🚀 go-pugleaf

Sanders Kaufman wrote:
> "Stephan Rothstein" <srothstein@earthlink.net> wrote in message 
> news:azXhe.1697$Lc1.869@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...
> 
>>Jeffrey Salzberg wrote:
> 
> 
>>First, I cannot agree that academics and journalists are the two groups 
>>with the greatest access to information, especially in the days of the 
>>internet.
> 
> 
> It's worth pointing out that the academic and journalist sites are the most 
> reliable sources on the internet.

This is a debatable point. I note that almost all of the journalist 
sites are regarded as biased, either one political direction or another. 
  The interesting thing is that the people who agree see the other side 
as biased but claim their own site as independent.

> Furthermore, we academics and journalists not only have access to the same 
> Internet as you - we're pretty well trained in how to organize what's there.
> 
> We spent our carreers asking the tough questions, and compiling mercilessly 
> scrupulated reports.

Gee, I have spent my whole career asking the tough questions and 
compiling mercilessly scrupulated reports (which surely is not what the 
average journalist today does), yet I am blue collar and not an academic 
or a journalist. A lot of true research involved in it also, to get the 
new information.

> Your average NeoCon proletariat will spend 20 years using the same wrench to 
> spin the same bolt and call it a career.

And here you are revealing your very bias. The average liberal 
proletariat will do the same thing, and the proletariat is pretty evenly 
split between the two groups. Incidentally, the proletariat includes 
both the academics and the journalists if we use the definition listed 
as #1 on the dictionary.com web site (The class of industrial wage 
earners who, possessing neither capital nor production means, must earn 
their living by selling their labor).

Of course, if we use the most common political definition (the Marxist 
one), then the journalists and academics would consider themselves the 
bourgeoisie, and oppose the proletariat. You appear to be Marxist in 
your use of the word and opinion of the proletariat.


> 
> 
> 
>>The academics most famous as liberals are all from the soft sciences and 
>>arts areas, which do not hold to the same strict standards of research and 
>>information.
> 
> 
> That's not true.
> There's no such thing as "soft science" - it's either science or art.
> Liberal science is the same as Conservative science.

I agree, and that would make most of the academics artists. This is the 
group who style themselves as scientists in fields that are not 
mathematically based, such as sociology, economics, psychology, etc. 
These are the areas normally classified by the academics as the soft 
sciences and defined by the real scientists as the arts.

Steve Rothstein