Tag: media

Just not that smart

Proud, yes. Arrogant, sure. But not particularly intelligent. I also very much doubt that Obama is a pathological liar. He strikes me as more the classic example of Dunning-Kruger, thinking he is very clever when he quite clearly is not.

NBC’s Chuck Todd scored a huge interview with President Obama Thursday and opened things by immediately drilling down on the president’s relentlessly repeated lie that under ObamaCare you can keep your current  insurance plan if you like it. The full interview is even more impressive than the clips that have been going around. Even after he elicits a “sorry” from Obama, Todd keeps after the point for almost ten minutes.

Ultimately, though, Todd came away with the impression that Obama doesn’t believe he lied. And Todd is probably right, which is a little unnerving.

During his own interview on the Hugh Hewitt show Friday with guest host Carol Platt Liebau, Todd said, “You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get.” Here is Todd’s entire quote:

You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get. I mean, I think that that’s, he’s taken issue with that before with folks off the record, and I got it’s a sensitive issue, felt like he did not sit there and say he intentionally lied. He said that he wanted to, he thought he was going to be able to keep this promise. I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.

If Obama has convinced himself he didn’t lie, that borders on pathological.

Stupid people tell stupid lies and deny that they did so on a regular basis. Remember, this is the same guy who went off on bitter clingers while trying to convince them to vote for him. We’re not dealing with a rocket scientist here, but rather an affirmative action president.

How bad is Obamacare?

It’s so bad that the New York Times is back to acting as Obama’s personal PR agent again:

So bad that the New York Times has to issue one of its patented awful editorial board op-eds in order to try to defend the law–and the administration that has botched its implementation. The whole thing is a laugh riot from soup to nuts.

The very title of the piece–”Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping”–signals to the reader that the Times is fully prepared to cover up, paper over, and outright ignore the fact that President Obama and his political allies repeatedly and deliberately misled the nation by promising Americans that if they liked their health care plans, they could keep them. We are told that the president “clearly misspoke” when he told Americans that they could keep their plans in all instances; for the Times, “clearly misspoke” is a euphemism for “repeatedly consistently and deliberately told the exact opposite of the truth,” given that the prevaricators in this instance were political actors the Times approves of when it comes time to hand out endorsements (and when it comes time for Times employees to go to the polls and vote).

This talk about “clearly [misspeaking]” is about as blatant a signal that the Times is ready to engage in journalistic fraud and malpractice as is the opening paragraph, which tells us that the reason news reports are focusing on the cancellation of insurance policies–and the revelation that the Obama administration and its political allies lied to the American people–is that congressional Republicans “have stoked fear and confusion.”

As though the stories of cancellations and sticker shock themselves–told straight and without any congressional Republican lobbying for the stories to be told–were not enough to make Americans fearful, and as though the unbelievably malfunctions that have been suffered by the website are not enough in order to make Americans confused and outraged.

It’s an interesting logic behind the New York Time’s aggressive PR campaign. Obama clearly said Americans could keep their health insurance policies. But now his landmark law is not permitting them to keep those policies. But the new policies are better! Therefore, we should all ignore the fact that he lied and focus on the fact that he is forcing Americans to accept better policies than the ones they would freely choose if left to their own devices.

Surely we should apply this logic to everyone’s daily food choices as well. After all, what one eats tends to determine one’s health. And sexual choices too. It doesn’t matter what you happen to prefer, not when it is eminently clear that certain forms of sexual activity are healthier than others. Forget the closet and the fat farm, Obamacare serves as precedent to fine fatties and homosexuals if they insist on continuing to engage in their expensive and socially deleterious activities.

In any event, all of this is but a temporary sideshow. We are assured by Porky that all these reports of problems are mere strategery by the political supergenius Obama, who is simply suckering in those clueless Republicans for a few weeks, just long enough to befuddle them and amaze the general public when he reveals that the Obamacare system is working more slickly than a pair of greased penguins sliding over glare ice.

