But again, op-ed pieces are all about narrative. They're often a series of stories written by the same columnist. Anyone who takes op-ed pieces that seriously obviously doesn't understand how newspapers function. That's not to say that there aren't informative op-ed pieces, far from it, but they are *opinion*, and inevitably that is where newspapers' ideological leanings will show up, and indeed where they should. By and large, the Guardian's actual journalism is often rather good, and they have one of the best investigative journalism reputations in the English-speaking world. Just don't go to "Comment is Free" to see it.
And that's what bothers me about your whole "narrative" line. In one respect, you're absolutely correct that newspapers and other news media spin narratives. That's what the press has been doing for centuries now. Do you think the press as it existed in the lead up to the American War of Independence didn't have plenty of column spent condemning nasty King George and praising the brave colonies for defying his despotic rule?
As I said, where I will criticize modern media is jumbling up opinion and journalism on the same web page, and CNN is actually worse for that than even Fox News or MSNBC. It almost goes out of its way to confuse readers on what stories are actually news and what pieces are opinion, and I will say that I think there is intent there to trick readers and to push a narrative, but if you open the stories they still make it pretty clear what is opinion and what is actual news reporting. Part of that is simply driven by the need to count clicks, to sell advertising, and the opinion section has been the seller of newspapers for a very long time.
You are aware the Guardian story you reference is a comment piece. Op-ed pieces are fundamentally different than reporting of stories, and in fact, in general, comment pieces are often inflammatory, even absurd, because, guess what, it's often the op-ed section that sells newspapers, and not the news itself.
And there was a point during the election when a landslide Clinton victory seemed likely. But what of it? Papers having been making wrong calls for as long as there have been elections and newspapers. Remember "Dewey defeats Truman"?
The other thing about all of this that bothers me is that people seem to be confused about what constitutes "reporting" and what constitutes "opinion and analysis". Op-ed pieces are renowned for their bias, and in fact that's the whole point. Now it is true that there is a subtler kind of bias elsewhere in a newspaper, but a lot of what people attack and declare "fake news" is often the op-ed and "analysis" pieces, and if I can criticize newspapers for that, it's that I find they often shove some of the op-ed stories on to the main page of their website. I don't think that's an issue of bias so much as it is deliberate click-bait, in that if you punch up your main web page with stories like "Just how big will the Clinton landslide be?" you'll get a lot more hits than more mundane stories reporting the daily grind of a presidential campaign. The latter, even in this last election, can often be pretty fucking boring "Clinton attended a luncheon of the so-and-sos, and had a rally at such and such a place, and the polls shows she's leading by x% in California."
To my mind that's the real problem here, not a bias specifically, at least not political bias, but a constant need to sex everything up. But come on, that's not even new either. Every edition of a newspaper has to have a headline, whether the underlying story deserves it or not. That's the nature of newspapers for over two hundred years now.
I agree that that is difficult, and in fact Sweden is experiencing integration problems (though it still remains one of the safest countries in the world). And if Trump had actually been discussing that problem, then he would have had a strong point. But since he appears to do no research other than to watch news broadcasts and respond viscerally to what he doesn't like, he comes out with idiotic and factually-impaired statements that the White House spin doctors have to try to find some event close enough in time and space to make what he said sound even vaguely plausible.
There has always been a bias in the press. If you think the big press agencies and newspapers now are bad, open up a newspaper from the 18th or 19th centuries.
The best solution isn't to abandon papers like the NYT, which despite any bias, still remains one of the best news gathering organizations in history. The solution is to find multiple sources.
And the anti-Trump bias extended a lot further than allegedly left-leaning press. A lot of Republicans were alarmed by Trump's rise, and remain pretty skeptical even now. Even Fox News, while generally the most pro-Trump of the big news sources, has had its problems with Trump. He is an "atypical" candidate to put it bluntly, and how does one cover such a candidate, when his supporters are willing to overlook, or outright support his more outrageous statements, and yet are so thin-skinned that anyone reporting those statements is accused of bias? How do you report "just the facts" about someone who happily dispenses with facts whenever it pleases him?
