Comments on: Hear no evil …

By: nick s

nick s — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 18:20:02 +0000

Anybody who wants to find out what the foreign press is saying about us can go online—there’s no need for a separate collating service.

Except that State is still preparing its round-ups of the foreign press, just not publishing it. Which is nice.

But are you offering to take over, mycroft?

By: jet

jet — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 13:24:16 +0000

Fair enough? Maybe I just need to sanity check what I write for clarity so I don’t piss off people when I’m trying to agree with them.

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 02:07:33 +0000

OK - fair enough. Sarcasm sometimes doesn’t come through on the Internet.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 01:50:55 +0000

Heck, if you look at their bit on the Bill of Rights, you’ll see that the essay on the right to keep and bear arms has been pulled for “review” for over a year now, ever since somebody pointed out they were relying on Bellesiles’ fraud.

http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/rightsof/arms.htm

I think they’re just not maintaining their website.

By: jet

jet — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 01:12:27 +0000

Err, last two sentences….I guess I should have been clearer. I forget that it is not obvious here that the State Department is not a tool of corruption and does a half way decent job.

Either way, I thought it was clear that the first two sentences were sarcasm. But let me be clear, it is a Bad ThingTM that US citizens have even less idea how they are perceived in the world.

By: jet

jet — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 01:05:49 +0000

I guess that last sentence wasn’t clear enough….sigh.

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:40:14 +0000

jet – you’re just trolling for outraged responses, right?

By: jet

jet — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:33:51 +0000

I’m glad the spin doctors at the State Department have given this up. Enough of their cherry picking articles making US citizens think the world hates us and believes we’re wrong in Iraq. Because everyone knows right now the world couldn’t be more interested in the US. And that’s always a good thing, right?

By: bert

bert — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:41:10 +0000

No clippings from the Iraqi press? I hear that’s been reassuringly favourable recently.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:27:00 +0000

That puzzled me too Brendan. And, as mycroft points out, no sensible American would want to find out what was being written in foreign languages. The few who do are doubtless fluent in all relevant languages, or, thanks to the internets, can rely on machine translations.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:03:12 +0000

What is this ‘foreign’? You mean, everywhere isn’t America?

By: Mycroft

Mycroft — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:12:02 +0000

About time the State Department stopped putting manhours into this sort of thing. Anybody who wants to find out what the foreign press is saying about us can go online—there’s no need for a separate collating service.