Obama is a cunning and masterful politician, though. Consider how carefully he chose his words to extricate himself from a briar patch that would easily ensnare less brilliant strategerists:

“President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night
that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least
29 times.”

Or perhaps having the entire mainstream news industry running interference makes one look smarter and more successful. Who can say?

Turnabout is fair play

Some game reviewers crying because a developer played hardball:

Here’s a quote from Totalbiscuit:  Unfortunately, every day we have to sit there worrying, will some company decide to abuse the copyright claim system to destroy my livelihood today?

Another popular youtube guy, Francis, also chimed in with this: YouTube has saved my life, and it terrifies me that with this system in place, it’s possible all of this will disappear tomorrow morning.”

and this: Your dream, your livelihood, your future… everything you’re aspiring to be can go *snap* like that.  It’s terrifying.

That’s powerful stuff.   It is terrifying.  How do I know? Many video game developers live this every day of their lives.

Many of us, especially indies, have made staggering sacrifices to pursue our dreams.  Financial, mental, emotional, relationship.  Many of us pour our life energy into our creation.  We dream for success.  We dread failure.  Failure is catastrophic.

Especially indies, who rely almost exclusively – not on multi million dollar marketing budgets, but on the people who review and talk about their games.  A review by someone like Totalbiscuit can completely change the fortune of an indie developer.  And I mean completely.

First of all, having been a nationally syndicated game reviewer as well as a game developer, I am EXTREMELY dubious that any reviewer has the sort of power being described here. I suspect an amount of correlation/causation confusion. Second, while Totalbiscuit may be an excellent reviewer, (and he is clearly more conscientious than most with regards to playing through the entire game before reviewing it), it appears no wise old editor ever taught him a very important lesson concerning game reviews.

It’s one that I was taught by Chris Lombardi of Computer Gaming World when I was reviewing a very, very bad game for CGW, a game that has repeatedly made Worst Game Ever lists, and it was a lesson I never forgot.

After I emailed him the review, he called me up and said: “It’s a really funny review. It made me laugh out loud. And it isn’t publishable. Drop the ba-doom-boom stuff; it’s not professional.”

What he meant by “ba-doom-boom stuff” was lines like this: “In space, no one can hear you scream.  And when it comes to Salvation Prophecy, that might be a good thing.”  These sorts of one-liners indicate that the reviewer is sacrificing the game on the altar of a punchline. And that’s not only unfair to the game, it shows that the review has become more about showing off the reviewer’s clever wit than actually reviewing the game itself.

I don’t know if the game developer was in its rights or not to get the review taken down; that is outside my area of competence. I do know that as a general rule, I am 100 percent opposed to DMCA-related nonsense. But I also know that if reviewers are resolutely professional and play fair in their reviews, developers are unlikely to react in an unprofessional and unfair manner even when the reviews are less than flattering.

Setting the record straight

CJ Grisham has been rightly concerned that people, even some commenters here, have been misled concerning his ongoing dispute with Michael Yon.

I’m making this post public because it’s high time Michael Yon ate his words. I don’t share this to pump myself up but to warn – again – that if Michael Yon ever steps foot back in the United States I will slap a defamation and libel suit on his ass faster than a Thai take-out place can read back his order. Yon has not merely suggested that I am a case of Stolen Valor or stated he “thinks” I’m a case of Stolen Valor. He also states as fact that I lied about helping with the capture of 8 of the top 55 Iraqi leaders in 2003. He also claims I never saw combat. He has reported it as fact both on his public Facebook page and his personal blog. I have screenshots galore, so even if he goes back and deletes these references, I have them. So, I offer this up to again discredit a man that has little or no credibility left.

This is the NCOER I received in July while in Fallujah, Iraq. Feel free to share this far and wide. I’m not afraid.

