Sorry- been dealing with RL nonsense.
Tweet hoax
Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart fell for a fake congressional Twitter account Monday night, writing a story based on the hoax @RepJackKimble account (via New York Observer).
“Rep. Jack Kimble” is a fake Republican congressman from California’s nonexistent 54th district.
Capehart wrote an article baesd on a tweet the account sent last week:
“Why have the wars cost so much under Obama? Check the budgets, Bush fought 2 wars without costing taxpayers a dime,” the tweet read.
Capehart called that tweet a “stunning bit of fiscal ignorance,” and went on to analyze the nation’s budget and fiscal health.
I don’t this makes Capehart stupid or anything (he’s one of the few Kaplaners I can take, generally), I just think that “Check the budgets, Bush fought 2 wars without costing taxpayers a dime” is damned good spoof.
Open Thread: Memory & Forgetting
From Tom Scocca’s always-excellent blog at Slate, two adjacent posts on the weaknesses of old media and the strength of the new:
Lying Propaganda-Ghoul Ari Fleischer Explains How Professional, Ethical Reporting Should Work
The Atlantic has a sort of yakkity-yakkity thing up online about how Professional Journalists handle material being on or off the record. The peg is that Rolling Stone story from—when was it, back in 2005?—that got that general who was running our success in Afghanistan dismissed for being insubordinate and for having drunk and mouthy aides. Professional Journalists are still bothered by these events because the irresponsible and non-staff-employed Rolling Stone reporter went and wrote up quotations and anecdotes that he witnessed happening, rather than negotiating with his sources to produce a polite and abridged and untrue version of things…
… which comes right after a post linking (via the Awl) James Bridle’s “On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography”:
… In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth, whether it concerns the evidence for going to war, the proliferation of damaging conspiracy theories, the polarisation of debate on climate change, or so many other issues. This sounds utopian, and it is. But I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.
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This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.
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It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.
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This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.
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And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button.
Man-on-dog bites man
Santorum has no shot at the presidency anyway, but….
Santorum has what you might call a Google problem. For voters who decide to look him up online, one of the top three search results is usually the site SpreadingSantorum.com, which explains that Santorum’s last name is a sexual neologism for “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”
Santorum’s problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the “definition of marriage” has never included “man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.” The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who’s gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to “memorialize the scandal.” The winner came up with the “frothy mixture” idea, Savage launched a website, and a meme was born. Even though mainstream news outlets would never link to it, Savage’s site rose in the Google rankings, thanks in part to bloggers who posted Santorum-related news on the site or linked to it from their blogs. Eventually it eclipsed Santorum’s own campaign site in search results; some observers even suggested it may have contributed to Santorum’s crushing 18-point defeat in his 2006 campaign against Bob Casey.
[…..]To at least make a dent, Santorum could try a concerted push to generate links to his domain on prominent sites and blogs, ginning its Google ranking….Santorum faces an uphill battle, in part because Savage’s site has been up for so long—with more than 13,000 inbound links, compared with only 5,000 for Santorum’s own site, America’s Foundation. “He’s staring at a very big deficit,” Skidmore observes.
I’m hoping this unfortunate turn of events becomes the subject of a Michael Gerson or Lee Siegel column.
Late Night Open Thread: Live for Today
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What can I say? I’m genetically inclined to prefer men who look good in a kilt. And it’s good to know that Fran Lebowitz has a fall-back career in percussion if the NYC litcrit market crashes.
Lay right down in my favorite place
I’m visiting family, watching “The Closer” against my will, but I liked this Obama clip:
And it made me think of this:
I don’t know, it feels awful to talk about Labor Day today, everything in our national discussion is about how to fuck over working people, how to give more money to the Galtian geniuses who engineered this awesome economic expansion.
Open Thread
Just looked at the front page, and cripes I have been emo today. I think it might be because I think I am getting a cold.
Boise State v. Va Tech is on. As much as it pains me, I’m rooting for the Hokies, because I can’t take any school that has a blue football field seriously.