The Sgt. Friday approach to knowing things

Have been wondering about fact-checking operations, which claim to have the strict facts when it’s often a matter of argument threads, as opposed to spelling a name or getting a date right — except, of course, when there’s argument about a name or a date. 

Hence, I much support this from Red Statesman Erick E. in piece about Rep. Todd Akin’s rape comments.  (And is E.E. sure about spelling of his first name?) 

Erick (sp?):

Politifact disagrees with the statement about Obama and infanticide, but as is often the case, Politifact is obfuscating what Barack Obama said to help a Democrat. Politifact is, after all, the Walter Duranty of fact checkers complete with a Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, and would Sun-Timeswoman Lynn Sweet, recommender of Politifact, take note?  Thank you, Lynn.  And Lynn, please broaden your list of resources.  Better recommend rabid promoters pro and con any position, keeping in mind Norman Mailer’s comment to Chicago 7 judge Julius Hoffman many years ago, “But Your Honor, facts without nuance are nothing.”  

Another point, Hegel, and Plato long before him, had it right about dialectics.  It’s a jungle out there, full of charges and counter-charges.  You have to be good at sifting things.  These fact-checkers claim a lot for themselves but sometimes offer a cookbook approach, comforting to some, indeed a naive approach. 

What we have here is a problem of communication, true, but more specifically one of epistemology. 

Think about it.

Argument detective caught in act

Faulty principle proposed by faulty-argument detective:

. . . why does the rarity of the issue have any sway in this debate? Especially when we’re talking about rape victims? Your justification for controversial action should not be: “Well, it only affects a very small minority of the population.” Instead, you should stop dodging the question and give a firm answer with rationale justification. Otherwise you are just using extremely faulty logic which shouldn’t be taken seriously . . .

Rarity-sway matters often, as when rarity-threatened public funds are allocated to prevent occurrences of a problem or even to remedy effects of bad thing.  Which is where big problems deserve more attention.

It’s a public-policy question that should not be dodged.

Chi Trib, please, be clear about the Servites

You’re a Chicago reader.  You’re a Catholic.  You have some idea of who’s who among priests and nuns.  You think Chi Trib does its homework when it prints a story.  Well not always!!!

Story today about mail theft of donations, a dastardly act that does more than steal money.  It steals trust in the U.S. Postal Service, one of the pillars of society. 

But what of the newspaper that leads off with “The letters to the Servants of Mary were mailed from across the country” by which it means “the Servites, headquartered . . . at Our Lady of the [sic] Sorrows Basilica.”  The Sorrows?  It’s not how people talk!

Reporter is Annie Sweeney, who’s not a new arrival in town, as are not the copy deskers at her newspaper.  It’s been many years since Ed Eulenberg of Chi Daily News chewed me out for getting a standard Jewish term wrong in a story — and he the cheeriest and gentlest of men.  Time was . . .

Anyhow, in this case, we have Servite sisters, headquartered in Ladysmith,Wisconsin, who are called Servants of Mary, and Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, Kansas City-based, founded in 1851 in Madrid, Spain.

Just a bit of Internet searching turns them up.  It’s easier than finding lost mail, that’s for sure.

A mere bagatelle for smutty Tribune

Trib writers Rick Pearson and Monique Garcia having fun in story about Gov. Quinn and pension reform:

Back in the 1970s, Quinn was a populist organizer known for launching petition drives to cut the size of the Legislature and starting tea-bag protests over legislative pay.

And:

Perhaps in an era of tea party politics helping to drive Republicans in the national debate over the size and cost of government, the Democratic governor and his tea-bag protests may be back in vogue after all.

Urban dictionary definitions?

Tea bag:

(v). To lower your body as to dip the testicles into her mouth as the woman is tonguing the scrotum.
And:
(n. or v.) To place testicles in someone’s mouth and proceed in a up and down motion.
And:
Placing your testes inside someones mouth and raising and lowering them to look like you are making tea.
As in:
I proceded to tea bag the homeless man.
Enough.  You get the idea.  Nice going, Chicago Tribune.

How to be a great anything

First, consider what great ones do. For instance:

Flannery O’Connor wrote: “Vocation implies limitation.”  In other words, if you want to be good at something, there are other things that you have to give up.  You can’t have it all, unless you want to be average or mediocre at everything you do.  O’Connor wanted to be a great writer, so after morning Mass and breakfast, she spent the next three hours of every day, writing, with no interruptions.  She said “no” to appointments, to visits, and even to reading before lunchtime, so that she could devote her entire self to writing, in order to become a great writer.  It worked.

Limit yourself.  You can neither be nor have everything.

Illinois issues, please, front and center

This is good reporting of Gov. Quinn’s bad day at the fair on Wednesday, but the lede is in the middle, I think.  Namely:

“I inherited a lot of problems that I didn’t create, but I’m here to repair and resolve them, reform them. And there may be some people perhaps in this audience even who aren’t pleased with some of those decisions, but I want to ask the people of Illinois today: Do you think it’s right that in 1992, some state worker who retired on a $60,000 pension — that’s 1992 and a $60,000 pension — that 20 years later, under the current pension rules that need to be reformed, that very same person is getting $120,000 from the taxpayers?

“I think most taxpayers and parents in Illinois, particularly those who are concerned about education, want to make sure we invest more money in education of our children and our students in Illinois than we put into the pension piggyback for retired state workers,” he said.

To be followed by an adaptation of the actual lede, noting that what he said was rendered inaudible to his live audience by the heckling and available only later only to sound-feed recipients among the press:

Union members heckled him while he ate his State Fair favorite for lunch: pork on a stick. A plane flew overhead towing a banner blasting him as anti-worker. A labor leader was stumped on whether he was a better governor than the disgraced Rod Blagojevich.

