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WSJ Crowdsources Investigation of Hillary Clinton Emails
PvtVoid writes: The Wall Street Journal now has a page up that encourages readers to sift through and tag Hillary Clinton's emails on Benghazi. Users can click on suggested tags such as "Heated", "Personal", "Boring", or "Interesting", or supply their own tags. What could possibly go wrong? I'm tagging this story "election2016."
We are not your personal army.
Benghazi to you!
Read this link..
You MIGHT learn something.
Although your addle-brained Fox Derangement Syndrome doesn't correlate well with intelligence.
The news side is fairly reliable. The editorial page has been brain-dead since the Carter administration, and that was long before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/...
Rupert has little, greasy hands? Momma like!!
Remember that the Wall Street Journal is owned by the same people who own Fox News and several tabloids that are even worse, the News Corp (i.e., Rupert Murdoch); you can even see WSJ reporters on Fox.
It's well established that their owners exercise few journalistic ethics and little regard for the truth, and they publish pro-GOP propaganda, along with incitements to prejudice, anger and hate. Why does anyone trust them?
This stunt should not be a surprise.
How many once proud and reputable representatives of the news media have gone this route, simply because it's what drives the ratings that fill the advertising coffers?
By and large, the general public will lay out money for the Enquirer and People an order of magnitude more frequently than for a Time, Newsweek, or US News.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Meanwhile, independents just sit back and watch the name calling and shake their heads in disgust. Also, if the current candidate spectrum tells us anything at all, it guarantees we are continued to be FUCKED! Just like the last 30-ish years!
"Just another tabloid rag."
Gotta compete with the NYT.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Saying someone is not credible because they are part of an organization that is not credible is not ad hominem.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
I have already randomly tagged some :)
You say that.
But did you watch Australia's election in 2013?
http://i.imgur.com/MyU1MDV.jpg
She is a pathological liar of epic ability
I'm tagging this story "election2016."
How about "USAelection2016"? While Slashdot has always been somewhat US-centric (or, really, North America-centric), the level of unapologetic chauvinism here has gotten worse over the years. This site has a significant non-US user base and readership, and a lot of articles posted regarding international situations (UK government spying, EU IP laws, etc.). US posters and editors ought to maintain at least an iota of respect for the rest of the world, or risk alienating a good chunk of Slashdot's audience.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Getting Elected to the U.S. Senate is 1 more accomplishment than you'll ever have.
Guess what Slashdot, people read other websites. I don't read /. for political news. And except for AM radio conservatives, nobody gives a shit about Benghazi.
Please. Someone name me ONE Hillarhea!!! accomplishment outside of her marrying Bill.
1. She was a senator
2. She was secretary of state
3. She was a successful attorney
4. She was an extremely successful commodities trader
I think that 'Association Fallacy' would be closer than Ad Hominem
However, I do not think that it is a fallacy to doubt the credibility of any 'news' source that is part of the News Corp family
News Corp has demonstrated a decided bent in favor of the American right wing of the political spectrum, and it would be wise for anybody to take that into consideration when weighing the value of 'news' generated by any member of the New Corp family
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Uh... if you dismiss every argument from a person (or organization) simply because "I don't believe them to be a credible source," then you are not addressing the merits of their argument with your own logic, you are attempting to duck having to engage in debate by claiming that everything they say is a lie, unbelievable, or in-credible.
That's kind of the textbook definition of an ad-hominem attack.
Rachel Maddow recently criticized Ted Cruz over his position on Operation Jade Helm in Texas. If my response is:
"I love Ted Cruz and am sure that it's safe to disregard any criticism of him by MSNBC, because Rachel Maddow is just not credible."
Do you see how I've failed to address any part of her criticism, and just dismissed her arguments out of hand because she has cooties or something? Yeah, that's an ad hominem attack. And you just tried to justify it.
By some accounts the regular articles are not that biased; it's the editorial section that resembles the usual Rupert style.
Table-ized A.I.
In a world where an organization dedicated to publishing the damning evidence of cults is forced into bankruptcy and then purchased by one of those cults, who continues to operate the organization as a means to identify individuals against their cause, I'm generally willing to take the acquisition of a group originally with certain positions by a group with differing positions with a bit of a grain of salt.
The Wall Street Journal has been a decent publication, but is now owned by a media entity whose management staff has an agenda and has nakedly used its media holdings to advance that agenda. The very name, "NewsCorp," is doublespeak when the bulk of their prominent content is not news. I have no doubt that WSJ's acquisition was in part strategic.
Not that it's much consolation to an anonymous coward like you, but I don't exactly put a lot of stock in CNN or MSNBC or whatever they're currently called either. The 24-hour news cycle is one of the worst things in that because it's ad-revenue based, it has to continually attract attention to itself to remain profitable, so it makes much ado about nothing in order to keep its audience. That means polarizing the audience because there's nothing people love more than to have some feeling of theirs reinforced. They're all echo-chambers that feedback on their respective audiences.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It is still a fallacy though.
Let me help you understand how to stop fallacies:
X must equal Y because Variable M that does not require under all circumstances that X must equal Y given the presence of Variable M.
So for example, does news corp or the wallstreet journal ALWAYS lie? Obviously not.
What is more, MUST they lie? For example, if we had a computer program that reported on a binary value and it always gave the opposite value to whatever it read. Then you could conclude that variable X was the opposite of whatever that program said. Neither newscorp nor the Wallstreet journal are reliability reporting the opposite of anything.
Therefore it is logically fallacious to say that something they said is a lie because they said it.
See?
Fallacies are about LOGIC. Not you fucking politics.
You can't say anything is automatically bullshit no matter who says it because no one is reliably wrong 100 percent of the time.
You can of course take what they say with a grain of salt. You can choose to ignore them. You can hold any sort of opinion you want.
You cannot say that everything they say is wrong or that any given thing is wrong simply because they said it.
You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.
If you can't be bothered to do that, then your opinion is based entirely on your own bias and the value of your opinion is based on the value of your bias. Which in this place is literally nothing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Senator.
Secretary of State.
In her own right, is one of the most influential women alive by virtue of her success and power.
married Bill Clinton, one of the most influential men alive.
Had a kid.
Successful lawyer.
What's on your resume, champ?
I'm not even all that big a fan of Mrs. Clinton, but trying to cut her down by giving her derpy nicknames and claiming she's never accomplished anything is just fucking weaksauce.
After you wade past the trolls, Disqus is already the best fact checker for any story out there. Obviously, you have to follow up with a search to confirm what you read in the comments, but that's where I usually find the most important (unreported) portion of most stories.
Same is true of slashdot. Which is why most of us don't even RTFA.
It's the paper for business-oriented conservatives. Their news sides has always been pretty good (it's not smart to invest on what you want to be true), but the editorial side has never been what non-business conservatives would describe as "sane."
They're always convinced the world would be a paradise of joy if only the big bad government would let businessmen have their way with everyone else. During the Civil Rights movement they were squishy about Dr. King on their best days, they were the ones beating the "FDR is a Commie" drum when he created Social Security, etc.
