Comparing Apples And Genocidal Maniacs Dept.: One of the inevitable kooks objecting to the Alfred Kinsey biopic proved that his lack of connection to reality goes Deeper Than That. Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America’s Culture & Family Institute, huffs, “Instead of being lionized, Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist.” Yes, folks, we have here a man who cannot tell the difference between the monster who experimented on Holocaust victims and… Dr. Shrinker. Good of him to give the movie a little bump in my consciousness, though; I’m going to have to check that one out.
The election map as bad (but statistically accurate) acid trip…
Limecat glowers on my behalf today. Oy.
Mary Hodder’s thinking good thoughts about what the core values of bloggerdom are. Sounds like the conference thoroughly rocked; wish I’d gone, but I feel like I’m already winging my way to and fro *quite* a bit of late…
Oh lord. Well, my dears, let us have hope. And if we cannot have hope, let us have courage.
Well, kids, here we are: About an hour ’til Election Day. By my calculations, you have just enough time to rediscover your slack. Go in peace, and don’t forget to pull the wool over your own eyes tomorrow.
And more good reading tonight: An essay (again from the NYT) on rockism; a blistering interview with Sy Hersh, not suffering foolish questions gladly, bless him (and bless the nervous interviewer too). He makes, about 3/4 down, a great point about insider vs outsider journalism, something Andrew Kantor has touched on recently (and something I’ve written about offblog that I may yet get around to posting).
Daniel Okrent is just a mighty, mighty force for good these days as ombuddy at the NY Times (and that’s coming from someone still grieving her fanatasy-league team — the man invented Rotisserie, you understand). He’s got a gorgeous essay in the Times today talking about attributions and how reporters are encouraged these days to quote — but not identify — “experts” in their work, whilst not giving (overtly anyway) their own opinions. It’s a grand piece of writing and closes with a passage that’s worth committing to memory:
“One reason I read a paper with ambitions like The Times’s is because I want the expertise of its writers to lead me through complex matters. The contrary argument holds that, absent attribution, the writer is only providing an opinion, but attribution to unnamed experts is no attribution at all. When a writer offers an interpretation in his own voice, he’s putting his own reputation behind it. Writers (and newspapers) who are often wrong may soon lose their reputations. But writers (and newspapers) too timid or too disingenuous to assert what they know to be true may not deserve those reputations in the first place.”
(As ever, thanks RS for the good eyes — one attribution I never hesitate to make!)
Too. Damn. Funny. Also, this is pretty good. Note well that this election has engendered a tremendous amount of creativity, not unlike Weimar-era Berlin in some cases.
agunn.com 