Patterico's Pontifications

7/31/2019

Hot Air: Babylon Bee may Sue Snopes

Filed under: General — DRJ @ 7:26 am



[Headline from DRJ]

No Joke: Babylon Bee Sics Lawyers On Snopes Over “Fact Checks”

Even the satirists at the Babylon Bee have a limit to jokes — and the attempts by Snopes to “fact check” their humor doesn’t qualify. In a message to subscribers yesterday, the Bee declared that Snopes was attempting to exploit its position as a Facebook partner to “deplatform” the conservative satire site. In response, the Babylon Bee has decided to sic their very real and non-humorous attorneys against the urban-legend site to put an end to their harassment.

NOTE: I edited the title to add “may” since there doesn’t appear to be a lawsuit filed. My thanks to Davethulhu for pointing this out.

— DRJ

3/27/2016

Snopes Lamely Tries to Exonerate Emory Crybullies, Gets Facts Wrong [Updated]

Filed under: General — JVW @ 11:28 am



[guest post by JVW]

As a follow-up to last night’s post on the recent kerfuffle at Emory, I see that the website Snopes, which describes itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation,” has weighed in. In what seems to be a curious take on the subject, the snopes blogger Kim LaCapria focuses on the claim that Emory students “were offered ’emergency counseling’ after pro-Trump graffiti appeared overnight in campus ‘safe spaces,'” and judges it to be “mostly false,” decreeing the following:

WHAT’S TRUE: Students at Emory University gathered in protest after pro-Trump graffiti appeared overnight; administrators investigated the graffiti as it appeared outside designated areas for chalk markings.

WHAT’S FALSE: “Emergency counseling” was offered to or demanded by students; Emory students complained that their “safe spaces” had been violated; students were afraid of or traumatized by the chalk markings.

It strikes me as a bit odd that Ms. LaCapria is so fixated on the idea of emergency counseling being offered. Yes, as she points out, some conservative critics claimed that the school had offered the students “emergency counseling,” and in fact, the word “counseling” was not used in any official communication from Emory’s administration, let alone “emergency counseling.” But the administration did promise “. . . regular and structured opportunities for difficult dialogues, a formal process to institutionalize identification, review and [the] addressing of social justice opportunities and issues and a commitment to an annual retreat to renew our efforts,” and announced that the student government would be holding extra office hours “to provide Emory students an opportunity to discuss such support and inclusivity on Emory’s campus.” While this might not rise to the level of official counseling sessions with trained psychiatric professionals, it seems to me to be at least some sort of counseling or other.

But let’s put that aside for a moment, giving Ms. LaCapria the benefit of the doubt in her judgement. What can’t be explained away, though, is her puzzling assertion that students were not in fact “afraid of or traumatized by the chalk markings.” If that were the case, then how would Ms. LaCapria explain the following quotes from the article in the Emory Wheel campus newspaper:

An antiphonal chant addressed to University administration, led by College sophomore Jonathan Peraza, resounded “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” throughout the Quad. [. . .]

“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” one student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well. I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school. . .” [. . .]

“What are we feeling?” Peraza asked those assembled. Responses of “frustration” and “fear” came from around the room. . . “

[bolded emphasis in all cases is added by me]

Though I have never been a huge believer in the idea that Snopes is part of a left-wing media cabal seeking to push a progressive agenda, I find it difficult to read this particular entry and not get the sense that Kim LaCapria sought to spin this controversy in a way to mitigate the damage that Emory crybullies and their venal and cowardly administration have done to their university. Honing in on the idea that the word “counseling” was never used, and the weird obsessiveness with debunking the idea that “emergency” counseling was offered is one thing, but Ms. LaCapria is flat-out wrong in her assertion that no students expressed fear or a sense of trauma at the chalkings.

I rate her coverage of the Emory Crybully Saga to be “Mostly False.”

UPDATE: MD in Philly, who at the moment is not in Philly, reminds us that this site has had opportunity in the past to call into question the Snopes ruling on disputed events. Thanks for the timely reminder.

– JVW

12/17/2008

Xrlq Takes on Snopes.com

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:28 am



He focuses on their lies by omission.

They still haven’t fixed their error‘ about Obama’s pledge not to run for President, by the way.

5/31/2007

Snopes Remains Shameless

Filed under: General,Terrorism — Justin Levine @ 3:57 am



[posted by Justin Levine]

Patterico justifiably took Snopes to task in 2004 for skewing the real issue behind the Annie Jacobsen story concerning the suspicious behavior on flight 327.

Recent events seem to have vindicated key claims of Jacobsen’s story – but Snopes continues to be disingenuous about the controversy.

