The thread mentioning Heinlein's Future History has reminded me to
post something I've been thinking of for some time.  A small part of
Methuselah's Children has always stuck with me:

************
"Ensenada, Baja California, Jeffers and Lucy Weatheral today asked for
special proctor protection, alleging that a group of citizens  had
broken into their home, submitted them to personal indignity and
committed other asocial acts.  The Weatherals are, by their own
admission, members of the notorious Howard Families and claim that the
alleged incident could be traced to that supposed fact.  The district
provost points out that they have offered no proof and has taken the
matter under advisement.  A town mass meeting has been announced for
tonight which will air-----"

The other man turned toward Lazarus, "Cousin, did we hear what I
thought we heard? That is the first case of asocial group violence in
more than twenty years . . . yet they reported it like a breakdown in
a weather integrator."

"Not quite," Lazarus answered grimly. "The connotations of the words
used in describing us were loaded."

"Yes, true, but loaded cleverly, I doubt if there was a word in that
dispatch with an emotional index, taken alone, higher than one point
five.  The newscasters are allowed two zero, you know."
************

Now with my obsession with reality these days, I compare this to the
work of Ron Fournier:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Fournier

Besides his own writing, I'm pretty sure his editorial policy is
responsibile for allowing Julie Pace's "Patriotism a pitfall for
Democratic candidates" to be sent widely through the wire service.
Rachel Maddow dissected the piece on her August 22 show, showing step
by step the opinion piece in something supposed to be a news item.

I also remind you that the United Press International is owned by Sun
Myung Moon, also owner of the notoriously right wing Washington
Times.  Rupert Murdoch now owns the Wall Street Journel, which despite
an editorial page routinely described by many as being far right, has
been responsible for some of the best objective reporting of past
years.  My guess because they feared subscribers abandoning it if such
thought their financial news was being manipulated.  I wouldn't be
surprised if Murdoch's DirectTV comes up with some reason to drop
MSNBC due to Olbermann and now Maddow.  NBC, the only network to
occasional report stories the others ignore, would be harder to drop.

Disney, which wants complete control of copyright law for obvious
reasons, is responsible though ABC for the notorious "Path to 9/11"
and the gag inducing debate moderation of Charles Gibson and George
Stephanopoulos, in which nearly every single right wing talking point
about Clinton and Obama was brought up as a question.

The whole service memo controversy conveniently overlooked that

"Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for President
Ronald Reagan, has reviewed the payroll records for Bush's last two
years of service, and concluded that they indicate that Bush did not
fulfill his obligations and could have been ordered to active duty as
a result.[30]"

while the media was responsible for the amplifying needed for the
Swift Boating of Kerry to succeed.

Fox News is meant only report to morons and give Cheney and his ilk
something safe to watch, it is meant to give cover to the right wing
nature of most of the mainstream media by making them look liberal in
comparison.

From http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030224/alterman2:
************
Patrick Buchanan, among the most conservative pundits and presidential
candidates in Republican history, found that he could not identify any
allegedly liberal bias against him during his presidential
candidacies. "I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage--all
we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the 'liberal
media,' but every Republican on earth does that," the aspiring
American ayatollah cheerfully confessed during the 1996 campaign. And
even William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/
neoconservative publicist in America today, has come clean on this
issue. "I admit it," he told a reporter. "The liberal media were never
that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by
conservatives for conservative failures."
************

Even after the 2006 elections, the right wing is still succeeding in
forcing the fights to be fought on their terms.  Other than Petosi's
preemptive compilation in preventing the impeachment of one far more
worthy of impeachment than even Nixon, most of the lack of progress in
Congress has been the fault of fillibuster threatening Republican
Senators, but you'd never know that from the mainstream media.  How
many of you know that the tax credits for solar projects will
disappear after Dec 31, 2008 because the Democrats want to pay for it
by reducing oil tax credits and the Republicans say over their dead
bodies?

Stalin said that controlling the vote is unnecessary when you control
the count (another thing to worry about after 2000 and who owns the
electronic voting machine companies), but when you can control what
people like my parents and their friends see and hear, you don't even
have to worry about that.

