If you had any understanding of how the Internet was developed you would realize how wrong this statement is.
The backbone for today’s Internet was developed entirely under government funding.
Your analogy to Bill Gates is inept and simply demonstrates once again that you are more interested in grinding your axe than in finding the truth. The additional fact that you are unable to appreciate how much this weakens your claims of “liar!” borders on the tragic, or at least the tragi-comic.
So now I suppose the Repugnicans will want to impeach him, too? After all, a lie is an impeachable offense, no matter what the context, right? Yeah, let’s spend another $40 million to pursue that! Get over it!
AND…
your attack of me personally rather than my comments or the facts … well, I am heading down your path now aren’t I?
What I should have said is Federal government…
I believe (once more, perhaps you know more than I do of the internet’s origin and make-up through the years) but my read would be it was brought into existence by STATE universities and colleges before any federal acknowledgement or intervention.
and here come all the AHA! so you used the wrong words…
YOU LIED!!!
Okay, I’ll take it… dish it out.
Yes. In any version of history which places dates in sequential order, in fact. I do not know about yours.
And yet you attempt to do this by returning again and again to statements which are not false on their face. Gore did receive a letter that described a student unable to sit for lack of a desk. Gore was instrumental in the governmental policies which fostered the creation of the Internet.
I have no liege. I have no trouble calling a lie a lie. I also have no trouble calling hypocrisy hypocrisy. Perhaps you should invert your own advice and cease trying to twist honest statements into lies.
Your twists are every bit as acrobatic as anything you accuse Gore of attempting. Moralist, heal thyself.
I am not a Democrat.
I have not said anything about whether Gore has “stretched the truth on a consistent basis”.
I have addressed only 4 specific accusations of lying made in the OP and in additional posts to this thread.
Undoubtedly. From the evidence in this thread I would say that implies more about your ability to reason objectively than it does about Gore’s behavior.
In what universe do state universities not receive massive amounts of federal funding?
I have addressed every substantial claim you have made, I believe. If I have missed any please repeat them, and I will addreess them now.
I have also addressed the subtext of your posts and noted that your lack of objectivity on these issues weakens any persuasive position you might use to brnd someone a pathological liar.
That is not an attack on your personality. It is an attack on your credibility regarding this issue.
I suggest you type “arpanet” into a good search engine and start following links.
First of all JustAnotherGuy, you shouldn’t be moving the goalpost. First you say the 'net needed no government, then you say the state governments could handle it.
And where is that state university that accepts no government money?
Anyway, I think we might need a good internet primer here, since you did say "I may be wrong, I know little to nothing about the internet and how it works," JAG
http://info.isoc.org/internet-history/cerf.html
The Advanced Research Projects Agency was funded under the Defense Department. For those who bother to gather facts before calling folks liars, that means that arpanet was developed directly under the auspices of the federal government.
The state universities (University of Michigan, UCLA, etc.) involved in the early stages were contractors working under grants from the IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office), which was a division of (D)ARPA.
SterlingNorth – love the sig.
Hmmm…
Actually, I looked it up. Where else but on the internet?
Seems, at least by the version I read, the internet was brainstormed in 1968, funded through the Advanced Research Projects Agency, later the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but obviously federal funding. It was up and operating in 1976 in its original form. (The year Al Gore was first elected to Congress)
So, although Al Gore’s freshman term did not preceed the internet, I stand humbly corrected that it was created by federal funding. Further, I will even allow that he may well have provided the funding for the internet to exist as it does today and I withdraw my objection to his ‘off the cuff’ word twist.
bows in defeat
So, Al Gore is directly responsible for the success of the internet, huh? I would suggest that not only is he not responsible for it, but if he had had his way the internet as we know it would not exist.
See, Al is a fan of government control of high technology. He’s a technocrat. If he sees a good idea, he thinks that the way to improve it is to let the government run it. He was a big fan of Minitel, and if he’d had his way we might have had a nationwide Minitel network, which would have set us back years or decades. He was also in favor of several proposals to impose regulatory controls on the internet.
The success of the internet is a FREE MARKET phenomenon. Yes, the infrastructure was originally funded by government, and inasmuch as Gore was partially responsible for some of that funding I’ll give him credit. But what made the internet explode was the efforts of millions of individuals WHO HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH WASHINGTON DC. And in fact, those individuals would have been greatly hampered had all the programs Gore approved of come to pass.