Ah yes I remember how the WSJ and FOX went after Bush, Cheney, Libbey and Rove when they used a private email server (gwb43.com) for a private email server for use in the White House whose stated purpose was to avoid FOIA requests. You know the instance where Bush and Rove were embroiled in two competing scandals — the Valerie Plame scandal, in which operatives for Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, including Rove and Scooter Libby, were accused of unmasking Valerie Plame, a CIA specialist in the black market for weapons of mass destruction, for purely partisan reasons, and the U.S. Attorney purge, in which Rove’s political operation in the White House was accused of ordering Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to purge eight U.S. attorneys who were qualified prosecutors and replace them with political hacks with little or no prosecutorial experience. During the investigation, it came to light that Rove’s server had been used to send official, non-political emails — correspondence that was required by law to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act. On April 12, 2007, Rove’s operation admitted that it had deleted at least 5 million emails from the server. In December 2009, technicians who had examined the server reported that the number of emails that had been deleted was far greater — 22 million.
It is not an Ad Hominem attack nor addle-brained Fox Derangement Syndrome when the group we are complaining about the attacks on Clinton, but under similar if not identical circumstances they didn't attack Bush, Cheney and Rove
"What the heck?" asked Bill.
"Used to date him years ago," replied the Missus.
"Hmm... " he chuckled, "so if you married him, you be the wife of the owner of a service station."
"No," she replied quickly, "if I married him, he'd be the President of the United States."
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I thought that was the Post's job?
Okay, post-acquisition, did WSJ make a point of investigating the Sarah Palin private yahoo e-mail that she used for business while in power as the Governor of Alaska to circumvent Alaskan law? I don't remember coverage of that being terribly strong. I also don't remember WSJ asking the public to comb through through the gwb43 e-mail personally.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I would argue it's not even right wing anymore, but has become entirely libertarian in their hate of all government. Except the one that signs all their social security and medicare checks.
Yes, let's stick to the news sources that are unbiased like...
I have the weirdest boner right now.
I think I love you.
no... its not libertarian. We dont like fox anymore than you do. if you were correct, they would not have treated ron paul the way they did, and they would not be treating rand paul the way they are now
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
sarcasm I hope???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Classic! When I walked past the 'Kick this mob out' stack, I stopped and re-read it before I walked away, shaking my head. Until then, I always thought there would be some propriety in journalism. I was wrong and I will never forget that.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
This story is the definition of a fishing expedition. The reports that Hillary Clinton was not in the wrong will not be released until after the election. This stunt is to look for some vague coincidences from which to spin a fairy tale.
You're trying to turn it around and imply that just because a non-credible source occasionally reported the truth that you can therefore automatically accept that source's assertions are always true or that that particular assertion has somehow become credible all by itself.
You cannot "bootstrap" the credibility of a source off a one-off sample. Just because a stopped clock shows the correct time doesn't mean that it can be depended to do so anytime you look at it.
It rates up there with "the Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend" - they've already proven their ability to be an enemy.
You are referring to the mathematical logic concept known as "implication". Just because P implies Q doesn't mean that Q cannot be true event if P is false, only that Q MUST be true if P is false.
Therefore just because Q is true, that doesn't make P a credible indicator. When Q is true, it is true regardless of P's truth or falsehood and therefore lends no credibility to P.
Oh, I'm sure *that* will be impartial. (rolls eyes}
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
And except for AM radio conservatives, nobody gives a shit about Benghazi.
You would think so, but evidently not. If nobody cared, the State Department wouldn't time the release for take-out-the-trash Friday (the day when you get the least news cycle result). Instead, the timing points to an obviously politically motivated timing utterly inappropriate to a theoretically neutral unit of government.
But, we all knew exactly what the Wall Street Journal would become once Rupert got his greasy little hands on it 10 years ago. Just another tabloid rag.
It did and it didn't. On the one hand, it added a "New York Post" aspect that's not worth the screen space it pollutes.
On the other hand, it spews out a lot of general political nonsense in its editorial pages. But then, that largely predates Rupert's takeouver. And besides, if it wasn't for editorial pages, where would the wackos of the world get a chance to speak? Outside of talk radio, anyway.
On the gripping hand, the WSJ does seem to be reasonably sane when it comes to purely financial matters. David Wechsel's appearances on NPR always seemed to me to be relatively free of the sort of wishful thinking that ideological thinking colors interviews and reports with.
Okay, and here we have a textbook case of a strawman argument. I never said that the "WSJ is always credible." I never even remotely implied that. What I stated was that simply hand-waving away arguments you don't like on the basis of who is saying them is a *textbook* case of an ad hominem argument, and it is.
If you want to make an argument that WSJ is often biased, then by all means do so.
If you want to make an argument that WSJ is often factually incorrect, then by all means do so.
But don't expect anybody to take you seriously if you engage in facile rhetoric like, "Oh of course we can disregard everything the WSJ says about Hillary Clinton, they're simply not credible." It's weak-ass logic, and all it does is underscore your own partisan biases. If you want to be taken seriously, then attack the *argument*, not the *man or woman making the argument.*
You have never thought that U.S. Senators are reading and commenting on Slashdot? I am the U.S. Senator and I have been elected and reelected.
For the record, /. is more interesting and more informative than the fantasy games that my colleagues Congress and Senate are spending their time on.
Not really. The credibility of the source does not mean what they report automatically true or false.
What I'm talking about is more elemental than what you're talking about.
Philosophy sits on top of logic as logic sits above math in the way that math is above physics and the way that physics is above biology.
Mathematics is applied symbolic logic. But logic itself is a different persuit and cannot be conflated with mathematics. And logic is itself a product of philosophy which can be neither conflated with logic nor mathematics.
When one speaks of fallacious logic, one speaks of logic... not math. You can represent most logical concepts in symbolic form though rarely with sustainable accuracy. There is a translation when you go from logic to math and frequently there are conflations of similar concepts and terms which leads to fallacies.
As such it is far more reliable to maintain the logic in a more conceptual context since it is less likely to go through translations and thus introduce errors.
Your example did just that thus baring out the wisdom of what I just said.
Sometimes it is helpful to express things in purely symbolic forms. But only when you have defined your variables properly and have not made the extremely common mistake of conflating similar concepts.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.
By far the coolest part of all this is now a "crowd" will form an opinion about Clinton and Benghazi from reading her emails. Primary sources FTW. Not want any journalist wants them to think, not a quote picked carefully for a political ad, but by actually reading what was said at the time. That's more informed democracy already than I expected in this whole election cycle!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Even for non-business conservatives, the editorial side wasn't "sane".
After the Comcast deal got killed, the WSJ's editorial page was lamenting the fact the big bad government refused to listen to Comcast and ignore the fact that the merge would have given Comcast at 50+% marketshare of internet services in the country.
As if that wasn't enough, the editorials argued that Comcast's poor customer service would have been solved, AFTER the merge, if the big bad government had simply left it to the "invisible hand of the market".
The Patriot Act needs to be continued.
Why?
The NSA has, embarrassingly, gathered all electronic communications of every member of Congress and staff, every Supreme Court Justice and staff, and the President and White House Staff.
This trove constitutes the greatest threat to the Federal Government of the USA. It can be used, by FOIA, and for Blackmail by the peoples of the USA against their elected and unelected Federal Employee perpetrators for Felony Crimes against the peoples of the USA and High Crimes and Treasons against the peoples of the world.
Want to see George W. Bush and Barak Hussein Obama (and three thousand bureaucrats) in shackles before the Court of the Hague ?
