Our tax dollars at work

Tony Long:

The next time you watch a war movie where a monocle-wearing Nazi says "Ve haff vays of making you talk," realize that his tactics are now endorsed by the U.S. government, which is in court defending the use of evidence gained by torture. Although statements obtained by torture have been inadmissible in American courts for 70 years, the government and the military are arguing that information obtained from foreign enemy combatants subjected to the so-called third degree should be allowed. Military panels reviewing the detention of 550 prisoners at Guantanamo, Cuba, have been accepting evidence gotten by torture to justify holding the men without due process.

Via Kevin Drum:

According to FBI officials, the Bush order approved interrogation tactics that include "sleep deprivation and stress positions," as well as "loud music, interrogators yelling at subjects and prisoners with hoods on their heads."

What's that, you say? This doesn't sound all that horrible? Keep reading:

In a June "Urgent Report" to the FBI director from the Sacramento field office, for example, a supervising special agent described abuses such as "strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings and unauthorized interrogations."

Timothy Burke:

What does one do when one becomes aware that a significant plurality of one's fellow citizens seems to believe that it's right to torture people and pursue an exterminationist or brutalist strategy of conquest?
...
I emerged from 9/11 with a renewed faith and pride in American society, with a sense of my belonging to America and treasuring its achievements and possibilities. I still believe in America, love America, but I increasingly wonder if I am believing in a once and future thing, that in the kingdom of the present, the America I love is lost.

Gladwell on Foote, indirectly

From Sands Hall's Fair Game? - or Fair Use? on the current Footes' anger at Wallace Stegner's having made extensive use (in his novel Angle of Repose) of Nevada County luminary Mary Hallock Foote's letters and life, while turning her into an adulteress for literary purposes:

...it was not the issue of plagiarism that bothered them: it was the fact that Stegner used so much of Mary's life, and then, by the end of the novel, radically changed who she actually was, and distorted the nature of her relationship with her husband. Many people, not just local friends, recognized the Footes' lives in Stegner's novel, and believed that a skeleton had been exhumed from the family closet.

In his Nov. 22 New Yorker article on plagiarism, Malcolm Gladwell recounts a similar case:

Dorothy Lewis says that one of the things that hurt her most about [the play] 'Frozen' was that Agnetha [the character that was, essentially, her] turns out to have had an affair with her collaborator...Lewis feared that people would think she had..."That’s slander...if everything up to that point is true, then the affair becomes true in the mind...If you are going to take the life of somebody, and make them absolutely identifiable, you don’t create an affair, and you certainly don’t have that as a climax of the play."

In constructing a fictional character by taking artistic license with a non-fictional woman's morals, is the author of 'Frozen' plagiarizing Stegner's plagiarism?

BTW, the Wikipedia page on Angle of Repose is just a stub, and needs you to add to it; the page on Mary Hallock Foote is somewhat more extensive, but could also use your help.

Special 'Safer Computing' issue

Added Nov 19:
PC World has good articles, e.g. Privacy Watch, protecting yourself from web sleaze, and the best free software.

Basic security precautions for your computer.

A happy experience installing DSL. Not like mine so far...

Website problems when using Firefox are often not Firefox's fault.

BusinessWeek on Firefox.

I read somewhere today that power users are switching to Firefox in droves.

ZoneLabs' free firewall ZoneAlarm, and the Phishing IQ Test

How to irritate your readers

(note: the intent of this post is to instruct, not to deliver.)

Another "pretend news" story:

...Geberding said the CDC considers the likelihood of a bird flu pandemic to be "very high."

Dr. David R. Johnson, director of scientific and medical affairs at Aventis Pasteur, said that a bird flu pandemic is generally considered "a question of when, not if."

What is "very high"? 50% likelihood within 6 months? 5%? 1%?
Another meteor strike causing mass extinctions on earth is also "a question of when, not if", but hardly something to lie awake nights worrying about. When the "when" is "when you've been dead for millions of years", it does cut down on the perceived urgency.

Quantitative ballpark figures would have rescued this part of the story from the "cognitive allergen" dustbin - as it is, it's written to impart emotions, not information, and cranky readers find this frustrating.

BTW, there are far more newsworthy topics to blog about - for example the Vote rigging affidavit (doubts) (or not; Wired takes note)
, presaged by Britt Blaser's Secreted Ballots and a War Story.

