I have been thinking for some time about BAs comments regarding Rudy being an effective President, and what was his role during 9/11- to which BA responded:

http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/index...=15999&st=0

Having said that... You live in Nebraska and you're going to question what his leadership meant to and for New York. In plain, simple English - You don't have a Goddamned clue what you're talking about. 9/11 was a TV show for you. You literally have no idea what you're talking about. None. I don't care what you heard, what you blogged, who you know, who you knew. You know two things Jack and ____ and Jack left town.

I have to say- to some degree, I agree with him, though personal perspective can also be a handicap- "too close to the problem to be objective" and all that.

The reason I am so sympathetic to this mind-set is because I live in Alaska, and here SOO much crap in the national media and "lower 48ers" that have no basis in reality or logic. From ANWR to the "bridges to nowhere"- we have been the victims of various MSM propaganda smears. Don't even get me started on "Into the wild:the Chris McCandless story"- OMG what a cluster___ that one is! I mean, they basically glorified a schizzo-affective idiot as someont that "pursued his dream" by starving to death 100 ft from a pool of spawning dolly vardens.

So, the question is simple:

When it comes to debating an issue, how is more likely to be correct on local issues- the local, such as in BAs statement, or, is it those that study the problem from Afar, such as NTs rebuttal and others?

How accurate is information gathered via written or media sources vs local experiance in your opinion?

"You had to have been there" is a pretty darned common expression, and a pretty old one, too.

Certainly, there is no substitute for being up-close-and-personal with an event, especially if someone you knew/loved was killed or injured.

However, you can watch an event with a jaundiced eye (or rose-colored glasses) just as easily from close-up as from several states away with CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC et al. covering it 24/7.


You're going to get a lot more information pertinent to locals when a local station covers a major news event. In that case it makes a difference. However, that does not mean that same news cannot be accessed via the Internet. You don't have to smell the toxic fumes unless you don't believe the reporters who talked about it. You don't have to rub your nose in Ground Zero to have seen what happened and grieve and rage about it.

A New Yorker or resident of New Jersey could depend on one newspaper (but I doubt most of them did) like the New York Daily News for their information. They could listen to one local disc jockey pre-digest and spew out the news for their consumption/amusement (ala Rush Limbaugh in another setting), and that would not mean that they knew more than a dedicated viewer did in Arizona or Nebraska.

But then, a local would know which delicatessens would be closed afterward and which streets to avoid because of the debris. I suppose in that circumstance some out-stater might not "have a G-ddamned clue" about 9/11.

(I would be interested in knowing what the locals, the really local locals, think about the "pancake theory" of the WTC collapses. A few of the national news anchors at the time first commented that it looked like a demolition, only to be good boys later on and amend their statements.)

In regards to the first question-the answer is clearly no, a person can learn just as much about an event as the person who was there. My thread is somewhat unrelated, as the premise did not come from me. If you reference the thread that I started, I did not give my opinions from afar. I posed questions based on hyperlinks from firefighters, first responders, and politicians who were there. Big difference.

The second question is better answered through written and media sources. Feeling your heart burst with pride upon seeing Rudy doesn't address the facts. It doesn't address whether or not his administration was negligent in failing to udpate communication equipment for first responders. It doesn't address the fact that he has admitted to not having been "in the trenches" at ground zero as long as he claimed he did. it doesn't address whether it was appropriate or not to scale back rescue efforts. It doesn't address wether or not he was truly focused on terrorism, when the record indicates it was organized crime that he was concerned with. Now this is a specific example, but it is one where facts from the media can be more reliable than is relying on the image of some politician standing upon a heaping wreck, with a halo on his head.

Emotions and "personal opinion" are fine and dandy, but all that shows me is that a person isn't ready to even consider contradictory information.

Nebraska- let me relate this as it personally applies to many Alaskans, including myself. Debates about Wolf Control, ANWR and the "bridges to nowhere" are great examples of evidence like the stuff you mentioned in your post, where someone here rolls thier eyes and says "you don't know jack, or less than even jack"-

ANWR is the most classic, because our own politicians use misinformation as well.

