Get It Now, Get It First, Get It Wrong, Redux

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One of the most aggravating features of our multi-network, Twitter-driven, twenty-four-hour news cycle is something that invariably happens in the wake of a horrible event like last week’s bombing at the Boston Marathon: driven to get something, anything, out there, the cable news channels, the airwaves, and the Twitterverse became veritable fountains of misinformation. Apparently, the old journalistic principle that you didn’t go live with something unless you’d verified it with at least two sources is as dead as Walter Cronkite. Now what they report on is what’s been “reported,” whether or not said “report” is actually true or even from a credible source. Hey, they’re not lying. All they’re saying is that someone else said it. Such is the sorry state of “journalism” today. 

So in the aftermath of the carnage, unsubstantiated rumors and gossip became “reports”, which were breathlessly passed on but which quickly became discarded as new and more lurid rumors took center stage. The device was a pipe bomb. There were two other devices found that hadn’t exploded. No, three. Twelve people were dead, among them an eight year old girl who’d come to see her Daddy run the marathon. A Saudi national had been arrested running from the scene. And, of course, before the echoes of the blasts had died down and the wounded were still bleeding in the streets of Boston, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of the online nuthouse Infowars were proclaiming that the whole thing was a government conspiracy. (When an Infowars “reporter” asked if the bombing was a “false flag operation to take away our civil liberties,” Governor Deval Patrick’s three-word response was a lesson in how to handle stupid questions: “No. Next question.”)

The wave of BS reached a crescendo on Wednesday when CNN said there were “reports” that a suspect had been identified. Then there were “reports” that there was a suspect in custody. Then there were “reports” that there wasn’t. Finally, the Boston FBI office released a statement refuting the story: “Contrary to widespread reporting, no arrest has been made in connection with the Boston Marathon attack.” Once can almost hear the exasperation as the release goes on to say: “Over the past day and a half, there have been a number of press reports based on information from unofficial sources that has been inaccurate. Since these stories often have unintended consequences, we ask the media, particularly at this early stage of the investigation, to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.” 

Yeah, good luck with that. 

The part about “unintended consequences” brings to mind one of the most pernicious effects of misinformation: if you say one thing today, and say something different tomorrow, there are thousands of the above-mentioned conspiracy theorists out there who’ll insist that the correction was not an attempt to set the record straight, but is part of a cover-up. For example, after the Newtown massacre, one incorrect MSNBC report that killer Adam Lanza (originally misidentified as his brother Ryan) had left his Bushmaster semi-automatic mass murder weapon in his car is still being seized on to this day by callous gun nuts to “prove” that the government is lying about assault weapons to promote the “gun control agenda.” Of course, these are the same people who won’t believe anything else ever reported on MSNBC, but you can’t expect consistency from crazy people. 

Sure enough, as soon as it was revealed that the “Saudi national” who was supposedly taken into custody was being questioned as a witness, not a suspect, commenters at the right wing website “the Blaze” were proclaiming that the President was “protecting his Muslim brothers.” 

I know we can’t forbid news organizations from spreading misinformation (darn that pesky First Amendment!). But there ought to be some kind of required warning label on all the crap the news media spreads in the immediate aftermath of a horrible crisis. Something like a disclaimer in the ubiquitous “crawl” running across the bottom of the screen: “Warning: thanks to the near-total erosion of journalistic standards, the so-called ‘information’ you are receiving in this broadcast may be based on rumor, half-truth, prejudice, completely unfounded speculation, or the person on-screen just pulling allegations out of their rear end because they have nothing solid to report but don’t want to just stand there looking like a goober.” If we’re going to be so consistently misinformed by our media, we should at least be informed of that fact.

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage.

Giving a Voice to The Voiceless...Republicans?

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"Psst!" The voice came from a dark alley down a side street. If the voice hadn't sounded like someone I knew, I would have quickened my pace and walked on. But I stopped.
 
"What's going on, dude?" I asked the familiar figure in the shadows.

"Have you heard the latest?" he said, his voice glum.

"Can you be a little more specific?" I said.