Perspectives

Bringing the chickens of "Don't talk while I'm interrupting" home to roost:

One man's "vicious political diatribe"* is another's "biting criticism"*.

You believe that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, but I fear you're stooping to his level.

Is it "money laundering", or "an evolution of campaign finance"? *


Nonlocal, but in the same vein:

Isn't there a quote to the effect that "no man is a monster in his own heart"? what is it?

What [x] calls "gaming the system", others call "optimizing your site"*.

and

Party ticket peddlers handed voters preprinted tickets to place in the ballot box before stepping over to the tavern for a few dollars' reward from the party. We now call this corruption. At the time, it was called loyalty.*

Wayne, I still owe you an email...

Nevada County Citizens for Responsible Journalism

The website is up, and very nicely done. Go explore it, lots of excellent stuff there on what The Union could be, vs. what it is now.

But here at NCFocus our glasses are habitually half empty (as is the cranium behind them), and we are not a team player, so a couple of critiques:

Not addressed(?): the structural bias produced when the editorial page features only two regular local columnists (publisher and editor), one of whom forcefully pushes a right-wing agenda, the other of whom reflexively avoids politics altogether. The problem has been pointed out; the apolitical editor has defended his stance, but without acknowledging that an imbalance exists which a fair newspaper would take action to rectify.

The NCCRJ website currently shows a single-minded focus on replacing The Union's publisher, and thus has a bit of a "publisher is spawn of satan" tone to it. While it's true that he's extreme, your correspondent believes the pro-development, anti-citizen-empowerment bias of the paper is structural, and thus would continue - more subtly, but still effectively - if he were replaced. Perhaps it's better to keep the devil you know...

short

Dec. 2, Added more links.

30 seconds in the life of Corporal Yeager (grandson of Chuck), in Fallujah. A very brave man.

Other perspectives on Fallujah here and here.

The poor Greeley Tribune is plagued by an Anna of its own. What is with these people? (we are like locusts)

Greeley Trib editor Chris Cobler's blog has featured a guest journalist reporting from the Ukraine on the "Orange Revolution" there; here's an interesting piece on the backstory.

Correspondent Veronica Khokhlova, blogging from the Ukraine. (mentioned here)

Special "a plague on both our houses" issue

We may be on the verge of decimation.
(Full disclosure: cried wolf about SARS too)

The bad news:
Bird flu could kill up to 50 million people, claims WHO (or 100 million, depending on who you read)

The helpful advice, worth every penny you paid for it:

• Sell your house, restaurant, cafe last month; use the money to start a business making fashion face masks and hand sanitizer gel in cheerful colors.
  
  
• Give away your pet ducks, which "display no symptoms of the disease but shed huge amounts of the virus in their faeces"...
  
  
• Persuade the unwell around you to avail themselves of oral saline spray:
  ...roughly half the population - 6 of 11 individuals in their study - may produce more than 98 percent of all potentially pathogenic bioaerosols.
  
  The researchers found that a six-minute inhalation of aerosolized salt-water solution, often used in the treatment of asthma, can markedly reduce the number of bioaerosol particles exhaled by these "high-producers" for up to six hours.
  
  
• Hide your nose in a book - fiction (The Last Flight of Dr. Ain) or not (A Journal of the Plague Year (1665) ).
  
  
• From the latter, a recommendation that you air your stuff:
  ORDERS CONCERNING INFECTED HOUSES AND PERSONS SICK OF THE PLAGUE
  

  • Airing the Stuff.
    'For sequestration of the goods and stuff of the infection, their bedding and apparel and hangings of chambers must be well aired with fire and such perfumes as are requisite within the infected house before they be taken again to use.'

A general complaint about "doom is on its way" stories: Why don't reporters ask the 'experts' to provide their best-guess probabilities too, to wring the maximum information content from them (along the same lines as the floated-but-discarded Terrorism Futures market)? If the goal is to inform the public, why not inform said public of the likelihood of doom and not just its worst-case scenario? Admittedly, experts might not be too keen on this idea since they don't want to look like fools when they inevitably get it wrong, but perhaps a number of them could be polled and a summary result provided?

Added Dec. 2:
Reassuring words from Tyler Cowan on our upcoming economic doom; rather less reassuring words to the effect that India, China and Russia are on the brink of AIDS epidemics to parallel those in Africa.

