Re: Ex-President for Sale

On Mar 23, 8:48 pm, Don Levey <Don_S...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Q" <quond...@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Mar 23, 9:16 am, Don Levey <Don_S...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But that could be why
I didn't find your first requests about Carter, if they came in late
December or early January.

Believe me, I did not post to this newsgroup before the end of
December.

I've gone back to Google and tried to find the Oct/Nov posts.
As I can no longer retrieve those either, I'll happily yield this
point to you.

The reason you can't retrieve them is that they don't exist. I posted
to other newsgroups during those months, but not to scjm.

(snip)

Perhaps your presentation has something to do with that?

Assuming you want to help, as opposed to -- say -- showing off, how
would you have presented my position more effectively?

(snip)

Perhaps this is why you've gotten some flak about using an obvious alias?

I haven't gotten that much flak. I'm not the only person here who
uses an alias. And a recent thread described how some posters left
because members of this newsgroup interfered in thir real lives. So I
think using an alias is really a good idea. After all, it's the ideas
that count in a discussion, not the personalities.

(snip)

Fair enough - but do you see how they might suggest anti-Semitism to
someone else?

Not to any reasonable person.
..
(snip)

I agree - some people seem to have a hair-trigger in that regard.

I've noticed that. And it's very disappointing.

(snip)

While I've not particularly liked your methods and presentation,
I think such a label was unwarranted.

Thank you (I think).



In general, people who rely on blogs and Camera-type pages are trying
to save themselves time, and not looking for further opportunities for
work and research.

(snip)

Newspapers are a primary source. Historians rely on them, genealogist
rely on them.
But space considerations being what they are, newspapers sometimes
only scratch the surface. A serious researcher needs to consult more
specialized sources, or even do a bit original reporting, so to speak.

Historians rely on them... why? Because they are a contemporary record,
and because they are often the best available. But that doesn't mean that
they're the best possible, just the best available for many time periods.
Who knows what historians will rely upon in 100 or 500 years? Personally,
I think that things like blogs will have a tremendous impact on history.

For any kind of sourcing, if a document is being used that was created
by a person who is likely to have a bias, that makes it less good

I don't particularly care about opinion blogs per se when looking at an
issue like this. But places such as CAMERA are not a blog in that sense.
They are a blog only in that facts may be immediately disseminated.

Wire services and mainstream papers' web pages serve the same
function. Newspaper websites are constantly being updated.

You'll
note that most newspapers have them, and use them, and even for hard news
stories use blog-like features.

It enables the papers to write about news more subjectively. One of
my daughters contributes to the blog of the large daily paper for
which she is also a reporter. Her writing for the blog is very
different from what she writes for the paper.

(snip)
The criticism has appeared in major papers -- not all of it -- but
it's clear that the book is very controversial. People don't need to
read Camera and its ilk to know that.

So who wrote the criticism? Was there much published at all from
anyone who was not Jewish (judging by names)?

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) we only have their names to go
by. Plus, the book was widely reported on, but not so widely
reviewed. Lots of non-Jewish writers covered it as a news story. The
lovely and talented Robert Fisk wrote something that reads like a
review in the UK Independent. It goes without saying that Fisk's
review wouldn't exactly be called "criticism."

(snip)
Why not? You can talk about what CAMERA contains, when you haven't
read it (or have you?).

Of course I've read it. Why do you think I haven't? I don't read it
every day, but I certainly read the links supplied by posters to SCJM.

Because you strongly implied that you didn't, and probably wouldn't,
given that you said you discount such sources. If you have, I apologise.

I read it when somebody here uses it as a reference. I don't dismiss
things without looking at them.



(snip)

Show me where I have criticized Israeli policy, please.

Actually, you have, with regard to Israeli actions in the West Bank.
I'll have to dig through to find it, so it may take a while.

Again, you won't find it because it doesn't exist. What you may find
is a description by me of what is in Carter's book, clearly labeled as
Carter's ideas, and not mine.

(snip)


IMO, lists of facts from pages such as Camera require more scrutiny
from the reader than a comparable list of facts from -- say -- the
New York Times.

Why? Here's the crux of the matter - why?

Since when is anything having to do with Camera the crux of the
matter?

The CAMERA facts, good
or bad, provide lists of sources from which you can verify. The NYT
stories do not. The CAMERA pages have, as you say, an undisguised
agenda, which you may take into account when reading their pages.
The NYT claims not to have an agenda, which in my opinion is more
dishonest.

That's because you assume they have an agenda, because they see fit to
write stories that don't necessarily support the side you favor.