ANWR won't change the nations dependence on oil one bit, even if we started pumping oil tomorow (which is impossible)

Drilling in ANWR isn't going to do anything to the enviroment- zip, nada. The global warming from using fossil fuels might- but not the drilling itself won't.

But to hear all of the debate- both are imminent. Only locals seem to really know the whole story sometimes.

We were pilloried over the "bridges to nowhere"- and to some degree, in Ketchican, perhaps that was a bit true - but the Turnigain arm bridge? Vitally neccesary, still is. We will keep coming back to this, no matter how many times it takes, until we get it- and it is also why so many Alaskans are so "anti-lower48" in thier speech- you have trillions of dollars in infrastructure building down there, say, oh, the golden gate bridge? Etc etc- and the nation bags on us for one needed bridge- that could have ramifications on the building of a gas pipeline, since that is the real thing that could seriously decrease the nations dependence on oil for energy.

And on and on. Enviromental groups are the worst losers of all, and you just want to beat one up now and again if they were ever dumb enough to come up here and espouce thier insane views about nature- especialy PETA poeple. I would be one of the first to try and buy a hunting license to hunt and kill PETA poeple- if they ever declare open season on them-simply because I think them as lower forms of life anyway.

Here's the thing. You can definitely be "too close" to an issue to see it objectively. However, you can also not have any idea what you're talking about if AP is the genesis of you information. Worse if your paper/newscast is rewriting from AP.

I think Jena is the perfect example of this. America was bleating all sorts of nonsense about that town being racists, and the huge racial tensions. None of which were actually true but were based on a "report". Ask the Israelis if Al Jeezera is getting the news right. Ask Hillary about The Post. Hey I know, ask the Duke kids what they think of the "news".

To some extent we actually know less because we know so much. The truth is we really don't need news about California in New York. It's terrible what that man did to his pregnant wife I'm just not sure it required "on the scene reporting" - that was a local story. Should have stayed local.

An attack on America is, of course news worthy of massive coverage... but don't believe for a second because you watched 35 hours of news coverage with the same 18 second clip shown for 25 hours that you know anything about what is going on there. Don't feel bad there are people 20 blocks away who are clueless as you are.

Okay BA- then why does your views differ so much from the Firefighters on the scene Nebraska quoted?

When it comes to debating an issue, how is more likely to be correct on local issues- the local, such as in BAs statement, or, is it those that study the problem from Afar, such as NTs rebuttal and others?

How accurate is information gathered via written or media sources vs local experiance in your opinion?

I live in Chicago, and you don't know jack.

I ain't never seen no dead people votin', so all y'all's chattin' 'bout Chi-town better keep it on the downlow, know'm'sayin'?

Actually, I think a lot of times people studying from afar, meaning they aren't influenced by local feeling (such as the inane feeling of loyalty to one's home sports team solely for the arbitrary reason that you live there), are the ones who might be more "correct" or at least report things more fairly.

But I don't really know anything; I'm just a twice-votin' Chicagoan.

When it comes to debating an issue, how is more likely to be correct on local issues- the local, such as in BAs statement, or, is it those that study the problem from Afar, such as NTs rebuttal and others?

I don't think distance matters nearly as much as the diligence and thought put into the act of studying the problem, whatever that is. An academic specialist who spends their lifetime studying and comparing everything ever published on the subject of Alaska might conceivably be just as informed than a native born Alaskan, especially if the native doesn't read newspapers, watch the news, or talk to their friends about anything except (say) football scores and how nice the rack is on the new lady bartender at Big Joe's Bar & Grill.

And (perhaps because I'm a foreigner on a US debate site :grin:) I've got an instinctive mistrust of anyone who tells anyone else that they can't possible know or understand a situation, and by extension have a valid opinion on it, unless they are some kind of local expert who lives and breathes it all the time. (Which is how I read BA's Giuliani outburst - it felt to me more like a roundabout way of telling everyone to shut up because they're all ignorant and you're the only person qualified to have an opinion, which in turn is usually code for "people are saying things I don't like and I don't have the time, will, skills or patience to address their arguments rationally so I'll just shout at them instead" than a reasoned defence of a politician, despite having some underlying validity.)