Left and right

Dec. 2: I've linked to these before, but they're must-reads in this context:
Britt Blaser on conformity enforcers vs diversity enhancers, and Ed Cone's Don't Talk While I'm Interrupting.

most of the following links are old, in fact they might already be stale.

Dec. 1, Added stereotypical hors d'ouvres:

Deliberately exploiting and furthering defamatory...stereotypes is racism...
The racism isn't in printing the images or reporting the facts, it's in the deliberate use of them to promote racial stereotypes.
...consider this ad: "A new scientific study proves that []s get rich faster than any other group. (Picture of rich []ish family)"
"Visit our website and donate money to overcome America's wealth inequality. (Picture of poor [] family)"
Completely factual -- and completely racist. Any editor who printed this sort of ad wouldn't deserve to keep his job.
(here)

If it's not ok to make group-level generalizations (even if factually accurate) based on sex, religion or race, what about based on culture? socioeconomic status? political orientation? (no answers here, just questions)
vs. Debra Dickerson:

One reason for bigotry's maddening intractability is that a determination-however knee-jerk, superficial, or unthinkingly made-that something or someone is racist ends the discussion.

(bringing this to mind)

with the above moral confusion firmly established, here's the main course:

A comment illuminating how left and right don't play by the same rules:

Do we cut Rush [with his drug problems] more slack than we would cut Al Franken? You bet. Because Rush is one of ours. He is our leader, our hero, our champion. We take care of our wounded first. Only afterwards do we worry about the enemy wounded, if we worry about them at all. *

Once at a child's birthday party, the very smart (teaches at a NY area medical school, for what it's worth) rather non-political father of one of the part-goers asked me why people were willing to put up with obvious lies and equally obvious bad policy choices, even cheering the perpetrators on. Half seriously, I told him that an awful lot of people seem to view politics as a team sport. No matter what else may happen, you want your team to win. If the game is lopsided, it is a good bit less exciting, and it is annoying to see your guys breaking the rules over and over, but still, it is the final score that matters most. *

[Research shows that] conservative editorial pages are far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than liberal pages are willing to take issue with a Democratic administration *

...even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies. *

Seen somewhere recently -

We are what we fear in others.

Conservatives have more nightmares.

There's an interesting pattern going on. When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?" *

From a characteristic reaction to research on personality correlates of political orientation:

I'm sorry. I really wanted to say something incredibly clever about how dumb I think a new study from Berkeley is....what is it about this that makes me think of bovine flatulence? Well, everything. Scientists spend millions of taxpayer dollars...Whatever their reasons, they think it's important work

I tend to be basically conservative in my philosophy and my politics. This is not due to any strict religious beliefs. It is just a pragmatic viewpoint. Traditional values have stood the test of time. A culture based upon them works. ................. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. *

In discussions with conservatives...I always come away with the same nagging sense that I'm attempting to reason them away from a deep-seated gut feeling. This accounts both for their self-described moral "clarity" and their immense defensiveness and paranoia. They don't "believe" conservative "philosophy"--they are conservatives. It is viscera you attack when you argue with them, it is their very identity, and they react accordingly.
...
But here's the rub: the fact that these positions are rooted in aesthetic preference makes them stronger, not weaker, in today's media culture. Liberals persist in clinging to reasons and rationales...What's happening is a competion of symbols, of myths... *

Words

The Union's editor is correct that the term "bully pulpit" has been misused recently, but the misusers have plenty of company.

Listening to the copy editors:

Officious and bemused don't mean what you think. And convince and persuade aren't interchangeable.

A colleague asks why the word abbreviation is so long and phonetic isn't spelt with an f. *

"We know it's wrong, but it's consistent with what we've written before. If we change now, readers will be confused and we'll look bad." *

...remember, if you want to make them look good, paraphrase most of it; if you want them to look like a complete idiot, quote verbatim.*

Book quotes

Nov 28: added a few more

• The Elements of Editing
  by Arthur Plotnick
  
  p. 31:
  
  [addressing a class of writers]
  Communication...is your reason for being - not nourishment of ego, not praise of colleagues, not money, not love of generations to come. You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you -
  And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
• Stalking the Feature Story
  by William Ruehlmann
  
  p. 73:
  
  Writers who recount events sometimes need reminding that they are historians, not autobiographers.
  p. 121:
  
  Remember: writing an effective story is like facing a mean drunk twice your size. You'd better get in the first punch, and it had better be a damned good one...
  