Categorization is always to some extent artificial. Are viruses alive? What constitutes a planet? What is a species? All you can do in some cases is accept that there is an inevitable fuzziness, and that a concept can at best explain the majority of cases with the outliers either being categorized in or out of the set depending upon how many attributes are shared.
The definition of a continent has become considerably more complex as we learn more about how the geology of Earth works, and so far as I understand it these days a continent is usually defined as a contiguous section of crust, made up of multiple plates, but that has fairly deep roots into the mantle. The oceans themselves play a somewhat muddier role in all of this, but in general continents are not defined anymore by how much of their surface sits above sea level. Considering that sea level fluctuates a great deal in geological time, you can have situations like the Bering land bridge where two separate continents are in fact joined by a land mass. Similar features can be found with the Ismuths of Panama and Suez. Another good example of a continent that is defined largely by crust and sub-crustal features is Antarctica, which would actually be more of an archipelago if the ice cap were to melt.
The problem here is force fitting a rather 19th century *geography* definition of continent with a modern 21st century *geology* definition of continent.
Elections are never a sure thing. Even fivethirtyeight was weighted towards Clinton, but everything has an error margin, and any prediction of something as large and complex as hundreds of millions of voters in what amounts to fifty separate elections, each with its own dynamics, is inevitably going to have a significant margin of error. For chrissakes, even many Republicans expected, and probably hoped Trump would lose (as is evidenced by the chaos now surrounding repealing and replacing Obamacare, as it turns out no Republican in Congress, save perhaps for Rand Paul, ever actually believed they would ever be in a position to replace Obamacare).
"Merely a tool". No, it's not "merely a tool". Insolvency means your broke and the courts basically take you over and you're either restructured, if that's possible, or you're sold for spare parts.
But to say Trump's business ventures fail is to misrepresent what Trump's business is. He may look like a real estate developer, but in reality what he's selling is his name. He licenses "Trump", gets paid up front and if the development goes tits up, well that's irrelevant, and at least until recently, even if the development went into bankruptcy, the debt holders still viewed the Trump name as a significant enough asset to keep the signage up. So in a way, those who claim Trump's businesses have gone bankrupt don't actually understand what it is Trump sells.
So now we've moved the goalposts from "fake news" to "blowing the subject out of proportion". I guess that's what happened with Flynn. It went from "claims that he was chatting with the Russians are fake news" to "the media blew it totally out of proportion" to "he didn't do anything wrong but pissed Pence off."
Nixon's supporters did much the same thing, invoking the same trajectory of "made up" to "not a big deal", and it ended up with him abandoning the Presidency before the inevitable impeachment and removal from office.
They keep reporting what he actually says, as opposed to what he apparently meant to say... or something. The whole "what happened in Sweden" thing is a perfect example of how Trump makes unhinged and false statements, and then his press team and the legions of true believers will reinterpret those statements so, at least in their minds, he doesn't look, well, unhinged and dishonest. "Ah well, he wasn't talking about a specific event, but you know, general problems in Sweden." How is it that a grown man who is such a tremendous dealmaker needs a full-time public relations team to translate his utterances into something vaguely like the truth? And how is that you can condemn the press for reporting those utterances? Isn't that the press's job? But oh no, because the press doesn't do Conway's job for her, they're "pushing a narrative".
The Saturn program should have never been abandoned that's for certain, but other aspects of Apollo technology are literally a few technical generations old now. This is like arguing "rather than building a new CPU, we should reverse engineer a 4004."
The reason to name Ray Tomlinson is because the set of header fields that we consider the core of an Arpanet/Internet email message originated with him. He, unlike Ayyadurai, was a humble man who freely admitted that there had been many people working on these concepts, and that his contribution by and large was to publish an RFC that laid out those developments at that point in time (1973-75) of what Arpanet email should be or was capable of. In reality, of course, messaging systems predate even the Internet by many years.
Nothing so violent. A judge should hurt his feelings by declaring him a vexatious litigant. That's the appropriate route for those who use (and abuse) the court system for idiotic and abusive lawsuits.
