1/ One of the things that fascinates me about journalism is the distinctive, objective difference in the way that the Associate Press reports news and the way the the New York Times reports news.
The AP prides itself on neutrality, the NYTimes prides itself on interpretation.
2/ Take today's daily Twitter outrage as an example. The GOP passes a resolution censuring a couple of its members. You can read the full text of their resolution here: int.nyt.com/data/documentt…
3/ Both the AP and NYTimes wrote nearly identical, and yet, completely different (sic) stories. You can see the difference in their titles.
The NYTimes interprets what the resolution said, the AP describes it neutrally.
4/ This continues to their leads. Note that the NYTimes is factually in error: the censure certainly "implies" that thing, but doesn't "officially declare" that thing -- this is the NYTimes interpretation.
5/ Both quote GOP chair Ronna McDaniel as clarifying things, that the GOP wasn't referring to the violent bits, but the things that weren't violence.
Both NYTimes/AP point out that while this may be true, but the censure resolution made no such distinction.
6/ Both quote Romney tweeting a condemnation of his own party, while pointing out GOP chair McDaniel is his niece.
So what we have here are two fundamentally identical stories, but told in the "NYTimes way" and the "AP way".
7/ The APs language uses plain language. The NYTimes uses terms full of connotation and judgements, like "vacillation" or "rushed" in the text below. Consider if the author had chosen "debate" in stead: one word is neutral description, the other personal judgement.
8/ The AP does use the word "insurrection" here, though. I, too, use the word, but I'm worried if it's truly neutral. On one hand, the events clearly match the dictionary definition of the word. On the other hand, none of the 768 people involved were charged with "insurrection".
9/ Sure, the NYTimes is biased against Republicans, but I thing their actual bias is that of elitism. They need to decide for the reader what they should think rather neutrally give them the facts and let the reader determine for themselves.
10/ I agree that GOP is trying to downplay and excuse the events of Jan 6, but on the other hand, it's legitimate for the GOP to fear that Democrats will exaggerate those events. The investigation is clearly a political rather than neutral process.
11/ Personally, since I believe the Republicans are rat bastards on this issue fighting the peaceful transfer of power, I want the Jan 6 to be as FAIR as possible. The more partisan their conclusions, the less effective they will be.
12/ Anyway, the purpose of this thread is to show the distinct styles of journalism. I feel these sorts of articles should be in a textbook somewhere, contrasting NYTimes elitist interpretations vs. the AP factual neutrality.
13/ This tweet makes a great point (so I'm taking a screenshot of it).
The problem is YOUR inability to come up with any other interpretation is YOUR flaw, your ignorance, your lack of empathy. I don't mean this insulting. Let's see what I mean...
14/ If you talk with Republicans (such as this quote from the AP story) you'll find widespread unhappiness with the way the Jan 6 committee is going after people with absolutely zero involvement in the Jan 6 attacks.
15/ The reason the text doesn't make this distinction is because all Republicans already know the distinction. Republicans wouldn't interpret the text this way. Even the Republicans (like Romney) who are critical of the censure don't interpret the text this way.
16/ The Jan 6 committee is investigating the thing BEHIND the insurrection, namely Trump's attempt to overturn the election. That means lots of subpoenas for things that aren't directly related to the violence at the capitol.
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By the way, the energy density of C4 is 6.7 megajoules/kilogram.
The energy density of lithium-ion batteries is about 0.5 megajoules/kilogram.
C4 will "detonate" with a bang.
Lithium-ion batteries will go "woosh" with a fireball, if you can get them to explode. They conflagrate rather than detonate. They don't even deflagrate like gun powder.
To get a lithium-ion battery to explode (in a fireball) at all, you have to cause physical damage, overcharge it, or heat it up.
Causing heat is the only way a hacker could remotely cause such an event.
I don't want to get into it, but I don't think Travis is quite right. I mean, the original 25million view tweet is full of fail and you should always assume Tavis is right ....
...but I'm seeing things a little differently.
🧵1/n
I'm a professional, so I can take the risk of disagreeing with Tavis. But this is just too dangerous for non-professionals, you'll crash and burn. Even I am not likely to get out of this without some scrapes.
3/n To be fair, we are all being lazy here. We haven't put the work in to fully reverse engineer this thing. We are just sifting the tea leaves. We aren't looking further than just these few lines of code.
The reason IT support people are so bitter is that YOU (I mean YOU) cannot rationally describe the problem:
You: The Internet is down
IT: How do you know the Internet is down?
You: I can't get email.
IT: Is it possible that the email servers are down and the Internet is working just fine? Can you visit Twitter on your browser?
You: Yes, I can visit the twitter website.
IT: Is there any reason other than email to believe the Internet is down?
You: The last time I couldn't get email it was because the Internet was down.
The fact that IT doesn't call you a blithering idiot on every support call demonstrates saintly restraint, even if a little bit of their frustration leaks through.
A lot of good replies to my tweet, but so far this is the best:
Trump is pure evil, the brutality of his answers appeals to ignorant brutes who reject all civilized norms.
But the yang to Trump's yin is a liberal elite like Rosen whose comfortable with the civilized norm of lying politicians who play this game of deceitful debates.
To be fair, Biden (and Obama and Bush before him) have stood up for important democratic principles, the ones that Trump flatly reject. But still, the system has gotten crusty. There's no reason to take presidential debates seriously as Rosen does.
It's the same as all Ben Cotton's analysis's, looking for things he doesn't understand and insisting these are evidence of something bad, that the only explanation is his conspiracy-theory.
I can't explain the anomalies he finds, either, but in my experience as a forensics expert, I know that just because I can't explain it doesn't mean there isn't a simple explanation.
For example, he points to log messages about mismatched versions. I know from experience that such messages are very common, I even see them in software that I write. It's the norm that when you build something from a lot of different software components, that they will not be perfectly synchronized.
That he would make such claims based solely on log messages of mismatched versions proves that he's really not competent -- or at least, very partisan willing to be misrepresent things.
In particular, I disagree with his description of these files. In the C#/.NET environments, creationg of new executables is common. In particular, these are represent web server files. It's quite plausible that as the user reconfigures the website, that these executables will be recreated.
I don't know for certain. I'd have to look at Dominion in more detail. I just know that if any new C#/.NET executables appear in the system that they are not automatically new software.
The certification process looks haphazard and sloppy to me, so it's easy for me to believe that uncertified machines were used in elections.
But nothing in Ben Cotton's report suggests to me that this happened. He's not looking for an explanation for the anomalies he finds, he already has an explanation, and is looking for things that the ignorant will believe is proof of that explanation.
This is an incredibly important article and Charlotte Cowles (@charlottecowles) should be praised for writing it. Everybody should read it.
People laughing at her for getting scammed are missing the point, such as what the following picture does. thecut.com/author/charlot…
No, I wouldn't have gotten scammed like her. For one thing, I believe every phone call is a scam, either a criminal one, or some vendor trying to waste my time getting me to pay for things.
But I hate to think what I might fall victim to.
The only real defense is reading articles like the one above. Forget advice about what you should/shouldn't do told to you in a vacuum, instead, read about such stories about what sorts of scams actually happen in the real world.