My lede would have put focus on issues rather than (in this case) bully-boy and -girl tactics by public-employee unions AFSCME, teachers’ Ill. Ed. Assn., state AFL-CIO, and others — which I find disgusting, but that’s another matter.

To get it straight, go to some other paper, says Sweet of Sun-Times

Lynn Sweet bemoaned dirty campaigning yesterday, offering odd advice to her readers: Go somewhere else to get things straight!

I am imploring you in the months ahead to do some homework. Do some reading up on what’s at issue in the now red-hot future-of-Medicare debate — and not on websites that masquerade as nonpartisan.

For starters, the folks at two independent fact-check operations — the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact.org and FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center — sort out the political debate in thoughtful and simple language, and they have the guts to make the call.

Why wouldn’t she recommend her own newspaper, the Sun-Times?

Why the college-educated believe Obama

This letter-writer (Wall St. Journal, 8/16/12) puts it well:

Regarding your editorial “The Postmodern President” (Aug. 10): Perhaps Bill Clinton was the first postmodern president depending, of course, on what the definition of “was” was (or is). The reason that the Obama campaign’s loosely woven fabrications resonate with the public is [that] we have a rising population of postmodern, university-educated minds.

Interestingly, tea partiers are vexing to postmodernists because they cling to their guns or religion, i.e., absolute truths and unalterable, God-given rights enumerated in our nation’s founding documents. These are roadblocks to free interpretation and relative “truth.”

Doug Mainwaring, Gaithersburg, Md.

We are not supposed to be sure about things, you see.

Burke’s statism revisited: Industry spoke, he and Emanuel listened

Whoa.  Slow down there.  This morning’s story, “Burke: City should consider seizing ‘underwater’ homes,” on which an earlier blog posting was based, has been superseded.  Its very idea has been erased from the hearts and minds of Ald. Burke and Mayor Emanuel, and surely from those of the aldermanic finance committee which met to do the considering.

There was complete turnaround on the issue, backtracking, by Burke from serious consideration of the move, an exercise of dominant domain.  The hearing was “quite informative and [it had been] worthwhile to spend the time learning about what is happening around the country,” he said after it and after retreat by Mayor Emanuel from the fence he was sitting on in the morning story, when he was “still evaluating” the idea, as his press aide told Sun-Times reporter Fran Spielman. 

But by early afternoon, the mayor was convinced it was a bad idea:

“The idea of using eminent domain is not one I support,” the mayor said at an unrelated news conference called to showcase CTA improvements and ridership gains

What happened to make him so sure?  Maybe or probably the instant opposition, unsurpising after all, from the mortgage industry:

Timothy W. Cameron–managing director of SIFMA Asset Managers Group comprised of securities firms, banks and 30 of the nation’s largest asset managers–argued that the use of eminent domain would “do more than good” [sic] to Chicago.

“The worst harm will be felt by Chicago residents themselves, as they will find it harder or impossible to obtain credit,” Cameron said in a statement distributed to reporters prior to Tuesday’s hearing.

So Spielman’s piece was well timed to quash Ed Burke’s can-you-top-this piece of statism at the local level, alerting industry opposition from deep in the morning’s paper. 

The extended new lead online story, “Actor John Cusack addresses foreclosure epidemic at City Hall” — Cusack was there because a friend was pushing the local (eminent domain) solution — seems careful not to be in-Burke’s-face about it, which is not Spielman’s style and would do nothing for her continuing important reportage.

And that, my friends, is my new lead on my morning posting, which you can read here.

Ed Burke’s new statist adventure

Candidate for nation’s most statist pol, allowing for circumstances such as inherited societal proclivity towards (ugh!) democracy?  Presenting Ald. Ed Burke (D-Chi), whose latest — in a long and distinguishing career, if not distinguished except ironically speaking — statist brainstorm is to seize underwater houses and condos.  (this morning’s hard-copy Sun-Times, p. 50, Fran Spielman reporting: link is to on-line new lead of a.m. hard copy story). 

Off-with-their-heads Ed, Red Queenie to his colleaagues (no? should be).  Public housing here, 667,000 units masquerading as mortgages!  A statist’s moist if not all-out wet dream.  Seize the mortgages.  (We can afford it, it’s not our money anyhow.  Sound of eyebrows raising, like drawbridges or Michigan bridge at rip tide.)

“Steep discount” on loans at “fair-market value” to be determined by apparatchiks in city govt.  What could be more fair?  Serfs get new affordable mortgages from the lords of the manor, and the system works!  (System? Seat of pants system if any.)  In long, run we’re all dead, said Lord Keynes, he of the Bloomsbury crowd —sexual cut-ups all, by the way.

FHA not so sure about this mortgage seizure: something about “sound operations” and “taxpayer expense.”  Oh?  What are they? aldermanic Finance Committee members ask, turning to each other in shock and awe.  What the hell is that FHA talking about?  Then back each to his coloring book, or drawing board the expression is, shaking head at the mystifying gaucherie of that mysterious agency with its talk of “chilling effect” on market.

Mayor R. is not sure if he likes it.  Wind not blowing strong enough yet to dry his wettened forefinger held at eye level, his best determinant for seat of his pants decision-making.  But the first rule of statism is bound to win out, don’t just stand there, do something, or look like it.

(Besides, as Steve Bartin points out, “If this passes, the potential for corruption will be unlimited.”  So who needs statism as a ruling orthodoxy?)