But I think Ayyadurai is in the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" department. Doubtless he's thrilled that his claims are being talked about again.
Except Mann isn't a fraud, and no one in the scientific community actually thinks he is, and why Steyn is being sued is for comparing Mann to Jerry Sandusky. Steyn is a polemicist whose stock and trade is making outrageous statements for the hoards of like-minded who want to believe science is a lie and Muslims are all evil.
His all argument is basically based on semantics. Basically, when he was a teenager, he wrote a program called "EMAIL", and that was the first messaging system called "EMAIL", except that it wasn't, previous systems had been referred to as "e-mail". At any rate, he then asserts that because his system was called "email" and he can't find anyone who called previous systems "email", that not only is he the first to develop a messaging system with that name, but apparently the first to develop a messaging system with those features. It's a semantic wordplay feeding into a conflation fallacy, because the features of his program already existed by 1975-76.
He's a kind of IP troll save that he's bereft of any actual IP. At this point he really is a kook in the classic vein, trying to salvage a reputation he never really had.
Ray Tomlinson invented email if you're going to pick any single person who developed the email system we know today. Ayyadurai developed some dead end email system years after the header formats were developed for Arpanet email. Ayyadurai can try to sue people all he wants but a series of RFCs beginning with RFC 561 in 1973 laid out the Arpanet email system that we still use today (though the transmission protocols have evolved since the mid-70s). That's the most frustrating part of this fruitcake's claims, since one can delve into the RFCs from the early 70s onward and see how the Internet email system evolved as new features and logic were added.
Slashdot Mirror
The last Brexit polls were incredibly close. Again, it seems you misunderstand what statistics represent.
But again, op-ed pieces are all about narrative. They're often a series of stories written by the same columnist. Anyone who takes op-ed pieces that seriously obviously doesn't understand how newspapers function. That's not to say that there aren't informative op-ed pieces, far from it, but they are *opinion*, and inevitably that is where newspapers' ideological leanings will show up, and indeed where they should. By and large, the Guardian's actual journalism is often rather good, and they have one of the best investigative journalism reputations in the English-speaking world. Just don't go to "Comment is Free" to see it.
And that's what bothers me about your whole "narrative" line. In one respect, you're absolutely correct that newspapers and other news media spin narratives. That's what the press has been doing for centuries now. Do you think the press as it existed in the lead up to the American War of Independence didn't have plenty of column spent condemning nasty King George and praising the brave colonies for defying his despotic rule?
As I said, where I will criticize modern media is jumbling up opinion and journalism on the same web page, and CNN is actually worse for that than even Fox News or MSNBC. It almost goes out of its way to confuse readers on what stories are actually news and what pieces are opinion, and I will say that I think there is intent there to trick readers and to push a narrative, but if you open the stories they still make it pretty clear what is opinion and what is actual news reporting. Part of that is simply driven by the need to count clicks, to sell advertising, and the opinion section has been the seller of newspapers for a very long time.
You are aware the Guardian story you reference is a comment piece. Op-ed pieces are fundamentally different than reporting of stories, and in fact, in general, comment pieces are often inflammatory, even absurd, because, guess what, it's often the op-ed section that sells newspapers, and not the news itself.
And there was a point during the election when a landslide Clinton victory seemed likely. But what of it? Papers having been making wrong calls for as long as there have been elections and newspapers. Remember "Dewey defeats Truman"?
The other thing about all of this that bothers me is that people seem to be confused about what constitutes "reporting" and what constitutes "opinion and analysis". Op-ed pieces are renowned for their bias, and in fact that's the whole point. Now it is true that there is a subtler kind of bias elsewhere in a newspaper, but a lot of what people attack and declare "fake news" is often the op-ed and "analysis" pieces, and if I can criticize newspapers for that, it's that I find they often shove some of the op-ed stories on to the main page of their website. I don't think that's an issue of bias so much as it is deliberate click-bait, in that if you punch up your main web page with stories like "Just how big will the Clinton landslide be?" you'll get a lot more hits than more mundane stories reporting the daily grind of a presidential campaign. The latter, even in this last election, can often be pretty fucking boring "Clinton attended a luncheon of the so-and-sos, and had a rally at such and such a place, and the polls shows she's leading by x% in California."
