They'll get over it, when they realize we could have handed them three decades of deflationary, spiraling depression instead.
It's a little like dipping into your ten-year-old kid's college fun to pay for his heart transplant. Sure, you're spending money he was going to use in the future. But unless he's an unreasonable little shit, he'll get over it.
Here's one thing wrong with Inkscape: what you see is not what prints. There's no way to print in landscape mode short of rotating your entire image, manually, 90 degrees to one side.
Switching to landscape mode in Page Setup in every other application is sufficient to produce landscape-orientation printouts, but it has never worked in any version of Inkscape.
At any one time the wind is blowing over 95% of the Earth's surface. An improved energy grid would be able to transfer excess production to areas of increased need.
Every penny that left the account was taken by someone authorized to access that account.
I'm sorry, but in what sense is that true? If I pay you to help move my stuff in, but then you come back a week later to rob me in the middle of the night, in what sense are you "authorized" to be in my house?
Just because I let you in, one time? Absurd. I hope you're never hired as a security guard.
For $20k per month, I'll learn to read a statement. Why wouldn't you?
Why do you think this guy couldn't? Because that's what the bank said? Again, absurd.
then why can't a scientist, who is a professional, that is going to follow strict guidelines, do the very same thing but for an honorable purpose.
Because it's really not that necessary. Mouse embryos work just fine - and you can do research on them unencumbered by the moral objections of laypeople - because the mouse genome is around 95% the same as ours.
On a genetic basis, mammals are basically mammals. At some point, we'll exhaust the applicability of the mouse genome to the human genome, and we'll have to do the research you describe to answer some final, minor questions; but we're nowhere near that point yet.
Quite frankly it's a lot easier to work on model organisms like mice, or fruit flies, or what have you.
That's what they should do. They shoudln't go and balance your checkbook for you.
No, but once you've complained about a discrepancy, it does become the bank's problem to demonstrate that they've posted no unauthorized charges to your account.
And what they definitely shouldn't do is what they did to this guy, which was deliberately obfuscate his transaction history so that he couldn't track down the error.
That makes them complicit in the fraud, in my opinion.
What more do you think they should have done?
Presented his transaction history in a usable form, instead of obfuscating it to hide their errors.
I start going through every transaction to determine the discrepancy.
Apparently the bank refused to give this guy his transaction history in a usable form. It's great that they don't do that to you, but they did it to him, apparently, and when a bank responds to a notification of error by deliberately obfuscating transaction history, that's fraud.
But when your bank defrauds you, what the hell are you going to do? You've already given them your money.
Person A acknowledges the correctness of the written statement by failing to report an error after Person A has examined it.
But he went in with the errors. Person B - the bank - told A to go fuck himself, they're the Great and Powerful Bank, and there's no way they could make a mistake.
It sounds to me like A fulfilled his legal obligation. The statute of limitations on theft by fraud is ten years long, isn't it? The bank has no power to enforce a shorter limitation.
This allows me to not only easily spot fraudulent transactions, but also allows me to keep an eye on how much money I really have available, regardless of what the bank says.
Great. So, like this guy did, you go to your bank with your QuickBooks or whatever, showing that you should have substantially more money than you do, and the bank tells you to go soak your head, they're the bank goddammit, and there's no way in hell that your accounting could be more accurate than theirs.
You know, like they told this guy. Then what the hell do you do? Apparently you can go fuck yourself, since according to the laws the banks purchased, they can hand out your money to anyone that presents trivially falsifiable certifications, and there's not a damn thing you can expect them to do about it.
This guy went every month to the bank with evidence of funny business, and they told him that he must be running the numbers wrong, and then handed him balance statements that obfuscated the transactions.
Sure, it's prudent to keep track of your own money. But what about when you've kept such good track of it that you realize some is missing? What the hell are you supposed to do then? I don't think Quicken has a form for that.
Everybody, if they're being honest with themselves, has had "thoughts of suicide." It's human nature. When you're standing near the edge of the building, you think about what it would mean to jump. We're fascinated by death, and why shouldn't we be?
You forgot to mention the "sleeping in a watersoaked car", or "going to pick up the kids, even though it wasn't his turn",
These are evidence of nothing, except how easy it would be for an innocent person to be fingered by police, if something as innocuous as picking up your own children from school can be evidence for murder.
