Change in media reporting

[wm]

One of these days, we have to sit down and do a comparison between formal logic and semantic or emotional logic - preferably combined with a series of optics experiments .

Only if those optics experiments involve aiming and projecting some pointy objects with flights at a bristle board (AKA a round of darts) in an atmosphere conducive to quaffing fermented malted effervescent beverages (AKA beer)

Actually, I don't disagree with you at all. As far as formal logic is concerned, and especially that based on crisp sets, his "experiment" is junk. The crucial point, and the reason why I tossed it up in his thread, was his use of an experimental / experiential test as a way to reinforce his "authority". Did it "prove" that waterboarding was "torture"? Not in any hypothetically objective sense. Then again, "torture" is not a thing that can be perceived as objectively existing in reality (for an analog, see all the problems with defining "abuse"). "Torture" (and "abuse") are socially constructed and negotiated conceptual constructs that have no objective and absolute existence (i.e. they are not crisp sets or objects existing outside of a socially constructed context).

What I was noting that Hitchens was doing was invoking a particular epistemological stance (or ploy, take your pick ) in an ongoing debate.

I agree. What concerns me is how many folks may have been taken in by the ploy.

[marct]

Only if those optics experiments involve aiming and projecting some pointy objects with flights at a bristle board (AKA a round of darts) in an atmosphere conducive to quaffing fermented malted effervescent beverages (AKA beer)

Couldn't have a proper academic discussion without them - especially the beer .

I agree. What concerns me is how many folks may have been taken in by the ploy.

Yeah, and it does happen. My suspicion is that he is doing this as a form of auto da fey (sp?) in order to justify backing off of support for it. Good social theatre... .

[wm]

My suspicion is that he is doing this as a form of auto da fey (sp?) in order to justify backing off of support for it. Good social theatre... .

Allows him never to have been wrong as well--just "previously less aware about what waterboarding really entails"--and to have a foot in the "experience-based" reporting camp that includes all those embedded journalists who file their stories without ever leaving the hotel in Baghdad or the FOB/Green Zone.

[Culpeper]

Allows him never to have been wrong as well--...

Ah, so he's playing the nihilist card. I see this all the time on the Internet. And I have been to the end of the Internet. Now, before you ask I'll tell you what I found. An extreme form of skepticism, denial of all real existence and the possibility of an objective basis for truth, which is pretty much what I found at the beginning of the Internet. Present company excluded, of course.

[marct]

Ah, so he's playing the nihilist card. I see this all the time on the Internet. And I have been to the end of the Internet. Now, before you ask I'll tell you what I found. An extreme form of skepticism, denial of all real existence and the possibility of an objective basis for truth, which is pretty much what I found at the beginning of the Internet. Present company excluded, of course.

You know, I'm wondering about those ads in the top right corner. Culpeper, I got this after your post


A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there once was a reporter who stove for truth...

[Ken White]

Ah, the song of Diogenes, I'd recognize it anywhere...

[Culpeper]

You know, I'm wondering about those ads in the top right corner. Culpeper, I got this after your post


A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there once was a reporter who stove for truth...

You may have something there. It is part of the Internet. But when I log in the advertisement is for "Generation Kill". After I post it goes to Star Wars? That ain't right, man. See, I told you.

Don't pay attention to how I gave you credit in the first sentence and took it back in the last sentence.

[Rex Brynen]

A thoughtful piece by John Burns on the recent death of NYT translator Sultan Munadi and a British soldier during the successful rescue of NYT reporter Stepehn Farrell:

September 9, 2009, 3:34 PM
John Burns on Those Who Aid War Journalists
By JOHN F. BURNS

Sultan Munadi is dead, and a British paratrooper whose name we may never know. There may also have been other Afghan casualties, perhaps Taliban, perhaps not; that we also don’t know yet, for sure. But from where I am writing this, on a sunny autumn afternoon in rural England, the deaths of Sultan and the British commando seem like a grim black cloud darkening the landscape –- a harbinger, perhaps, for the increasingly grim news that seems to await us all from a war that seems to be worsening by the day, and heading for worse yet unless our political and military leaders can find a way to turn the situation around.

Behind these deaths lie complex and highly emotive issues for those of us who have traveled to war zones for The Times and other news organizations, involving our responsibilities for the lives of the locally employed people who make it possible for us to operate in faraway lands -– interpreters and reporters like Sultan, but also drivers, security guards and domestic staff members; altogether, in the case of The Times, at least 200 people in Iraq and Afghanistan over the years of those two wars.
Beyond that, and far more difficult to weigh, if not impossible, are our responsibilities to the soldiers, Marines and commandos who may be deployed to rescue us, as they were in the case of Stephen Farrell and Sultan in the overnight hours of Tuesday to Wednesday.

I know already, from calls and e-mail messages I have fielded in the hours since the raid outside Kunduz, that these are issues that attract highly charged opinions that tend to polar opposites. There are those who say that reporters are to be admired for their intrepid pursuit of stories like the fuel-tanker bombing in Kunduz, and that local staff members who accompany them are keenly aware of the risks, as we know Sultan was, and that military personnel, too, are aware of the risks they take on operations like the one that led to the deaths of Sultan and the British commando. That was a point made in the statement issued by Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, who said of the commandos engaged in the raid –- which the BBC and The Times of London reported as having been approved personally by the prime minister — that they “knew the risks they were running.”

But we know, too, that there are people, including many who have written into this blog, who will condemn us, as they see it, for willfully exposing our local staff and our potential rescuers to fatal risk in our pursuit –- as our harshest detractors see it — of front-page stories, of journalism prize and of a faux claim to courage for our gung-ho ways.

...

[davidbfpo]

On the reporter's rescue etc: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8246514.stm

davidbfpo

[Greyhawk]

...from Sultan Munadi here:

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/...-no-i-wont-go/

I have passed the very darkest times of my country, when there was war and insecurity. I was maybe four or five years old when we went from my village into the mountains and the caves to hide, because the Soviets were bombing. I have passed those times, and the time of the Taliban when I could not even go to Kabul, inside my country. It was like being in a prison.

Those times are past now.

That from 2 Sep 09, a few days before his death.

[Entropy]

Oh my:

He said the two journalists hid behind a wall as the fighting went around them, and at one point Munadi, a 34-year-old father of two, raised his hands and walked into the open, shouting: "journalist, journalist". But he was shot down by "a hail of bullets".

[Greyhawk]

...shouted "British hostage".

[Ken White]

It is an important commentary on many things though...