To my mind that's the real problem here, not a bias specifically, at least not political bias, but a constant need to sex everything up. But come on, that's not even new either. Every edition of a newspaper has to have a headline, whether the underlying story deserves it or not. That's the nature of newspapers for over two hundred years now.
Obama flubbing a line and Trump basing public policy based on irrational and emotionally visceral feelings are not the same thing.
I agree that that is difficult, and in fact Sweden is experiencing integration problems (though it still remains one of the safest countries in the world). And if Trump had actually been discussing that problem, then he would have had a strong point. But since he appears to do no research other than to watch news broadcasts and respond viscerally to what he doesn't like, he comes out with idiotic and factually-impaired statements that the White House spin doctors have to try to find some event close enough in time and space to make what he said sound even vaguely plausible.
Except that the polls didn't show either of those things. They showed them as being less likely than a Clinton win.
I'm not the one rushing around trying to find some set of circumstances to match to Trump's statements so he doesn't look like a fantasist.
Yes, I was so greatly angered by the utterances of President Joe Biden.
There has always been a bias in the press. If you think the big press agencies and newspapers now are bad, open up a newspaper from the 18th or 19th centuries.
The best solution isn't to abandon papers like the NYT, which despite any bias, still remains one of the best news gathering organizations in history. The solution is to find multiple sources.
And the anti-Trump bias extended a lot further than allegedly left-leaning press. A lot of Republicans were alarmed by Trump's rise, and remain pretty skeptical even now. Even Fox News, while generally the most pro-Trump of the big news sources, has had its problems with Trump. He is an "atypical" candidate to put it bluntly, and how does one cover such a candidate, when his supporters are willing to overlook, or outright support his more outrageous statements, and yet are so thin-skinned that anyone reporting those statements is accused of bias? How do you report "just the facts" about someone who happily dispenses with facts whenever it pleases him?
Categorization is always to some extent artificial. Are viruses alive? What constitutes a planet? What is a species? All you can do in some cases is accept that there is an inevitable fuzziness, and that a concept can at best explain the majority of cases with the outliers either being categorized in or out of the set depending upon how many attributes are shared.
The definition of a continent has become considerably more complex as we learn more about how the geology of Earth works, and so far as I understand it these days a continent is usually defined as a contiguous section of crust, made up of multiple plates, but that has fairly deep roots into the mantle. The oceans themselves play a somewhat muddier role in all of this, but in general continents are not defined anymore by how much of their surface sits above sea level. Considering that sea level fluctuates a great deal in geological time, you can have situations like the Bering land bridge where two separate continents are in fact joined by a land mass. Similar features can be found with the Ismuths of Panama and Suez. Another good example of a continent that is defined largely by crust and sub-crustal features is Antarctica, which would actually be more of an archipelago if the ice cap were to melt.
The problem here is force fitting a rather 19th century *geography* definition of continent with a modern 21st century *geology* definition of continent.
Thank you for providing an example of how Trump's supporters happily reinterpret his statements so as to at least try to make them jive with reality.
Elections are never a sure thing. Even fivethirtyeight was weighted towards Clinton, but everything has an error margin, and any prediction of something as large and complex as hundreds of millions of voters in what amounts to fifty separate elections, each with its own dynamics, is inevitably going to have a significant margin of error. For chrissakes, even many Republicans expected, and probably hoped Trump would lose (as is evidenced by the chaos now surrounding repealing and replacing Obamacare, as it turns out no Republican in Congress, save perhaps for Rand Paul, ever actually believed they would ever be in a position to replace Obamacare).
"Merely a tool". No, it's not "merely a tool". Insolvency means your broke and the courts basically take you over and you're either restructured, if that's possible, or you're sold for spare parts.