But, sure, let's add all that stuff too - sleeping in a wet car, picking his kids up. The "car chase with police" is a figment of your imagination, so let's discount that. Without the body and the confession, it was still pretty idiotic to pretend that the evidence was "overwhelming." At best it was sufficient; many of us felt that it didn't rise to even that level.
Sorry, but I can only assume you haven't seen the list of evidence
No, I've seen the list. Now that there's a body and a confession, sure, you might have an argument for "overwhelming".
In the trial, though, what you had was a missing person (who held dual citizenship and had every plausible motive to want to disappear), a missing car seat, one spot of blood that was never determined to be Nina's, and two books on criminalistics.
That's not really overwhelming evidence of anything. It wasn't even overwhelming evidence that Nina Reiser was dead.
It's the murder equivalent of a cookie missing from the cookie jar and your five year old son saying he didn't do it while crumbs are all over his face.
Except that there weren't any "crumbs" on Reiser; there was nothing physical to tie him to the murder because until he produced the body there was no physical evidence of any murder.
And if we were talking about sending my five-year-old son to jail for 20-to-life, I'd want a whole lot more evidence than a few crumbs on his face. Which, again, we didn't even have in the Reiser case.
Technically, yes, the evidence is circumstantial, and yes, we don't have the body of the cookie, but it doesn't take a mind reader to know that a burgler probably didn't sneak in to eat the cookie.
Cookies don't walk off by themselves, but people do. Just because someone has disappeared doesn't mean they've been murdered. Often people disappear completely on purpose.
I like the analogy another poster made: if this had been Bill Gates and Melinda was missing, most Slashdotters would've convicted him instantly based on the evidence we had.
That's a bit of a stretch. Just from the comments in this thread it appears that Hans Reiser was liked even less than Bill Gates.
The evidence was clearly enough to convince a jury. In that sense, it was satisfactory. What we learned from the media was anything but, and only a great idiot would pretend that a missing person, a car with no seat, and two books about real-life CSI constituted "overwhelming evidence" of being a murderer.
On the other hand, compatibility from generation to generation of Linux applications is pretty solid.
The last time my Linux install updated its kernel (mind you, completely without asking me) it broke wireless networking, the display drivers, and MythTV, all at once.
So, in my experience, compatibility is shit. Enough other people have had this experience, I notice, to make "don't upgrade unless you have to, once you get it working" to be standard advice in every Linux book I've ever read.
No, egg on your face for stubbornly clinging to innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt
Prior to his confession and the discovery of the body, the evidence against Reiser could justly have been described with many different terms, but "overwhelming" could hardly be one of them. The case was entirely circumstantial. And it's possible to be justly convicted on circumstantial evidence, but to my mind, "overwhelming" is a term that applies when you have a confession, eyewitnesses, and a body; until just now, the case against Reiser had none of these things.
The people who thought he was guilty were right. Accept that. Be glad about it. Don't idiotically overstate your case by throwing around terms like "overwhelming."
They believe Hans simply because they find it more likely that a woman would screw over a man than vice versa.
Strictly speaking, I find it more likely that a Russian woman would screw over an American software engineer than vice versa.
I dunno, there's just something about Russian culture that instills a mercenary attitude, particularly when they emigrate, particularly women. In Russia it's probably a survival instinct. In America, it simply translates to someone I would never, ever count on having my best interests at heart, ever.
The conviction was not against the principles of the system. If you're one of the people who think that Habeas Corpus means you have to have a corpse to try someone for murder, Habeas Corpus doesn't mean what you think it means.
You may not need the body, but you need some kind of evidence that a murder had even been committed, and the disappearance of a woman with dual citizenship and a history of duplicity (plus a missing car seat) may or may not constitute such evidence.
I don't think it did. Now that we have a confession and a body, that's different.
That's why the standard is 'reasonable doubt', not 'ironclad proof'.
I don't think it's reasonable to convict a man of murder when it's every bit as likely his victim is alive in Russia.
Now, obviously we know that's of zero likelihood. But that's what we know now. And the jury might very well have known things that we did not. But back then, when we didn't know those things? There were serious questions about whether it would have been reasonable to convict him.
