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In January, TIME ran a 12-question quizthat guessed your politics based on things like your preference for cats versus dogs and the neatness of your desk. The survey’s questions were all taken from previous research projects that found differences between liberals and conservatives on matters not directly related to politics.
Many readers were skeptical, to say the least. The comments section simmered with protests like “Since WHEN does being a cat-lover make one a liberal?” and “Having a neat desk isn’t political.”
Loving cats may not make a person a liberal, but it does increase the odds that a person already is one. To see how accurate our survey was, we analyzed the data from 220,192 TIME readers who took the quiz and then volunteered their actual political preferences, and found that all 12 items did in fact predict partisanship correctly.
Each graph below represents the average response by ideology for one of the 12 questions. Charts are shaded red if agreement with the statement correlates with conservativism, blue if it correlates with liberalism.
Since Libertarians don't have a clear place on the liberal-conservative spectrum, they're graphed here by arrows and the letter 'L' and placed near the ideology that their responses most closely match for each question.
Even seemingly innocuous questions like ones about the state of one’s desk or preference for fusion cuisine had at least modest predictive power. A majority of TIME readers, like a majority of Americans, prefer dogs to cats, but conservatives had a significantly stronger preference, on average.
Overall, the quiz’s predictions were quite accurate when compared to a respondent’s self-reported ideology. (The correlation coefficient was 0.682, for those of you keeping score at home.) The individual questions varied in their predictive accuracy, from low (but non-negligible) correlation of 0.124 for the “cats versus dogs” question to 0.471 for the statement “I’m proud of my country’s history.”
When you add together a bunch of these modest predictors, you end up with a pretty good guess as to how a person votes. Not as good as asking people about their views on taxes, abortion and gun control, but enough to show that partisanship nowadays correlates with many non-political attitudes and behaviors.
Interestingly, Libertarians—often considered as being on the political right—fell between the liberal and conservative extremes on most questions. Even when it came to an affinity for nature’s truest libertarians: felines.
Shelby is a writer for a conservative echo-chamber blog called The Daily Caller (it's the kind of ego-stroking site which refers to its subscribers as "Patriots,") and so far as I can tell, she is criticizing NPR for admitting that they, like all other news outlets, are imperfect, and encouraging the reader to keep an open mind and be accepting of new information, even if something which had previously been said, and subsequently found to be untrue, contradicts it.
Another way of reading this would be that, by criticizing NPR for admitting that they might make a mistake, she's implicitly putting herself and / or The Daily Caller on a pedestal of journalistic infallibility.
So, one entity says "we're not perfect, everyone can make mistakes, and we'll do our best to correct them if we do" and another, in criticizing them for that, essentially says "we are perfect, you can always trust us."
Which one of these sounds more like a trustworthy news agency, and which one sounds more like Party Apparatus?
Shelby is a writer for a conservative echo-chamber blog called The Daily Caller (it's the kind of ego-stroking site which refers to its subscribers as "Patriots,") and so far as I can tell, she is criticizing NPR for admitting that they, like all other news outlets, are imperfect, and encouraging the reader to keep an open mind and be accepting of new information, even if something which had previously been said, and subsequently found to be untrue, contradicts it.
Another way of reading this would be that, by criticizing NPR for admitting that they might make a mistake, she's implicitly putting herself and / or The Daily Caller on a pedestal of journalistic infallibility.
So, one entity says "we're not perfect, everyone can make mistakes, and we'll do our best to correct them if we do" and another, in criticizing them for that, essentially says "we are perfect, you can always trust us."
Which one of these sounds more like a trustworthy news agency, and which one sounds more like Party Apparatus?
Joe, I can't say I agree with your logic on this one. Might the person simply be pointing out that NPR should be reporting news that has been confirmed and then not need to be retracting/correcting stories?
On every set of building plans I get there is a disclaimer that says these plans need to be verified in the field and field conditions may warrant changing them. Well, what's the point in the plans then? Can't they tell that they have a 4" plumbing pipe, a12" AC vent, and a 6" light fixture all occupying the same space in a soffit that is only 18"?
So when I-a lowly sub-contractor without a fancy engineering degree, can see the conflict without going out into the "field"- say that these engineers are not doing their job, I am not implying that I am better than them. I am implying that they need to do their job better and not leave it up to us (the superintendent, plumber, electrician, and mechanical installer) to figure it out in the field. IMO, of course.
But, you may very well be correct that a media outlet promoting a certain propaganda will likely point out all the others mistake and try to make themselves look perfect. I wouldn't know as I don't watch/hear/subscribe/follow any of them.
But, you may very well be correct that a media outlet promoting a certain propaganda will likely point out all the others mistake and try to make themselves look perfect. I wouldn't know as I don't watch/hear/subscribe/follow any of them.
It is interesting what many people will accept as "news" these days. Interesting and disheartening.
Out of curiosity, I went to the Daily Caller's website and clicked on a few things. One of them was their "Become a paid contributor" link. Here's the page in its entirety: https://dailycaller.com/contributor/
And here's an excerpt which starts at the very top, from which I've trimmed out some boring stuff in the middle:
. Tired of waiting tables? Is working the campus cash register SOUL CRUSHINGLY BORING?
