treated with the first serious salvo of media spin from The Palm Beach Post and from CBS12. Here is my take on Kevin Thompson's pitch about the child depicted in the mural with the too-white skin color, according to "one woman". Lauren Hills follows up this nonsense with the same "one woman" with her story at CBS12; here's an excerpt from the text:
It's a colorful mural, a little boy with fair skin and blue eyes, she's referring to. It's painted on a new affordable housing complex on 6th Ave. South near the rail road tracks.
The "one woman" is Tuesday Gilliam and she has close ties with the Anarchist group called Everglades EarthFirst! (EEF). A candidate in the upcoming March elections happens to be an EEF member—a coincidence? You'll see Ms. Gilliam in a video below from October 2014 along with Peter "Panagioti" Tsolkas and Cara Jennings in opposition to a new road being proposed on 7th Ave. South near the La Joya Villages upon which the mural of the 'too-white' Cuban-American child is depicted.

Here are the parts of the video to pay special attention to:

The 16:10 mark to 17:24: Tuesday Gilliam refers to some group (the Lake Worth CRA?) and their "super apparent" designs for the neighborhood and goes on to say the La Joya Villages are a "huge amount of rental properties towering over our homes." [Note: the La Joya Villages are 3-story buildings and Ms. Gilliam lives at least 2 blocks away.]

The 22:00 mark to 26:18: Peter Tsolkas and Cara Jennings (the leaders of EEF) chime in with their thoughts on the 7th Ave South road project and the La Joya Villages.
Tuesday Gilliam cleverly tricked the Post reporter and CBS12 Lauren Hills using multiple logical fallacies, relying heavily on the hasty generalization fallacy, among others. Gilliam's objection all along has been to stop any development, road building, and/or new housing south of 6th Ave South—that much is clear. Would you expect any less from a sympathizer of EEF? 

Gilliam gives up the gig in this excerpt from the CBS12 story, what the objection to the "mural" is really about:
"There are arts initiatives all over the country in use for gentrification, and I feel like we might be seeing that play out right here in our own backyard," she [Tuesday Gilliam] said.
So, you see, the mural of the 'too-white' Cuban-American child isn't about race, it's about "gentrification" or what most others would call long-delayed community improvements and upgrades. Ms. Gilliam claims she wants to "start a conversation" but she's not really doing that at all. How do you start a meaningful conversation by begging the question and circular reasoning? Well, true, that job does get easier when you can trick some in the press into falling for it.

Question: If you knew Ms. Gilliam has been a strong opponent of the CRA's La Joya Villages project all along would that have given you a different perspective on this 'news' story? Probably so.

And that's the rest of the story you won't read or watch in the local press.