Andrew Hagen

Good news. The great Robot Wisdom is back and has been back for a couple of months. (*)

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit and high muckity-muck of the blogosphere, rolls out the artillery against the MSM ground assault. (*)

In the wake of the bloggers’ successful campaigns against Howell Raines, who once condescended upon the red states from high atop the New York Times, and Dan Rather, anchor of liberalism, the old guard media has been licking its wounds. Eric Engberg of CBS fired a few shots at the pajama-wearing and generally unwashed battle host of the blogs with his scornful comparison of 21st century web logs to CB radio. (†) Engberg’s volley only drew, however, a few murmurmings in response by the usually talkative bloggers.

The full MSM counterattack began with a snarling feint to the blogosphere’s center. Several liberal web sites ran exit poll results on election day without providing any context. The gaping gulf between the exit polls and reality caused great shock and awe upon the blue states when Bush captured the Ohio flag. By equating the rumor-trading liberal blogs with blogs as a whole, and then smearing their credibility as a whole, the MSM appeared to have made its last stand. (‡)

The conservative and libertarian blogospheres reacted with unconcern at the MSM’s light infantry charge, deflecting it as another Battle of the Bulge. The MSM then launched a surprise flanking maneuver, bombarding the weak point of the blog lines. The MSM chastised bloggers for unsubstantiated rumor mongering of election fraud and an actual Kerry victory. The dogs of war came unleashed.

Field Marshal Reynolds let fly the cannonade in his furious reply. The long-toothed MSM only made an issue of this to put down the young, innocent, and ethically pure blogosphere so that the public would keep reading the Times and watching the evening news, instead of logging on and tuning out. Furthermore, only the liberal blogosphere trades in rumor. The libertarian and conservative blogs never do.

In the wake of Reynolds’s devastating fusillade we shall see what if any ammunition the MSM has kept in reserve.

And so the battle rages. Will there ever be peace, or are these two groups destined to continuously wage war upon their journalistic brethren? Will there come a day when blogs feel a little shabby for parasitically providing fourth and fifth-hand information as if they were personally present for the events in question? One day will bloggers scrub most of the fallacies from their opinions? Will the MSM ever rejoice to reformat the news so it appears in chronological order?

We don’t know if there can ever be true peace. We only do know that this war will rage for decades—unless, of course, this is not a “war,” but is instead a mere imperialistic adventure that will surely end in quagmire and in regards to which there should have been many more allies before going in.

Michael Totten is back, and not a moment too soon. (*) Check out his photos from North Africa.

The great Marc Cooper has a web log I just found. (†)

Finally, Heather Wilhelm’s web log will start up within days. (‡)

Bill Wallo of Walloworld (*) names this as one of his favorite web logs in the course of his interesting profile at Normblog. (†)

Thanks, Bill. The feeling is mutual.

Andrew Sullivan (*) uses the term paleoliberal and derivations three times in his article on the Democratic Party’s policies on the racial divide. (†) It happens to be a thought-provoking article worth reading, but Sullivan’s use of rare terminology that I am trying to promote into common usage makes me even happier to have come across it.

Seemingly tedious issues vex me.

One of the poorest understood and most widely relied upon subjects is statistics. In modern society, the educational system should teach basic statistics to all pupils. Unfortunately, it does not. A primer is online. (*)

Three of the most common offenses are a misuse of percentages, statistical surveys of factual questions, and the employment of web polls for anything other than entertainment.

Every educated person knows something about percentages. The trouble is that so many people do not understand the fundamentals of the concept. Take a person who flips a coin 1,000 times, recording the results of each toss. Let’s say the coin is perfectly balanced. Let’s say that there were 550 heads, and 450 tails. That is, 55% of the tosses came up heads. Now he prepares to toss the coin again. What is the probability of heads in this toss? 55%? No. It is 50%. This is because in probability the past does not matter. There is always a 50% chance of heads, no matter how many heads or tails came before.

Another common, glaring error is the use of a percentage to characterize an upcoming event. Say one sports team is playing another. The first team has ten victories and no losses. The second has ten losses and no victories. A sports commentator might say something like, “The first team has got a 75% chance of winning this game.” Yet, there is no validity in that statement at all. It is unfortunate that this mistake really happens. It happens every day and in all walks of life. Think about it. How many games are these teams playing? Just one. They are not playing four times. Only once. Therefore, at the end of their playing the game, one team will be 1–0 against the other team; while the other team will be 0–1 against the first team. Therefore, the actual chance of victory is 100% in favor of one team or another.

Instead of saying, “this event will probably happen,” say “this event will happen because…” or “this event will happen if….” The misuse of percentages tells your audience nothing of what you really know. Tell your audience why you think what you think.

Sometimes perfectly valid, scientific polls are taken of whether the public believes in certain facts. The trouble is the results seem to have more importance than they really do. For example, imagine a poll that found that 83% of American adults believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when his regime was attacked in March 2003. (I just made this figure up.) Why would it matter? Such a poll has no bearing in any way on whether that is a true statement or a false one. Popular perceptions cannot make a false statement true or true statement false. Perhaps in some cases such a survey could be of help in understanding why other popular opinions are what they are. Surveys of factual beliefs should be carefully framed when presented. Commonly, however, they are presented as if they were in some way intrinsically important.

