I just didn’t like the phrase that he was being fed information, implies that he is a pawn. And I have always respected your attribution and original research.

And your interesting posts.

But tell me this, if you post something you found on Drudge, Republic, etc, were you “fed these news stories?” Or is that something only liberal sites do and yours provide provocative information and reasoned journalism?

I said I conceded the point. Most stories I get from things like Drudge and other “collection of links” sites I look at in the course of a day are along the lines of the “tallest building” post on Space. That came from here. The “art restoration” post on Off-Topic came from here.

Sites with political content, stories with none.

(For the record, out of all the original posts I’ve done in the past month, about 20, only three had political content.)

When I put up statistics or references, I usually already have bookmarks to original sources.

Conservatives read conservative sites that provide conservative content. Liberals read liberal sites that provide liberal content. Yeah, there’s a whole lotta confirmation bias that goes on in the web. Accept it.

Mostly it was the timing. He presented two news stories at a time when I was particularly irked at the steady stream of Hutchinson/Nation/TPM/Alternet/etc. around here and I just knew he’d been fed these news stories on one of these sites. Took thirty seconds to find out where. One right after the other.

I don’t think alcaray needed to do anything differently than what he did on his presentation of the stories.

Hell, I hardly ever flag the routes by which I find stuff, and probably for the same reason alcaray didn’t: you don’t want to poison the water when people pay more attention to the messenger than the message. Looks like I was a bit guilty of that this time.

But this often becomes the basis of a sort of ad hominem attack. “You found that story linked on a website I detest, therefore the story is bullshit in my eyes.”

Completely agree with your last paragraph. I have always read a lot, and sometimes when Mrs. P. challenges one of my frequent factoids, I can only shrug my shoulders and tell her I couldn’t possibly remember the source of something I read decades ago.

Attribution can get lost in its own density and egos. I had a psyc class in college where the final exam was more about who developed ideas than what the ideas were. Me, I studied the ideas and didn’t worry about memorizing all the authors of the studies. I thought the prof was more interested in the history of the topic and not the models. Good thing I took that class pass/fail.

There’s also information that the writer may just not feel is necessary to look up and cite formally because he is not using it as formal evidence in an argument. For example, if I say “it has been said that Napoleon Bonaparte was poisoned by his captors on St Helena”, I shouldn’t have to take time off to track down the reference, as long as I make clear it is something I read somewhere that I can’t vouch for. However, I don’t expect anyone to take my word for it, either.

Before the internet, people used to read a lot.
They knew a lot of stuff they could not readily attribute, although they were also aware that this sort of information was not reliable and could not be used as argumentary evidence.