Renew the Patriot Act and send Bush and Obama to Hell !
so if FOX is our "enemy" who is our friend??? MSNBC??? CNN???? National Enquirer???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
And "we need a credible third party that will actually serve the people" so I can modded up to +5?
she managed to get elected senator of my state of NY, eventhough she was horribly unqualified
She managed to become sec of state... also horribly unqualified
thats an accomplishment!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
My point in originally posting *yawn* it's worth taking with a grain of salt. I was judging the reporter, not the report. It may be factual, or it may be wildly inaccurate, or it might be factual from a technical perspective by narrowing or qualifying the statement, I do not know. I do know that I'm not going to take NewsCorp's word for it.
Fact of the matter is, I do not trust NewsCorp's motives as I do not know what those motives are in-whole, but the way I interpret their past direct actions, ie, that which they have themselves published or broadcast through their various properties, leads me to not assume that their intentions are what they seem to claim them to be. Even if they immediately decided to be wholly transparent and above-board it would probably take several years for me to be able to trust them, as there's usually no benefit in changing a negative opinion once it has been demonstrably earned.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And then there was whole problem of invading the wrong country for the wrong reason. Oops. I wonder how that happened. We still don't know.
None of the hijackers were from Iran. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon. Not an Iraqi in sight. The were all Sunni member of Al Queda, and citizens of (at the time) US allies in the Arab world.
And then there was the problem with no weapons of mass destruction. Oops again. There were no biological weapons. There was no uranium separation/enrichment program. "Iraq's WMD capability ... was essentially destroyed in 1991" ... No evidence was found for continued active production of WMD subsequent to the imposition of sanctions in 1991 The chemical weapons that Iraq had in the 1980's that were used against Iran were built using technology imported from the West.
So why was all the intelligence about Iraq wrong? That is an unanswered question. The Republican controlled Congress never stepped up to the plate to ask any hard questions. Gosh, I wonder why?
Of course, there is a clue: PNAC, or the Project for the New American Century. PNAC released a Statement of Principles in 1997 calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It was signed by Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Elliot Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Aaron Friedberg, Peter Rodman, Henry Rowen, and Paul Wolfowitz, who all ended up working for the Bush administration. One would almost think that they used 9/11 as an excuse and made up a bunch of crap to make it happen.
Back to Benghazi. It was a big mistake and four people died. In Iraq he US military alone suffered 4,425 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 32,223 wounded in action. The civilian death and injured toll is staggering, and still going up.
So fuck the WSJ, and fuck the Republican Party. Collectively they are mass murderers. When they scream about Benghazi it's like child molesters complaining about someone playing their radio too loud. The fact that they have so much power shows that voters in the US have less intelligence then a pack of inbreed poodles.
Why is Snark Required?
Take Fox News and MSNBC coverage of any given story and split the difference and you might get something vaguely resembling the truth.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Right, and George Stephanopolus gave Hillary Clinton 75K for her "charity" without telling anybody. Amazing how nobody here was unhappy about that.
Well said.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Your local news is probably the closest to being a friend for broadcast television. By only running three or four hours of news every day, they don't have to sensationalize news in-general just to survive, the bulk of their other programming does that for them.
I personally like NPR and some of the PBS news, but they're not infallible and they've made mistakes.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So for example, does news corp or the wallstreet journal ALWAYS lie? Obviously not.
No one said that they always lied.
No one even said that they lied, only that they were not credible.
For instance, if I said that the advice of financial advisers was not credible because it was no better than a bunch of monkeys randomly throwing darts at a list of mutual funds. It wouldn't necessarily mean that those financial advisers purposefully lied with their advice.
For instance, it could mean that they have a bias of some kind, known or unknown. It could mean that they prefer to choose funds that sound cool and trendy, so that themselves sound cool and trendy when speaking to clients. It could mean that the person who hired them or the person who owned their company had a bias of their own and selected financial advisers that followed the same financial schools of thoughts that he did. It could mean a number of other things too.
I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.
In my professional judgment the WSJ used to be the best, most reliable news source in English. Then Murdoch took over, and turned it into a right-wing propaganda sheet. It was a tragedy. This crowd-sourcing of Hillary's emails is maybe the worst example of their partisan bias and seeking sensationalism.
I read the WSJ daily for 40 years (along with the New York Times, Washington Post, and professional magazines like Science and JAMA). I used to pick up their stories, and interview the same people they interviewed.
I knew reporters who wrote for the WSJ. I believed, and most journalists I knew agreed, that the WSJ was the best newspaper in the English language. The reason I liked it was that the news sections were as objective and fact-checked as humanly possible, and one of the few publications not influenced by advertisers and political pressure from the publisher. They really were fair and balanced.
The WSJ's defining moment was in the 1950s when they got leaked photos of the new model GM cars, which were a big trade secret. GM threatened to cancel their advertising if they published it. The WSJ told them to fuck off. Newspapers didn't do that. It was a long time before they accepted GM's advertising again.
An editor at McGraw-Hill once told me that if he picked up a story from the NYT, he would have to check it for accuracy, but if he picked up a story from the WSJ, he could take a chance without checking because he could depend on them to get it right.
If I read a story in the WSJ, I could depend on them getting everything right. (The quick formula is, get all sides; and especially if you attack somebody, get their side too.)
I remember one story on welfare reform in California in which the reporter quoted everybody, from the governor's assistant in charge of welfare, to the supervisors, to the caseworkers, to several welfare mothers. The story made it clear that welfare "reform" wasn't working, merely harassing welfare recipients and making it harder for them to get back on their feet.
A. Kent Macdougal was a WSJ reporter until he retired to teach journalism. He wrote an article in Monthly Review, the marxist magazine, about his experience. (Can't find it online, sorry.) He said that in his career in the WSJ, he could write whatever he wanted, as long as he followed the formula for getting all sides and supporting every statement with documented facts, even though he was a socialist who was criticizing the capitalist system in the WSJ's own pages. The WSJ was one of the few places where you could read news stories that actually criticized the American free-market system, and stood up to companies like GM. I follow health care and drugs, and the WSJ published some of the great exposes of drug companies and the medical establishment.
The ironic thing about the WSJ was that they had a very liberal news section, and a very right wing editorial page. I used to enjoy the editorial page because every day they would publish a tightly-argued, logical, well-documented right wing argument, and I would have to figure out where they made their mistake. Sometimes I had to agree that they were right, and they changed my mind. That's a good editorial page. However, there was a sharp division between the editorial section and the news section.
When Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ, it was a tragedy for journalism and even for democracy, because the WSJ was the best thing you could read to be an informed citizen and voter.
Ironically, the best business story the WSJ ever did was their coverage of the takeover of their own newspaper by News Corporation. They gave the whole background of the ownership and control of the WSJ, and how the older generation of the Bancroft (sp?) family was committed to the mission of great journalism, but the younger generation just wanted to get higher dividends. And some of those editors and reporters, who knew they would be leaving, gave the best story ever of how un
"Smells Like Bullshit".
And this is so much different in what the NYT did when they did the same thing to Palin's STOLEN emails..... how, exactly?
Take Fox News and MSNBC coverage of any given story and split the difference and you might get something vaguely resembling the truth.
That is yet another fallacy.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I don't know the answer to this, but I suspect I know the answer: does Hilary's printed email dump (which is all that she will provide) include the email headers and associated metadata that comes with an electronic copy of an email?
