7 responses to “Monday’s Forum”

1. 

   Kathy

   May 11, 2026 at 8:45 am

   Odds and links:

   NOTUS has some short perspectives from former WaPo journalists. There are several notions, but this one struck me as necessary: treat lies like obscenities.

   Sylvia Wrigley on the China Eastern Airlines crash, and what the released flight recorder data indicate.

   Short take on the XpaceS IPO.
2. 

   charontwo

   May 11, 2026 at 9:55 am

   A conversation about what the “Epstein Class” is, how it works, what it does.
3. 

   Jay L. Gischer

   May 11, 2026 at 12:29 pm

   I just ran across a Veritasium video that talks about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. It then mentioned Approval Voting. It seems closely related to PR that Steven advocates. Thoughts?

   1
4. 

   gVOR10

   May 11, 2026 at 1:15 pm

   @Kathy: Your link says about lies,

   Lies should be treated like obscenities, graphic violence or sexual content. That means literally refusing to repeat a transparent lie — not quoting it early and then offering corrective facts two paragraphs or 30 seconds later.

   It gets worse. NYT is fond of a deep dive format: ‘A Clinton Foundation donor asked for a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’. Then they discuss sources and philosophize about corruption for thirty paragraphs before mentioning he didn’t get the meeting.

   George Lakoff proposed the media use a “Truth Sandwich”.

   Here’s how to build one: Lead with the truth. In the middle of the report, briefly describe the falsehood. And then fact-check the misinformation and repeat the truth.

   Of course NYT no longer does briefly. They don’t report the news, they publish long essays about the news. But they do claim to be objective with their end of story fact checks, even though they know everyone read only the headline and the first graph or two.

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5. 

   gVOR10

   May 11, 2026 at 2:05 pm

   I’ve quoted Toynbee here, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” I stumbled across Tim Snyder on substack, On Superpower Suicide. Fairly long, but on point throughout. I won’t attempt to excerpt. Also – depressing.

   2
6. 

   CSK

   May 11, 2026 at 2:52 pm

   @Kathy:

   Having tried and failed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, Trump apparently now wants to call it the Gulf of Trump. What say you?

   1
7. 

   Kathy

   May 11, 2026 at 6:22 pm

   @CSK:

   “Nuke the whole thing from orbit.”

   1