Correctness is not a function of distance. Just as an example, France is closer to Iraq than the USA is (geographically and politically, at least pre-2003), yet that doesn't automatically mean that the French opposition to the invasion was more correct than US enthusiasm for it. We can argue about how right or wrong those positions were and are, and have done many times, but simple distance has got nothing to do with it.

How accurate is information gathered via written or media sources vs local experiance in your opinion?

I'd say it depends very much more on the sources that are being used for information gathering than on the distance - in physical space or in time - from the events being discussed. If you get all your information locally from the guy at the end of the bar who lives down the street from you, you're certainly getting a local perspective, but it could still be the same sort of quality information (i.e. rubbish) talked by men in bars all over the world.

There's a lot to say on this topic. Not the least of which is WHICH NYFD people are YOU talking to.

NYFD had a long standing feud with RG for a lots of reasons not the least of which RG clearly liked the NYPD a lot more than he like the NYFD.

The NYFD also has a long standing feud with the NYPD. A personal anecdote and not representative of all the NYFD is:

A good friend of mine was an NYPD Crime Scene photographer. He showed me some 9/11 pictures of a Jewelry strore covered in thick dust. He then showed me pictures of it taken the next day.

"What happened?" I asked seeing all the jewelry missing.

"Look at these," he said pointing out hack marks on the back of the display cases.

"Those look like ax marks."

"They are. Do you know who carries axes in NYC?"

"Oh."

The end of that personal anecdote is that about a dozen NYFD people were arrested and some were successfully prosecuted. The gist is that the NYPD in a larger sense thinks the NYFD are a bunch of drunken criminals. I suspect the NYFD thinks the same of the NYPD.

***

So why might some of the NYFD have a reason to disparage RG... draw your own conclusions.

***

As a civilian who simply went down to the pit to help out wherever I could I saw RG as a leader. Could I be wrong in my assessment? Sure. But I have a better idea of what RG meant to NYC than someone who watched 9/11 on TV.

Actually BA- I cheated a bit and asked you a leading question to make my own point - when ever the news does a story on Alaska, they get some "Alaskan" no one has ever heard about, as an expert opinion or something. It is EXTREMELY hard to find a person in Anchorage/Wassilla/Susitna drainage in Alaska that doesn't want the Knik arm bridge- but darned if the MSM didn't find one

In fact, KTUU, the local TV station, conducted a poll, online and totally unscientific, that showed Alaskans were against the bridge, but when dittman completed a poll using the right methods- anywhere from 60-80% of residents want it, and want it badly.

So, like you understanding the beefs going on in your district, I understand those that go on in mine. The only community that DOESN'T want the bridge, and polls consistantly against the bridge, is goverment hill, where the bridge will originate, bringing 100k or so commuters right through that very old nieghborhood.

So who does the MSM go after? You guessed it, goverment hill residents.

I thought my ears were burning....

There are certain subjects that people feel they are, if not experts, at least better exposed to or experience with, than someone who is looking at the matter from a distance.

My very first published article was a column on the 1992 Los Angeles riots. I'm not from Los Angeles. I've never been to Los Angeles. I don't even know anyone from Los Angeles. I don't have any personal knowledge or exposure to the dynamics and divisions of that city. So what made me the go-to guy for a column about a place I knew about as well as the dark side of the moon?

Because I'm Black. I'm reasonably articulate. I understand the motivations, mindsets and frustrations of Black people better than my White editors. That's it.

I never woke up and smelled what New York City smelled like on September 12, 2001. It would be arrogant and presumptious for me to lecture BA about what life was like in post-9/11 NYC. I haven't been to New York City in nearly nine years (though I miss it every day). On my last visit to NYC I did go to the World Trade Center. The fact that it is now gone is a concept I have difficulty wrapping my head around.

I suppose it annoys any person when somebody "out of town" makes statements that are based on second-hand knowledge. Does it irk Dontreadonme when net2007 tries to one up him on military matters? Does it irk BoF when people who aren't teachers try to tell him how teachers think? Does it annoy Wertz when people make silly assumptions about gay men? Are Julian or moif bugged when someone tries to tell them they aren't Americans so they can't understand our ways? Does Aevans176 see red when liberals suggest conservatives hate poor people?