Snopes writes:

Claim: Passengers encountered by reporter on airline flight were proved to be terrorists making a dry run at assembling a bomb on-board.

Status: False

[UPDATE BY PATTERICO: Note that this is different from Snopes’s original characterization of the controversy, as detailed in my 2004 post:

Claim: Reporter encounters terrorists on airline flight who are making a dry run at assembling a bomb on-board.

Status: False.

More on this in the UPDATE BY PATTERICO below.]

Snopes then even has the gall to cite the latest government [PDF] report as “proof” about the veracity of its own assessment.

Technically, Snopes is correct of course – but only because it constructs a disingenuously worded “claim” upfront, rather than reassess the story under a reasonable “claim”.

It is true that none of the passengers were “proven” to be terrorists. The latest government [PDF] report does not offer any such proof either.

However, contrary to Snopes implication, (more…)

5/29/2007

Snopes: Wrong Again on Flight 327

Filed under: Air Security,General,Terrorism — Patterico @ 6:23 am



With the revival of the debate over Annie Jacobsen and Flight 327, commenters are pointing to Snopes as providing an allegedly authoritative opinion on the matter.

Hardly — as I showed long ago in this post.

Since I wrote that post, Snopes has doubled down — and their new material is disingenous indeed. Xrlq explains.

3/9/2022

Duke Law Students Resign from Journal When Contributor Questions Whether the Trans Lobby Can Change the Definition of Words

Filed under: General — JVW @ 3:44 pm



[guest post by JVW]

It’s getting so that the whiny crybully children are now taking advantage of every single opportunity for showy grandstanding. Here’s the latest:

Kathleen Stock’s essay in the latest issue of Law and Contemporary Problems was controversial before she even wrote it. Last summer eight student editors resigned from the journal, which is published by Duke University’s law school, rather than be associated with the essay. The remaining student editors elected not to work on the issue in protest, and they voiced their objections in a note appended to the journal’s masthead. The proposed topic, along with Stock’s reputation, was enough to prompt a staff revolt.

The essay, titled “The Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Language,” is part of the journal’s “Sex in Law” special issue, which is dedicated to the “high-stakes, highly polarized” debate surrounding how sex is defined by courts and legislatures. In it, Stock, who until last fall was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, in England, argues against what she calls “sex-denialism.” The core of her case is the following: “Though it is normally polite and desirable to observe the preferred descriptors and pronouns of trans people in interpersonal contexts, there are times when literal and accurate reference to actual sex is important.” Among the times she cites: medical settings, sports teams, and prisons. Stock insists that “the concept woman does vital cognitive work that simply could not be done were the concept changed to refer to gender identity or social role.”

Here in full is the “note” appended to the essay by the woke budding legal eagles:

As a general matter, student staff members of the journal Law & Contemporary Problems (L&CP) do not select articles for the symposium issues in its volumes. As L&CP is organized and operates, issue proposals are approved by the journal’s faculty board and article selections are made by the special editors. The student role is typically to produce the issues once articles have been finalized by the authors and special editors. In the case of this issue, 85-1: Sex in Law, no articles have been read, edited, or reviewed by any L&CP student staff editors or executive board members acting in their official capacities as journal members. Over the summer of 2021, eight 3L students resigned from the journal and the remainder of the 3L membership voted not to have student members contribute to this symposium in their official capacities; these decisions were in response to the inclusion of Kathleen Stock’s essay and the faculty board’s rejection of the student executive board’s request for use of a style guide on uniform language for the issue which the student executive board’s membership considered necessary to avoid harm to the transgender community.

The unearned sanctimony, the denial of legitimacy of viewpoints outside of their own narrow parameters formed in the smallest of echo chambers, the snide little boycott of their assigned duties because their tender feelings were hurt, and the utterly ridiculous (but expected) invocation of the superstition that provocative ideas cause “harm” to various communities designated for hyper-vigilant protection is exactly the toxic stew we have come to expect from melting snowflakes like these students. And what sort of invitations to mayhem were hidden in Professor Stock’s otherwise dryly academic essay? Oh, I suppose the following:

For centuries, the English language concepts of woman and man have been understood as referring only to adult female and male humans respectively, whilst girl and boy have been understood as referring to the younger versions; and nearly all – perhaps all – other natural languages have had equivalent ways of systematically differentiating between male and female humans. Yet we live in a cultural moment when adjustments to the traditional understandings of womanhood, manhood, girlhood, and boyhood are being urged upon language users, sometimes by those with great institutional influence in Global North societies. We are told by progressive-styled organisations and leaders that, quite literally, transgender women (henceforth, “trans women”) are women, and transgender men (henceforth, “trans men”) are men. Since on ordinary understandings, trans women are by definition biologically male and trans men biologically female, this looks like a radical shift in usage.

