The Ugly Un-American 10.17.07: You Can't Handle the Truth
Posted by Ray Church on 10.17.2007
With so much information at our fingertips, Ray Church takes a look at the difficulties created by Information Overload.
Sometimes, I troll for an issue to talk about. I will dredge through the news until I find something no one is talking about.
Other times there is one of those issues that just smack you in the face. It's big, it's on every television program and it's not OJ or Britney Spears.
Then, there are the columns inspired by you, the readers. A couple of weeks back I put out one of those columns that covered everything on my mind that week. Lo and behold, but I got a few letters in my in-box, giving me pointers in one way or the other.
Now let me just say I love these letters. If you talk to the other columnists here, they'll probably agree that you get three basic types of letters: The "you suck" letter, the "you rule" letter and the "I agree / disagree with you, but have you considered this…" Needless to say, this third type of letter is my favourite. I love the "you rule" emails, but I don't need them. I try to engage the "you suck" emails, but normally the writers have no actually facts or thoughts to deal with, but the critiques are the ones that get me thinking.
Here was the first one I got, from EnglishEuropean:
"How Baha'is are arrested for teaching classes to underprivileged children"
Not sure where you got that from. Baha'is were excluded from the state education system and so responded by setting up their own parallel private "university".
This is the one whose teachers were arrested. They weren't teaching "underpriviliged children" by any stretch of the imagination.
I through an email back to EE, giving him links to my information, and that's where this turns interesting:
I stand corrected! The reason I was surprised is because I am a Baha'i (albeit from England) and heard quite a bit of the detail when it started happening.
Note that the source on who exactly they were teaching is a member of the Baha'i International Community office in New York who told HRW.
HRW is Human Rights Watch, the source of my facts, and EE points out something interesting here. If the source of my details is derived from the same community that claims to be persecuted, how do I trust them? (I'm leaving out the primary evidence here, which in this case would be the Iranian Government's leaked memo that I mentioned in that column). Needless to say, this got me thinking.
Then I got an email from Chris, referring to comments about Rush Limbaugh:
I normally enjoy your column, even though we don't agree on much. Just wanted to let you know that Limbaugh was not referring to troops who have served and are speaking out against the war. He was referring to a story ABC did earlier in the week about people claiming to be soldiers and saying they witnessed soldiers commit all these horrible acts
First let me say how flattered I am that someone who disagrees with everything I say would still read my column. To me, that's a great compliment.
Then again, I watch Tucker Carlson just to have something to yell about, so I hope this is not the same reason Chris is reading my columns.
Back to the point, if you haven't seen what these to comments have in common, let me spell it out. They both got me thinking about the issue of sourcing in today's media.
Out of Context
With all due respect to Chris, his claims about Limbaugh were something that I heard several times that week, including from our own Enrique. I heard it from Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck and Melanie Morgan. Remind me to talk about the echo chamber later.
At this point, I know my editor Jason Easley is rolling his eyes. He is already sick of the Limbaugh matter, and so am I, but I think it is a useful example to look at a number of issues I want to talk about. So sorry Jase, but you did say there was no censorship when I signed up.
The problem was that the "out of context" defense doesn't quite hold up. While it is true that Limbaugh was talking about "phony soldiers" at points during this segment, that's not how he originally made the comment. Now, there is a lot of detail to get through here, and to avoid repetition, you can get the transcript for the show here
Aha, Mr. Church! You've just fallen into our cunning trap. That's Media Matters, a left wing smear site.
Actually, instead of me schizophrenically playing the diabolic evil genius, let me instead quote Chris' letter once more.
The interesting thing about this whole controversy is that Media Matters is the group that has taken the Limbaugh Quote out of context, as they are pretty chummy with the Clintons, even though they claim they are not. In fact, the Clintons helped start Media Matters and Center for American Progress (or at least that is what Hillary told YearlyKos)
This, by the way, is a fallacy that I'm all too guilty of. It's called Ad Hominem. Instead of defending the facts, we attack the source, and it's all too easy to do when someone like Hillary Clinton or (in my case) ExxonMobil is involved.
OK, for those of you entering a liberal media website for the first time let me ease your conscience. You can ignore everything on that page except Rush Limbaugh's words. We are just dealing with what Rush said, so you don't have to read any commentary or subliminal left wing messages asking you to join Al-Qaeda that Hillary Clinton may have left.
Have you finished? OK, let me summarise, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. First Rush responds to a caller called "Mike from Chicago", but I'm a lazy bastard so lets call him Mike1. Mike1 rings up and says he's a Republican and he's against the war. Rush responds that the guy can't be a Republican, because he's against the war. The caller then says that he used to be in the military, and he is a Republican. Limbaugh responds "yeah yeah". Mike1 then asks Limbaugh how long it will take in Iraq. Limbaugh explains that he's not listening anymore, he can't be a Republican.