The last is the worst of all. Web polls are inherently untrustworthy. (†) First, web polls are frequently “freeped.” That is, groups of people who support one position or another, sound or unsound (”We must stop flouridating the water!”), can network online and all take the poll together. This skews the results. Second, polls are frequently sabotaged by those with basic technical skills. They are able to vote more than once. Finally, even if such elementary issues were reckoned with, web polls are open to anyone with a modem, and to no one without. As a result, the poll taker cannot know whether his sample is normally distributed. Most likely, it is not. A scientific poll requires careful design. A web poll requires five minutes and no thought. Draw your own conclusions as to their comparative validity.

Just going through the mantra of “It’s unscientific” is not enough. Major television news networks, newspapers and other sources of information to the public routinely trumpet the results of their dreadful web polls, doing the minuet of it being “unscientific.”

It is time to face the reality. Web polls are not merely unscientific. They are lies. Anyone who believes in a web poll, or uses it for anything other than the object of comedy should be ashamed, embarrassed, and deeply shaken at his having falling into an abyss of avoidable deception.

Some defend web polls as “participation.” That is bunk. Sheer unadulterated bunk. Web polls are a way of fabricating what popular perceptions really are. They provide only the illusion of participation.

Benjamin Disraeli had the privilege of not living to see web polls. If he had, he might have remarked that there are four kinds of lies, “Lies; damn lies; statistics; and those damnable abominations of mendacity, web polls.”

The great, astounding levels of statistical ignorance that are everywhere abundant is a danger to the continued freedom and prosperity of our modern society. Our educational system must teach every student basic statistics. We adults must continue to educate ourselves. For all that is at stake, we must stamp out statistical insanity.

Update: 20 December 2003. Linked by Walloworld. (‡)

Anne Cunningham tells her tale of sexual harassment in the classroom at a major institution of higher education in the United States. (*) She did the right thing and got help.

Jorn Barger has been reported missing at another web site. (*) He writes the popular web log Robot Wisdom. (†)

Cedar, a Metafilter commenter, however, says the police know where Barger is and say he is safe. (‡)

That’s good news.

Edited.

He sees himself as better than the rest of us. (*) He claims to blog, but he links to only a handful of blogs. He rakes in tens of thousands of dollars in web donations per year, but can’t bring himself to part with a few hundred bucks at most to hire someone to fix his permanent links. He’s an impatient writer, with no time to make arguments or to worry about “niceties” such as logic. (†) What he does have time for is creating his overly stylized reactions to some of the news of the day, keying on a few media organizations like the New York Times and the BBC that draw his ire above all others.

He’s Andrew Sullivan. The worst part about his site, however, is the lack of permanent links. (‡) If he were actually interested in critical thought, he would be interested in what other web loggers are saying about his writings. Unfortunately, we cannot easily respond to what he says, because his permanent links are not working, and have not been working for a very long time.

He’s Andrew Sullivan, and he has no time for any of this.

Update: 4 April 2004. To improve the clarity of what I wrote about permalinks, I offer this. Every single entry on Sullivan’s site should be linkable with a unique URL. Currently every one or two or three or four or five entries has a unique URL. This makes it difficult to pinpoint a certain topic on his site when one is composing a response.

C. Dodd Harris’s Ipse Dixit is three years old today. (*) Congratulations!

Despite numerous recent problems in the quality of journalism at the New York Times, it remains the country’s best newspaper. (*)

Unfortunately, it has reduced the scope of public access to online articles. Most articles over two weeks old are now unavailable. Mitigating that are the Times excellent URL format, that makes clear the date of articles, and the nice summaries of fee-based articles. It is too difficult now, however, to always work with articles that are at most only two weeks old. Therefore, I am unlinking the Times from the front page.

The Washington Post has an inferior registration and login interface to that of the Times web site, but at least most Post articles will be available online for a month.

CNN and USA Today remain the champions, as their articles are always easily available.

Dodd Harris of Ipse Dixit has come to my defense in the Paleoliberal brouhaha. (*)

Michael J. Totten is also supporting me against the ravages of the surly apparatchiks. (†)

You are two free thinking, open-minded, noble, and courageous fellows. Your support means more than the castigation of a thousand. You and the others who have commented have my thanks.

Some have suggested deleting offensive comments and banning the IP addresses of such posters. I’ve decided not to do that at this time. I knew when I posted “The Paleoliberals” (‡) that it would attract either little attention or the fire-breathing type of response that is so unfortunately characteristic of the Left today. I’ve noted before that the Left is dangerously obsessed with disciplining its rebellious members into submission, treating autonomous beings as its own flock of sheep. (§) It reminds me of a scene from history.