P.S. Could you tell me why John Schilling and David Freidman are
believed more than me?  Schilling poo-pooed the idea that a economic
meltdown was offing after Bear Stearns collapsed.  Friedman has poo-
pooed both the idea that the Greenspan bubble oriented economy of the
last twenty years should induce any terror and the notion that global
warming presents any serious economic problems.  Tell me, has the past
year done anything to support them more than me?

P.P.S.  I fully admit these subjects make me more emotional.  I can be
quite sedate arguing about SF, as I discovered by rereading some of my
past posts.  I seem to be the one of the few to realize that we aren't
part of a story and there are real stakes in this and real people will
be hurt.  Rasfw is actually better than almost all other newsgroups
I've read, but still fear that in regards to taking lessons from the
art, Fandom is just a goddamn hobby and mundanes are right to dismiss
it as escapist literature.

I wonder how she would dissect the bias behind your item here?

Because they don't come off sounding like loons?

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Aug 27, 1:49 pm, fairwa...@gmail.com (Derek Lyons) wrote:

No more than your reply.  The issue is the active framing of issues
and people in right wing terms by institutions that were more
objective and less B.S. spewing under the GI generation.

As opposed to being able to write loony BS in a form that sounds good
to the uninformed and their fellow true believers?

I noticed you never even attempted to argue based on actual facts.

That's the other insane part of today, the millions of people who
honestly believe that their beliefs trump any inconvenient fact.
Richard Dawkins pointed out that there are lots of things he'd like to
believe, but sadly there is no evidence so he doesn't, and would that
other people would put aside their childhood beliefs based on what
they wanted to believe and what adults told them.

Ah, so noting the presence of bias is bias?

You asked a question, I answered it.

I rest my case.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Aug 27, 6:20 pm, fairwa...@gmail.com (Derek Lyons) wrote:

Not in and of itself, but denying the obvious bias within yourself
(since you summarily dismissed any fact I presented as irrelevant)
while reserving the right to pass judgement on me is definitely
biased.

So summarily dismissing somebody's argument as sounding loony is
answering as serious question rather than making an attack?  You never
said exactly how I sound loony, which really rather clever since you
never have to defend yourself on the basis of reasoned analysis.

BTW, how old are you?

If you are resting your case, prosecutor, who are the judge and jury?
You?

What part of paragraph allows you to rest your case?  The first or the
second?  Do you deny that millions of Americans, much less the rest of
the world, put more stock on their beliefs than on facts?  Or have you
not read The God Delusion or heard his interviews to know that I gave
a fairly accurate if amatuerish description of Dawkin's views?

BTW, Maddow would not have dissected the bias in the item, she would
have agreed with most of the gist, though probably giving bad marks
for the amatuerish construction.

On 2008-08-27 18:30:26 -0700, Mark_Reich...@hotmail.com said:

The rest of us, presumably.

If he's rested his case, just move for a directed verdict.  If the
prosecution fails to meet even minimal standards of proof, the defense
isn't required to make an opposing argument.

kdb

I find it fascinating that he classes me a priori as the prosector and
himself as the defendant.

At any rate, his writings speak abundantly for themselves.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

news:48b8a16a.237856781@news.supernews.com...

Seems more of an expose to me.

The media have been letting the twisted semantics slide for years.

On Aug 27, 5:38 pm, Mark_Reich...@hotmail.com wrote:

In politics, perceptions are reality. If you sound like a loon, then
you are a loon. There is no refuting this newly established natural
fact. The fact that you are loony is then as true as the gravitational
constant, that is until Rush Limbaugh tells his thralls that the
gravitational constant is 11.3 meters per second.

So Derek's statement that you are not as believable as Schilling or
Friedman because you sound loony, is hard truth in the universe of
politics.

On Aug 27, 12:47 pm, Mark_Reich...@hotmail.com wrote:

That final bit is a rather clumsy piece of exposition:  "as you know,
Bob..."  The same thing could have been accomplished by his saying
something like "I doubt if there is a word in that dispatch with an
emotional index, taken alone, that comes close to the allowed limit."

Richard R. Hershberger