It is their claim at unbiased reporting which is their
undoing when easily-detectable patterns emerge in their reporting.

"Easily detectable" by conspiracy theorists.

(snip)

If you respond to facts with more facts, the opportunities for abuse
are far fewer.

That should be the case, yes, but in fact it is not the case.

So far you haven't presented facts, so we don't really know, do we?

I have no interest in supplying some of the posters here -- who seem
rather bloodthirsty to me -- an opportunity for further abuse.

(snip)

No matter what I write, it seems that my
posts are treated by some as the "black utterances of a depraved
imagination." (For the benefit of any G&S fans who are still awake)

Your presentation creates that impression.

No it doesn't. It is their desire to be belligerent that causes them
to react that way. They are habitually extremely nasty to strangers.
Most of the strangers leave when they've had enough of this kind of
crap. Then they go back to fighting with each other.


If you have no opinion,
then why do you feel that whatever you write it will be greeted in
such a fashion? If you believe that everyone here writes in chorus,
with one viewpoint,

No no no. That's definitely not what I believe. Not really
"everyone." It's a handful of people who claim they are everyone, or
speak for everyone. Which is baloney.

(snip)

I inferred it from your sentence which reads, "It's almost as if your
intent is not necessarily to get to the truth, but to score points
against Israel"

I will grant you that "almost" and "as if" are "weasels" that people
place in their text so they won't have to take responsibility for what
is clearly implied..

I will overlook your implication that I am a weasel. Some of us use
words for a living, and know not only what they mean in a technical sense
but also amongst people.

"Weasel" is a term used in advertising, that enables advertisers to
make a claim that's not quite accurate. You should not infer that I'm
saying you are one. Women also tend to use lots of qualifiers when
they speak and write, as if they were backing into their position
instead of stating their ideas firmly.


Amd again, you misread. I said that the implication was that your
responses to the list of facts with which you were presented would
necessarily be contrary to the prevailing opinion of the group here
(see above). There would be no reason for anyone to abuse you if you
agreed with them, would there?

In fact, there hasn't been any reason for them to abuse me so far,
nevertheless they have done so. IMO, the abuse is the point of the
discussion for some of them, and not the thing that the discussion is
supposed to be about.

I'm not the only person who suffers from it either. For example,
Cindy, who has given me rather a hard time, is often misread. She
spends quite a lot of time in threads I don't post to correcting other
people's misreading of what she has written.

But your fear of such abuse for your
responses, for any response you make to those facts, presupposes that
your response will indeed be contrary to that prevailing opinion.

I have no idea what my response will be because I'd have to go
research the claims on the page in order to know that.

And THAT suggests that your motivation from the responses would not be
to get at the truth, but something else - and I suggested one
possibility.

Those are merely your speculations, and they are incorrect.



I am only interested in the strong reaction to this book, and why
people are so glib about tarring everybody who disagrees with them
with the "antisemite" brush.

You have two major theses in this one sentence:
1) The strong reaction - Do you now understand why people have reacted the
way that they did? Have you seen enough background to follow that? Even
if you disagree with the assumptions?

No. Nothing in the book justifies calling Carter an anti-semite.

But we're not talking about just the book.


*I* am talking about the book. Because the book is the thing that
Carter is getting clobbered with at the moment. The thread was about
the book.

People have been saying
that for quite a while.

But *which* people have been saying it? And what, exactly, have they
been saying?

In fact, people have been quite explicit in
bringing to bear other facts from the past 30 years or so to support
their contention that he is an anti-Semite. I don't recall that anyone
has used the book as a source to make that suggestion,

Of course, they have used it as a source. How do you think this
discussion got started, anyway?

so saying that
nothing in the book justifies it is really irrelevant.

No, you're quite wrong. The discussion is about public reaction to
the book. If it were a discussion about Jimmy Carter's career, I
wouldn't be participating, because I am not especially interested in
Jimmy Carter, and also I don't know a great deal about him.

(snip)

You *do* seem to have comprehension problems. I stated that I have
read EVERY post on this thread. I made no mention of other threads
(but I have in fact read almost every post, dropping perhaps fewer
than 10).

Okay. Let me put differently then. This conversation about Jimmy
Carter's book has encompassed several threads -- at least one of them
much longer than this one. You seem to have missed quite a bit of the
discussion. So maybe you need to read the other threads to be truly
up on what has been said by both sides.

(snip)

I think that many people who claim they are unjustly labeled
an anti-Semite are unable or unwilling to examine the reasons why,
and instead are claiming victimhood.


That seems to be a stylish rhetorical ploy in these parts. Quite a
few people here are claiming victimhood, it seems to me. Your friend
even invoked his dead ancestors when criticizing me.