Having been the subject of similar calumnies and repeated attacks by a dishonest, media-friendly psychological wreck myself, I’m quite happy to help Mr. Grisham set the record straight by posting the documentary evidence that shows Mr. Yon’s assertions about him to be false. Relentlessly self-promoting narcissists like Michael Yon, McRapey, and Hugo Danger always go off the deep end sooner or later, and the one thing they absolutely cannot bear are those who not only see through their deceptions, but aren’t afraid to call them out on their lies and misrepresentations.

And just to be clear, here are Mr. Yon’s direct assertions concerning Mr. Grisham, made last year on Facebook:

Michael Yon · 62,269 like this
October 21, 2012 at 9:35pm ·

Stolen Valor? 

I have here in front of my eyes CJ Grisham’s military records. He says he got a Bronze Star with V — this is not reflected on his records. What I see in these records is a boring, slow career. Others do more in two years.

Barbara — I have a dispatch going up today but will publish Grisham’s records probably on Tuesday. Even a rat such as Grisham should have the opportunity to defend himself. He says he got a Bronze Star with V. That medal is not on his records. Maybe his records are wrong. He can always publish the citation. Without that, it does not exist.
October 21, 2012 at 10:14pm 

The records cover the date that he claims to have BSV. Am not saying he does not have BSV, but that it is not reflected on records. The BSV is just not there. Either he is lying, or his records are wrong. No two ways about that.
October 22, 2012 at 7:33pm 

The Economist notices bad science

I look forward to all of the science fetishists who have shrieked with outrage every time I pointed out the uncomfortable fact of the increasing departure of scientistry from scientody finally realizing, with all due horror, that I was correct about modern professional science, all along as the mainstream media begins to repeat my previous criticisms. Science has gone wrong, badly wrong. And it has done so by abandoning the method that gave it its reputation.

A simple idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better.

But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties….

One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern
academic research took shape after its successes in the second world
war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists
numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m
active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their
taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish
or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is
cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in
2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for
every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other
people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And
without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.

As in the case of university degrees, scientistry has been badly diluted. Scientists of a wide variety of disciplines are cashing in on the reputations of physicists from more than sixty years ago.  The science of Bohr and Feynman is simply not the pseudo-science of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

This is not a surprise. I’ve been reading Kuhn’s landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions and it is eminently clear that we are rapidly approaching a crisis in biology, the sort of crisis that has historically led to new scientific paradigms. It may take a long time for the crisis to resolve itself, but this Second Crisis of Darwin should be sufficient to put the theory of evolution by natural selection in the dustbin of scientific history with phlogiston, heliocentrism, and other erstwhile scientific “facts”. Instead of salvaging Darwinian theory through a synthesis, the continued refinement of Mendelian genetics will destroy it once and for all.

And it’s not a coincidence that the growing awareness of bad science is occurring as the global warming debacle continues to unravel. Those who attacked the skeptics of global warming and staked science’s reputation on the idea that Man was cooking the earth are directly responsible for the public’s increasing dismissal of scientific authority.

Making it better by ruining it

Tom Hoggins is a harbinger of the scalzification of the game reviewer:

GTAV is a sensational video game and a
marvellous feat of technical engineering. However, as always with Grand
Theft Auto, controversy has not been far behind the adulation.

The series penchant for carnage and violence is well known, as you may expect
from an “open-world” game about criminality that gives players carte blanche
to cause havoc in its facsimile of the United States. Set in Los Santos, a
twisted vision of Los Angeles, V is Grand Theft Auto at its most barbaric;
torture, cannibalism and murder featuring in its nihilistic milieu.
There has also been much discussion about how GTAV treats women. That GTAV is
misogynistic is a defensible position. Women in the game are either bit-part
players or set dressing: strippers to throw money at, prostitutes to pick
up.

There are three lead characters that players can control in the game: all
male. The women characters are often leered at or cast as nags. One of the
player characters daughters has “skank” tattooed across her back, one
mission has you chaperoning a paparazzo as he tries to photograph an aging
actress’s “low-hanging muff.”