I rather doubt that she has; but, I ask because she claims that she has fulfilled her obligation by providing printed versions of the emails. So, even if we were willing to concede that incredibly dubious claim, has she really complied with the law by not providing the entire electronic record?
Obviously, this part of the email can be quite important (just ask the NSA), so if she isn't providing that, what is her justification for not doing so?
If the law doesn't specifically make an exemption for that, then it can't be omitted. When she received an email, the header is a part of the email that she received. Therefore, it is part of the official record.
It is still a fallacy though.
It's not a fallacy to warn others that an unreliable source is unreliable.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Rand and Ron Paul would have never bailed out the banks, that's why!
Are you really so far gone that tautology doesn't look like a fallacy for you?
You say they're not credible... why? Because they're not credible? Oh well, glad that got sorted out.
So you must accept that the God invented the universe etc as well right? Because that is also backed up with tautology and circular logic.
You're expecting me to accept the GIVEN that a host organization is inherently non-credible and that therefore all subsidiaries are not credible and therefore that a given story submitted by such a subsidiary is also not credible.
Your entire argument is a cascading waterfall of fallacious shit where the shit flows through a logic tree supported by assumed givens at the top then pools at the bottom where it is pumped up and pours through the system all over again.
Genius.
As to you saying a financial adviser is credible or not... exactly how do you substantiate that position? You just saying " they don't know what they're talking about" is meaningless without some sort of supporting argument. Absent that you have an unqualified opinion that isn't worth anything.
I will take news from ANY source and evaluate it rationally. MSNBC does some good reporting sometimes and sometimes Fox does some good reporting. No one is all bad or all good. And discounting any given story simply because of the source is fallacious.
Let me explain what that means again because I don't think you understand what a fallacy is in the first place.
A statement is fallacious if it is not 100 percent true. If you say "everyone in my car is hungry after six hours in the car"... well, you might know YOU are hungry and MOST of the people in the car might be hungry but you don't know that EVERYONE in the car is hungry. It is fallacious because it isn't known to actually be true. It doesnt' follow that because YOU are hungry and everyone else SHOULD be hungry that they all actually ARE hungry. Maybe someone is dead. Maybe someone has been pigging out in the back eating snacks. Maybe anything. You don't know.
That is what it means for something to be fallacious. This passive slippery shit logic that so many people are comfortable with is inherently fallacious because people are not giving any attention to whether things MUST be true or MUST be false. You simply go with "probably" and "maybe" and "should" and thus don't actually fucking know anything.
As to bias, simply dismissing a source out of hand especially when they're passing no judgement on the source material but literally offering the RAW data for public evaluation is itself bias... on your part.
Admit it, apologize, and promise not to do it again. Or surrender any shred of intellectual credibility you were presumed out of common courtesy.
I have no patience for this shit.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is a tautology to say something is X because it is X though... and tautology is fallacious.
You're saying a parent organization doesn't share your political leanings and so all subsidiaries are going to be polluted with BADTHINK and BADTHINK is all lies and UNGOOD because it wasn't approved by one of your ministry of truth censorship outlets.
The WSJ is releasing the RAW emails. Explain to me how the Rupert Murdock cooties get on your new messiah's emails when they are not altering them at all?
Explain it.
Actually don't. There's no excuse for your position. Any source offering the RAW data cannot impune the raw data... by definition. The data is fucking raw. If I am the slimmest liar ever and I give you raw unmodified records then those records include none of my slimy lies because its fucking raw.
The pathetic kneejerk reaction against anything not part of the leftist echo chamber should make you ashamed of yourself.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Great post. Moderators take note.
But I'm a bit confused by the last paragraph of the article you quoted. Why would the new WSJ not embrace "death tax" if it was a dog-whistle for its opponents?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I didn't know that Sarah Palin was previously a Secretary of State, had access to 'eyes only' information or anything like that either. I'm not saying what Palin did was correct, but the trust level was already far lower than what Clinton had access to.
Om, nomnomnom...
It is a tautology to say something is X because it is X though... and tautology is fallacious.
Wrong again. Tautology means "logically guaranteed to be true". That's pretty much the opposite of fallacy.
Let me give you some examples:
X or not X -- tautology, logically guaranteed to be true
If X, then X -- tautology, logically guaranteed to be true
Suppose X. Therefore, X. -- fallacy, looks like a tautology but isn't.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If they did and came to the conclusion that there was nothing illegal or corrupt about them, would you believe them? No, you would just call them shills for her campaign. So why bother. Let the left-wing media report on right-wing problems and let the right-wing media report on left-wing problems. That seems fair.
Requiring that "credible" information only be spoon fed to you by MSNBC is the sign of a moron and Face Painting Homer.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I have been modded down. Whatever.
If one side is lying and the other side is telling the truth, then the truth is not somewhere in the middle.
I'll let the reader decide which side is which.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Hypocrisy is the alternate spelling of Slashdot.
Fact of the matter is, whether or not *you* trust NewsCorp's motives has no bearing on whether or not they are saying something accurate. If someone - even someone you aren't inclined to trust - tells you a demonstrable truth, then they are telling the truth, no matter *what* you think of them.
If they are NOT telling the truth, then by all means, shout from the rooftops that they're a bunch of liars - you can, and SHOULD, call people out for lying. But remember that a single lie does not mean everything a person ever says from now until judgment day is a lie.
Evaluate arguments on the basis of their merits, not on the basis of your biases.
Obviously, the email that the Benghazi conspiracy nuts are looking for - the one where Obama tells Hillary to launch their secret Islamist army against the Americans so he can bring about his New World Order - is in there somewhere.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A judge later ordered Palin's emails released to the New York Times in response to a FOIA request they filed. The Times crowdsourced their investigation by posting the archive online (which is exactly what the WSJ is doing, by the way.) Neither the Times' professional investigation nor the crowdsourced investigation show any evidence that she conducted state business over the private emails.
By only running three or four hours of news every day, they don't have to sensationalize news in-general just to survive, the bulk of their other programming does that for them.
Well, that and their ability to regenerate crime sprees on the fly. I've seen a number of such stations which don't go beyond reading the local crime blotter and cute pet stories.
I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.
So what? I don't expect everything to last forever. Read something else and move on. If the WSJ lost a bunch of readership, then it wouldn't matter that it has slid so much.
You're also an incredibly stupid liar. If anyone clicks through the link, they will see that you are lying about the Carr piece. You left out the first five paragraphs of the piece. These are the first two:
Sunday was the second anniversary of the sale of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdochâ(TM)s News Corporation. At that time, a chorus of journalism church ladies (I was among them) warned that one of the crown jewels of American journalism now resided in the hands of a roughneck, and predicted that he would use it to his own ends.
Yet here we are, two years later, and The Wall Street Journal still hits my doorstep every morning as one of the nationâ(TM)s premier newspapers.
In 2009, Carr was worried that the WSJ MIGHT be used by Murdoch as a conservative weapon, but in the two years he had owned the WSJ to that point, Murdoch hadn't started doing so.
I'd imagine that if the WSJ had started down that path, you'd have something more recent than 2009.
Well, these are Hillary's emails from that time period. If they show her and her advisors discussing how it had to be a YouTube video, we'll know they were giving us the best information they had at the time. On the other hand, if they're talking in the emails about how it was an al Qaeda terrorist attack at times when they were claiming to the American people that it was a YouTube video, we'll know it was a coverup.