But I don't expect you to agree, and apparently you were right not to. Congratulations, this time.
Ya gotta wonder about the people who thought he was innocent.
What's to wonder? Lacking the whole story as told in the courtroom, they merely thought that there was not enough evidence to conclude that Hans was guilty.
Absent the body, absent any known murder weapon, and with the victim being a foreign national holding dual citizenship and with plausible motive to flee the country and frame Hans for murder, that's not an unreasonable conclusion. It may not have been the conclusion you came to, but different people have different ideas about how much evidence you need to convict a man of murder.
Now, of course, after a guilty verdict, a confession, and with the body right in front of us, it's pretty stupid for anyone to continue to maintain his innocence. I know I'm convinced. But before all this? "Beyond reasonable doubt" depends entirely on how you define "reasonable."
Maybe one of the reasons you'll never have games written for the OS is that you can't count on anything to work from one release to the next (like your example of games under WINE.)
You don't consider several different people commenting on blogs in support of Greenwald while using his IP address and many of the same mannerisms to be "damning" or even suspicious?!
I don't know how you would detect a mannerism without being there in the room with the writer; maybe it's just that you don't know what the word "mannerism" actually means.
And I don't know how you would prove that any specific IP address belonged only to Glenn Greenwald and not to any other person or organization, in perpetuity.
But, I do know that Patterico is such a mouth-breathing moron that he can't tell the difference between a funny costume and child pornography.
Not to mention all the other evidence included in the article.
What evidence? Not posting in an Ace of Spades thread? That's evidence of sense, not of sock-puppetry.
Patterico has a rep for not knowing his head from his ass, and drawing completely unwarranted conclusions from ambiguous data when it tars a political opponent.
Zero credibility. I mean, the most damning evidence for sockpuppetry is that Greenwald didn't post on a thread at Ace of Spades.
Does that prove sockpuppetry? Or does that prove that nobody with any goddamned sense pays attention to what Ace of Spades has to say?
You are still unable to understand the actual situation, or usual journalism practice.
Usual journalism practice is, as I've told you, irrelevant, because we're not talking about your "usual journalist."
We're talking about Tim Russert, who had a stated policy that, in his words, was to allow government officials to be off the record unless and until they gave specific instructions for Russert to go on the record.
Is that good for the American people, or good for powerful elites? It's a simple question that I can't help but noticed you've ignored again.
Russert was quoted incompletely though not inaccurately in a tech magazine opinion piece which was widely reproduced.
Oh, I see. You're actually saying that Russert didn't say what he is quoted to have said.
Gosh, if I'd realized you were simply factually misinformed we could have cleared this up several go-rounds ago. This is Russert:
"When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy -- our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission"
It's the government official who decides for Russert, not the other way around as you state. If he can't get permission - permission! Like he's a schoolchild! - then he renders himself mute. Just like a good government stenographer, I guess.
I bet you didn't notice that Russert made no mention of who it is that makes the specification.
But we know who specifies - Russert always allowed the government official to do so. We know that because that's exactly what he stated, and we know that because everybody in the Bush Administration knew how that worked; hence, the reliance on Meet The Press as a propaganda tool, because they knew Russert would allow them to "control the message."
So answer the question. Who benefits from that? Russert and powerful elites? Or the American people?
You might also consider the implications of the fact that in any interview Russert would have notes.
What, you were there? Or are you talking about journalists in general, again?
Again I don't dispute that, in a system of functional journalism, that would be true. Indeed I would prefer that to be true.
But that's not how it worked for Russert, because he was far more interested in bending over backwards for powerful elites than for doing anything as hard and meaningful as the kind of journalism you describe.
That's sort of the problem, here. It's amazing that you still don't get that, after all this time. (Maybe if you'd spent more time thinking about the argument instead of thinking of ways to insult me, we'd be on the same page, finally.)
Try to get beyond the shallow, seven-second-sound-bite version to a place where you understand that criticism of Russert, or any journalist, has to rest on more than an incomplete apprehension of idiosyncratic practices that are largely situational.
It's time for you to arrive at a place where you understand that criticism or defense of Russert has to happen based on Russert's own conduct and statements, not what journalists in general do or don't do. Indeed the number one problem with Russert that I've been describing is that he doesn't follow standard journalistic practice; by every indication he had his own set of practices that privileged the convenience of powerful elites over his responsibilities as a journalist.