Professor Stock seems to be willing to accept the definition of “woman” applying to one who was born male but has undergone the hormone therapy and cosmetic surgery necessary to align oneself with the sex one has chosen, yet she draws the line at allowing an individual to just willy-nilly declare themself to be a member of a group with which they share no defining characteristics and then forcing the rest of us to play along. And the most insidious (and effective) way for the crybullies to advance their argument is simply to redefine the language by denuding words of their millennia-long acknowledged meaning and then enforce mandatory acceptance (“. . . the student executive board’s request for use of a style guide on uniform language for the issue which the student executive board’s membership considered necessary. . .”) of the new contrived definition. For instance, it’s accomplished by conflating the established concept of “sex” which is determined by biology with the more trendy and post-modern notion of “gender” which in today’s inane parlance can be “fluid.” Foucault and Marcuse no doubt heartily approve of how far traditional standards have fallen in their old industry, but Professor Stock is having none of it.

Once upon a time, the whole point of higher education was thought to be to expose callow young minds to a world of ideas and opinions that exist outside of the narrow and insular bubbles in which they had previously existed, especially in a contentious discipline such as law. But somewhere along the way we got to the point where we grossly over-expanded our higher education industry to the degree that it became dedicated to babysitting and credentialing marginal students, some of whom will receive degrees of questionable employment value and many of whom will not receive any degree at all. It’s sad to contemplate that this sort of coddling now extends to prestigious law schools such as Duke, which once gave us the brilliant legal mind of Richard Milhouse Nixon. After years of seeing this percolating through the undergraduate body at our nation’s universities through outlandish student claims of abject fear triggered by provocative ideas, or in attempts to infantilize students by confining them to “safe spaces” of the sort you might see in a kindergarten, it is not surprising that our top professional schools — those which we are told are molding our future leaders — have gone all in with this bullshit. Frankly, I hope that future employers see these virtue signaling resignations as off-putting and a red flag, but given the way this nonsense has crept into the modern professional world I would imagine that they will not.

– JVW

7/17/2017

A Ringing Defense Of Donald Trump From A Very Unlikely Source

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:26 am



No matter what you think of Donald Trump — not much, in my case — all sensible people agree that he has been the subject of many unfair attacks from the news media and elsewhere. A few days ago, a long list of such attacks was compiled by a very unlikely source: Snopes.com, which is usually absurdly left-leaning when it comes to political issues. The surprising and excellent piece is titled The Lies of Donald Trump’s Critics, and How They Shape His Many Personas. The deck headline reads: “An in-depth analysis of the false allegations and misleading claims made against the 45th President since his inauguration.”

Dan McGuill, the author of the piece, selects four categories of calumny against Trump. I’ll give you a short excerpt from each category to whet your appetite for the full piece:

  • Donald Trump: International Embarrassment

Take, for example, the claim that Trump was the only world leader at a G7 summit in May not to take notes, based on a photograph posted to Twitter by French President Emannuel Macron. Here Trump was portrayed as unprepared and out of his depth on the world stage, with a “ten-second attention span”. However, the claim was entirely untrue, with other images and video of the meeting showing that Trump did indeed have notes and a pen. Not only that, but the very image used to make the false claim clearly shows two other world leaders sitting with no note-taking paraphernalia. In this case, even the cherry-picked evidence chosen to make the point undermines it.

  • Trump the Tyrant

Then there was the satirical article that reported Trump had signed an executive order declaring himself the popular vote winner in 2016’s presidential election, or the claim that he had imposed martial law in Chicago, using a video of a police tank which has been in use since 2010.

  • Donald Trump: Bully baby

Sometimes these claims seem plausible enough to gain even more credibility and traction. In April, Trump met the public at the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll. A teenaged boy asked him to sign his “Make America Great Again” hat, and the President obliged, but appeared to toss the hat in the air.

This was presented as a callous act from a bullying, villainous Donald Trump by observers such as the Resistance Report web site, which wrote ” Trump Just Ruined This Kid’s Day at the Easter Egg Roll.” However, another camera angle clearly shows that Trump was playfully tossing the hat back to the boy, who happily receives the hat and walks away. This video was posted to Twitter 42 minutes after the original:

But even without the second camera angle, Occam’s Razor comes into play once again. Does it make sense that Donald Trump, asked by an enthusiastic young man to sign a hat bearing his iconic slogan, would sign the hat and then, smiling, deliberately throw it away from the boy? Or is it more likely that Trump was being playful with someone who acted admiringly towards him, and tossed the hat in the air with the intention of giving it back to the boy?