  
• The Craft of Interviewing
  by John Brady
  
  p. 89:
  
  If [the interviewer] fails to ask tough questions when he must, then he is risking the fate of many smalltown journalists who serve as news clerks rather than as newsmen.
  p. 119:
  
  "what do I think about beauty pageants?" Clark said. "I think they're ************. And besides, ************************."
  
  Startled, I said, "But you're the master of ceremonies."
  
  "**********," Clark explained. ... "Of course, everything I say is off the record."
  
  "Of course", I said.
  p.195:
  
  [on "jugular journalism"]
  But there have been slip-ups, too, in some reporters' search for wrongdoing. Rush jobs. "the point is to make your case, says Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register. "Getting evidence that's admissible in court is what it's all about...every time you neglect that, you cut into your credibility."...
  Motto: Verify before you vilify.
  p. 200:
  
  We speak in fits; we plague our sentences with grade-school interjections, grammatical wreckage, aborted half-thoughts. To commit a man's inconstant speech to permanent print without allowing him to tidy up his syntax is cruel punishment; it is like shoving him before the TV cameras before he can get out of his pajamas.
  p. 208:
  
  The following interview [by Smith, in dressing room of a beaten boxer] ensued:
  
  [Q:] "Did he hit you hard?"
  "Holy Jesus!"
  
  [Q:] "Do you want to fight him again?"
  "Holy Jesus!"
  
  [Q:] "Do you think you could lick him if you fought him again?"
  "Holy Jesus!"
  
  [Q:] "Does your head hurt?"
  "Holy Jesus!"
  
  [Q:] "Do you think Baer can lick Schmeling?"
  "Holy Jesus!"
  
  ..."I was well satisfied," reflected Smith. "It was one of the most revealing interviews I had ever had. I was quite astonished, however, to read [other reports]...One of them quoted Carnera as having said:
  
  "Max's blows were very hard. He hurt me several times - I'll have to admit that. But I sincerely believe that I could defeat him and I would like to have another chance. I want to regain the championship."
  
  
  p. 213:
  
  "[Logan Pearsall Smith?] once said that the true test of a person's love for his vocation was his capacity to tolerate the drudgery it involved."
  
  
• The Reader over Your Shoulder (a handbook for writers of english prose)
  2nd ed., by Graves and Hodge
  
  p. 151:
  
  ...the worst is that the reader feels himself written at, not written for
  
  
• The Writer's Guide to Conducting Interviews
  by Michael Schumacher
  
  p. 85:
  
  Archival interviews and oral histories are unique because they are intended to be lasting statements. Newspaper and magazine articles have limited shelf lives, but archival interviews and oral histories are intended to be "position statements" that could last for many years. Under these circumstances, and interviewee may rightfully expect to see the words as exact as he or she intends them to be.
  
  related:
  ...as [Jay] Rosen noted parenthetically, "What bloggers call their archive, newspaper journalists call the morgue." This continuity and forced memory is something traditional journalists avoid. As we always said at the newspaper, "No matter how bad we screw things up tonight, we start with a blank slate tomorrow."
  not any more.

The Union's website - what's changed, what hasn't

Improvements:

The Search page is no longer silently defective; it now warns that it has problems.

Thanks for adding the alert, which should help to prevent misunderstandings like the one in this election letter:

Who would you prefer as a representative to plead our cause...A councilor who has certified skills in dealing with people, or an officer who refers to his opponents as "leftist and left-leaning functionaries," and "braying asses?"

I realize these quotes are taken out of context. I would refer you to The Union's Web archives for the context, but Nate's Other Voices articles have been removed. I asked why, but received no reply.

The articles hadn't been removed (they're here and here ) but when a search no longer brings them up, it's reasonable to assume they're gone, particularly if no one explains otherwise.

The North Star House Series page now contains links to the more recently published articles. Content of articles is still not obvious from perusing the page, but apparently that's a limitation of the software:

> The "crowd defends land trust" article is still not linked to from
> the "North Star House Controversy" webpage, on The Union's website.
> Is this an oversight? if so, when will the link be added, and will it
> be clear from the "blurb" that no wrongdoing was found?

The North Star page just hadn't been updated with some of the more recent
stories. I added them today. The "blurb" is generated by the content
management system. It uses the first paragraph or a limit of characters,
depending on which it reaches first.

