THE MEDIA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR TERRORISM!

By
Here's the deal: Pope (who ostensibly represents tolerance, love for humankind, etc. around the world) says something that one particular group (Muslims) can misinterpret to be slanderous to Islam. Actually, he was quoting someone else, trying to explain the Vatican's policy that there is no room for violence in religion, but the Muslim fanatics went nuts. Why? Because of the way the MEDIA reported it.

Fanatic Islamic groups around the world respond by protesting and burning Christian Churches. Yo, man!-- It's a self-fulfilling prophecy! Even if the Pope did not -- in any way -- intend for his utterances to be interpreted to say that Islam is bad, Islamist extremists will dutifully react and start burning Christian symbols, knowing full well that the media will report it, thereby proving to all the world that Islam is indeed "bad" - when in actual fact, Islam is a peaceful religion that does not preach violence at all.

Who is responsible for this? THE MEDIA. Because of the slanted, one-sided, myopic way that they report anything sensational, because it sells advertising and it increases ratings. The media does not care -- it is a whore, addicted to the crack of the ratings race.

Make no mistake -- it is THE MEDIA that is SATAN! The media is responsible for the war in Iraq, President Bush, Hillary Clinton, Webtards, Blogtards, high oil prices, e-Coli in your spinach, and everything else!

The MEDIA is like the biblical Jacob - a con-man, a manipulator, a deceiver... and we just suck it up like a Slurpee out of a straw, without even thinking!

Jeesh! I feel so much better, now that I've got all this figured out!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous4:26 PM

    Peter, how could you expect anything else from the media. Reporters, with degrees in Journalism, are trained to write stories that appeal to current popular tastes. They are not trained in any subject they are reporting. It's similar to education. Teachers, with degrees in Education, are trained how to teach, not in the particular subject they are teaching. My kid is being taught algebra by a teacher who graduated without ever passing a math course. What ever happened to common sense and the ability to reason? Who are these people?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous7:00 AM

    No, it's not the media. It's because we're a society of intellectually lazy people who want to be spoon-fed everything. Your rant is case in point. You want an simple, black & white explanation for something that is complex and techno-color. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous2:11 PM

    The first comment posted forgot to include software developers who are/were not trained in software engineering/development ....

    Some even become MVPs :P

    On the 2nd post I don't think this person was actually expecting an answer to the 'lazy' question. The same as I don't think you were expecting an answer to yours.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous7:43 AM

    I'm completely agree

    SOf,
    Russia

    ReplyDelete
  5. NothingButNet11:53 PM

    While the media may have overplayed the issue as usual, I think the Pope could have communicated a more inclusive and accessible message than the one he did, if it was his intention to help people understand one another.

    The text of the Pope’s speech may be found here

    I don't think his decision to quote a 14th century Byzantine emperor who makes an inflammatory sounding remark about Mohammed represents the leadership needed to bring the great religions of the world together.

    Here's the questionable quote again: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

    The Pope's speech is not very accessible to begin with IMHO, and to include this quote in a speech that attempts to convey the "logos" or "reason and word" of God does not appear to me, very astute given the climate our world currently struggles in.

    The media just reported the issue, they didn’t write the speech.

    ReplyDelete
  6. peterbromberg5:53 PM

    Certainly the Pope could have exercised more restraint in his choice of quotes.

    But the media has a distinct CONFLICT BIAS - a term which I believe was recently coined by Neil Gabler appearing on Fox News.

    This conflict bias causes the media to tend to report events in their most caustic, egregious light, which foments people who are already looking for an excuse into violent reaction.

    In essence, the media, when given a bottle of nitroglycerine, will often try to find the best way to shake it, not caring about the results other than how it plays in the ratings.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous4:09 PM

    The is nothing new about people manipulating religion to achieve violence.

    Most of the montheistic religions have had a problem with this at some time.

    That the real teachings are peacefull has little effect on those who will always find the tools they need to create violence.

    The media's conflict bias is not the sole cause, but it can make things much worse.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more