"It's the General Assembly," he said.

"Oh, Lord," I sighed. "What have they done now?"

"Where do I start?" he said. "They've decided to monkey around with the state's divorce laws and require couples to wait two years instead of one to get a divorce. And they have to get hours of counseling in the meantime."

"Oh," I said, "I can't think of any way THAT could possibly go wrong. And don't tell me - let me guess. Whoever came up with this bill hasn't provided any way all this counseling's going to get paid for."

"Of course not," he said. "You and I both know it's going to be a disaster. Having the state keep couples together who don't want to be is just asking for more domestic violence. Not to mention the fact that it's more government intrusion in people's lives. We're supposed to be the party that's against that." He shook his head. "Every time we get in and have a chance to do some real good," he said, "we go and pull something like this."

"Hey, that's right," I said. "Aren't YOU a Republican?"

"Shhhh!" he said frantically. "They can't know!"

I was going to ask who, but I knew. "Don't worry," I said resignedly. "Your secret is safe with me."

OK, it didn't happen in a dark alley, but his dramatization is a reflection of actual conversations I've had in the past few weeks with at least three Republican friends (yes, I do have them) who are aghast at what our new GOP overlords are doing, but who, for one reason or another, don't feel like they can go against the current Republican Jihad.

It's not just the cockeyed proposal for the government to force divorcing couples to stay together when they've decided to part. It's nonsense like the attempt to suppress votes among college students by denying their parents the state tax deduction if the kids vote where they're going to school.

That's right: The people who supposedly are against any and all tax increases are perfectly willing to raise yours if your college-age children vote where they live the majority of the year. Note that it doesn't matter how much actual support you provide them; their status as dependents is entirely determined by where they vote. Yes, they can vote absentee, but why should they have to?

What problem is solved by this, other than the pesky problem for the Republicans that college students tend to vote Democratic, and if you make it more inconvenient for them, the Democrats may lose some votes in the next close election?

It seems to me that the Republicans spend a lot of time and energy, not on the economy or job creation, but on trying to make it more difficult for traditionally Democratic-leaning groups to vote. Makes you wonder just how confident they really are about their ideas, if they have to try and rig the election to win.

Or how about the bill introduced in the General Assembly to make any "public servant" who attempts to enforce a federal gun law guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor? Or the one attempting to exempt North Carolina from the First Amendment by establishing an official state religion?

Another frustrated Republican friend asked me, when we were discussing the above, "What the heck does this have to do with jobs or the economy? How is this going to make this state more of a draw for business?"

It's the classic GOP bait-and-switch: They say they're about growing the economy, easing regulation, creating jobs, etc. You know, the "doing real good" that my Republican friend mentioned. But as soon as they get in, it's all about the radical right-wing social and theocratic agenda.

And now, it's not just liberal democrats feeling as if N.C. voters have been hoodwinked. And yet, for one reason or another, the people I call the "sane Republicans" feel like they can't speak up. In fact, one of them was the one who suggested that I write a column on this subject - so long as I didn't use his name.
Well, giving a voice to the voiceless is part of my mission in life. I just never thought the "voiceless" would include members of the ruling party.

April Fool's Day Can't Keep Up

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This past Monday, as you know, was April Fool's  Day. And, as always, jokers and pranksters everywhere tried to pull the wool over the eyes of their fellow citizens with straight-faced claims of outrageous events and plans.

In the age of the Internet, April Fools' jokes seem to have gotten bigger and more elaborate, certainly more widespread.

The message service Twitter, for example, announced that from now on, users would be subjected to a two-tiered system: You could pay $5 a month for the currently full level of functionality, or you could keep using Twitter for free - but you wouldn't have access to vowels, so yr twts wld lk lk ths.

Google claimed to be introducing "Google Nose," which would allow users to search for smells online. Lindsay Lohan announced that she was pregnant. Alas, this last joke fell rather flat, because (a) it's too plausible; and (b) no one really cares about Lindsay Lohan anymore.

As I've said before, however, one of the hardest things about spoofs, satire and cons in this modern world is keeping ahead of a reality that's becoming increasingly more bizarre. Some stories that you could swear were pranks turned out to be true.

