Twits on Twitter, Do the Math Dept. 0
An Oxford University study reports that the use of Twitter to spread lies was immense. A snippet:
Nationwide, an average of 25 percent of election-related tweets contained material from established news organizations, the researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute wrote. However, they said, “a worryingly large proportion” of tweets about the election – as much as 57 percent in West Virginia – came from junk news sources, as well as Russia’s state-owned television network and the transparency group WikiLeaks, which published unverified stories.
In the election’s three decisive states, the researchers found that fake and junk news constituted 40 percent of the sampled election-related tweets that went to Pennsylvanians, 34 percent to Michigan voters and 30 percent to those in Wisconsin. In other swing states, the figure reached 42 percent in Missouri, 41 percent in Florida, 40 percent in North Carolina, 38 percent in Colorado and 35 percent in Ohio.
The Snaring Economy, Gypsy Cabs with an App Dept. 0
Owen Davis reports that Uber has achieved another milestone.
It has gotten itself sued for stock fraud, even thought it has not yet issued any stock. An excerpt:
If Uber had recently gone public in a massively overhyped IPO, only to shed double-digits as the true depths of its mediocrity came to light, a lawsuit would not be unusual. Just ask Blue Apron. But it’s rare for a startup to face investor suits in any situation short of complete and utter fabrication on the part of the founders. It basically signals that the highly illiquid startup stake you’ve got – and for which you’d like good money – is worthless.
Read the whole thing. It will give you a lyft.
Clown Car 0
Headline of the day:
Russian Burger King wants to ban ‘It’ because Pennywise looks like Ronald McDonald
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Expose the children to politeness.
(snip)
Haddad says they were wounded by a gun that was kept in the Dearborn home, but there are “questions about who pulled the trigger.” The circumstances are under investigation.
(Link fixed.)
QOTD 0
Edmund Crispin:
. . . the faults we most dislike in others are generally those we unwittingly display in ourselves.
Crispin, Edmund, Frequent Hearses (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 33
The Professional Is the Political 0
Responding to a Wall Street Journal article whose author wistfully yearns for the good old days of “apolitical” big time sports, Justin Levin points out that such times exist only in Never Never Land. He explains why the national anthem is played before every pro baseball and football games (hint: it was a politicized decision). An excerpt:
Pete Rozelle, the commissioner of the NFL, and Spike Eckert and Bowie Kuhn, the commissioners of baseball, worked to put their sports on record in support of the Vietnam War, while laboring to silence those in the game who disagreed. While many believe that before the protests of the last year, the national anthem and other patriotic elements of sporting events symbolized unity, they are actually remnants of this campaign to interject sports into a bitterly divisive political debate.
Plus ca Change 0
David Farmer has heard it before. A nugget:
It was echo of the stinging voice of Alabama Gov. George Wallace that I heard in Alabama last week.
The speaker was President Donald Trump, but his words carried themes from the not-so-distant and ugly past.
Taxing Thoughts 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Peter Ubel explores why people hate taxes, despite that fact that, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once pointed out, taxes buy civilization.
What he finds is not what you might expect.
All Coked Up 0
More stuff you can’t make up.
A gunman “dressed as a Coca-Cola bottle” yesterday robbed a Kentucky restaurant, police report.
Misdirection Play, Freedom of Screech Dept. 0
There has recently been much moaning about “freedom of speech” on college campuses amongst the right-wing puniditocracy. Upon a close reading, most of it falls into the “much ado about not much of anything” category and generally seems designed to use ad hominem arguments to discredit ideas, as in
- “Oh, look! Their clothing is unkempt! I shall fall upon my fainting couch clutching my pearls as I refuse to listen to a word they say!”
In other words, it’s a misdirection play.
Joe Patrice refuses to be misdirected.
He tells us of a flying visit by Attorney-General Jeff Sessions to Georgetown Law School. Some students were invited, then uninvited to the event, apparently because they might have had the temerity to disagree with the views of Sessions and his sponsors.
Patrice suggests that the sequence of events illustrates the right-wing selective perception on freedom of speech. The whole story is rather convoluted, so follow the link for the details, but here’s the lesson Patrice draws from it: