writing

On writing for freedom

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged liberty writing on by

As the election approaches, I’d like to offer an unpopular idea: There’s too much focus on the candidates. If you care about human freedom, it should be obvious that Trump and Harris are both inimical to it (thought Trump is far worse). However, they’re just symptoms. Whether we’re looking at sending the military into every neighborhood to expel people from the country or instituting price controls and handouts to create winners and losers, the underlying premise is the premise that a central authority should decide how things should be. This idea has gained in popularity in spite of all the evidence that it’s harmful. The Republicans have almost completely abandoned the free-market principles that once formed an inconsistent part of their platform. The Democrats have believed in a managed economy and growth in federal power and spending ever since Franklin Roosevelt, and they haven’t changed on fundamentals.

As the election approaches, writers spend many words on the candidates as people. News sites, no longer pretending to give news, jump on any little thing that makes their preferred candidates look good or their opponents look bad. Their goal is proxy power. People on social media do the same, often with even less regard for the facts and less of a reason. Their main line of argument is “I’m smart, anyone who disagrees with me is dumb, and if you’re smart like me you see that, right?”

If you write on current controversies and value human freedom, you can do something different. You can set a better standard. If enough authors and journalists do it, it can make a difference, pushing the national discourse in a better direction. It wouldn’t take much to make it less awful.
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The death of objectivity

This entry was posted in Commentary Writer ethics Writing and tagged ethics journalism news writing on by

Try to find a news source that just gives you the facts, instead of trying to sway your opinion in every story. You can find some on the local level, but national news sources that care about objective reporting are rare. You only have a choice between sites with “left-wing” and “right-wing” agendas. The result is that people don’t trust the news they get. They especially notice when people they like are hit with distortion and selective criticism. They’re likely to turn to sources whose biases match theirs, even if they’re less trustworthy than the mainstream ones.

This is a big factor behind Trumpism. A site which bashes him day in and out, pulling quotes out of context and picking on minor things, is less convincing than one which presents the facts and lets people draw their conclusions. When they repeatedly note that Trump has failed to back up a claim with evidence, yet never do the same with Democrats who do the same, people dismiss the stories as hit pieces. I just came across a CNN top headline: “Trump’s wild and lewd rhetoric reaches a new extreme.” I try to keep myself informed, I know Trump is horrible, and I don’t want to read that article. Do they really think anyone inclined even a little favorably to Trump is going to think, “This article may contain important facts. I should read it.”?
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Yahoo News calls its readers “absolute morons”

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing and tagged fake news news SanityProject writing on by

I don’t know whether headline writing is a low-paying job that attracts incompetent people or they’re under time pressure and can’t do a decent job. Or perhaps their bosses tell them, “Never mind respect for the reader, write clickbait!” A headline that I just saw on Yahoo News tops them all: “No, Donald Trump Isn’t Wading Through Hurricane Floodwaters, You Absolute Morons.” I don’t know why Yahoo decided it was a good idea to grossly insult all its readers, but I won’t reward them with a link. You know the search-engine routine. Here’s a screenshot, in case the people responsible have been sacked by the time you read this.
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Has the meaning of “refute” changed?

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged language usage vocabulary writing on by

This week I came upon a bizarre claim in an Associated Press article: “The federal law that President Joe Biden signed at the end of 2021 followed allegations of human rights abuses by Beijing against members of the ethnic Uyghur group and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has refuted the claims as lies and defended its practice and policy in Xinjiang as fighting terror and ensuring stability.” If AP was using the established meaning of “refute,” it was claiming that these allegations were lies and China had proven they were. The article didn’t say what this proof was.

However, it was called to my attention that some dictionaries give a new, second meaning for “refute.” Merriam-Webster gives two definitions: (1) to prove wrong by argument or evidence : show to be false or erroneous. (2) to deny the truth or accuracy of. Dictionary.com, on the other hand, gives two definitions that both entail proof: (1) to prove to be false or erroneous, as an opinion or charge. (2) to prove (a person) to be in error.
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AI Panic and NaNoWriMo

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged AI computers nanowrimo software writing on by

This has been the year of panic over artificial intelligence. It will take over our jobs! It will replace journalism, fiction writing, and maybe even songwriting! This panic has shown up in reactions to a measured statement by the board of National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. Three members of the board have resigned over the statement.

It begins: “NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI.” That’s not a very tactful way to start, I’ll grant; it could easily be read as endorsing the use of a computer to write your work for you. A clarification was added after the first paragraph, saying, “We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.”
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