At one stage during my play-through of the game, I had a barrage of these
aspects which made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I commented to a friend
that I was concerned about the treatment of women within the game, that
there were few female characters drawn with any depth and that it felt a
deliberate decision to avoid an attempt to do so.

I was the first second nationally syndicated game reviewer, and it is a little sad to see how grotesquely standards have fallen since I ended my game review column. There are two ridiculous points here as well as a remarkable failure of observation.

  1. Torture, cannibalism, murder, and nihilism all get a pass. But the treatment of women, well, that makes gamma boy feel uncomfortable.
  2. The game has earned over $1 billion already and received a 98/100 critical reception. It is one of the most successful, best-reviewed games in the history of the game industry. Does the reviewer think that removing one of the GTA’s most well-known attributes is actually going to improve either its sales or its critical reviews?
  3. The reviewer fails to observe that the deliberate attempt to draw female characters with any depth is done so because that it precisely what its young male audience wants. They are sick of women relentlessly trying to control them. They are sick of women drugging them and punishing them because they don’t behave like little girls. And GTA V, like its predecessors, allows them to escape a ruthlessly feminized world in favor of one that, if nothing else, allows them to behave in an unapologetically masculine manner.  

The success of GTA V is because it is misogynistic. It is what games are supposed to be: it is escapist.  The Telegraph reviewer writes: “Games will not be able to take its much coveted place in
mainstream culture while these type of people get to dictate anything. Good
riddance to them when they are finally cast off.”

And the day that happens, the game industry will begin to die. Instead of great games like Doom and World of Warcraft and GTA 5, it will be Spamville, and Mafia Clicks, and Words with Friends, and 50 Shades of Necrobestial Rape Fantasy until the industry collapses amidst general bewilderment. If the McRapies ever replace the likes of Rockstar and Romero and me in the way that this guy has succeeded me in the mainstream media, (and McRapey has been trying to establish himself in the game industry), that’s exactly what you’re going to get.

A surrender of scientistry

Popular Science can’t take the dialectical heat and flees from open scientific discourse due to the inability of its writers to present arguments capable of standing up to public criticism:

Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off. It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter….

If you carry out those results to their logical end–commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded–you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the “off” switch. Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

I found it amusing that below this article trying to justify its attempt to claim the right to be “championing science” without protest or criticism from its readers, the very first article listed is: “Republicans Block Proposal For National Science Laureate, Fearing Science”.  Whatever they are championing these days, it is not science.

It is wonderful news that some of the foremost defenders of scientistry are in full-blown retreat from the skeptics and scientodists. Their inability to defend their “bedrock scientific doctrine” and “popular consensus” is the direct result of their abandonment of scientody for ideological dogma and invented doctrine cloaked in an increasingly thin veil of faux science.

Comments aren’t bad for science. Comments are bad for those who are stubbornly clinging to outdated scientific paradigms that are showing obvious cracks.

Science badly needs a cleansing baptism of intellectual fire to burn away all the professional and academic scientistic barnacles that have affixed themselves to the ship of science and are now threatening to sink its credibility entirely. Genuine scientists, as opposed to the posers championed by the likes of Popular Science, may not be able to defend themselves rhetorically, but they have no need to do so.  Science is neither democracy nor holy doctrine, and it is the right of every thinking individual to accept or reject the declarations of scientists as he sees fit.

Pew’s news IQ

“You answered 13 of 13 questions correctly.”

That doesn’t surprise me.  I consider myself reasonably well-informed. What surprises and alarms me is that only one percent of the 1,062 Americans that Pew surveyed could do likewise.

Take the quiz.

