Al Gore has a new book coming out called The Assault on Reason. It's about the sickness of our democratic dialogue, the systemic features of our culture and media that lead us to ignore evidence, focus on trivialities, and accept deception after deception.
Gore's going to be out promoting the book, and there's a certain bitter irony to the fact that the media is likely to interact with him in a way that proves his thesis better than anything in the book itself.
Exhibit A: this interview with Diane Sawyer. They introduce Gore in pure horserace terms -- "the most visible candidacy that isn't a candidacy" -- and the book purely as an attack on Bush. Sawyer then proceeds to ask him three separate times whether he's running for president, once by way of pointing out his weight. As Steve Benen says, "It was as if Sawyer and the producers read the book and thought, 'How best can we make ourselves look ridiculous, proving Gore right?'"
How he can stay calm in the face of all this is beyond me. I'm pretty sure I would have cracked halfway through and screamed "read the f*cking book, Diane!"
For a more intelligent look at Gore's take on media dysfunction, see Ezra Klein's profile from a while back.
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odograph Posted 5:07 am
21 May 2007
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:13 am
21 May 2007
The logic for Gore doesn't work.
He paints a picture of everyone being suppressed and if only "they" would consent, then Al Gore would have invented the Internet, and be right on Global Warming and also be President.
But he didn't.
And he's not.
And he isn't.
That's the reality of life -- but Gore is trying to paint an alternative Universe which is Goro-centric.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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odograph Posted 6:58 am
21 May 2007
It is my opinion as a practitioner that the world would have looked very different (probably "silo'd" worlds owned by MS, Apple, AOL, etc.) without Gore's legislation:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/gore_in ...
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odograph Posted 6:59 am
21 May 2007
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:11 pm
21 May 2007
Oh yeah?
Well I was chatting with people in different colleges from computing center at Princeton in 1981...using an IBM S/360.
And I don't think Al Gore had anything to do with it...although his name does sound a lot like ALGOL.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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odograph Posted 11:07 pm
21 May 2007
Without Gore's bill, what would have driven the inter-networking to the point where it broke down the Chinese walls around everyone's networks?
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odograph Posted 11:13 pm
21 May 2007
Why don't you just believe Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf?
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html
What is this personal experience stuff? Is that the rational way to learn world history? If you didn't see it on your networked mainframe, it didn't happen?
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:49 am
22 May 2007
Do you understand the difference between "networking" and "inter-networking" then?
Al Gore seems to be a bit out of touch with the pace of invention (in the same way he seems to have only cursory knowledge of the state of climatology).
I read here:
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/10/39301
In January 1994, Gore gave a landmark speech at UCLA about the "information superhighway."
Well, as a matter of fact, I also gave a speech in 1994 at Mecklermedia's "Internet World" in San Jose, CA. My speech was in March and it was an essay about how I thought the Internet fit into Marshall McLuhan's spectrum of hot and cold media (I argued the Internet was 'hot' because it was a resurgence of text as a communications media.).
What I am saying is that by 1994, the term Internet was already as common as hamburgers to the point that magazines sponsored large conferences around it. To think that using a term like "information superhighway" in 1994 makes one some kind of pioneer is ridiculous.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:51 am
22 May 2007
Or yea, just disgard everything you see or hear in real life. Just watch the Leonardo Di Caprio documentary and turn off your brain.
That's the path to knowledge, according to Grist.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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odograph Posted 4:21 am
22 May 2007
Except:
"As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement [...]"
from the doc you ignored.
Explain to me how it is rational or reasonable to ignore that Cerf and Kahn.
Explain to my how floppy sound-bites and talking points advance knowledge.
Explain to me how cretins can continue to think there is a solid dig against Gore on this!
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odograph Posted 4:22 am
22 May 2007
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:55 am
22 May 2007
As far back as the 1970
Yeah, along with everyone and his brother!
Gee, whiz, that was the whole Stuart Brand, Steve Jobs, era. All the geeks said stuff like that...no brainer!
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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odograph Posted 5:51 am
22 May 2007
A good book on this is "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet"
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848 ...
Whoops! There's a hit for "gore" in the index.
Please explain to me why it is so important to be stupid on this issue?
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odograph Posted 5:52 am
22 May 2007
(I was a well user ;-)
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:13 am
22 May 2007
He was however responsible for passing the laws that allowed for the public to gain access to it.
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Delay And Deny Posted 7:52 am
22 May 2007
If by "very few people", you mean the Department of Defense...
1968 - ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history.shtml
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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odograph Posted 8:25 am
22 May 2007
Just give it up man. By fighting this weird battle against fact and history all you do is prove how empty, irrational, and emotional these Gore attacks are.
I mean, if you want to get back in the "fact based" world, just tell the story straight up, and don't play games.
Gore helped fund the build-out at a critical point in history. It made ARPA/DARPA's old internetwork open for all, and broke down the "silos" at places like compuserve. It was no longer sufficient to just communicate with other schools on an educational (and non-commercial!) network. It was no longer sufficient to just correspond with other researchers at your own company. Everybody wanted to connect to everybody, and the inter-network was built up to make that happen.
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Delay And Deny Posted 8:43 am
22 May 2007
Thanks -- you've exactly captured the Gore Paradigm.
"Weaving".
What you do is take some real facts, then intertwine either your own self, or your own cause and when someone picks out the chaff from the wheat, you cry "look, that's all wheat -- how dare you question otherwise".
So, Al Gore takes some facts about natural warming, weaves in some eco-hysterial, and makes a niche for himself. Al Gore takes a real history of the Internet, dabs a few points here and there, and suddenly, it's him "inventing it".
It's as bad as Hitler, who said, "if you want to tell a lie, tell a really big lie, because people will be less likely to question it".
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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odograph Posted 9:05 am
22 May 2007
The facts in the internet thing come from Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf. You ignore them. The facts in the global warming thing come from the scientists who study that. You ignore them as well.
You weave irrational and emotional claims in place of fact.
Unfortunately, you are all too typical, too human.
Such is our bounded rationality and that is what stops us from taking the simple rational steps that would benefit .... us! That's the sad thing, we can't always be rational for our own sake. So freakin' sad.
I can only hope ... what's the Winston Churchill quote? Oh yeah ... "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."
I think the nutballs and irrational Gore-hataz have about exhausted all their irrational claims.
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Delay And Deny Posted 9:31 am
22 May 2007
Remember on the Old Star Trek, they used to say stuff like:
"...the great warrior leaders: Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincon, George Patton....Kurak of Alpha 5!"
It's always "CO2 made by Man (and land clearing) is reponsible for blah blah blah". You are always sneaking the extra clause that is the fact breaker.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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odograph Posted 10:05 am
22 May 2007
It is not reasonable or rational to think that CO2 is all about me. And I don't actually think I said "CO2 made by Man (and land clearing) is reponsible for blah blah blah".
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tico89 Posted 1:28 pm
22 May 2007
I think Gore has had a lot of practice on keeping his cool, although I don't think a 'thanks for proving me right' comment would have exactly gone amiss during that interview.
If I share initials with 'Global Warming', is that a sign?
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