Fwd: Jacob impervious to "Rubber Hose Cryptanalysis" performed by Stewart Baker

[dan at geer.org]

> All journalism is and has always been "advocacy" journalism. Often
> people don't notice the so-called advocacy as it is usually for the
> unjust status quo in an unquestioning, fully compromising subservient
> manner, I'd add.

Perhaps, as you say, it was always thus at least in terms of bias
of intent, but there seems something qualitatively different between
the yellow press of yore (where stories were made up) and the press
that is now in a world so awash in news stories that any "channel"
can deploy its bias solely via story selection, i.e., it can lie
using nothing but truth.

Take that one phrase you selected to comment upon; it is entirely
true that I wrote it, and it would be entirely legitimate to disagree
with it in and of itself were it the point, but that phrase was a
member of a series of supporting elements in an argument that
polarization, a marker for societal strain, is proceeding on our
watch.  As Camille Paglia wrote, "...history's far darker lessons
about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, ... as they become
more complex and interconnected they also become more vulnerable
to collapse."  Polarization, that sublimation of the middle, is my
point, and to go one step further, technologic progress is its engine.

N.B., we are now waist deep in a rat hole.

--dan