Zerohedge notes a logical connection between the quiz results and the failure of the Fed’s QE:

It is stunning that only 18% of quiz-taking females and 24% of males, and only 32% of those with a college/grad+ education, can identify what the stock market has done in the past 5 years. If anything this is the prima facie evidence why QE has failed: for a program whose primary purpose was to restore confidence in the economy through a rising stock market, even if manipulated through and through, the reason why there has been no confidence restored is because about 80% of the population neither knows nor cares that the DJIA is now just a fraction off its all time highs.

A cure for gay?

It would appear that publicly taking a certain political position is sufficient to render an internationally famous gay activist the equivalent of a straight white conservative Christian male in the eyes of the mainstream media, an evil to neither be heard, seen, or spoken of.

Russian gay activist Nikolai Alexeyev, who until now was considered
Russia’s top lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) advocate,
appears to have ended his political career tonight in a series of
anti-Semitic Facebook and Twitter posts that have even his most ardent
supporters calling out his ongoing anti-Semitism….

In apparent anger over cancellation of his participation in a
conference call hosted by human rights group Human Rights First
tomorrow, Alexeyev responded via Twitter and Facebook with a slew of hateful anti-Jewish comments, since he is now convinced that “the Jewish mafia” did him in, rather than his own rank prejudice….

He had an illustrious career.  And it’s now finished.

Let me see if I have this straight. It is now observably safer for an activist to criticize Vladimir Putin and the KGB than to criticize a non-existent mafia that has no influence with the media. Furthermore, if one’s career is forcibly ended as a result of criticizing something that does not exist and has no influence with the media, that should not be considered evidence that said mafia does, in fact, exist, but rather, as the inevitable karmic consequences of one’s prejudice.

I find this puzzling. How would the end of the gay activist’s career, such as it is, prove that he is wrong? And what color is the logic in your world?

Mailvox: an automated response

I just received this in my inbox in response to the 15-page document I sent them this morning:

This is an automated acknowledgment.

Thank you for making your complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about the article published in the The Guardian on the 30/08/2013.

Please note that we require you to supply a copy of the article or articles under complaint; this can take the form of a link or links to the publication’s website. If you have already provided a copy, or if you are aware that the PCC has already received a large number of complaints about the article or articles, please disregard the following.

If you have not already provided a copy of the article and we do not receive a copy within seven days we will assume you do not wish to pursue the matter further.  You can email a copy  of the article or link to complaints@pcc.org.uk, or send a hard copy in the post to Press Complaints Commission, Halton House, 20/23 Holborn, London EC1N 2JD.

If you require any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us by email at complaints@pcc.org.uk or by telephone 0845 600 2757.

However, it isn’t the only response my complaint has already triggered.  You may recall that back in February, the author of the article, Tor Books’s David Barnett, exchanged tweets with SFWA member Damien Walter.

@davidmbarnett Well done for doing that piece without linking to the bigot. *applauds*

@damiengwalter Well, I figured anyone who wanted to could trawl back through @Scalzi’s site, and if I’d named him I’d have to get a quote…

Within minutes of my retweeting his tweet and mentioning that I’d fired off a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, I noticed that Mr. Barnett had belatedly decided to delete his tweet.  I tend to doubt his action is going to help his cause in the slightest; in fact, at this point, it may even be seen as an implicit admission of his malicious intent.  Especially since his action was far from unpredictable and I would have been remiss had I failed to capture the screen.

This is just the first stage.  How I proceed from here will depend, to a certain extent, upon what the Commission determines concerning the two Guardian articles.  The second article is potentially quite useful as the Guardian can’t even try to plead ignorance this time. This is because, in addition to the articles, the comments, the list of Mr. Scalzi’s public attacks on me dating back to 2005, and the aforementioned tweets, I also sent the Commission copies of several emails that were exchanged between me and the Guardian editor.

It’s possible that the PCC will be just as fair and balanced as the SFWA Board, but if nothing else, I don’t think they’ll be as likely to make their determination on the basis of Mr. Scalzi’s threats.  And I find it rather telling how eager people like the SFWA Board and Mr. Barnett are to try to hide their actions from public view.