Quote of the Day

Steve – preposterous in quite what sense? The point of the joke is hard to dispute – that the bombast surrounding Rathergate doesn’t change the fact that the Freepers are a pretty nasty bunch of people. It’s hard to dive lower into the sewers than LGF, but the Freepers manage it on a regular basis. Do you really think that FreeRepublic.com is a valuable source of truthful information as a general rule? If you had your choice between getting your news from CBS or FreeRepublic.com, which would you choose?

I’m a big fan of Andrew’s, and I think very little of the web site in question, but this is just childish name-calling. Someone might think it’s just flinging something.

Andrew has said about a thousand smarter things worth quoting than a simple insult.

Actually, as much as I despise the brownshirts at Freerepublic I’d much rather get my news from there than CBS. Why’s that? Because the freepi frequently post news articles from many mainstream news and lefty sites just to make stupid comments. I’d be able to read the articles posted and simply ignore the ignorant comments below.

Wow, I can’t belive I’ve found a single redeeming feature of that godawful website.

“the internet as a whole is approaching “infinite monkeys” status.”

this is a great line. But if we can’t read the entire internet at once and sort out the truth from the screeching, what good does it do us?

I’m not sure what entitles the freep to a presumption in favor of their story of spontaneously discovering that the memos were forged. It is plausible at the very least that Bush’s people used Powerline and FreeRepublic as back channels to discredit a story that, for obvious reasons, they were reluctant to attack on the record. Nor can one rule out the possibility that the whole thing was a sting operation conducted by Bush’s friends.

Steve – don’t want to flog a joke to death, but your response only makes sense if Andrew is claiming that the Freepers weren’t right. What he’s saying is that they may have been right in this instance, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not full of it. If (to take an example from British sporting history, “Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards”:http://www.infoplease.com/spot/02oleddie.html had somehow won a medal at a major sporting event, and someone had commented that he was still a crap ski-jumper, this surely would have been fair and accurate. Similarly, the fact that the Freepers were right for once in their life doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot more feces-flinging than truth-seeking argument going on over there. And surely that’s the point of the joke???

the second part is that it would also take them an infinite amount of time

As long as the text is finite, it would take them finite(albeit long, unless really a lot of monkeys are out there typing) time, so that part works.

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“I find if you look at the top 4-5 blogs on the left and right (IP, Atrios, Alterman, Volokh, etc) most everything filters up pretty quick.”

Really? Free Republic is full of some pretty crazy people, but the truth is that I can find more information on what’s happening in Africa or Asia on that site on almost any day than I can in any of the “top 4 or 5” blogs you mention.

Then again, most blogs that cover those parts of the world in any depth aren’t left-leaning (perhaps because too much familiarity with local affairs tends to disabuse one of left-wing views on economics), so I can see why the Timberites prefer to pass them over.

The truth is that this Rathergate episode is a moment of victory for the Freepers, and this post just ends up making its author look churlish, especially after so many otherwise sensible liberals embarrassed themselves with their desperate attempts to deny the fraudulent nature of the CBS documents.

PS – I can’t believe I’ve been driven to defend Free Republic! What does that tell you about how badly this post comes off?

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So the great conclusion is that now, thanks to web logs, the mainstream media will shape up, relearn those rules of journalism, and be carefull enough not to let their stories be ripped to shreds by the howler monkeys of FreeRepublic. Clearly a golden age of responsible reporting is coming, now that such lofty standards are being put in place. Um, yay.

There’s actually some truth in Abiola’s claim that aggregating blogs (like blogs in general) do a bad job of finding interesting news stories from the rest of the world – see “here”:http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/paper.pdf . His theory of why the blogs he reads from these parts of the world tend not to be left leaning is rather less plausible (although I did find it amusing).

“Henry-
Preposterous in the sense that the quote makes fun of Free Republic’s accuracy right after they were right!”

Thats exactly when we need to point out that this isn’t usually the case.

I actually find myself linking AAARGH to the freepers. It is true that they store articles that have otherwise been imprisoned by the mainstream meedja and hidden away for money.

And they do provide a snapshot of collective derangement, rather like those old experiments with a cow surgically altered to put a plastic window in its side so scientists could see the bacteria digesting food.

Sorry. Finish your sandwich, you are safe in Massachusetts and far away from me.

The Freepers have been accusing Rather of fraud, etc., more or less daily for the last 10-20 years (as long as there have been Freepers), so Andrew’s point is good.

Question of Rove plants aside, the original intuition of fraud was good intuition, but the initial arguments given were weak and it made sense to reject them. Make the other side prove its own case. There’s nothing dishonest or “in denial” about this.

The fact that the substance of the memos is valid, according to several eyewitnesses, does not help Rather or the forgers, but it is an error to think that Bush has been exhonerated. A very common error. And worse, CBS apparently killed another valid story about the runup to the Iraq war. No logic to that at all, except for a partisan hack — two completely different stories by (as I understand) different news teams.

It’s as if we were keeping score of a sports team and penalizing them for an infraction. But news isn’t sports.