If you can write quickly and want competitive pay from a high-traffic news outlet, the Daily Caller wants you as a contributor.
(...)
Contributors will be expected to write current, breaking news stories for online publication. Articles will be approximately 250 words and writers are paid on a per-article basis of $20. With no minimum or maximum work requirements, writing for us will never conflict with school, employment, or family obligations — but the more you write, the more you get paid.
There is no trial or probationary period — get hired and start earning from the first story you submit.
(...)
Writing experience is preferred but not required. .
So...
.
They're looking for people whose only viable employment alternative is waiting tables or running a cash register.
No experience required.
Compensation is based on quantity, not quality.
.
Uhm... yeah. That's not a media outlet which I'd trust to have anything resembling journalistic integrity.
And yet, to look at their website, and they way they present themselves and their "contributors," one might easily be led to assume that they are a news agency, which is engaged in something resembling journalism. Especially if what you're reading reinforces your existing beliefs.
And that's a problem. Because what you get for $20 an article isn't news in the sense of something into which any amount of research or fact-checking has gone. It's just opinion, and not likely well-informed opinion at that.
Holy crap! At $20 an article I would have to write.... takes off shoes...... takes of son's shoes.... takes of cat's shoes (thankfully she's polydactyl)... Ahhh, forget it, not enough toes for this to make sense. I'd better stay a plumber.
This is probably better for you, and I imagine that you're doing much more to enhance the overall quality of society in this role as well.
In other news...
[EDIT: Damn, how did I miss Xturner's post above about what I'm about to discuss?]
When I read the book The Cuckoo's Egg in 1990 or so, I was puzzled by the fact that telecommunications in West Germany were managed exclusively by the Deutsche Bundespost, and thus, their involvement was necessary in the international phone-traces which eventually led back to Markus Hess, a German college student whose hobby was selling US military secrets to the KGB.
At the time, I was in occasional contact with a German phone phreak named Thorsten, who frequented a BBS which I was fairly active on. He considered this arrangement to be perfectly normal, and in fact was not aware that the telephone system in the US was owned by a private company.
The Bundespost was later broken up in much the same was as Bell Telephone, and today, Deutsche Telekom operates the phone system. But that odd arrangement has always stuck with me.
Which is what made reading the following all the more interesting. Now, as a disclaimer, while there have been many articles written today telling this story from varying perspectives, they all seem to link back to one single source, a "document obtained by Yahoo News." Yahoo News, is, well... Yahoo News. After interviewing at their Manhattan office in 2015, I turned down a pretty decent job offer, because I didn't have a good feeling about the place.
But, here we are:
Louis DeJoy’s Postal Inspectors Are Secretly Monitoring Social Media Accounts via a ‘Covert’ Program: Report
An almost entirely undisclosed program under U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy‘s purview is secretly monitoring social media posts under the guise of needing to protect U.S. Postal Service employees and “infrastructure.” The effort is called the Internet Covert Operations Program, or iCOP, and it is raising civil rights issues that one expert calls “serious constitutional concerns.”
“The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News,” the news site reveals. “The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public.”
The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
The Yahoo News report does not state when the Internet Covert Operations Program was created but there are no online references to it before 2019.
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, a former Obama appointee who was tasked with reviewing the NSA’s bulk data collection told Yahoo News, “I don’t understand why the government would go to the Postal Service for examining the internet for security issues.”
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program told Yahoo News it “seems a little bizarre.”
“Based on the very minimal information that’s available online,” Levinson-Waldman said, “it appears that [iCOP] is meant to root out misuse of the postal system by online actors, which doesn’t seem to encompass what’s going on here. It’s not at all clear why their mandate would include monitoring of social media that’s unrelated to use of the postal system.”
Levinson-Waldman also questioned the legal authority of the Postal Service to monitor social media activity. “If the individuals they’re monitoring are carrying out or planning criminal activity, that should be the purview of the FBI,” she said. “If they’re simply engaging in lawfully protected speech, even if it’s odious or objectionable, then monitoring them on that basis raises serious constitutional concerns.”
The Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is one of seven functional groups within the Inspection Service Cybercrime program. The iCOP program protects the Postal Service and the public by facilitating the identification, disruption, and dismantling of individuals and organizations that use the mail or USPS online tools to facilitate black market Internet trade or other illegal activities. Analysts in iCOP utilize USPS systems and tools to provide open source intelligence and cryptocurrency blockchain analysis in support of all Inspection Service investigations.
The Postal Service would not comment to Yahoo News other than provide a statement that says in part, “The Internet Covert Operations Program is a function within the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which assesses threats to Postal Service employees and its infrastructure by monitoring publicly available open source information.”
Another way of reading this would be that, by criticizing NPR for admitting that they might make a mistake, she's implicitly putting herself and / or The Daily Caller on a pedestal of journalistic infallibility.
Maybe she’s simply pointing out the obvious statement that a fact is always a fact. If new information comes to light later, how have the “facts” changed? In reality, the only threshold the media meets today is emotional “proof” or social justice impact and wokeness.
04-21-2021, 12:08 PM
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