------------

Still true:

The "search by date" functionality still doesn't bring up "election letters", contrary to the editor's stated intent.

The "election letters" classification still includes letters that simply contained the word "elections", even when the thrust of the letter was entirely different.

You be the judge

The photos:



The letter to the editor:

...[The photo] makes the one look cool, calm, determined, and, with only one hand in the air, decisive, while making the other look, with two hands in the air, unsure. The only thing worse than such a silly journalistic prank is just how opposite the truth really is...

The editor:

We had a chuckle in The Union's newsroom last week over the reader who looked at the photos...and saw an anti-Democrat conspiracy.

President George Bush was gesturing with one hand, which according to the letter writer signaled calmness and determination, while Senator John Kerry had palms up - obviously a journalistic prank, said the reader, to make him look like a flip-flopper.

Our chuckle was for several reasons...[it's against our principles]; [it's silly to think that we look for the exact perfect worst image, we're too busy]...ridiculous...[besides, we get the same comments from the right]... maybe it's just that folks read their own bias into photos or stories, but cannot recognize it...

Related commentary:

Mark A.R. Kleiman:

A newspaper photograph of a political figure is less an image of the politician than it is of the editor's political prejudices.

Dan Okrent:

Unquestionably, individual articles, headlines or photographs do cast one or another candidate in a colored light, either rosy or dark. Headlines are especially toxic because of their reductive nature.

and

I don't buy the argument...that because charges of bias come from both liberals and conservatives, the paper must therefore be doing things right. This makes as much sense as saying that a man with one foot on a block of ice and the other on a bed of hot coals must feel just fine.

but

passion is a distorting lens that makes it hard to perceive the shape of things...A Bush-hater will see a front-page picture of the confident president greeting enthusiastic crowds and shout "Bias!" much more quickly than he will remember the nearly identical photo of Kerry that ran the day before.

and:

One famous psych study c 1951 showed students and Alum of Princeton and Dartmouth a film of a controversial game between P & D. It was a vicious game, lots of penalties. The loyalty of the viewers resulted in what can only be described as perceptions of a different game by Princeton fans and Dartmouth fans although they all saw identical footage.

updates

Added some info to the "What's been going on with local politics" Nov 15 post.

In Nov 12 post, added link to Eric Engles's 300-word Other Voices column.

And - one large kudo to whoever came up with the headline for this story

Quotes

Scott Rosenburg's extensive and excellent collection of quotes relevant to weblogs and journalism - example:

What's changed is the involuntary outsourcing of fact-gathering and -checking to a growing assortment of amateurs and professionals who are largely external to the profession. What we need isn't competition between blogs and mainstream news outlets, but a working symbiosis between the two....
-- Doc Searls

Research on trust:

Researchers found that people who are wronged in a business transaction may be more likely to say they would reconcile if the offender offers a sincere apology - particularly if the offender takes personal blame for the misdeed...a willingness to take blame and offer amends can have a positive effect, and may be necessary to help repair a loss of trust in a business relationship.

From Kevin Drum *:

Generally speaking, conservatives believe that our biggest danger comes from rogue states, those who support international terrorism. Thus the "axis of evil" and the obsession with Saddam Hussein.

Liberal analysts, by contrast, tend to believe that the bigger danger comes from failed states, those that are so chaotic that non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaeda can flourish simply because there's nobody around to keep them under control. Afghanistan and Sudan in the late 90s are good examples.

And, from his excellent post on red-state-blue-state patterns of crime and culture:

You can define ["Blue state" culture] in a variety of ways. I'd say it's based in modernity and tolerance. But once you see it in that light, is it simply a matter of the Blue States having an attitude of condescension toward the Red ones? The country has become sufficiently divided that there is a good deal of mistrust and animosity on both sides. And I think it is fair to say that that ill-will on the part of the Blue state America does sometimes express itself as condescension.

But the bad feeling of Red State America toward the Blue is just as often expressed as contempt, moral denunciation or simple rage. To the extent that one hears Blue Staters dissing Red Staters as holy-rolling trailer park denizens, the Red staters routinely portray their fellow countrymen as corrupt, deviant, rootless perverts who express their flipflopper-dom by oscillating between being limp-wristed whiners on the one hand and signing up to work for Osama bin Laden as terrorist fifth-columnists on the other.