- Seems cops and the U.S. Justice (sic) Department will go to amazing lengths to hide their newest tracking methods from us.
- A must-read for philosophical Libertopians: “Welcome to the Arena in the Clouds” by Max Borders.
- Guerrilla civic improvement. (H/T AG)
- It takes 13,000 words for the Columbia Journalism Review to say it and those words are thoughtful and worth reading. But bottom line: in their zeal to confirm an agenda, Rolling Stone’s staffers chose to mistake the behavior of a manipulative liar for the behavior of a poor, traumatized victim. (To their credit, RS and writer Sabrina Erdely cooperated fully in the exposure of their own screwups.)
- The poor, discredited brontosaurus is back.
- And here’s your feelgood story for the day: young wife refuses to pull the plug on her brain-injured young husband. And he eventually walks out of rehab on his own two feet.
So very glad for the young couple. Doctors and scientists have a long way to go understanding the workings of the brain, and brain injury is one of the most complex and poorly understood areas they study. I’ve worked with a good many people in various coma states, as well as inducing “conscious sedation” along the way in my nursing. Each person responds in a unique manner, and that response is tied to many of the other physical and emotional/mental realities involved. This young lady was a moving and very necessary part of those related conditions. He would very likely never have recovered without her. May they live long and prosper.
Love that Max Borders piece. Beautifully addresses a pet bugaboo of mine. Thanks!
Power outages in DC, somebody has a sense of humor: http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/04/07/white-house-state-department-lose-power-due-to-scattered-outages/
Even better joke if aliens beamed the entire city into space. But I suppose that would be too much to ask for.
Loved the Snowden bust. They should market mini versions; I’d buy one.
Somehow it seems fitting, Claire, that I would initially miss your reference to the Max Borders piece, instead see Joel’s excellent highlight, and then notice that he originally got it from you.
Such a nicely done piece. The “argument in the clouds” idea is so often done with a dismissive, sneering tone, and this…isn’t.
(To append the previous comment) It is precisely the “beyond purity” aspect of your observations that makes them so useful. Again, it seems fitting that it would have been you and Joel as the vehicle by which I’d run across that particular story in the first place. 🙂
Followup on Snowden bust: Guerrilla Snowden sculpture removed from park, replaced by hologram.
In election news (YUCK!), at least Rand Paul is having some fun.
But bottom line: in their zeal to confirm an agenda, Rolling Stone’s staffers chose to mistake the behavior of a manipulative liar for the behavior of a poor, traumatized victim.
Well, not quite. It wouldn’t have mattered which the source was if they had contacted anybody else who was involved.
My wife has been an award-winning reporter for three decades. If Jesus Christ walked into her office flanked by angels and gave her the Word From On High she would check the facts with an independent source and try to get Satan’s side of the issue before the story went in the paper.
I’m her consultant on matters military and shooting related. We’ve ben married nigh on 46 years, but whenever I answer one of her questions I point her to a source, because if it’s anything the least open to interpretation she’ll go check.
RS’s problem was that the story was To Good To Fail.
LarryA — Oh, I definitely agree on RS’s utter failure to check key sources. The three friends. The guy she claimed led the rape, etc. But they based that on their conviction that “Jackie” was a) so traumatized that any real investigation would “damage” her and b) a rape victim and rape victims never, ever lie about what happened to them.
I agree with you 100% that a good investigative reporter would even subject Jesus Christ to hard scrutiny (and even scrutinize more the more unusual his claims became (e.g. Jackie’s claim to be lying on broken glass during the rape)). I agree the RS reporter and her editors were wildly remiss for not doing that. They were gulled. Had. They deserved the public scorn they brought on themselves (and the lawsuits to come).
I think that your “Too Good to Fail” and my gulled by a manipulator because she fed right into their agenda are really the same thing, just different ways of looking at it. “Too Good to Fail” is a great way to put it.
How does a “Stingray device” differ from a cell phone, I wonder?
That clouds article got me looking here at this older article, about “the adjacent possible”. An excellent idea!
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838
BTW I think that is the group in Nike my wife is working with at the moment.
Love that Snowden bust, and that it got there “illegally”. How fitting!
I have to laugh at all the angst over that Rolling Stone story about a fake campus rape – as if the old media does not continually peddle lie after lie in the service of the State. Yeah, get yourself some more factoid checkers, guys. That’ll help.
I notice ordinary peons are not able to comment on that article. Par for the course…
It’s not just that the Rolling Stone story was “too good to fail” (that’s certainly true), but that the reporter wanted it to be true. She was actively looking for a campus rape story to write about, because she wanted to jump on the bandwagon of the spurious “culture of rape” on big campuses meme and the supposed callous disregard of their administrations. So it’s really classic confirmation bias.
And while the CJR report is admirably detailed in cataloging RS’s reportorial failures, it too is unduly solicitous of “Jackie”. Admittedly the report is about journalistic failure, but nowhere does it even mention that Jackie’s story was fabricated from whole cloth. A pathological liar who does so much damage to the university, the fraternity and its members does not deserve such kid-glove treatment.
Jed, nice addition about the Snowden hologram. I am really glad that his story of massive government perfidy isn’t dying out. John Oliver’s interview with him last Sunday is helping with that, too. (If you didn’t see it, the whole show is here: https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M.) We need to keep pushing this up in the public consciousness.
their conviction that “Jackie” was a) so traumatized that any real investigation would “damage” her
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were concerned about her traumatization (IOW they were human) but the way the story was recounted in the apology think they were more concerned she would break off communication and they would lose the story. She played that for all it was worth.
I wasn’t there, so what I know about “Jackie” is what was in the paper. Even so there were more red flags than May Day at the Kremlin.
Another side story was the pile-on, University administration et al who also made no attempt to get both sides before imposing sanctions. As Paul notes, these days “in the paper” is a long way from “must be true.”
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150409/06072330598/baltimore-pd-has-deployed-stingray-devices-over-4300-times-instructed-fbi-to-withhold-info-courts.shtml