So, just for fun, see which of the following stories from last week were true, and which ones were April Fools' jokes:

- NASA announced plans for a mission that would send a robotic spacecraft into deep space to capture an asteroid and tow it to the moon, where it could be more easily studied and, possibly, mined for raw material. The asteroid would be trapped inside a giant bag deployed from the spacecraft and towed back to lunar orbit.

- Airline Samoa Air announced that it was going to start pricing tickets by the weight of the passenger and their luggage. "The rates range from $1 a kilogram (or about $2.20 per pound) for the weight of the traveler and their baggage - on the airline's shortest domestic route to about $4.16 per kilogram (or about $9.17 per pound) for travel from Samoa to the neighboring nation of American Samoa," according to a story in Time magazine.

- A Turkish Muslim group claimed victory after iconic Danish toymaker Lego announced that it was withdrawing one of its playsets depicting Jabba the Hutt's palace from the "Star Wars" movies, after complaints from the group.

The Turkish Cultural Association claimed that the palace itself closely resembled the Hagia Sofia Mosque in Istanbul. Further, they said, the figure of the galactic underworld kingpin Jabba was shown as a "terrorist who likes to smoke hookah and have his victims killed," and the playset was thus insulting to Muslims.

Lego originally insisted that it was only "following the film," but announced this week that it would discontinue the product as of 2014.

- A professor at the University of Rochester in New York who described himself as a "hard-core libertarian" caused a stir when he published an online essay proposing that it shouldn't be illegal to have sex with people who are unconscious, "in a way that causes no direct physical harm - no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission."

The professor went on to ask, "As long as I'm safely unconscious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why shouldn't the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits?"

- Two North Carolina lawmakers introduced a resolution in the General Assembly last week calling for North Carolina to declare itself exempt from the "no establishment of religion" clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
If passed, the resolution would state that "the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion." Further, the resolution states, North Carolina would "not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the state of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the state from making laws respecting an establishment of religion."

Give up? All of the above stories are real.

Truth: It's not only stranger than fiction, it's also more foolish.

COVER STORIES

 Blogging today about the evolution of my latest cover over at the Thalia Press Authors Co-Op Blog.

Are Google And Sweden Going to War?

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Sweden. Pearl of Scandinavia. It's one of the richest countries in the EU, also known for its beautiful women, excellent meatballs, and a liquor called aquavit that'll strip the enamel right off your teeth.

The Swedes are, by all accounts, a nice people, a peaceful people, at least since the early 1800s. But now, it seems, the Swedes are threatening an epic tussle with the American Internet company Google. The point of contention? A single word.

We all know how big a player Google is when it comes to the Internet. The search engine that gave the company its name has become the default term for "looking something up on the Internet." ("Wait, let me Google that.") In addition to its mighty search engine, Google's Android operating system runs more than 32.9 million smartphones and tablets, making it the leading platform for mobile devices. 

Yes, Google bestrides the Internet like a colossus. So when the Swedish Language Council's end of the year list of "new words" in the Swedish language included the word ogooglebar, meaning a word that can't be looked up on Google, the California company got tough.

First, a bit of background. It seems that Swedes are mighty fond of coining new words, words that take a few syllables to sum up concepts that other, clumsier tongues like our own require whole phrases to describe.

Take, for instance, the word livslogga. The word literally means "life logging," and it describes the annoying habit of "continually documenting one's life in pictures," according to the online Swedish-American journal "The Local." A Swede, for instance, might say, "My friends are always livlsogga. It's driving me crazy," except he'd, you know, probably say the whole sentence in Swedish.

Other new Swedish words include nomofob, which describes someone pathologically afraid of being separated from his or her cellphone, and fulparkerare ("ugly parker"), which describes those who park their vehicle in particularly inept or inconsiderate ways.

