DescentBB

Tools like this streamline the hectic process that is blogging — were the situation different, I could see easily myself swindled by someone like Holiday. With each story he was quoted in, there would have been an analog way to get the source – to find an insomniac, call a doctor who specializes in insomnia and ask if any of his or her patients would be willing to go on record. For vinyl records, call a store and ask the owner to put you in touch with his best customer. But oftentimes, it can be hard to justify taking the long way around when news moves at the speed of the internet.

For Roy Furchgott, the reporter from the New York Times, this kind of lie can be hard to catch — Holiday sounded just like all the other record collectors he had talked to, and it was hard to imagine why someone would lie about something so mundane.

“He gave a fairly credible account in line with what most vinyl record collectors and owners say,” he says. “So I took his word on it, as frequently happens, and you’re telling me that he suckered me.”

“I’ve been in the business a fairly long time, and I’ve seen this happen many times even prior to blogs. I don’t think this is isolated or terribly, terribly unusual.”

callmeslick wrote:we have more information at ready access than ever in human history....and, vast amounts of misinformation or deliberate falsehoods. Critical thinking, always important will become absolutely critical for our children and grandchildren IMO.

callmeslick wrote:I probably should have coupled 'solid education' and 'critical thinking'. Those were the hallmarks of a real University degree at one time, ...

Wolfe is right to be concerned about “the highly organized and concentrated forms taken by capitalism in the contemporary world.” That system does indeed undermine autonomy and equality. Where he goes wrong is in equating the “capitalist” economy with the free market. Thus he is guilty of what Kevin Carson calls “vulgar liberalism” and Roderick Long calls “left-conflationism”: attributing the evils of corporatism to its antithesis, the freed market. (It’s the mirror image of the view that defends business conduct in the corporate state on the grounds that the free market wouldn’t permit such conduct if it did not efficiently serve consumers.) . . .

. . . “Man in any complex society,” F. A. Hayek wrote in “Individualism: True and False,” “can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior. So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one.”