And it's time for you to arrive at a place where you actually answer the most pertinent question, which I have repeated multiple times.
Ah, progress. All you had to do was grapple with the argument. I knew you could do it, eventually. Too bad you still haven't answered the question.
As a matter of fact, in this case it does.
But it didn't. It was just the index page; it offered nothing that was relevant to the discussion. A red herring, essentially, so you could pad your post with links.
That's why you just don't seem to comprehend that the question you keep harping on is utterly meaningless. Get this through your thick head: It is the journalist who decides whether a comment or interview is "off the record". Nobody else.
But it's clear that Russert had a policy of not deciding - of allowing the government official to make the decision.
I don't understand why you keep talking about journalists in general when it's Russert, specifically, that's under discussion. And it seems to be you who's under a misapprehension - the misapprehension that Russert wasn't doing precisely what he stated that he was; allowing the government official to determine what was, and wasn't, on the record. Often after the remarks had already been made.
I agree that it should be the journalist who decides. But Russert specifically abdicated that decision to the powerful elites. He did not decide.
So answer the question, already. Did that benefit the powerful elites (and, in turn, Russert) or did that benefit the American people?
Answer the question.
Russert's situation was probably this
Russert's "situation" was precisely what he told us it was: conversations with the nation's powerful elites were off the record, always; unless they specifically told them they were on the record.
That is, when the elites decided that Russert was useful to them as a megaphone, someone to get their message out on their behalf. A stenographer.
Is that good for the American people, or is that good for the elites? I've told you what I think. Why don't you answer the question? Why don't you stop pretending that Russert didn't say what he said?
Is it just that you're completely ignorant of what journalism has become in the United States?
Slashdot Mirror
They'll get over it, when they realize we could have handed them three decades of deflationary, spiraling depression instead.
It's a little like dipping into your ten-year-old kid's college fun to pay for his heart transplant. Sure, you're spending money he was going to use in the future. But unless he's an unreasonable little shit, he'll get over it.
Anyway I probably won't have kids. Woohoo!
Here's one thing wrong with Inkscape: what you see is not what prints. There's no way to print in landscape mode short of rotating your entire image, manually, 90 degrees to one side.
Switching to landscape mode in Page Setup in every other application is sufficient to produce landscape-orientation printouts, but it has never worked in any version of Inkscape.
That's a pretty glaring failure, in my opinion.
At any one time the wind is blowing over 95% of the Earth's surface. An improved energy grid would be able to transfer excess production to areas of increased need.
The wind's always blowing somewhere.
Well, look. It's not legal obstacles that stand in the way of that research; it's that we don't yet know enough to start that research.
There actually is a procedure for doing experiments on human cultures, tissue, and even individuals.
Every penny that left the account was taken by someone authorized to access that account.
I'm sorry, but in what sense is that true? If I pay you to help move my stuff in, but then you come back a week later to rob me in the middle of the night, in what sense are you "authorized" to be in my house?
Just because I let you in, one time? Absurd. I hope you're never hired as a security guard.
For $20k per month, I'll learn to read a statement. Why wouldn't you?
Why do you think this guy couldn't? Because that's what the bank said? Again, absurd.
then why can't a scientist, who is a professional, that is going to follow strict guidelines, do the very same thing but for an honorable purpose.
Because it's really not that necessary. Mouse embryos work just fine - and you can do research on them unencumbered by the moral objections of laypeople - because the mouse genome is around 95% the same as ours.
On a genetic basis, mammals are basically mammals. At some point, we'll exhaust the applicability of the mouse genome to the human genome, and we'll have to do the research you describe to answer some final, minor questions; but we're nowhere near that point yet.
Quite frankly it's a lot easier to work on model organisms like mice, or fruit flies, or what have you.
That's what they should do. They shoudln't go and balance your checkbook for you.
No, but once you've complained about a discrepancy, it does become the bank's problem to demonstrate that they've posted no unauthorized charges to your account.
And what they definitely shouldn't do is what they did to this guy, which was deliberately obfuscate his transaction history so that he couldn't track down the error.
That makes them complicit in the fraud, in my opinion.