But to say Trump's business ventures fail is to misrepresent what Trump's business is. He may look like a real estate developer, but in reality what he's selling is his name. He licenses "Trump", gets paid up front and if the development goes tits up, well that's irrelevant, and at least until recently, even if the development went into bankruptcy, the debt holders still viewed the Trump name as a significant enough asset to keep the signage up. So in a way, those who claim Trump's businesses have gone bankrupt don't actually understand what it is Trump sells.
So now we've moved the goalposts from "fake news" to "blowing the subject out of proportion". I guess that's what happened with Flynn. It went from "claims that he was chatting with the Russians are fake news" to "the media blew it totally out of proportion" to "he didn't do anything wrong but pissed Pence off."
Nixon's supporters did much the same thing, invoking the same trajectory of "made up" to "not a big deal", and it ended up with him abandoning the Presidency before the inevitable impeachment and removal from office.
They keep reporting what he actually says, as opposed to what he apparently meant to say... or something. The whole "what happened in Sweden" thing is a perfect example of how Trump makes unhinged and false statements, and then his press team and the legions of true believers will reinterpret those statements so, at least in their minds, he doesn't look, well, unhinged and dishonest. "Ah well, he wasn't talking about a specific event, but you know, general problems in Sweden." How is it that a grown man who is such a tremendous dealmaker needs a full-time public relations team to translate his utterances into something vaguely like the truth? And how is that you can condemn the press for reporting those utterances? Isn't that the press's job? But oh no, because the press doesn't do Conway's job for her, they're "pushing a narrative".
This Creationist meme is about forty years old now, and was long ago debunked. But nice trolling.
The Saturn program should have never been abandoned that's for certain, but other aspects of Apollo technology are literally a few technical generations old now. This is like arguing "rather than building a new CPU, we should reverse engineer a 4004."
"We're doing it so the Chinese don't claim the Moon..."
The reason to name Ray Tomlinson is because the set of header fields that we consider the core of an Arpanet/Internet email message originated with him. He, unlike Ayyadurai, was a humble man who freely admitted that there had been many people working on these concepts, and that his contribution by and large was to publish an RFC that laid out those developments at that point in time (1973-75) of what Arpanet email should be or was capable of. In reality, of course, messaging systems predate even the Internet by many years.
Nothing so violent. A judge should hurt his feelings by declaring him a vexatious litigant. That's the appropriate route for those who use (and abuse) the court system for idiotic and abusive lawsuits.
But I think Ayyadurai is in the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" department. Doubtless he's thrilled that his claims are being talked about again.
Cosmo the Cumbucket
Seriously, this sentence seems absurd. I thought "on a computer" was supposed to add orders of a magnitude to a sentence.
Except Mann isn't a fraud, and no one in the scientific community actually thinks he is, and why Steyn is being sued is for comparing Mann to Jerry Sandusky. Steyn is a polemicist whose stock and trade is making outrageous statements for the hoards of like-minded who want to believe science is a lie and Muslims are all evil.
His all argument is basically based on semantics. Basically, when he was a teenager, he wrote a program called "EMAIL", and that was the first messaging system called "EMAIL", except that it wasn't, previous systems had been referred to as "e-mail". At any rate, he then asserts that because his system was called "email" and he can't find anyone who called previous systems "email", that not only is he the first to develop a messaging system with that name, but apparently the first to develop a messaging system with those features. It's a semantic wordplay feeding into a conflation fallacy, because the features of his program already existed by 1975-76.
He's a kind of IP troll save that he's bereft of any actual IP. At this point he really is a kook in the classic vein, trying to salvage a reputation he never really had.
Ray Tomlinson invented email if you're going to pick any single person who developed the email system we know today. Ayyadurai developed some dead end email system years after the header formats were developed for Arpanet email. Ayyadurai can try to sue people all he wants but a series of RFCs beginning with RFC 561 in 1973 laid out the Arpanet email system that we still use today (though the transmission protocols have evolved since the mid-70s). That's the most frustrating part of this fruitcake's claims, since one can delve into the RFCs from the early 70s onward and see how the Internet email system evolved as new features and logic were added.