doomed colleagues in the American media

I've never heard of this guy but I wanted to remember this post...


https://medium.com/@alexey__kovalev/message-to-american-media-from-russia-6e2e76eeae77#.elhencmqd

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A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media

Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear. We in Russia have been doing it for 12 years now — with a short hiatus when our leader wasn’t technically our leader — so quite a few things during Donald Trump’s press conference rang my bells. Not just mine, in fact — read this excellent round-up in The Moscow Times.

Vladimir Putin’s annual pressers are supposed to be the media event of the year. They are normally held in late December, around Western Christmas time (we Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas two weeks later and it’s not a big deal, unlike New Year’s Eve). Which probably explains why Putin’s pressers don’t get much coverage outside of Russia, except in a relatively narrow niche of Russia-watchers. Putin’s pressers are televised live across all Russian TV channels, attended by all kinds of media — federal news agencies, small local publications and foreign reporters based in Moscow — and are supposed to overshadow every other event in Russia or abroad.

These things are carefully choreographed, typically last no less than four hours, and Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children. Given that Putin is probably a role model for Trump, it’s no surprise that he’s apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook. I have some observations to share with my American colleagues. You’re in this for at least another four years, and you’ll be dealing with things Russian journalists have endured for almost two decades now. I’m talking about Putin here, but see if you can apply any of the below to your own leader.

• Welcome to the era of bullshit.

Facts don’t matter. You can’t hurt this man with facts or reason. He’ll always outmaneuver you. He’ll always wriggle out of whatever carefully crafted verbal trap you lay for him. Whatever he says, you won’t be able to challenge him. He always comes with a bag of meaningless factoids (Putin likes to drown questions he doesn’t like in dull, unverifiable stats, figures and percentages), platitudes, false moral equivalences and straight, undiluted bullshit. He knows it’s a one-way communication, not an interview. You can’t follow up on your questions or challenge him. So he can throw whatever he wants at you in response, and you’ll just have to swallow it.


Some journalists will try to preempt this by asking two questions at once, against the protests of their colleagues also vying for attention, but that also won’t work: he’ll answer the one he thinks is easier, and ignore the other. Others will use this opportunity to go on a long, rambling statement vaguely disguised as a question, but that’s also bad tactics. Non-questions invite non-answers. He’ll mock you for your nervous stuttering and if you’re raising a serious issue, respond with a vague, non-committal statement (“Mr President, what about these horrible human rights abuses in our country?” “Thank you, Miss. This is indeed a very serious issue. Everybody must respect the law. And by the way, don’t human rights abuses happen in other countries as well? Next question please”).

But your colleagues are there to help you, right? After all, you’re all in this together?

Wrong.

• Don’t expect any camaraderie

These people are not your partners or brothers in arms. They are your rivals in a fiercely competitive, crashing market and right now the only currency in this market is whatever that man on the stage says. Whoever is lucky to ask a question and be the first to transmit the answer to the outside world wins. Don’t expect any solidarity or support from them. If your question is stonewalled/mocked down/ignored, don’t expect a rival publication to pick up the banner and follow up on your behalf. It’s in this man’s best interests to pit you against each other, fighting over artificial scarcities like room space, mic time or, of course, his attention. It’s getting especially absurd because some — increasingly many — reporters will now come with large, bright placards aimed at attracting the president’s attention to names of their regions or specific issues. This is what it looks like:

Also, some people in the room aren’t really there to ask questions.

• Expect a lot of sycophancy and soft balls from your “colleagues”

A mainstay of Putin’s press conferences is, of course, softball questions. Which also happen to be Putin’s favorites. Mr President, is there love in your heart? Who you will be celebrating New Year’s Eve with? What’s your favorite food? “Questions” of this sort, sure to melt Putin’s heart, typically come from women working for small regional publications. A subtype of this is also statements-as-questions, but from people who really love the man on the stage and will bob their head and look at the stage adoringly and say something to the tune of “Mr President, do you agree that a lot of media are treating you unfairly?”

Another type of softball questions is hyperlocal issues that a president isn’t even supposed to be dealing with. Mr President, our road is full of potholes and local authorities aren’t doing anything about it. Mr President, our tap is leaking. Mr President, how about a chess club in our village. This is a real opportunity for him to shine. He will scold the local authorities and order to have a new road built. All of this, of course, has been choreographed well in advance.

Also, some of these people really love him and will meet his every answer with enthusiastic applause. There will be people from publications that exist for no other reason than heaping fawning praise on him and attacking his enemies. But there will also be one token critic who will be allowed to ask a “sharp” question, only to be drowned in a copious amount of bullshit, and the man on the stage will always be the winner (“See? I respect the media and free speech”).