Read this link..
You MIGHT learn something.
Although your addle-brained Fox Derangement Syndrome doesn't correlate well with intelligence.
How funny. You did not learn. He was actually accurate in saying that. But you accuse him of a personal attack, when in fact, it was not. It might be an attack by association, but that is something totally different. However, the fact is, that WSJ is owned by murdock and has turned from conservative to loony tunes since that time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In fact, WSJ actually used to be conservative. Now, they are more loony tunes. Basically, they went from economics to political over the last 7 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh my god, I just came.
Marry me?
BBC. I'm ok with BBC
Note that she had to get around the entire Cuomo machine to do this. I don't know, go to a state that's overwhelmingly Republican and get yourself elected senator, just being from the right party isn't worth much.
Note that she had to run neck-and-neck with him basically to the convention in order to get to that point, she won 48% of the Democratic popular vote and dozens of states, including New York, Florida and California. I don't know what you mean by "ambassador killed," Issa spent years on the Benghazi committee and got nowhere, he eventually quit and the Speaker had to establish a new select committee just to keep the faux outrage in the news. Stop reading your grandpa's emails.
John Adams: successful attorney of murderous british soldiers. Are you really suggesting that we should hold lawyers in any way accountable for the crimes of their clients? Do some people not deserve lawyers? Or do they only deserve bad ones?
In other words, you got nothing.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I doubt it. The mainstream media liars spin everything, yeah you heard me, NSA. A better use of investigational crowd-sourcing of Hitlery Rotten Clinton would be on Whitewater and Benghazi. FTFY.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Wow.
No. Tautology means you're defining a given with itself.
If I say someone is a thief because they're a thief then that is tautology.
It is a kind of circular logic.
You're saying news corp is untrustworthy... this is a given from you. You're not offering any justification for it.
Then you use that given to say that subsidiaries of news corp must be untrustworthy as well because news corp is untrustworthy. This is one of the several false association fallacies.
And then you're saying that because those subsidiaries are untrustworthy a given story from those subsidiaries is untrustworthy... even though the story in question is a FUCKING RAW DATA DUMP. This is another false association fallacy compounded with blind fucking pigheaded mulishness when confronted with fucking facts. That isn't even a fallacy. That is just some retard pointing at the Sun and saying it isn't there.
That's bullshit. And if you don't see the several logical fallacies in that then you're an idiot.
First, the entire line of logic is fallacious.
Second, even if news corp -> WSJ -> this story were untrustworthy, the issue is that this is a RAW data dump and therefore the trustworthiness of the people posting it is irrelevant unless you're claiming that the data itself has been tampered with?
Your entire position is laughable from any rational stand point. You're wrong. And I just validated that position above quite firmly. I am not interested in you wasting any more of my time. You can either apologize for being a jackass or I will just say "good day, sir".
Your choice. Either way, I'm done with you.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm starting to understand why fire axes are so popular in the zombie apocalypse... they don't run out of ammo. These people are so fucking stupid. They just come at me drooling all over themselves while chewing their own tongues. I load another shell of logic into my boomstick of reason... blow the top of their rotten face off with an obvious fatal counter argument... then cock another logic shell and move on.
But my god there are a lot of these idiots.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
As to WSJ being non-credible... tell us MR AC why is that?
You do realize that they're saying the same thing on this issue that the New York Times and MSNBC are saying right? There is no political division in so far as the facts are concerned here. The left wing media is turning on hillary. Its already over. All that remains is stripping anyone in her coalition dumb enough to think they can shrug this off of any remaining credibility. This is going to get uglier and uglier. And you're not going to be able to count on any credible media allies to back you up. The establishment media has already abandoned you. And most leftwing alternative media has also abandoned you. That includes politico and huffington post. Its over.
Do as your allies already did... turn on hillary and save what remains of your credibility. If you don't... you'll just lose.
Honestly, I hope as many of you refuse to listen to that sage advice as possible. It will just make the political bloodbath to come all the more complete. ;)
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Didn't she flunk the bar exam?
Your mom likes BBC too...
"WTF are you talking about? EVERY nation's intelligence service agreed that Saddam was working to obtain nuclear weapons, and everybody ALREADY KNEW that he had chemical weapons"
Um, no. I live in Switzerland, and based on the European news at the time it was completely clear that Saddam had nothing left. He may have wanted such weapons, but what he had left was a shell-game he was playing with UN inspectors, with empty shells.
When Bush announced the Iraq attack, and I told my family back in the US that he should be impeached for telling such blatant lies, they were shocked. They totally bought into those slick PowerPoint slides from Colin Powell. That was the moment it became clear to me that the US (and their lapdop the UK) had determined that they wanted to attack Iraq, and had run internal propaganda campaigns to support this.
Apparently the deception holds to this day...comes from getting your news only from within your local country, which is pretty typical for both the US and the UK.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
No one is reading 10,000 emails. You're going to want someone to pick an email interest out of the flock. for closer scrutiny.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
PLEASE
Get enough of this bullshit elsewhere.
I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.
So you're here to offer a Left-wing attack job?
An editor at McGraw-Hill once told me that if he picked up a story from the NYT, he would have to check it for accuracy...
Interesting that you go on to quote the NYT attacking the WSJ.
Now when (if) I read a WSJ story, I have to ask myself, "What did they leave out because the publisher, or some big business like GM, didn't like it?" like any other newspaper
Did you bother to identify what the NYT left out in their story? And the fall of the WSJ is, in essence, to lower them to the level of the NYT? That is damning.
I'm also wondering what you left out?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Nothing like seeing the favorite ox getting gored to bring out the declamations against any attempt at actual transparency.
Better to be told what's in the scraps of original source material by contributors to Big Hill's slush fund than actually get to know the truth.
Only problem is these are the post-deletion ones.
So they were biased long before anyone ever got to read them due to the omissions.
I'm still glad people are getting access to primary sources, though. The more primary sources and the fewer layers of BS layered on top of the news, the better.
Tautology
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"It is still a fallacy though."
No it isn't. The word "credible" is a big clue that we are not dealing with a formal argument, since credible is not well-defined. For any issue we care to consider, we are not able to determine whether a news organization is in the set labelled credible. At least not if we have a life.
"If you can't be bothered to do that, then your opinion is based entirely on your own bias and the value of your opinion is based on the value of your bias."
Yeah, no. If you knew what you were talking about, then you'd distinguish a formal logical argument and (essentially) induction. What you call bias may simply be a well-calibrated internal probability measure, aka *experience*. But hey, next time you're on trial for murder, be sure to loudly object "genetic fallacy!" when your own lawyer discounts the only evidence against you by a paid informant.
Benghazi, seriously? This has been ridden to death. All relevant information is public already. When will they start discussing her actual policies?
Many thanks for this very informing post. One follow-up question, what news sources (online and offline) would you recommend as alternatives to the (pre-Murdoch) WSJ? What is your opinion on the FT?
LWN.
Which is what happens when NewsCorp owns something. Of the deep end bat shit crazy right wing political witch hunts with an eye on making sure the wealth transfer to the rich continues.
Irrelevant. They can all be enemies. The right does love their us vs them way of looking at things, but the truth is that just because one entity is an enemy does not automatically make the others friends.
