Nice dissection of lazy journalism re Egypt and Twitter

by Peta-de-Aztlan

The “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” Article
[Via Pressthink]

It’s a genre that’s starting to get a swelled head about itself. Here’s why.

I found it! I announced on Twitter yesterday. “It” was the generic Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators article. I said it had everything, meaning: every identifying mark and mandatory cliché needed to lift a mere example to the exalted status of genre-defining classic.

First, let’s be clear about the genre in question.

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One of the main rhetorical tricks of lazy analysts is the strawman argument. It is often easy to see. It states that “some say” without actually providing who actually said what.

Who actually said that Twitter was solely responsible for the uprising? It simply allows someone to write a few hundred words without having to actually provide thoughtful analysis.

Twitter was a tool that allowed information to flow in ways that old style dictators could not easily stop. But even if they could, people would have found other ways – such as cell phones.

Heck, we’ve had war games where the American attacking fleet was sunk using motorcycle messengers and calls to prayers.

It is the tools that ARE important in the hands of a determined group of people. A key is that these tools are greater with greater reach than ever.

This price for the Xoom must be wrong

Best Buy pre-order price for Motorola Zoom: Just $1,199.99
[Via MacDailyNews]

>Best Buy has begun promoting Motorola’s Xoom tablet. Pre-orders begin on Thursday at Best Buy stores (or so they delusionally dream).

Price: $1,199.99. 1 month data activation with Verizon Wireless required.

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I guess they need to make up for that very expensive Super Bowl ad. But $1200?

And it has a hard drive? In a mobile device? Maybe that is a misprint.

Unbelievable that a 1 month activation is required.

Just to stupid to believe that it is anything else but a pranks or something. It can’t be the real price?

Looks like something went wrong as the page is no longer there at Best Buy. It may be a placeholder but not a very smart one. Just do a search for the XOOM at Best Buy and you may still be able to see this great price.

This price may not be correct but it may take some real work to stop this meme – the XOOM is over priced – from going around.

Shearing the flock, denialist style

Hutchinson Wants To Go To Court
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

Remember Ken Hutchinson, the virulently anti-gay preacher from Washington? Now it seems he’s jumping on the anti-evolution bandwagon. In a recent communication with his flock he said:

Dear Prayer Warrior,

Put your prayer knee pads on. I think God is leading me to raise support to sue the state of Washington Board of Education for teaching a known lie, evolution. Let’s see how we can win this battle and then take it to the federal level.

Pastor Hutch

Yeah, because that’s never been tried before. Good luck with that.

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The correct name is Ken Hutcherson, who aspires to be to Christianity what Jordan was to basketball. Looking at his Wikipedia page, it seems that he needs something to get back into the news, since his gay-bashing episodes are several years old now.

Suing has been a losing legal strategy everywhere it has been tried. But it is a great way to raise money to support the evangelical lifestyle.

If we ever become a country where teaching science in a science class results in successful lawsuits by religious zealots, then we will know that America is ready for the trash bin of history.

Cherrypicking – another denialist tool

by whologwhy

Articgate: Now THAT’s cherrypicking
[Via Deltoid]

This graph by Peter Gleick reveals the cherry pick used by Harrison Schmitt to claim that “Artic [sic] sea ice has returned to 1989 levels of coverage” and Heartland’s Joseph Bast to claim

“In fact, National Snow and Ice Data Center records show conclusively that in April 2009, Arctic sea ice extent had indeed returned to and surpassed 1989 levels.”

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Take a look at the whole data. Look at it carefully, month by month. Then try and say this without feeling like a liar:

In fact, National Snow and Ice Data Center records show conclusively that in April 2009, Arctic sea ice extent had indeed returned to and surpassed 1989 levels.

The denialist toolkit is full of such attempts to ignore the majority of the data and find a few data points that fit their needs.

Do people really want to be on the side of such people, on the side of twisting data to mean what it obviously does not mean. This is not a case of statistics and such. For  two weeks out of 52 there was more ice in 2009 than in 1989. This is only because melting started later in 2009. But every other week in  2009 is less than in 1989.

So, which is really important to people who want to let the facts show them the truth? The 2 weeks cherry-picked by denialists or the other 50?

How about we look at all the data? Look at how much 1989 is above the line. Then look at 2009.None of it is above the line. Look at the overall trend, not just the 2 weeks of data the denialists used but the entire 1666 week record.

Does it look like the denialists are correctly explaining all the data or are they just finding a few data points – perhaps 0.1 percent of all the data – to shore up their denialist argument?

Would it be a winning argument to say “I’m right one time out of a thousand? Would you put money in a bank that only had the right balance two weeks out of 32 years?

Cherry-picking is a favorite tool of the denialist. It is always easy to tell which side is the side of denialism. It the argument requires only looking at a small part of the data, rather than the bulk of the data, then chances are they are denialists.

Couple this with quote mining and you have almost complete verification of the denialist’s side.

Quote mining – a tool for denialists

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

The Australian’s War on Science 59: Quote Mining
[Via Deltoid]

The Australian‘s daily column called Cut and Paste should more properly be titled Quote Mining. Look at their latest effort:

Re-insurers don’t seem to think that climate change is causing an escalating number of catastrophes …

Peer-reviewed paper by Eric Neumayer and Fabian Barthe of London School of Economics and funded by re-insurers Munich Re in Global Environmental Change, November 18, 2010:

Applying both [conventional and alternative] methods to the most comprehensive existing global dataset of natural disaster loss [provided by Munich Re], in general we find no significant upward trends in normalised disaster damage over the period 1980-2009 globally, regionally, for specific disasters or for specific disasters in specific regions.

But what does the very next sentence of their abstract say?:

Due to our inability to control for defensive mitigation measures, one cannot infer from our analysis that there have definitely not been more frequent and/or more intensive weather-related natural hazards over the study period already.

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It is always important to check the original quotes used by anyone but particularly used by denialists. The latter almost always use quotes improperly, revealing only a part of the quote and not providing any sort of context.

Because denialism is all about fitting the facts to their Cargo Cult world. IN this case, they left out the important parts, the part that completely undermined their argument.

Now, they obviously read the paper. They know what the authors wrote. By leaving out the relevant part, they reveal themselves as people more interested in driving their own narrative than in printing facts.

That is how easy it is to discover who is a denialist and who is not. Denialists knowingly use quotes to prove their point, even when they know that they are using the quotes improperly. When denialists create a Cargo Cult World, they require that the narrative is more important than facts and are willing to mislead to prove their point.

If someone has to mislead, misconstrue and lie to make an argument, you can pretty much tell they are a denialist trying to live in the Cargo Cult World they have created.