OK, at this point the audio clips, but you can compare it to Limbaugh's account here
Rush then takes another caller, Mike from Olympia. I'm a lazy bastard, so I'll call him Mike2. Mike2 explains that he is in the military, which Rush doesn't doubt at all, and says that he can "I'm one of the few that joined to serve my country, I'm proud to say, not for money or anything like that", making the inference that the majority of the army are not there to serve there country.
By the way, our own Enrique misattributes this to Mike from Chicago (Mike1 to us) and then goes on to attack him for it. Then again, Enrique was wrong pretty universally in his column on Limbaugh, so we'll let that slide.
It's then that we get this exchange:
RUSH: It's not possible intellectually to follow these people.
CALLER: No, it's not. And what's really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.
RUSH: The phony soldiers.
CALLER: Phony soldiers. If you talk to any real soldier and they're proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice and they're willing to sacrifice for the country.
RUSH: They joined to be in Iraq.
CALLER: A lot of people.
RUSH: You know where you're going these days, the last four years, if you sign up. The odds are you're going there or Afghanistan, or somewhere.
Limbaugh then briefly sidetracks to claims that the mustard gas artillery rounds are proof that Saddam had a chemical weapons factory, as opposed to say still had some left that the US sold him in the 80's, or, with mustard gas being a chlorine product, a bunch of pool cleaning equipment and a school science lab, before he gets back to the phony soldiers, where he clearly links to the legitimate "phony soldiers". The only problem is that because he (or more specifically Mike2, with Limbaugh chiming in) has stated that all real soldiers are "proud to serve and willing to sacrifice for their country", then his addition of "phony soldiers" makes it seem that these phony soldiers are representative of all phony soldiers.
So, if you go back to the context, Rush Limbaugh hangs himself with his own words, which is why Bill O'Reilly, when he defended Limbaugh, used video from a later show where Limbaugh is explaining the context rather than go back into the context itself.
If you use the source material, Limbaugh is a big bloated idiot. That's nothing new and only an issue because Congress decided that the best use of their time was to attack moveon.org. Limbaugh was strung up because people were looking for hypocrites.
Joining the Bandwagon
The reason Limbaugh got away with the "Out of Context" defense is it takes a lot of work to show that he wasn't taken out of context, and it's very easy to just repeat one liners like "I was taken out of context". Hell, even supporters like Enrique, when they try to defend Limbaugh can't keep the story straight and confuse Mike1 for Mike2.
This is an example of the Echo Chamber, and the biggest source for it seems to be Matt Drudge.
If you have no idea who Matt Drudge is, Drudge runs a right wing website which basically strolls through newspaper and blogs, delivering those that best serve the right wing. Nothing wrong with this, per se. The Left Wing has long since copied the format with webpages like Crooks and Liars and the Dailykos. The difference is that the Drudge Report is used as a Primary Source by many of the Political Commentators in Network News.
Back in April, for example, Drudge reported an unnamed official in CNN who claimed that reporter Michael Ware heckled GOP senators during a live press conference. This was picked up Michelle Malkin and the Washington Times. The source appears to have been the Right Wing Blog Powerline, which provided no evidence for the story.
More recently, the flag-pin story, about Barrack Obama's decision to stop wearing a flag in his lapel pin, a decision he made shortly after 9/11. So how did it become big news over the past two weeks? Well, he was asked it in an interview with KCRG, a small local newspaper, picked up in a few small papers, a small article in the Caucus section of the New York Times, that sort of thing.
Then the Drudge Report made it a banner headline. Suddenly it was on Wolf Blitzer, John Gibson, Charles Gibson, and Sean Hannity. The reality is that it's not an issue. If someone has to wear a certain piece of clothing to be considered part of the country, doesn't that strike you as odd? Doesn't that also strike you that you're asking to be lied to?
So why did the lapel pin become an issue? It was put on the Drudge Report and echoed through the media at large.
The Story Continues… The Shut the Hell Up Award
I'm going to do something I haven't done before. I'm going to include my Shut the Hell Up Award as part of the column. Bare with me while I set this up a little.
After Al Gore got the Noble Prize this week, I just knew there was going to be bullshit raining on earth. For some reason, the Right Wing of America just can't understand that Man Made Climate Change is not just a political issue, it is a credible threat accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community world wide.
That's it.
It's not a Democratic or Republican argument. It's not a left wing / right wing argument. It is a credible threat accepted by the scientific community.
But Ray, what about the scientists who disagree?
I'm glad you asked. I'm so glad you asked. I have been tossing this over in my mind for the past two years, since I first got chatting to nah-sayers on the net about it. First and foremost is my friend Josh White, occasionally a contributor here at 411Politics. I'm forever thankful to Josh, because he challenged me on it.
My immediate reaction was just "those scientists are in the pocket of big business", and to be fair a lot of them are, but Josh pointed out that this argument is cheating…
Even if they are working for big business, how does that make the science wrong? I pondered this for a while, and I'm sure I've explained my eventual decision before, but if you're a newbie it came to me like this:
There undoubtedly is climate change, neither side denies this. So what is causing this climate change?
Argument One: Climate change is a natural cycle that changes over millennia… Maybe true, but what causes that. After all, tides are a natural cycle, but we know there is a cause to them.
Greenhouse Gas Argument: Carbon Dioxide has always caused climate change, but today we have produced far greater Carbon Dioxide, which is leading to far greater climate change.
Counter Argument: Climate change is caused by another force; in this case solar radiation.
Evaluation: Solar radiation matches some of the trends observed over the last century, but thoroughly fails to account for the massive changes over the past two decades.
Therefore, with the current information I understand, the Man Made Climate Change theory is the best theory to explain the changes currently happening, and following this we need to make some severe changes to avoid further catastrophe
The problem with this searching, of course, is that it took me a hell of a long time to get a layman's grip on the arguments, and it seems clear that the certainty with which the nah-sayers are speaking hide the fact that the argument they are making doesn't stand closer scrutiny.
If you want to see some of the intricacies in unraveling the misinformation out there, the following video should give you some idea. Sorry that this doesn't include the original documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, but the link Josh once sent me has long since died.
OK, so after going to great length to establish that:
a) yes, global warming is real
b) yes, climate change is man made
c) yes, there is a real effort made to muddy the global warming debate on behalf of certain parties (most notably the oil industry)
You can imagine how much louder I yell at the Television when representatives of these parties are given prime time exposure for their propaganda.
And the Award Goes To…
OK, so there are certain parties out there who are jealous of Al Gore's Nobel Award. This Shut the Hell Up award is for all of them, but I've chosen two parties to receive the award on their behalf. Both were part of the same segment, as both host and interviewee of the Tucker Carlson Show…
Yes, Tucker Carlson once again proves what a little punk he is. This week, he had as a guest one Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. You may remember them. They're the morons who released the "They call it pollution, we call it life" advertisements. It's probably no surprise to find out that the CEI is funded by ExxonMobil, as well as Texaco and (stunned hush) Phillip Morris, the company that paid scientists to deny that smoking causes cancer.
But ok, we've just established that when we're doing this, we attack the facts, not the person…
Lewis: I would say that most scientists, though, understand even if they don‘t public say—publicly say that there isn‘t a whole lot we can do about it.
Evidence dude, give me evidence. This is an appeal to ridicule.
Again, I'm going to hook you up with the dude at Logical Science to a rundown on how Kyoto might help. None of us are saying that the Kyoto Treaty is an end to the argument anyway, so a second later, Lewis undercuts his own argument anyway.
Kyoto of course is understood to be just the baby step in a grand plan
So, you're commenting on how little effect Kyoto would have while you admit that it's a baby step… My work here is done….
But wait, there's more.
But the baby step is estimated to cost the U.S. economy if we were to implement it, about $180 billion a year.
Estimated by whom? He doesn't say, of course. His source, as best I can tell, was a British study from 2006 that estimated following the Kyoto Protocol would cost up to 1% of US GDP. What he didn't mention is that the same study said that failure to pay for the reduction could cost up to 20% in order to stop floods, storms and other natural catastrophes.
Tucker Carlson takes over…
Tucker: What about the individual decision about what kind of car to drive, which is taken as kind of a signal of your moral standing, good people drive Priuses, bad people drive SUVs. Is that really significant?
Lewis: Again, that‘s just a drop in the bucket.
I love it when they pull this logic up, the perfect solution fallacy. You're just one person, and your individual actions have very little effect on the world.
But how do you argue it? By looking at the alternative. My one drop can go in the bucket to make the world better, or it can go in the bucket to make the world worse, and if I make that choice, and a few other people make that choice, then it may encourage big business to believe there is a market for people who want to make that choice. If that happens, they might actually spend money on trying to make their products more environmentally friendly, rather than insane ad campaigns to tell you that Carbon Dioxide is life.
But I digress.
if you were thinking about the Supreme Court decision which requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set emission standards for automobiles, CO2 emission standards, carbon dioxide standards, that‘s a regulatory Pandora‘s Box. Al Gore and his friends are very strategic and what they‘re hoping that once the Environmental Protection Agency starts regulating the drop in the bucket they can be litigated into regulating the entire economy.