Again, just because a stopped clock can be indicating the correct time, that doesn't mean that it can be relied on to indicate the correct time. You cannot "bootstrap" credibility from an un-credible source just because the un-credible source sometimes repeats the truth. That is just as true whether you assert symbolically (mathematically) or in words. The mathematics, after all, is merely a codification of the words to permit seeing the problem more concisely.
An un-credible source may emit both true and false stories, but because it's un-credible, you cannot draw any conclusion as to the truth or falsehood of any invividual story. For that, you must disregard the un-credible source and go find credible ones.
To do otherwise is the opposite of wisdom.
Palin's WERE from her actual personal account (unlike Hillary, Palin did her government work on her government account NOT a private server). As a result, Palin's government e-mails were properly archived, accessible to government archivists and investigators, and accessible by public FOIA filings and any applicable courts if needed. Oh, and Palin's personal account was accessed and dumped into the public arena by a Democrat hacker.
These Hillary e-mails are only about 300 out of the thousands SHE screened and chose to hand-over; She deleted tens of thousands of e-mails that we are now never going to see and we have only her word for it that they were not relevant, AND she wiped her server so nobody would ever be able to recover them even if a court ordered it. Yup, that's "transparency" in the Obama/Clinton era...
You warped foil-hat wearing lefties who keep ranting that Bush is to blame for 9/11 because he did not interpret a memo that said "Usama Bin Laden is planning to attack the United States" (at some vague time in the future, possibly involving planes) to mean "airliners will be hijacked on Sept 11 2001 and flown into buildings" then scream that Bush was evil/stupid to take us into war in Iraq when the SAME intelligence people gave him a flood of very-specific memos about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction.
hmmmmmm
Had Bush ignored the much-more explicit Iraqi WMD memos (which were not just from US agencies but also the intel agencies of several or our allies) and then had the US been attacked with such a weapon, you guys would be the first in line to screech that he was evil/incompetent and to blame for that too. It's your damnably partisan hack narrative that forces a president in Bush's position to do what he did - no president in either party could have ignored that WMD threat so soon after 9/11
Unfortunately for you guys, even the leftists at NBC had to admit that the whole Valerie-Plame-and-hubby set of assertions related to yellowcake uranium in Iraq were wrong. Those claims had been used to massively mislead the American people to think Bush lied us into war, but they were just as wrong as the claims Bush listened to. You see, there WERE large stockpiles of the stuff in Iraq and we and Canada quietly moved it out after we removed Saddam from power. I'm not some sycophant GOP jerk who will say that this means Saddam had nukes - he did not, but it CONFIRMS the assertion Bush made to the American people that Saddam had acquired yellowcake. Bush did NOT say Saddam had WMDs, he said that he had been given reports that Saddam was rebuilding his WMD program (this was a true statement - Bush had been given multiple reports from multiple agencies that said this).
Of course, now that the Obama administration has prosecuted the Boston Bomber for use of a WMD (re-defining pressure cookers to be WMDs) Democrats can no longer claim there were no WMDs in Iraq - that country is clearly FULL of WMDs...
1. Palin's private e-mails (which she clearly never thought anybody outside her friends and family would see) which were illegally exposed by the Democrat hacker, were revealed to contain NOT A SINGLE CORRUPT ACT when exposed to the blowtorch of scrutiny of thousands of activist Democrats.
2. Clinton hid ALL her e-mails on a private server, then carefully screened them all and handed over to the government only the ones she knew would not hurt her before erasing tens of thousands she did not want anybody to see and the wiping the server so no court order could ever get at them.
Tell me again, WHO is more-trustworthy with power?????
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCQT53wiZ30
PBS/NPR are actually pretty unbiased. Just most Americans are dumb enough to prefer Fox/MSNBC/CNN.
And of course, there's always CSPAN..
The BBC is a bunch of pro-Labor hacks. Okay, okay, they're not *hacks*, they're quality journalists, and they do try to keep their opinions from being ostentatious and obnoxious, but they're definitely a lot happier with Labor than they are with the Conservatives (to say nothing of UKIP). They also dislike the SNP a little (mostly for being separatist -- other than that they're basically Labor Plus).
You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.
By far the coolest part of all this is now a "crowd" will form an opinion about Clinton and Benghazi from reading her emails. Primary sources FTW. Not want any journalist wants them to think, not a quote picked carefully for a political ad, but by actually reading what was said at the time. That's more informed democracy already than I expected in this whole election cycle!
Not really. The amount of cognitive dissonance that runs through this country when it comes to things like politics and, sadly, science, is quite staggering. People aren't going through those emails to become informed. They're going through them for dirt/vindication/etc. of whatever biases they have.
There's going to be a thousand cherry picked quotes out of context and a thousand facepalms. Fox news will more than likely take some of the juiciest out-of-context quotes and try to make Hillary sound like the next Pol Pot. MSNBC will make her out to be a saint. CNN will create some sort of pointless 3D fly through graphic that has nothing to do with anything and will make blue hairs think they didn't take their meds.
Whatever. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
~X~
The news side is fairly reliable. The editorial page has been brain-dead since the Carter administration, and that was long before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper.
As long as it isn't politics or science.
~X~
FDR was a Commie, though. We only see Social Security seven or eight decades after the fact, but the FDR administration completely overhauled the nation's economy, especially the agricultural sector, placing enormous swaths under extensive government control, with explicit production targets and price targets. The administration actively disbelieved in competition and a free market, and thought it could restore the nation to prosperity by paying people to fallow their land and by burning crops. By "disbelieved in a free market", I don't mean that they had a bunch of Regulators out there keeping Rich and Powerful People from doing Bad Things. I mean that they kept the Rich and Powerful People in business because they were rich and powerful friends of the FDR administration, and they did a lot to help them.
The FDR administration's interventions are a primary reason that the Great Depression was so Great. Fortunately, most of them were disassembled after World War II, resulting in an impressive game of catch-up as the nation returned to economic growth and prosperity (and unfortunately convincing some people that war is an economic catalyst instead of an exercise in spending valuable effort blowing stuff up, including some of the most economically valuable stuff out there, human lives).
Anyway. If you hate Big Agriculture, factory farms, and crop monocultures, then you should despise FDR, who erected the system which brought them upon us.
As for the rest, Social Security was the icing on the cake. It's an out-and-out wealth transfer in a way that the other programs, but at least it's an honest wealth transfer -- a generational wealth transfer, and future generations are likely to be richer. It makes a ton of economic sense as a transfer program (by tying your retirement pay to actually working it avoids the worst negative incentives of transfer programs, among other things). You just need to make sure the demographics and economic growth work out relative to the benefits -- easily doable. From an economic standpoint, it's wildly superior to the current health-care reform effort, which... let's just say it hasn't been a wild success at delivering its headline promise of cheaper health care for all.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
If you never listen to a source how can you know if what they say iis true or false?
So let me get this straight:
FDR caused a world-wide depression two years before he took office. He never had economic control over most of the world, but he nonetheless made the global depression worse. He was a commie in the 30s and early 40s, despite the fact he never sent anyone to the Gulag (kinda the defining aspect of Communism in the 30s and early 40s), the business community fought him tooth and nail the whole way (at one point forcing him to seize Montgomery Ward's entire company because the Chairman preferred forcing a strike and ending his war production to dealing with his unions) but he enriched his friends in business, etc.
