Monday, July 10, 2017
A couple of missed points
ZH features a NYTimes article on Russian journalism. ZH commenters took care of it nicely with two exceptions.
(1) The NYT, perfectly predictably, talked only to reporters who hate Putin. There are plenty of media who like Putin. That's the mark of a relatively open country. Twosidedness is impossible here. When the current president has R on his title, all reporters hate him. When the current president has D on his title, all reporters love him. I guess you could describe this as two-sided journalism, but it's really an alternation of two insane bigotries. At the moment the president has R on his title, so all reporters hate everything he does, even though 95% of what he does is precisely identical to the previous D president who was orgasmically loved.
(2) NYT totally missed this point:
He told me that, during the course of his reporting, he was struck by how technologically backward much of the Russian state’s security apparatus appeared—a nuance he said that he hasn’t often observed in American press coverage of the situation. Once, a source took Turovsky inside a cybersecurity facility run by the F.S.B., Russia’s main security service and the successor agency to the K.G.B. As he described it, “the F.S.B. officers had to give up their phones upon entering. There were no computers connected to the Internet—just one for each floor. To access it, they have to sign up in advance and get a key that was good for a certain amount of time.This is not technologically backward. It's simply good security practice. Airgaps. Russian spies and armed forces have always been extremely cautious about adopting new technology for the sake of newness. Our government and corporations have made themselves totally vulnerable to all sorts of cyberattacks because we obey Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. Elon and Eric tell us that it's COOL to connect everything to the web, so we obey. Irrelevant language peeve: Aside from all politics and insanity, I can't read NYT because it insists on bizarre spelling conventions. It's not Eff Period Space Space Ess Period Space Space Bee Period Space Space. It's FSB, fuckheads. Standard acronym practice for 1. 0. 0. years. Who's technologically backward?
Labels: Language update, switchover
¶ 4:00 AM