Enter the Swedish Language Council, which Wikipedia describes as "the primary regulatory body for the advancement and cultivation of the Swedish language." Every year, the council publishes its list of new words being officially "admitted" into Swedish. But when it approved ogooglebar, the people at Google apparently felt as if their trademark was being encroached upon. It appears they sent the council one of those dreaded Stern Letters, the generation of which appears to be a primary function of trademark lawyers.They "wanted the council to specify that the word's definition only covered searches performed using Google, and not searches involving other search engines," according to The Local.

This may seem silly, but such is trademark law. One of its quirky principles states that if you don't vigorously defend your right to exclusive use of a trademark, you lose it.

The council backed down without a fight. It announced that it was going to take the word off the list entirely, with only a weak statement expressing "displeasure with Google's attempts to control the language."

But then the Swedish people found out about it. As is true with most very nice people, when the Swedes finally decide to get their back up, it gets way up. Swedish social media exploded in a storm of invectives, including lots of vowels with those little dots and circles over them.

The Swedish Academy, the people who award the Nobel Prize for Literature and, as it happens, publish the official national dictionary, entered the fray by announcing that Google had "shot itself in the foot" and that they might very well decide to put the word into the next edition of the dictionary. "Then let Google roll out its cannons," said permanent secretary Peter Englund of the Academy, "because we have cannons too."

OMG, as the kids on the Internet say. Did the Swedish Academy just throw down the gauntlet? Will this blow up into the next major international crisis? Are Swedish commandos readying a lightning strike on Google's Mountain View, Colo., headquarters? Will Google attempt to pressure the plucky Swedes by cutting off access in that country - rendering, I suppose, everything ogooglebar for them?

And, I have to ask, why isn't Secretary of State John Kerry on this? Do we really have enough strategic meatball reserves to withstand a Swedish embargo? It's a scandal. A scandal, I say! It calls for a couple of hundred hours of congressional hearings, at the very least.

It's too bad the liberal press is so far in the pocket of the Obama administration, or this coverup would be exposed. It's time for the right-wing blogosphere to step up and do its part in exposing Ogooglebar-Gate.

The Closed Loop of Ignorance: A Case Study In Wingnuttery

Actual online exchange I observed today: 

Commenter #1: "Lower gun violence= no gun free zones"

Commenter #2: " I'd sure like to see proof that getting rid of gun-free zones reduces crime. Give it your best shot."

Commenter #1: "heck I'd love to be able to prove that theory of mine about gun free zones. But the liberal media and the liberals in D.C. will never let that happen."

So the fact that there is no evidence is evidence of the conspiracy to suppress the "facts" that you have no evidence for. 

Right. Got it.

Let’s examine this exchange because it illustrates so much about the wingnut “style” of argument.

First, there’s the bold assertion of so-called “facts” which are really just prejudices, half-baked notions, and/or “gut feelings” raised to the status of truth.

Then there’s the admission, when challenged, that no, there isn’t any evidence of the assertion but that that just proves the point, because  there’s a liberal conspiracy to hide the “truth”. This combines several of the central tenets of wingnuttery:

(1)    The insistence that the person speaking is part of an oppressed and eternally put upon class of people who are, despite their oppression, smarter, harder working, and more enlightened than their imagined oppressors. Ironically, the person claiming this oppression is almost always white, Christian, and heterosexual, and the majority are male—by far the least “oppressed” and best advantaged group in the United States, possibly in all of human history. 

(2)    The angry and bitter attitude that it’s hopeless that the truth will ever be known because of a vast conspiracy by the oppressors.

(3)    The rejection of any idea that they need to support their claims because the data they need to do so is forever unavailable, and

(4)    The unshakable conviction that their “facts” are, nonetheless, true, despite the lack of evidence, because their innate “common sense” (really just the above-mentioned prejudices, half-baked notions, and “gut feelings”) is more important than proof.This is the core of the anti-intellectual, chip-on-the shoulder resentment that marks a certain class of wingnut.

You have to admit that there is a certain twisted genius to this sort of "argument." It basically frees the speaker  from ever having to actually justify even the most outrageous claims, and creates a perfect protective force-field around the ignorance they cling to as if that ignorance was a gift  from God.

Unfortunately,  that’s not where ignorance comes from.