That makes almost as much sense as claiming ObamaCare hasn't kept costs in line. It has. Of course you did preface it by saying "cheaper," so you will probably weasel your way into a claim that it was supposed to reduce cost-growth not keep cost-growth within inflation; but then it was never sold as a way to reduce overall costs. If that had been the sales pitch there would have been no need for new money to fund it. It was sold as a way to cut costs for individuals, and (thanks to the subsidies) it's mathematically impossible for it to fail at that task.
5. She can set up her own home mail server.
Yes because everybody loves listening to a monotone voice for hours on end, as monotone means proper unbiasedness. And we get great gems of news stories like "Ottawa just began increasing the number of bike lanes throughout the city" because news stories like these are so heartwarming, even if you don't live in the same country as Ottawa.
There were tens of Benghazi type attacks on American consulates overseas during the Bush administration, although none of those attacks killed an American ambassador like the Benghazi attack did. But where was the outrage, the never-ending investigations, and the political attacks against Bush administration officials for all of those attacks? The Wall Street Journal and Republicans are so full of shit. They didn't even notice when the same types of attacks happened when their choice of president, George W. Bush, and his cronies were running the show.
Calling something a "Tautology" is not a compliment in traditional logic. From your own fucking link, Captain Assburger:
We were offered an argument of this form: "Person A is not credible, because they are part of an organization that is not credible." An argument that defines itself using unsubstantiated, circular logic.
"Why is the organization not credible?"
"Because Person A is a part of it, and they're not credible!"
"And why is Person A not credible?
"Because they're part of this organization that's not credible!"
When your assertions are garbage, your logical constructions that use them are garbage as a result.
"Do you even lift?"
Look Bro, you may want to take some time listening, watching, or even reading these two sources before claiming that they got nothing to do with 'Merica. It may do your outlook a world of good
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Look Bro, you may want to take some time listening, watching, or even reading these two sources
I have.
Great post. Moderators take note.
But I'm a bit confused by the last paragraph of the article you quoted. Why would the new WSJ not embrace "death tax" if it was a dog-whistle for its opponents?
My sense is that Murdoch wants to use the WSJ for his propaganda, but he wants to maintain the pretense that it's still an accurate and objective newspaper, so he can't overdo it. Calling inheritance taxes a "death tax" in the news pages was overdoing it.
I remember when they printed that article, and people were complaining in the comments pages that the story was propaganda. The reporter apologized.
No, of course FDR didn't cause the Depression (just extended it).
If you want to be pedantic about what is and what isn't Communism, you could at least break out the Manifesto because I can think of a lot of ideological nitpicks that you could put in advance of "did not establish a gulag".
Yeah, go read about the National Recovery Administration. Essentially they suspended antitrust law if you adopted a certain minimum wage. Clarence Darrow (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) briefly headed up the National Recovery Review Board, a body which issued a few nice reports on how effectively this crushed smaller businesses, and was then promptly dissolved. You could try reading one or two. (Of course the Supreme Court found the act establishing the administration unconstitutional, leading to the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, an utterly transparent attempt to pack the Supreme Court.) The Montgomery Ward incident, incidentally, was much much later, in 1944, during the war.
Hahahhahahahahahahhaha... let's see what Google can say on the topic in the next 15 seconds... Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to "improve it." -- Politico, 8/9/2010. (I'm sure I could find more coverage in the event that you don't think Politico's worth the paper it's printed on.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Many thanks for this very informing post. One follow-up question, what news sources (online and offline) would you recommend as alternatives to the (pre-Murdoch) WSJ? What is your opinion on the FT?
I don't know of any substitute. The nice thing about the WSJ was that I could get a complete overview of everything important in one place. You could read the front page of the WSJ every day in 5 minutes, and at least be aware of everything important.
The most important thing was that I could trust them to give it to me as straight as they could. If I read a story in the WSJ that a job training program wasn't working, I'd see right there that the reporter talked to people on all sides, looked at the evidence, and the evidence was that it wasn't working. It wasn't because one of the publisher's right-wing editors decided to attack job training programs.
(The NYT had those very problems of advertisers and publisher's calling the shots. For example, their second-biggest advertiser was the automobile industry. The publisher, AO Sulzberger, actually ordered his editors to run stories about how auto safety and pollution regulations were destroying the economy. He wrote a memo that got out. And they did a lousy job of covering the Vietnam war.)
I don't want to make it sound like I let the WSJ do my critical thinking for me, but they did a lot of the preliminary work.
So now I'm back to reading news media on all sides, and evaluating each story myself on a case by case basis. If I read the NYT, and Democracy Now, etc., with some effort I can figure out something close to the truth. I know the FT has a lot of fans, but I don't read it regularly so I can't evaluate it.
I mostly follow medicine right now, and the professional journals, like Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc. do a pretty good job. Once in the while, the editors will go too far, and get fired, which is what happened at Journal of the American Medical Association and Canadian Medical Association Journal. Maybe that's proof that the editors are willing to push it as far as they can.
But there was a time when I could tell a college student, "Read the WSJ every day and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the world." I can't say that any more.
When I'm writing something, I like to run it past somebody who disagrees with me, to see whether I got anything wrong.
If this is the worst that you and jmac_the_man and cold fjord can come up with, I'm confident I got it right.
You state the premise and then go off on a tangent, sir.
And your formalism is an over simplification. The problem with Fox News is that they introduce a systemic bias into their reporting. What they say is not necessarily strictly true or false (it's impossible to properly quantify this, which is why your argument is not compelling), but it is often presented in a way that promotes their agenda. It's that quality that makes them an untrustworthy source.
We were offered an argument of this form: "Person A is not credible, because they are part of an organization that is not credible."
Which isn't a tautology, because not all people who are part of a low credibility organization, are themselves of low credibility.
The OP made an assertion (that NewsCorp has low credibility), and used that assertion and fuzzy logic to substantiate his warning (that the WSJ might therefore inherit some of that low credibility). None of which is a logical tautology, since it is not logically guaranteed to be true. Nor is it a rhetorical tautology, since it has the tone of an assertion rather than a proof.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
None of those statements are tautologies. A tautology is more along the lines of "If this statement is true then this statement is true."
Also, tautological statements need not useless outside of formal logic / math. The theory of evolution by natural selection hinges on the ramifications of the statement "that which survives and reproduces, survives and reproduces" (and its negation.)
If one side is lying and the other side is telling the truth, then the truth is not somewhere in the middle.
While that may be true in general, you seem to be making the unwarranted assumption that MSNBC is necessarily telling the truth. It's far more likely that both Fox and MSNBC are telling the truth about some bits, and lies about others and so "splitting the difference," or trying to take the most true(ish?) bits from each source would lead one closer to a balanced understanding of the topic at hand.
Don't fool yourself, both sides are full of shit, it's just different colors of shit.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
That's easy. How closely does the source match with your own preconceived notions on the topic at hand? The closer it does so, the truer it is.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
No, of course FDR didn't cause the Depression (just extended it).
If you want to be pedantic about what is and what isn't Communism, you could at least break out the Manifesto because I can think of a lot of ideological nitpicks that you could put in advance of "did not establish a gulag"
Why would I do that?
Communism is a living political movement. It is defined, not by the words on a page, but what actual human beings who believe in the movement think the words mean. In FDR's era that was being a Vanguard party and frequent purges of opponents of the Revolution. If you were speaking about an Italian from 1970 it would be completely different.
