Here’s an interesting development. Long and acrimonious battles have been fought over the question, “Can you trust Wikipedia?” Now, at last, there’s a new answer to this question.
First, let’s recap the arguments in the original debate, and then I’ll explain why I think this news means is a sea change for how Wikipedia will be judged and used in future.
If you have nothing to do this weekend, you might want to check this out. Just don’t tell anyone. Especially, don’t comment with videos of how good you’ve become at it:
Courtesy of Tim Ferris.
I often say, in connection with issues such as foreign aid, state subsidies, or celebrities stumping for Africa, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions alone do not justify policy. The consequences of policy are what matters.
This observation cuts both ways, however. This editorial by Gregory Clark, author of Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, uses the same aphorism, and then, ironically, proceeds to illustrate the point.
I unfairly suspected them of having taken possession of Saddam’s famed chemical weapons. Shoulda guessed that’s not where they’d turn up.
Update: Not that this post was entirely serious, but a correction is in order. In the page title for this post, I used the term “nerve gas”. That is incorrect. The substance in question is phosgene, a blistering agent. Not much of a choice when deciding which way you’d rather go, but let’s be accurate about it.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by John Fund about Roşia Montană1, a small town in Romania, where Western “environmentalists” such as George Soros and Vanessa Redgrave are trying to stoke up opposition to a proposed gold mine. This is a place with 70% unemployment, where the filthy remnants of Soviet-era mining remain a scar on the landscape, and where 80% of the population voted for a mayor who supports the project because it will create 700 new jobs. The mine will also clean up a lot of the damage done in the past, according to its backers.
The editorial contrasts two documentary films. Opposed is Gold Futures, by Hungary’s Tibor Kocsis, partly funded by Soros. In favour is Mine Your Own Business by Irish journalists and filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. No surprises which side I back. A Google search suggests that Gold Futures hasn’t exactly aired (on America’s PBS) to rave reviews either.
In the rather lengthy comment thread on my child labour post, one point that was made went as follows:
If all you see worldwide is an improved quality of life, then you might be looking at surveys funded by investment banks, businesses and governments. Reports about severe violations of human and environmental interests are repeatedly leaking to the public, although the government is doing everything to avoid such reports, abolishing freedom of information and opinion, punishing citizens for giving information to journalists, imprisoning critics.
Not only does it make me fear for my own safety, but also for the safety of Hans Rosling, of whose TED lecture Jonathan Davis over at Limbic Nutrition reminded me.
If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Even if you’re not at all interested in the data, the data visualisation is spectacular.
In what is perhaps the most shameless column I’ve ever read, Steve Outing advocates media advocacy in trade rag Editor & Publisher. He claims that the alternative to “objectivity” is “truth-telling”. The cause in which he says newspapers should ditch this objectivity? Why, climate change, of course.
I’ve … been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don’t think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers’ fabled commitment to “objectivity” has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.
The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let’s change that.
What follows is a tortuous explanation of how the opposite of objectivity is not subjectivity, as simpletons might think. In fact, it is “truth-telling” and “advocacy.” I kid you not. This isn’t a publication defending its own editorial slant. This is a media trade publication recommending that newspapers in general abandon impartiality, and consider the often complex, often speculative debate on the causes, impact, severity and extent of climate change as settled fact. The issue now, he says, is what newspapers can do.
Outing is apparently unaware of embarrassments such as the Newsweek column that took the original global cooling advocacy mag’s more recent cover story on global warming to pieces as “vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading”. He sustains his argument for some time, before making just a teensy weensy mistake:
Advocacy has gotten a bad name in modern news media. I would argue that climate change is too important of an issue squander the power of the news media. Newspapers can and should not only educate people about what they can do, but pro-actively lead and encourage behavior change. That will mean setting aside a time-honored journalistic practice — for this one vital issue.
If his argument held any water at all, why would newspapers need to “get over objectivity”, but only “for this one vital issue”?
Breathless rumours are doing the rounds that the largest diamond ever found is currently stashed in a Johannesburg bank vault, according to an article by Matthew Hill in Mining Weekly, a South African trade publication. Some reports say it’s as big as a soccer ball. Judging by the picture alongside, either the soccer ball is rather smaller than regulation size, or they’re making huge cellphones again.
Granted, if the claimed size of 7,000 carats is accurate, not only would this diamond be twice as large as the famed Cullinan diamond, which was the world’s largest uncut diamond when it was discovered over a century ago, but it would also be more than 150 times the size of the largest green diamond ever found.