You've discussed newspapers as if they are subject to strict
fact-checking,

(snip)
Why are you unwilling to believe that other outlets have
similar mechanisms?

Because, or one thing, it is very expensive to check facts. And these
other outlets don't have the cash to spend on research.

(snip)

You've got plenty of your own homework to do.

Oh really? And what do you think I should be doing?
Have I not adequately explained why, with limited time, I am
unwilling to invest it reading something that is reputed to be fiction
masquerading as fact?

It seems to me that what you are really unwilling to do is think for
yourself. And it also seems to me that perhaps you need to read some
of the other threads on this same subject.

I've seen first-hand what happens, and how it happens.
From *inside* a newspaper.

That's why there are corrections.

Yes, and not all of them get made. And for those that do, the
correction undoes only a very small portion of the damage done.

And what about the damage done by blogs and advocacy pages that only
present half the story, and create what amounts to fiction by pasting
things together that have been taken out of context.


Again, reread the "perception" paragraphs I originally wrote.
For the vast majority of people in this world, perception IS reality.

That is a very scary idea. Unfortunately, the antidote to that is
thorazine and psychotherapy.

With newspapers and their corrections, they manage the perceptions
such that the initial story makes the splash, not the correction.

You write "manage" as if you believe the errors are made deliberately

(snip)

In my experience as a copy editor and as a person who sometimes phones
in corrections to newspapers when I see mistakes, most errors do get
corrected.

And how many mistakes don't you see? You yourself admit that "most"
errors get corrected, leaving "some" uncorrected. Unless you yourself
are perfect, you don't see all the errors either.

This is nonsense. The papers are not perfect but they do as good a
job as they can. And it's a better job than blogs and pages like
CAMERA can do because papers have more money to hire people to check
facts.


Which means that out
of all the errors, a subset of the subset that you see are eventually
fixed.

I repeat, most errors are corrected. Just because newspapers aren't
perfect is no excuse to condone reading crap and propaganda instead.



You have no idea what I know, or for what news organisation(s) I
have done work, or just how much of my work has been published (or
under what name). You are making gross assumptions that are not
based upon any information presented herein.

I'm making assumptions based on your apparent idea that newspapers are
thrown together with a careless disregard for facts. You seem to be
unfamiliar with the process.

Unfortunately, no. I am familiar enough to have seen far too many
errors get passed through with NO correction afterwards. Perhaps if
we had more copy editors like you (along with similar fact checkers
and editors) that would have been different.

No need to be snotty. If you don't trust newspapers, don't read
them. It doesn't matter to me. One more biased person isn't going to
make that big an impact in the world, much less at SCJM.

If someone comes along with information contrary to your apparent thesis,
it seems they are automatically labeled "unreliable" without regard to the
actual truth of their statements.


Aside from blogs and CAMERA, what other sources have I said are
"unreliable?"

(snip)

You comdemn others for dismissing contrary opinions and positions,
yet you seem to dismiss contrary opinions and positions.

The thing that I don't do is to tell people they are morally corrupt
-- as in, say, "antisemitic" -- because they have opinons that are the
opposite of mine.

And I really try hard to avoid telling people that they wrote things
they didn't write. Of course, sometimes it's hard to separate the
various posters, since "Everybody" here shares the same opinion -- or
so I'm told.

You say you have read all of this thread, but if you have, you are a
great point-misser. What I object to is being told I wrote something
I did not write, that I hold an opinion that I do not hold, and that I
am an antisemite, which is untrue.

And it cannot be somebody's "opinion" that I wrote something I did not
write, unless they have serious perceptual problems. I don't want to
use a loaded expression like, um, "seeing that which is not actually
there (you may supply the synonym for that)," but I hope you see what
I am getting at.


You'll have to do better than this if you expect
to be taken seriously here. And if you don't, or don't care, then
why do you bother?

I bother because I am interested in other people's ideas. But you
can't have an exchange of ideas with people who don't read carefully
or don't read at all. -- Q

I agree, which is why this is becoming difficult for me. You've outright
misstated, misinterpreted, or misrepresented my words on a number of
occasions. From that it would appear that you don't read carefully, or
at all.

Oh right. The famous "You're Another" argument.

Cite the occasions where you've been misstated or otherwise wronged by
me. I concede that you wrote you read every post in this thread.
However, gaps in your knowledge suggest that you have more reading to
do.

If you feel you are being misunderstood by me, perhaps if you
refrained from writing 4,000-word posts, it would be easier for me to
have a clearer grasp of your deathless prose. -- Q

(snip)


.

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