Everyone is guilty to an extent of having a subject where they feel they have a certain amount of authority and authenticity on. It certainly gets under my skin when White people try to tell me how Black people think when they've never been Black. I don't know how women think because I'm not a woman. I don't know how pro-lifers think because I'm pro-choice. I do have some idea how a man in the military thinks because I was a man in the military (but even then my knowledge base is over 20 years out of date).

All anyone can do is inform themselves the best they can about any subject. Simply because you're on the scene of what's happening at the time doesn't mean you're well-informed about it. The opinion of someone who knows nothing about the matter isn't particularly valuable.

All some people can say is, "I saw the whole thing. What happened?"

When it comes to debating an issue, how is more likely to be correct on local issues- the local, such as in BAs statement, or, is it those that study the problem from Afar, such as NTs rebuttal and others?

How accurate is information gathered via written or media sources vs local experiance in your opinion?


Hey, I was present at my birth and I don't know jack about it. However, I can read about childbirth and get a pretty good idea what was going on.

I've noticed along the way that everyone has their own ideas about what happens locally. It's not like just being there gives an edge to anything, so I figure that's a weak argument in debate. It's stronger in court but not that strong. Eye witnesses can be all balled up too.

Then there's hard evidence. You don't have to be anywhere in particular to figure out a reasonable conclusion off of hard evidence. An eye witness might finger one person in a murder, but if another person's fingerprints are all over the murder weapon, that's a tough one to refute. Also DNA evidence at the crime scene. They are tough, but the TV lawyer shows make it seem easy.

Regarding telling people what something is like, I actually got a lecture from a guy who had looked for maybe three jobs in his entire life, the last time being in 1969, about what it's like to look for a job. It was funny. He then tried to lecture me on freelancing. Eh, some people know everything in their own minds, which doesn't cover much territory to begin with.

AM and NT- a question- how do YOU distinguish between what is correct and factual and what is not, when reading a story from afar? We have a large number of poeple that call the mosquito infested swamp that is ANWR the "serengeti of the north" , when I have travelled all over that place, and know it is no "serengeti of the north"- not to mention, it is misleading, as no work is done in the summer- only in the lifeless winter of the arctic winter.

The only thing I really don't call into question as to direct bias is published scientific journals, because you can go and repeat what they have done for yourself.

When it comes to debating an issue, how is more likely to be correct on local issues- the local, such as in BAs statement, or, is it those that study the problem from Afar, such as NTs rebuttal and others?

How accurate is information gathered via written or media sources vs local experiance in your opinion?

The simple fact that this thread hasn't been slammed shut like the Cheyenne Mountain front door, proves that liberalism runs free reign on this site. If a conservative member had started this in this forum, we would have been subject to at least 3 page of how every rule in the book was broken. Furthermore this is totally silly, and can only garner the most subjective responses. For crying out loud we're even naming names of members! I become more astounded each day.


Here's your answer, location is irrelevant, if you're a liberal and you say it you are wrong.

Looks like somebody didn't get a nap today and woke up cranky.

More blah-blah-blah about how liberals run rampant on though the board stats clearly indicate that both conservatives AND Republicans are in greater number here than liberals and Democrats.

But hey, why let a little thing like facts get in the way of a fit of conservative victimization?

Um, wow, someone clearly needs to go back on his meds or something. So you are saying, if I can gather from this wierdness, is that if the local is a liberal, he or she is wrong, but if he or she, CALLS themselves conservative (and really, I don't believe you have even tried to define what that means- does that mean, everyone that disagrees with FI, or, is it some kind of actual philisophy that you have given some reasonable thought to? ) so, if a conservative says he saw blue skinned aliens land with Michael Jackson on the front yard- you would believe that to be true, if they simply said "I am a conservative, so, that means that everything that comes out of my mouth is true and correct, and blue skinned aliens landed on my lawn with Michael Jackson in tow, as part of a liberal plot to force "Thriller" on all us gawd fearing conservatives?