The find was reported to the media by Brett Jolly, described as a director of an obscure property developer named Two Point Five Group, which is apparently a shareholder in the unnamed mine where it was discovered. Jolly and his company appear to be just as mysterious as the claimed diamond. Google knows Two Point Five Group only as a company in New York State company licensed by the state’s Department of Labour as an asbestos contractor.
A story on the claim by Natasha Joseph in the Cape Times quotes “an insider” as saying: “No one has heard anything, not even rumours. The general reaction is that if (the diamond has been found), and if (Jolly) is shooting his mouth off the way he is, we would have known about it.”
I propose the name Kryptonite for the stone. What better to name it after than a piece of cut green plastic used in a film about a mysterious superhero?
With apologies to Win Treese at the Association for Computing Machinery, who came up with that headline. The Wall Street Journal has a piece on, you guessed it, Lolcatz. There’s a money angle there. Somewhere.
For some reason that has yet to be fully investigated, my usually excellent hosting provider fell over in dramatic fashion about six hours ago. Apologies for the service interruption. It seems we’re back online, though things may be a little jittery for a while.
Here’s what you may have missed:
In which I consider some unexamined angles of last week’s speech by George W Bush.
Forget what I said about the Chief
In which a far prettier blonde girl discourses on similarly weighty subjects.
This babe gets it. She’s going to edgercate America and get everyone a map and help South Africa and Eyeraq and stuff. At least, I think that’s what she said. She speaks a little high-faluting for me, but then, I’m not as smart as Miss South Carolina.
Update: Here’s a transcript of the clip:
Aimee Teegarden: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?
Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps. And I believe that our education… like such as in South Africa, and the Iraq, everywhere like, such as… and I believe that they should… our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or, or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.
Compere: Thank you very much, South Carolina.
Update: I thought it might be nice to follow on from Cherryflava’s idea, and create a Facebook group for South Africans to show their appreciation for Miss South Carolina’s efforts in getting our little country on the map in the great U.S. of A.
George W Bush made a few important comparisons in his speech just before the weekend. The one that got all the press — though not the most important one — was his comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. I’ve often responded to people who claimed that Iraq is another Vietnam by saying that the comparison is true in only two respects: if it is lost, it will be lost by political pressure at home, rather than military defeat on the battlefield, and if America surrenders and leaves, the consequences — for the region, America, and the world — will be terrible.
Having lost the counsel of Karl Rove, the US president used this suggestion of mine, scoring a political master stroke by turning his critics’ favourite rhetorical weapon against them. (Just kidding. I doubt Bush realises he actually has a few supporters in South Africa. He certainly won’t know it from reading the local press.)
Beyond the headline-grabbing Vietnam comparison, Bush also made an interesting comparison with Japan, which is in many ways even more worth reading. The skepticism about establishing democracy in Japan sounds eerily familiar, yet not only did history prove the skeptics wrong, Japan would become one of the world’s most peaceful and prosperous countries — even scaring Americans with their sheer economic success.
He likewise used South Korea as an example, but missed an opportunity to include Germany in his list. After its defeat it was occupied for years, was described as a “quagmire” by the media several years after the end of the war, and yet today is a free, first-world country. I guess you can’t expect miracles from an illiterate redneck.
Reading Bush’s speech, I find it hard to understand why people who describe themselves as “liberal” (or, for that matter, “democrats”) are so implacably opposed to the Bush Doctrine. As I wrote in a comment over at Commentary South Africa, it’s all so simple to some people. The glee on the part of opponents of intervention in Iraq is almost palpable every time another bomb explodes, or another political setback happens.
Would those who advocate surrender, or predict the certainty of civil war, have said the same thing about South Africa in the wake of Boipatong and the breakdown of negotiations? Or after the rolling mass action campaign and the Bisho massacre? Or when Chris Hani was assassinated and civil war looked unavoidable? Would they have said that negotiations are futile, peace is an idealistic myth and the cause is lost? My guess is they would have.
Though the situation obviously differs in the sense that no foreign military intervention precipitated the fall of Apartheid, the fact is that political negotiations are complicated, sensitive and dangerous. The reasons for success, if it comes, will be many and complex. The reasons for failure, if that’s what it is to be, will be many and complex too.
The only thing that’s easy is the sort of ill-disguised I-told-you-so politics of war opponents. It does not suggest pragmatic realism, nor an understanding of the way forward, nor even the wisdom of hindsight. Instead, it shows a venal need to be proven right, rather than to be doing right.
But most importantly, war opponents and the advocates for a speedy withdrawal fail to see the larger historical picture. George W Bush does. They fail to appreciate that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. George W Bush does.
If you don’t believe me, do read his entire speech. It’s interesting, if nothing else. I include the speech here, starting after the opening niceties…