Using it the way you're using it is like claiming Dubya actually wanted to murder the entire House of Windsor out of revenge for the Famine, or that he was identical to Saddam because all use the label "Republican."
Even if you were using word on a page, the fact that he didn't foment a bloody Revolution, ushering in a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is enough to prove that anyone who claims he was Communist in that sense is more then a little deranged.
Yeah, go read about the National Recovery Administration. Essentially they suspended antitrust law if you adopted a certain minimum wage. Clarence Darrow (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) briefly headed up the National Recovery Review Board, a body which issued a few nice reports on how effectively this crushed smaller businesses, and was then promptly dissolved. You could try reading one or two. (Of course the Supreme Court found the act establishing the administration unconstitutional, leading to the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, an utterly transparent attempt to pack the Supreme Court.) The Montgomery Ward incident, incidentally, was much much later, in 1944, during the war.
You know what Communists do when the Court rules against them? Shoot the court. That's kind of the defining aspect of Communism. Capitalism is inherently unfair, the system is stacked against us, therefore we must have a Revolution to destroy the system. There's no pacifism in the Manifesto.
You can accuse somebody who uses a legal procedure to try to pack the Court of being a Social Democrat and a hardass, but accusing them of being Communist is just not sensible. It's ad hominem for ad hominem's sake, it exposes you as intellectually bankrupt, and worst of all it's fukcing boring.
I mean you're using fucking ad hominem. At least be creative about you juvenile leaf-brained smeller of other people's farts.
Hahahhahahahahahahhaha... let's see what Google can say on the topic in the next 15 seconds... Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to "improve it." -- Politico, 8/9/2010. (I'm sure I could find more coverage in the event that you don't think Politico's worth the paper it's printed on.)
Reread your source. Scratch that, read your source.
It says nothing about what the White House said the plan would do. It it so far removed from the White House that it's impossible to describe in a single clause. A Think Tank supporting the White House was urging people to stop saying "it will cut costs." To those actually involved in the movement cut costs is a well-known shorthand to say "reduce cost grow
What is there to disagree with? Your post is well written and interesting enough to read. I just don't get why I'm supposed to care.
I dont' know who those parties are. They actually present facts as they come in as opposed to having a bunch of 'experts' talk about nothing in particular.
talking about BBC-covered US-news
Marrying someone and having a kid is not a political accomplishment. I will give her one accomplishment. She has the uncanny ability to avoid media scrutiny and can dodge a felony better than Teflon Don.
As to WSJ being non-credible... tell us MR AC why is that?
You do realize that they're saying the same thing on this issue that the New York Times and MSNBC are saying right?
Crowdsourcing bad information on someone is a move that is more typical of Anonymous, or Rush Limbaugh, or even Rupert Murdoch. It's not something that the New York Times or MSNBC would encourage themselves.
The left wing media is turning on hillary.
The true left wing media, the tiny sliver of it that's left of it anyway, turned on Hillary as soon as she became a warmonger.
What's left now is the corporate media. By the way, I also dislike Hilary. However, this doesn't change my original point about the credibility of the Wall Street Journal because it's owned by Murdoch.
And yet it would be a fallacy to say a stop clock has the wrong time. You don't know that. You also don't know that a working clock has the correct time. A working clock could have the wrong time always.
In fact, a working clock almost always has the wrong time and never has the right time. At least not to the second. But a stopped clock will be 100 percent accurate for two seconds out of the day.
Again... this is just simple logic and you either understand simple logic or I have to educate you which would require some humility from you and patience from me. Since neither is likely to happen... if you do not understand BASIC logic then I'm going to just deem you irrational by definition and move on.
If you DO grasp basic logic then you understand what is and is not a fallacy.
What is more, you've not established that fox etc is a stopped watch. In fact, the vast majority of what is printed even by very biased sources is entirely accurate. What changes is the framing of the discussion more than anything. The actual FACTS tend to be accurate.
So if you don't like fox, what you actually don't like is the way they frame a story.
Okay.
But in this case there is no framing. It is the literal raw data without context.
So you can't cite bias. Literally cannot. That you did merely speaks poorly for YOUR bias.
When someone releases RAW data and you claim bias... you're the bigot. ;)
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
As to crowd sourcing information, in what way is that a bad way to do it?
As to crowdsourcing being an inherently right wing activity, explain how that is the case? it is more common of the open source kickstarter world than anything.
You're really just sounding like a closed minded bigot here... Just fyi. You might want to watch that least you actually become a bigot. And you'll regret that and hate yourself eventually.
Just trying to spare you some regret and the occasional humiliation.
As to the credibility of the WSJ, in what way are they not credible? If neither MSNBC nor the NYTs are left enough for you than what remains? Pravda? Tell me what you consider a credible news source so I can laugh at you.
Dare you.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
As to systemic bias, no more so than any other source. CNN, the BBC, PBS, the NYTs, The LA Times, the Guardian... etc. They all have their bias.
What is more, you're mostly reacting to the editorials on fox etc because their actual facts are the same as everyone else's facts. The facts are not in dispute.
And I should point out that pretty much the ENTIRE media has turned on hillary not just the right wing media.
The New York Times has turned on her and so has MSNBC.
Beyond that, you can't cite bias in this case because they're releasing RAW information.
You literally cannot with ANY credibility cite bias. So when you cite bias YOUR credibility is damaged because it is literally impossible.
And since you did do that... and you still don't realize it... that damages your credibility FURTHER.
Frankly, all the credibility you had was credibility gifted to you out of common courtesy. Given that you've proven that you are personally unworthy of it... I'm going to just conclude you're a fruitcake and move on.
Good day.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
In my professional judgment the WSJ used to be the best, most reliable news source in American.
FTFY.
I don't read/watch/listen to much American Media, but NPR seems to be quite balanced.
Wrong. You're conflating reality with his argument.
If I say "something is not credible because I said so"... that is not a falsifiable argument. Non-falsifiable arguments are fallacious.
If I instead said "something is not credible because they said X = 2 when it was later found out that X = 3" then THAT would be something we could examine and would be an argument that was at least based on some kind of logic. And that logic could be validated or disproven.
But simply saying something is not credible because... because... is bullshit.
On top of that... we're talking about a raw data dump.
A raw fucking data dump.
Either explain how you bias a raw data dump in any kind of sustainable way... I mean, if they removed or changed emails or added one... it is going to be found out pretty much instantly and they're going to take a beating for that.
I think you know damn well they did nothing of the kind. First, they don't need to. Second, while they have political leanings they haven't lied about anything so far as I know... the WSJ has one of the better journalistic records of any paper anywhere. The NYTs has been caught in some very nasty journalistic ethics issues over the years as have many other papers. CIte one the WSJ got into of any significance?
But beyond that, it is a raw data dump. And simply saying a raw data dump is fallacious because the aren't sucking your favorite politician's cock... is itself worthy of intellectual contempt.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The question is whether something is worth evaluating. Evaluation requires time and effort; one may very reasonably decide not to apply that effort to something coming from a source with a significant history of untrustworthiness, particularly when less-biased sources (by which I don't mean NBC -- biased in the opposite position -- but, for US news, something like Al Jazeera or the BBC) are available.
Of course, sitting here talking about items other than the purportedly factual content at hand is also an expenditure of effort. :)