Lies, Damned Lies, & the News

Forgive me my naïveté, but is not the purpose of the news to report & analyze current events as they are, not as we might wish them to be? A commentator with the Washington Post, in an analysis of the recent polling that purports to reveal one in six Frenchmen supporting the "Islamic State" is the al-Qaeda offshoot I.S.I.S./I.S.I.L., didn't like the results, so he asserts that they cannot possibly be true: rubbish argumentation-link. The commentator argues, citing less than no evidence, delivers such airtight logical assertions as "we can reasonably expect" (paragraph four), "seems unlikely" (five), "makes that very hard to imagine" (eight), "more reasonable, to be fair, though still high" (eight), "implausible" (ten), & "makes no sense" (paragraph thirteen). Oh, so the poll must have been shoddily conducted, to produce such "unreasonable" results, right? The poll itself is addressed thusly in paragraph eleven: "while the methodology isn't perfect… it wasn't terrible either." The commentator's argument is this: he dislikes the results of the poll, therefore those results cannot be true; the poll must be fatally flawed in some unspecified way, though he defends the polling methodology. Former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously remarked, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later date." The purpose of the newspaperman is to report & opine on the world we have, not the world we might want; this can certainly be done in the service of influencing the world, to encourage it to become the world we might want or wish to have at a later date, but first we must accurately assess the world as it is. Insisting that things we do not like simply cannot be is both infantile & unproductive.

Drink!
Last night's party did not get rid of as much of the surplus H.R. beer as might have been hoped, in part because many of those in attendance did what I did & brought their own preferred beverage, in this case pretentious wine instead of yummy beer. One fellow brought beer, Yuengling Light, drank only one, & left the remainder behind. In a selfless act, at the host's request I carried away the remaining Yuengling, because I'm just that kind of guy.