What more do you think they should have done?
Presented his transaction history in a usable form, instead of obfuscating it to hide their errors.
I start going through every transaction to determine the discrepancy.
Apparently the bank refused to give this guy his transaction history in a usable form. It's great that they don't do that to you, but they did it to him, apparently, and when a bank responds to a notification of error by deliberately obfuscating transaction history, that's fraud.
But when your bank defrauds you, what the hell are you going to do? You've already given them your money.
Person A acknowledges the correctness of the written statement by failing to report an error after Person A has examined it.
But he went in with the errors. Person B - the bank - told A to go fuck himself, they're the Great and Powerful Bank, and there's no way they could make a mistake.
It sounds to me like A fulfilled his legal obligation. The statute of limitations on theft by fraud is ten years long, isn't it? The bank has no power to enforce a shorter limitation.
Re:you have 30 days to complain about fraud
Isn't the statute of limitations on fraud around ten years, or so?
From what legal basis does the bank have to shorten that?
This allows me to not only easily spot fraudulent transactions, but also allows me to keep an eye on how much money I really have available, regardless of what the bank says.
Great. So, like this guy did, you go to your bank with your QuickBooks or whatever, showing that you should have substantially more money than you do, and the bank tells you to go soak your head, they're the bank goddammit, and there's no way in hell that your accounting could be more accurate than theirs.
You know, like they told this guy. Then what the hell do you do? Apparently you can go fuck yourself, since according to the laws the banks purchased, they can hand out your money to anyone that presents trivially falsifiable certifications, and there's not a damn thing you can expect them to do about it.
This guy went every month to the bank with evidence of funny business, and they told him that he must be running the numbers wrong, and then handed him balance statements that obfuscated the transactions.
Sure, it's prudent to keep track of your own money. But what about when you've kept such good track of it that you realize some is missing? What the hell are you supposed to do then? I don't think Quicken has a form for that.
Everybody, if they're being honest with themselves, has had "thoughts of suicide." It's human nature. When you're standing near the edge of the building, you think about what it would mean to jump. We're fascinated by death, and why shouldn't we be?
It is impossible to test for something that lacks definition.
For reasonable people it's not necessary to - the lack of coherent definition of the entity is sufficient to conclude its nonexistence.
You forgot to mention the "sleeping in a watersoaked car", or "going to pick up the kids, even though it wasn't his turn",
These are evidence of nothing, except how easy it would be for an innocent person to be fingered by police, if something as innocuous as picking up your own children from school can be evidence for murder.
But, sure, let's add all that stuff too - sleeping in a wet car, picking his kids up. The "car chase with police" is a figment of your imagination, so let's discount that. Without the body and the confession, it was still pretty idiotic to pretend that the evidence was "overwhelming." At best it was sufficient; many of us felt that it didn't rise to even that level.
Sorry, but I can only assume you haven't seen the list of evidence
No, I've seen the list. Now that there's a body and a confession, sure, you might have an argument for "overwhelming".
In the trial, though, what you had was a missing person (who held dual citizenship and had every plausible motive to want to disappear), a missing car seat, one spot of blood that was never determined to be Nina's, and two books on criminalistics.
That's not really overwhelming evidence of anything. It wasn't even overwhelming evidence that Nina Reiser was dead.
It's the murder equivalent of a cookie missing from the cookie jar and your five year old son saying he didn't do it while crumbs are all over his face.
Except that there weren't any "crumbs" on Reiser; there was nothing physical to tie him to the murder because until he produced the body there was no physical evidence of any murder.
And if we were talking about sending my five-year-old son to jail for 20-to-life, I'd want a whole lot more evidence than a few crumbs on his face. Which, again, we didn't even have in the Reiser case.
Technically, yes, the evidence is circumstantial, and yes, we don't have the body of the cookie, but it doesn't take a mind reader to know that a burgler probably didn't sneak in to eat the cookie.
Cookies don't walk off by themselves, but people do. Just because someone has disappeared doesn't mean they've been murdered. Often people disappear completely on purpose.
I like the analogy another poster made: if this had been Bill Gates and Melinda was missing, most Slashdotters would've convicted him instantly based on the evidence we had.
That's a bit of a stretch. Just from the comments in this thread it appears that Hans Reiser was liked even less than Bill Gates.