Aha! The old slippery slope argument. If we allow the government to regulate fuel standards, next thing they will want to regulate the color of your car. Let's turn the slope upside down and spot the fallacy. If we don't allow carbon standards for cars, maybe we shouldn't regulate the automobile industry at all. Maybe we should not have any carbon standards. Maybe we should repeal all safety regulations for cars. Maybe we should repeal all standards related to safety.
Maybe we should let the Chinese put lead in the paint on our children's toys…
This is why a slippery slope fallacy doesn't work.
Tucker: Are there totally independent scientists who don‘t believe we can do a lot about global warming?
Well, gee. That doesn't sound like a set up at all. Let's see how Mr. Lewis responds.
In fact many of the scientists who are regarded as skeptics have been authors of the IPCC reports. For example, my friend, and I am very proud to call him a friend, John Christy (ph)
No surprise on this one. John Christy has been all over the show with his claims about global warming. Look at these two quotes from him:
1) "It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way."
2) "I showed some evidence that humans are causing warming in the surface measurements that we have but it is not the greenhouse relation."
Same guy? Yup… In fact Christy doesn't even believe that Global Warming will have catastrophic consequences, which is fine but realise that his statements have been all over the map.
Back to Mr. Lewis.
and Roy Spencer
Again, Roy Spenser doesn't even believe that global warming is man-made. He calls himself a global warming optimist, so the idea of doing something about it doesn't matter to him.
These are, of course, two opinions out of an ocean of scientists. Of course you will find the occasional scientist who goes against the grain. The question is whether they represent the rest of science.
Lewis: I would say the global warming movement generally has actually had the affect of stifling discussion by insisting that everybody tow their party line. And that if you don‘t you‘re a bad human being. At the very least you‘re in the hip pocket of some greedy polluter. And that puts a chilling affect on speech. Unfortunately.
OK, forget the fact that Lewis is, in fact, in the pocket of a greedy polluter, or at least several representatives from the oil industry (Amoco, Texaco and, until recently ExxonMobil), not to mention the automotive industry (Ford, CSX). That's an ad-hominem attack, and I can do better than that.
Let's compare the opposite. The CEI reports revenue of about $3 billion to direct towards the research and promotion of these industries. They also get the advantage of the Right Wing Bullhorn, so that anything they say gets repeated on Hannity, Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson.
The CEI complains that their voice doesn't get heard.
Hmm, methinks thou dost protest too much.
Lewis: Bobby Kennedy Jr. basically saying that these companies, who, energy companies are traitors. And then by implication anyone who is any way associated with them as my organization has been in the past, with one of the named companies, then we‘re traitors, too.
Sometimes I just want to slap these guys and yell "what if you're wrong".
They are so sure that they're right, in the face of overwhelming scientific proof, and yet they scream like a little baby if you suggest that they're endangering the lives of millions of people. If you want to argue this topic, Mr. Lewis, argue it with the scientists. When you argue it here, presenting what is effectively junk science, you win nothing but contempt.
Tucker: I mean, there‘s no question we‘re dealing with a faith-based movement here and all the kind of millennialism that entails
Faith based? Millennialism? Talk about getting the insults backwards. Here you have people holding up shoddy facts and claiming that all the other scientists are wrong… Pot, meet kettle.
So, for being a blowhard, peddling junk-science funded by the Oil Industry, a Shut the Hell Up Award Marlo Lewis.
And for being a repeated megaphone for junk science, just because he can't face up to reality, a Shut the Hell Up Award for Tucker Carlson.
Afterword They say the future...it's on a microchip
Don't you know we're all on a sinking ship
Only ten percent control all the rest
Only ten percent decide what is best
"Information Overload" by Living Color
Of all the things I had to look up for this column, the hardest one to find was where Marlo Lewis got his evidence about the annual cost of the Kyoto treaty. I found at least a dozen different estimates, all pointing in different directions. Marlo Lewis is so sure of this fact, and yet this is one area that is in genuine disagreement.
Last week, Michael Thompson claimed that readers should spend time researching for themselves. Its good advice, but not practical. The reality is that finding the truth takes time, time that most people don't have. There is a dedicated group of people who have taken to exploiting this fact, be it Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh or the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Stay sharp, and I'll try to be honest, but the hardest part is avoiding the paralysis that the information age has created. Why should you do something about global warming if the talking heads still deny its real.
Do something because even if you're wrong, there is less potential harm than doing nothing.
The Section Formerly Known as Pimping
Cedric King is now, officially, one of my favourite writers. Check out the Political Mock 5
Dan Martin decided to tear a new one for Anne Coulter. Again, Dan is one of my favourites here at 411.
Joe Rivett takes a look at S-CHIP I noticed, I tend to lie Joe's comments when he agrees with me. I hope that's not a bad sign.
STAY CURRENT