• You’re always losing

This man owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules — which he can change at any time without any notice. You can’t — in Putin’s case — campaign to vote him out of office. Your readership is dwindling because ad budgets are shrinking — while his ratings are soaring, and if you want to keep your publication afloat, you’ll have to report on everything that man says as soon as he says it, without any analysis or fact-checking, because 1) his fans will not care if he lies to their faces; 2) while you’re busy picking his lies apart, he’ll spit out another mountain of bullshit and you’ll be buried under it.

I could go on and on, but I think at this point you see where this is heading. See if any of this rings any bells if you covered Trump’s presser or watched it online.

P.S. You’re welcome to repost/reblog/republish this if you like.

My name is Alexey Kovalev, I’m a Russian journalist and I’m writing about propaganda, fake news and Russian state media on noodleremover.news. It’s all in Russian, but here’s an example of what I’m doing in English. You can contact me at kovalever@gmail.com. I tweet as @Alexey__Kovalev.

 

Accidents will happen...

I just wanted to save this quote from a book by Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made it:

Truth and Power

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

– Garry Kasparov, Russian dissident and former world chess champion

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

– Hannah Arendt

https://weeklysift.com/2016/12/19/exhaustive-methods/

Thining About Thinking, Thinking About Living

I want to bookmark this review of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/12/22/how-dispel-your-illusions/

this comes form reading Michael Lewis' book The Undoing Project and then looking online for reviews.

It is understandable that Kahneman has no use for Freud, but it is still regrettable. The insights of Kahneman and Freud are complementary rather than contradictory. Anyone who strives for a complete understanding of human nature has much to learn from both of them. The scope of Kahneman’s psychology is necessarily limited by his method. His method is to study mental processes that can be observed and measured under rigorously controlled experimental conditions. Following this method, he revolutionized psychology. He discovered mental processes that can be described precisely and demonstrated reliably. He discarded the poetic fantasies of Freud.

But together with the poetic fantasies, he discarded much else that was valuable. Since strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally controlled, Kahneman’s method did not allow him to study them. The part of the human personality that Kahneman’s method can handle is the nonviolent part, concerned with everyday decisions, artificial parlor games, and gambling for small stakes. The violent and passionate manifestations of human nature, concerned with matters of life and death and love and hate and pain and sex, cannot be experimentally controlled and are beyond Kahneman’s reach. Violence and passion are the territory of Freud. Freud can penetrate deeper than Kahneman because literature digs deeper than science into human nature and human destiny.

Behavioral Economics Exmple #1

I happened across this when Goggling Behavioral Economics, and I didn't want to forget it.

Another example of how easy it is to be unaware of being manipulated


 What are some examples of the real-world use of behavioral economics?

One of the primary questions in this particular study was how do purchase quantity limits (ex. Limit of 12) influence consumer behavior? Cans of soup were marked down from $.89 to $.79, and three grocery stores offered a different purchase quantity limit:

1. No Limit
2. Limit of 4
3. Limit of 12

The study shows that the purchase quantity limit affected the number of soup cans the customer purchased.

1. Customers that saw "No Limit" on average purchased 3.3 cans
2. Customers that saw "Limit of 4" on average purchasedand 3.5 cans.
3. Customers that saw "Limit of 12" on average purchased 7.0 cans.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-the-real-world-use-of-behavioral-economics

Kafka; The Brother I Never Knew

Strangely I have never been able to get "into" Kafka. But this quote attracts me in an uncomfortable way.

Thanks to J Store for having such cool stuff like Franz Kafka and Animals by Peter Stine

http://www.jstor.org/

Movie Editing Tips : Part 1

For quite a few years Ive been using Magix Movie Edit MX which I think is now call ...Pro. Anyway, when I first starting my amateur video making  10 years yeas ago I was fortunately gifted a fully functioning Adobe premiere package from a software salesment. But when I switched to HD the version was too primitive to handle it.

I probably could have found a cracked newer version of Premier but ended up purchasing a Magix Movie Edit MX from Amazon. For my purposes it is as good if not better than the Adobe thing.

Anyway, I don't use it all that often so this it to remind myself how to do a few tasks. Rather than pay a ton of money to have my in-laws box of 8mm films transferred to digital I found if you have a variable speed 8mm/Super8 projector you can speed it up enough so the flicker disappears whne you simply record to a digital camera recording the projections.

The upshot is you can't get a perfect screen projection ration to recording area AND the motion is too fast.

Here is what you have to do to remedy that.


To change frame to compensate for recording from projection on wall.

effects
video object effects
Motion effects
Section (NOT Size and Position)

To compensate for having to remove 8mm projection flicker by increasing projector
film speed by 10 to 15 %


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effects
video object effects
Motion effects
Speed
Factor
move slider to left to slow down speed to it roughtly matches orginal
factor of .84  so...