The news of the fall of the Bastille greeted Louis XVI late in the night of July 14, 1789, after that monarch had retired from a day at the hunt. Once the duke who had carried the news from Paris finished his statement, the king laconically commented: “Then it’s a revolt?” “No, sire,” replied the duke, “it’s a revolution.”

(**) The paleoliberal position is encrusted with rust and decay, and the newer, more rational, more open-minded, more forthright liberalism stands ready to take its place.

As for the offensive comments, in this case, it is useful to let the paleoliberals expose themselves. In the future, however, my intention is to foster thoughtful discussion, and therefore appropriate measures will be taken if incivility continues.

I have linked to Little Green Footballs (*) again. Earlier, I deleted a link from andrewhagen.com to that excellent product of Charles Johnson on the grounds that the petite emerald pigskin encouraged an irrational antipathy for a religion and culture that is anything but a monolith. (†)

I now withdraw that criticism. After reading more of LGF over the past few months, it is abundantly clear that a distinction is drawn there between the dangerous and non-dangerous branches of the faith founded by Mohammed. LGF should be read and grappled with by everyone, especially because of its ability to play corrective antidote to the deep tolerance, compassionate understanding, and warm sympathy that underlie much of the world’s media coverage of that most dangerous branch of Islam, even of the very offshoots who may properly be called terrorists. To the extent that hate is an issue in the debate today, it is worrying only that those with so few compunctions and so little concern over human life harbor hate for all who stand against radical Islam.

Apologies to all concerned.

Sean-Paul Kelley of the Agonist (*) and I linked to each other prior to the commencement of war with Iraq. He has covered the war thoroughly, but in many of his early stories provided unsourced material as if it were his own. (†) That is plagiarism, a serious problem. Sean-Paul has apologized, has now corrected all his old posts, and has an agreement with the source he plagiarized, Stratfor, a private company. He has not explicitly admitted plagiarism. Ken Layne believes the offense is unforgivable. (‡)

The exact problem is that while Sean-Paul made it clear that while the unsourced information he was providing—something like tanks now attacking in Najaf, for example—was clearly secondhand, there was no indication that another party had gathered that secondhand information, when in fact another party, Stratfor, had. Thus, this is not an edge case between plagiarism and something less problematic. It is plagiarism. Plagiarism destroys credibility.

Regretfully, I’m removing my link to the Agonist, but I am doing so provisionally. I’ll reevaluate this decision soon. The Agonist has been my chief referrer for a while now. That makes this decision especially hard.

Update: Gregory Harris has thoughtful reflections on the matter. (§) Chris Lawrence has further commentary. (**)

Update: Demosthenes comments. (††)

Glenn Reynolds and other right-wingers were quite peeved after it turned out that the sniper, or, neither of them, was not a white male. He charged the supposedly biased media with inventing the myth of the angry white male shooter. (*) (†) This was criticism without merit. Reynolds forgot all about Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, white male, who, in 1999, went on a multi-day shooting spree against minorities and Jews in Illinois and Indiana, leaving three dead and many others wounded. (‡) As CNN reported, “A specific motive for Smith’s three-day shooting spree has not been determined, but the 21-year-old had well-known racist views.” (§) (**) On the basis of this incident, it was natural to think that the recent snipings in the Washington, DC area were carried out by a racist white male with a gun. That had been the case of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith.

Reynolds and other conservatives should issue corrections. I frankly doubt they will, however.

Last updated: 12 February 2003. Phrasing.

There has been some amount of controversy lately about MSNBC’s description as “hateful” of the web log known as “Little Green Footballs.” (*) Many conservative web loggers have leaped to the defense of LGF and its writer, Charles Johnson. (†)

Then, today comes along and Charles Johnson posts:

Oriana Fallaci’s book The Rage and the Pride has been vilified in Europe, for daring to tell the truth about Islam’s hatred of the West.

(‡) Let’s leave to one side what Orlana Fallaci believes. Let’s focus on what Charles Johnson said. It’s apparently okay for Charles to say without evidence, without reason that Islam is a monolith that hates the West, but it’s not okay to say that based on his monolithic, stereotyped characterization of Islam, that Charles is a hater of Islam. Got that?

Islam is not a person, it’s a thing—both a religion and a civilization. A thing can’t hate. Moreover, I happen to know several Muslims, and I can’t think of one of them that hates the West. We do know that a few Muslims are terrorists like Osama Bin Laden and clearly do hate the West, but there is no reason to believe that this hatred is shared by more than a relative few. Islam can’t be described so simply as by Charles Johnson.

I would like to think that Osama Bin Laden will not get his wish, and that we of this world will learn to look past our differences and live in peace. That will not happen until the terrorists are defeated. Yet, there are apparently many in the West that are tempted to do what Osama wants and start hating Islam for being Islam and turn civilization upon civilization, as if peace were a luxury. We are right to direct our wrath toward our enemies—the terrorists—but not against Islam itself, which does not hate the West, no matter what some may say.

Anil Dash reflects thoughtfully on the controversy. (§)

Mac Diva comments. (**) (††)

Update: 2003.08.30. Link is reinstated. (‡)