  • Trump the Buffoon

Almost instantly, Trump was mocked for citing as an Irish proverb a poem written by a Nigerian man.
[]
The entire episode is a remarkable example of something bordering on collective hallucination, most likely brought on by confirmation bias. Here hundreds of thousands of people — including professional journalists working for influential news organizations, and a chat show host with more than three million nightly viewers — literally heard Trump say something he never said, in most cases probably because it confirmed a pre-existing image of the President as a poorly read, culturally ignorant buffoon.

Of course, one thing that feeds these falsehoods is the fact that Trump has aspects of his personality that are embarrassing, tyrannical, bullying, and buffoonish.

It has to be acknowledged that since January, many of Trump’s opponents, and even lukewarm supporters, have found considerable fault with his policies and behavior, based on accurate facts. There have been many occasions when Trump himself, undistorted and unfiltered, contributed mightily to the four personas we have outlined.

Indeed, even if you are a fierce opponent of the President, you should be an equally fierce opponent of manufactured stories designed to make him look bad. Because those stories undercut the genuine criticism he often deserves — and give his supporters a lazy way to dismiss as exaggerations even valid points about his character or behavior.

Snopes.com has a deserved reputation for left-leaning political bias. This piece undoes some of the damage the site has done to its own reputation for honesty … honesty which ought to be, and in this case is, integral to the brand of a site built to debunks myths and lies. This is a win for them and for us. And for integrity.

Fact-checkers of the world, take note. This is how you do it.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

12/20/2016

Who Is Going To Fact Check The Fake News Fact Checkers?

Filed under: General — Dana @ 4:57 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Fake news is all the rage these days. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he is establishing a group of media professionals as fact-checkers who will check and flag fake news:

The decision comes after Facebook received heated criticism for its role in spreading a deluge of political misinformation during the US presidential election, like one story that falsely said the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump.

To combat fake news, Facebook has teamed up with a shortlist of media organizations, including Snopes and ABC News, that are part of an international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit school for journalism in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Starting as a test with a small percentage of its users in the US, Facebook will make it easier to report news stories that are fake or misleading. Once third-party fact-checkers have confirmed that the story is fake, it will be labeled as such and demoted in the News Feed.

Also included in the described “respected fact-checking organization”: PolitiFact, Factcheck.org and the Associated Press. Obviously, there are any number of problems with this plan. Further, it’s troubling that along with several other politically liberal billionaires, the involvement of George Soros in the fact-checking effort is hypocritically being overlooked by the very media outlets claiming that this will be an objective and non-biased endeavor.

So, does it count as fake news when the fact-checkers themselves are posting intentionally incomplete or misleading reports?

Here is ABC News this morning – even after German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said yesterday that, “authorities have “no doubt” that the attack was intentional,” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also said yesterday, “We must assume at the current time that it was a terrorist attack.”:

untitled

And, on a side note, shouldn’t this also be flagged as fake news, too?:

MSNBC host Chris Hayes reported on the comments made by Turkish assassin Mert Altintas in the aftermath of his murder of the Russian ambassador Tuesday, but curiously left out the fact that he yelled “Allahu akbar“– “God is great” in Arabic.

“The gunman was Turkish, a 22-year-old officer in the Ankara special forces,” the All In host said. “According to witnesses, the gunman yelled out, ‘Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria,’ wounding three additional people before being fatally shot by police.”

Video of the shooting is readily available online, and shows that Altintas immediately yelled “Allahu akbar” after firing the shots. While nearly all outlets included that fact in their reports on the shooting (including MSNBC earlier in the day), Hayes did not.

–Dana

9/30/2016

Donald Trump’s Latest Late Night Tweet Storm

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:32 am



[UPDATE: Ah, I see Dana already did this story. Well, read both of our posts!]

All the online polls say this was a good idea. All of them!

After the Machado story broke, places like the Daily Caller reported: “Snippets of an adult film starring Machado are available on multiple free porn websites.” This has been debunked:

It should come as no surprise that celebrity nude photographs and sex videos drive major traffic on the Internet. But when legitimate photographs or videos are not available, hoaxsters often resort to creating their own. In some cases, this involves Photoshopping a famous face onto a nude or near-nude body (as was done with Sarah Palin), or changing the title of a sex video if it features a porn actress who bears a resemblance to a celebrity

The latter is the case with Alicia Machado. In 2009, a video clip purportedly showing the former Miss Universe winner engaging in anal sex was circulated online, and that is the clip that now most frequently shows up in response to web searches on the phrase “Alicia Machado porn.” However, the woman seen in that video is not Alicia Machado — the clip was taken from the 2004 DVD Apprentass 4, which features porn actress Angel Dark, and was later retitled to suggest it showed Alicia Machado:

The Daily Caller article now sports the correction: “Correction: The star of Apprentass 4 was Angel Dark, not Alicia Machado.”