The evidence was clearly enough to convince a jury. In that sense, it was satisfactory. What we learned from the media was anything but, and only a great idiot would pretend that a missing person, a car with no seat, and two books about real-life CSI constituted "overwhelming evidence" of being a murderer.
On the other hand, compatibility from generation to generation of Linux applications is pretty solid.
The last time my Linux install updated its kernel (mind you, completely without asking me) it broke wireless networking, the display drivers, and MythTV, all at once.
So, in my experience, compatibility is shit. Enough other people have had this experience, I notice, to make "don't upgrade unless you have to, once you get it working" to be standard advice in every Linux book I've ever read.
No, egg on your face for stubbornly clinging to innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt
Prior to his confession and the discovery of the body, the evidence against Reiser could justly have been described with many different terms, but "overwhelming" could hardly be one of them. The case was entirely circumstantial. And it's possible to be justly convicted on circumstantial evidence, but to my mind, "overwhelming" is a term that applies when you have a confession, eyewitnesses, and a body; until just now, the case against Reiser had none of these things.
The people who thought he was guilty were right. Accept that. Be glad about it. Don't idiotically overstate your case by throwing around terms like "overwhelming."
They believe Hans simply because they find it more likely that a woman would screw over a man than vice versa.
Strictly speaking, I find it more likely that a Russian woman would screw over an American software engineer than vice versa.
I dunno, there's just something about Russian culture that instills a mercenary attitude, particularly when they emigrate, particularly women. In Russia it's probably a survival instinct. In America, it simply translates to someone I would never, ever count on having my best interests at heart, ever.
The conviction was not against the principles of the system. If you're one of the people who think that Habeas Corpus means you have to have a corpse to try someone for murder, Habeas Corpus doesn't mean what you think it means.
You may not need the body, but you need some kind of evidence that a murder had even been committed, and the disappearance of a woman with dual citizenship and a history of duplicity (plus a missing car seat) may or may not constitute such evidence.
I don't think it did. Now that we have a confession and a body, that's different.
That's why the standard is 'reasonable doubt', not 'ironclad proof'.
I don't think it's reasonable to convict a man of murder when it's every bit as likely his victim is alive in Russia.
Now, obviously we know that's of zero likelihood. But that's what we know now. And the jury might very well have known things that we did not. But back then, when we didn't know those things? There were serious questions about whether it would have been reasonable to convict him.
But I don't expect you to agree, and apparently you were right not to. Congratulations, this time.
Ya gotta wonder about the people who thought he was innocent.
What's to wonder? Lacking the whole story as told in the courtroom, they merely thought that there was not enough evidence to conclude that Hans was guilty.
Absent the body, absent any known murder weapon, and with the victim being a foreign national holding dual citizenship and with plausible motive to flee the country and frame Hans for murder, that's not an unreasonable conclusion. It may not have been the conclusion you came to, but different people have different ideas about how much evidence you need to convict a man of murder.
Now, of course, after a guilty verdict, a confession, and with the body right in front of us, it's pretty stupid for anyone to continue to maintain his innocence. I know I'm convinced. But before all this? "Beyond reasonable doubt" depends entirely on how you define "reasonable."
then we will never have games written for the OS.
Maybe one of the reasons you'll never have games written for the OS is that you can't count on anything to work from one release to the next (like your example of games under WINE.)
You don't consider several different people commenting on blogs in support of Greenwald while using his IP address and many of the same mannerisms to be "damning" or even suspicious?!
I don't know how you would detect a mannerism without being there in the room with the writer; maybe it's just that you don't know what the word "mannerism" actually means.
And I don't know how you would prove that any specific IP address belonged only to Glenn Greenwald and not to any other person or organization, in perpetuity.
But, I do know that Patterico is such a mouth-breathing moron that he can't tell the difference between a funny costume and child pornography.
Not to mention all the other evidence included in the article.
What evidence? Not posting in an Ace of Spades thread? That's evidence of sense, not of sock-puppetry.
Patterico has a rep for not knowing his head from his ass, and drawing completely unwarranted conclusions from ambiguous data when it tars a political opponent.
Zero credibility. I mean, the most damning evidence for sockpuppetry is that Greenwald didn't post on a thread at Ace of Spades.