Happily, we can still carry on the debate, because there is some grainy footage of figures squirming together on a bed on a Spanish reality show. As Snopes.com says:

Machado is also often described as having been in a “sex tape,” a claim that stems from her 2005 appearance on the Spanish reality show La Granja (similar to the United States’ The Real World), which she was reportedly kicked off of after being filmed having sex with another cast member:

The romantic relationship between Alicia Machado and her fellow Venezuelan, baseball player Bob Abreu, is finished. The breakup was announced by the athlete himself in an interview with the Telefutura cable network.

The remarks followed a scandal that erupted over Machado’s appearance on the Spanish television program La Granja. In the course of that reality show, the former Miss Universe and Spanish actor Fernando Acaso were filmed having sex. After the incident, the Venezuelan actress and singer was booted from the program, and two weeks ago she apologized on the air to her boyfriend.

“I never thought things would happen like that. [Fernando] behaved very respectfully towards her as a woman” Abreu says. He also said that Machado would now have to think things through. Abreu emphasized that he is no longer Machado’s boyfriend and said their relationship had ended before Machado went to Spain to participate in La Granja.

However, the so-called “sex tape” stemming from that incident, which is nothing more than some grainy, night-vision footage of a couple of covered figures writhing in a bed, hardly qualifies as explicit. And reality television being what it is, the scene the tape depicts was quite possibly staged or fabricated.

I have a friend who once played a role on a reality show. He was the cheating husband caught on tape with multiple bikini-clad women in a hot tub. My friend has never been married, but he got paid cash money to pretend he was so he could sit in a hot tub with bikini-clad women. Not a bad gig. Lesson: “reality” shows are fictional trash. Sorry to burst your bubble.

So now maybe Mike Pence can spend part of the Vice Presidential debate defending the notion that Trump’s late night reference to a sex tape was not a debunked reference to a porn tape, but a reference to grainy footage from a reality show. I think that would be a good use of his time, don’t you? Better than, say, using that time to talk about, say, Tim Kaine boycotting Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and his ties to J Street.

Thanks, Donald!

1/18/2015

Empowering Middle School Students…With Canned Food

Filed under: General — Dana @ 5:03 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Public schools in America. I thought nothing coming out of them could surprise me, but then I read about this. In Alabama, the actions of one middle school appeared so ridiculous that even Snopes was compelled to confirm the veracity of the story.

As reported:

In a letter Friday, W.F. Burns Middle School Principal Priscella Holley asked parents to have each student bring an 8-ounce canned item.

We realize at first this may seem odd; however, it is a practice that would catch an intruder off guard,” she wrote in the letter, published by TV station WHNT in Huntsville.

“The canned food item could stun the intruder or even knock him out until the police arrive,” Holley wrote. “The canned food item will give the students a sense of empowerment to protect themselves and will make them feel secure in case an intruder enters their classroom.”

When asked about the canned food empowerment, Superintendent Kelli Hodge explained:

This plan is the result of an active shooter school training program called ALICE: Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.

Using cans or other items as weapons would be a last resort for students unable to evacuate, Hodge told the AP.

Teachers are taught to barricade classroom doors if an intruder is in the school, but if that fails, the cans and items such as textbooks could be used, she said.

“If somebody is going to force their way through, then as the last resort you would start throwing any objects you could get your hands on,” Hodge said.

Asked whether throwing cans of food could make a student a target, Hodge said they would already be a target at that point.

“If it comes to the situation that they are forced to do that, then they are a target because they’ve not been able to evacuate,” she said.

From the ALICE website:

The web site for the ALICE Training Institute explains the program was created after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 when a police officer and his wife, a school principal, began to look into active shooter protocols for schools and found recommendations to protect staff and students between a 911 call and the arrival of police officers were scant.

Further:

The purpose of ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) training is to prepare individuals to handle the threat of an Active Shooter. ALICE teaches individuals to participate in their own survival, while leading others to safety. Though no one can guarantee success in this type of situation, this new set of skills will greatly increase the odds of survival should anyone face this form of disaster.

So, if and when an armed intruder makes his way into the classrooms at W.F. Burns Middle School or other schools that have undergone ALICE Training, he better look out. Those flying cans of food just might find their target.

Sigh. This is what public schools have come to.

–Dana

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