Does that prove sockpuppetry? Or does that prove that nobody with any goddamned sense pays attention to what Ace of Spades has to say?
You are still unable to understand the actual situation, or usual journalism practice.
Usual journalism practice is, as I've told you, irrelevant, because we're not talking about your "usual journalist."
We're talking about Tim Russert, who had a stated policy that, in his words, was to allow government officials to be off the record unless and until they gave specific instructions for Russert to go on the record.
Is that good for the American people, or good for powerful elites? It's a simple question that I can't help but noticed you've ignored again.
Russert was quoted incompletely though not inaccurately in a tech magazine opinion piece which was widely reproduced.
Oh, I see. You're actually saying that Russert didn't say what he is quoted to have said.
Gosh, if I'd realized you were simply factually misinformed we could have cleared this up several go-rounds ago. This is Russert:
"When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy -- our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission"
It's the government official who decides for Russert, not the other way around as you state. If he can't get permission - permission! Like he's a schoolchild! - then he renders himself mute. Just like a good government stenographer, I guess.
I bet you didn't notice that Russert made no mention of who it is that makes the specification.
But we know who specifies - Russert always allowed the government official to do so. We know that because that's exactly what he stated, and we know that because everybody in the Bush Administration knew how that worked; hence, the reliance on Meet The Press as a propaganda tool, because they knew Russert would allow them to "control the message."
So answer the question. Who benefits from that? Russert and powerful elites? Or the American people?
You might also consider the implications of the fact that in any interview Russert would have notes.
What, you were there? Or are you talking about journalists in general, again?
Again I don't dispute that, in a system of functional journalism, that would be true. Indeed I would prefer that to be true.
But that's not how it worked for Russert, because he was far more interested in bending over backwards for powerful elites than for doing anything as hard and meaningful as the kind of journalism you describe.
That's sort of the problem, here. It's amazing that you still don't get that, after all this time. (Maybe if you'd spent more time thinking about the argument instead of thinking of ways to insult me, we'd be on the same page, finally.)
Try to get beyond the shallow, seven-second-sound-bite version to a place where you understand that criticism of Russert, or any journalist, has to rest on more than an incomplete apprehension of idiosyncratic practices that are largely situational.
It's time for you to arrive at a place where you understand that criticism or defense of Russert has to happen based on Russert's own conduct and statements, not what journalists in general do or don't do. Indeed the number one problem with Russert that I've been describing is that he doesn't follow standard journalistic practice; by every indication he had his own set of practices that privileged the convenience of powerful elites over his responsibilities as a journalist.
And it's time for you to arrive at a place where you actually answer the most pertinent question, which I have repeated multiple times.
Ah, progress. All you had to do was grapple with the argument. I knew you could do it, eventually. Too bad you still haven't answered the question.
As a matter of fact, in this case it does.
But it didn't. It was just the index page; it offered nothing that was relevant to the discussion. A red herring, essentially, so you could pad your post with links.
That's why you just don't seem to comprehend that the question you keep harping on is utterly meaningless. Get this through your thick head: It is the journalist who decides whether a comment or interview is "off the record". Nobody else.
But it's clear that Russert had a policy of not deciding - of allowing the government official to make the decision.
I don't understand why you keep talking about journalists in general when it's Russert, specifically, that's under discussion. And it seems to be you who's under a misapprehension - the misapprehension that Russert wasn't doing precisely what he stated that he was; allowing the government official to determine what was, and wasn't, on the record. Often after the remarks had already been made.
I agree that it should be the journalist who decides. But Russert specifically abdicated that decision to the powerful elites. He did not decide.
So answer the question, already. Did that benefit the powerful elites (and, in turn, Russert) or did that benefit the American people?
Answer the question.
Russert's situation was probably this
Russert's "situation" was precisely what he told us it was: conversations with the nation's powerful elites were off the record, always; unless they specifically told them they were on the record.
That is, when the elites decided that Russert was useful to them as a megaphone, someone to get their message out on their behalf. A stenographer.
Is that good for the American people, or is that good for the elites? I've told you what I think. Why don't you answer the question? Why don't you stop pretending that Russert didn't say what he said?
Is it just that you're completely ignorant of what journalism has become in the United States?