And even if you don’t buy that, Gore’s statement is a little disingenuous. Saying that he “Took the initiative in the creation of the internet” is kind of like a Senator saying that he “Took the initiative in the creation of the Space Shuttle” simply because he signed off on a NASA spending bill. Kinda overstates his importance, don’t you think?
But you still apparently do not understand that the arpanet, while it provided the communications backbone of what later became the Internet and served as the development/test environment for the TCP protocols, was not the Internet. You were not created when your father was born. The Internet was not created in 1976 (or 1967, or 1969, or several other dayes which wre milestones in teh development of the arpanet.)
The Internet did not come into existence until the the DNS/Bind addressing scheme was formalized and adopted, allowing segregated networks for commercial, educational, government, etc domains to communicate effectively across the same infrastructure.
Main Entry: pa·thol·o·gy
Pronunciation: p&-'thäl-&-jE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -gies
1 : the study of diseases and especially of the changes in the body produced by them
2 : something abnormal; especially : the disorders in structure and function that occur in a particular disease
Main Entry: li·ar
Pronunciation: 'lI(-&)r
Function: noun
: a person who tells lies
Main Entry: 3lie
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): lied; ly·ing /'lI-i[ng]/
1 : to make a statement one knows to be untrue
2 : to give a false idea <statistics sometimes lie> [Old English
lEogan “to say something that is not true”]
Why oh why JAG? Why do you continue this line of reasoning. Those who will accept your response have done so, those who have not will not. It can only be my self-sacrificing desire.
I believe it was alleged that I back-tracked, calling a continual exaggeration of the truth rather than my original quote of a pathological liar. I use the term, though the combination of words is a personality understood in and of itself, regardless of the definition. I know and have known many people with this… disease grin if I may be so forward.
I submit to you the following. It is not normal to consistently speak in non-truths. To continuously perform something that is not the norm of activity is pathological. If everyone did it (and I don’t assume for a moment that being normal is all it is cracked up to be) then there would be no debate as to whether it was a lie or not because it would be accepted across the board.
Lying… to make a statement that one knows to be untrue. Now the real question is, did he know that his statements were untrue when he made them? (I won’t use the easy definitions because the statements were all three incorrect, with an exception if anyone wishes to prove the third matter, but not even the anti-Gore Republicans seem to be bothered with proving the third point)
He made a retraction. An exaggeration of the truth is still a lie. Perhaps more acceptable based upon an individual’s morals, but a lie nonetheless. He knew he was exaggerating the truth and he did it to make his point anyway. Not once, as any of us might do, but three times (that have been identified in this post) in the same 90 minute debate.
Thus, I deduct that Al Gore is a pathological liar.
Circular reasoning. The poster wondered if the Internet or something like it would have existed without the government, and your response is no, because the government built it. Well, obviously the government played a large part in the initial creation of the infrastructure. But if it HADN’T, would there still be something like the internet today?
I believe there would be. If there’s a need for a nationwide information network and the government doesn’t provide it, the free market would have. It might not have looked exactly the same, it might have been better or worse, but it would have existed.
There were other networks around at the time, BTW. There were grassroots networks like FidoNet, there were private academic networks operated by companies.
But when the government involves itself in a market, it acts like the proverbial 400 lb gorilla, displacing all else. Would Fidonet have grown into a real-time network? Would the cable companies have put together a backbone system for their customers? What about the phone companies?
I know something about this, because I ran a company that wrote software for ISP’s of a private network that was an alternative to the Internet (this was when it was hard for non-academics to gain access). We had nationwide real-time chat, message boards, full-text searching (using tools remarkably similar to Yahoo, etc). There were hundreds of large BBS’s (some with several hundred local dial-up lines) connected across North America, acting as local ISP’s. People could log-on, chat with people around the world, send E-mail to any member in the world, post messages, etc. I wrote software for a dozen U.S. embassies, and they used it to connect them all and disseminate documents.
That network was growing by leaps and bounds, but the rapid rise of the internet in the early 1990’s killed it dead.
If the government had never spent a nickel on the internet, we’d still have something like it today.
For all those defending Gore’s statement about the Internet, funding does NOT equal creating. William Shakespeare received patronage while writing his plays. This may have allowed him the freedom from having to get a real job so that he could concentrate on writing, but it does not mean that one of his patrons is justified in saying, “I took the initiative in creating Romeo And Juliet.” This is an example of Gore’s habit of trying to claim more credit than he deserves, but in such a way that his defenders can say he didn’t “technically” lie.
An example:
After college, I participated in training camp for an NFL team, but an injury ended my career. If I were to refer to “my days in the NFL”, I would not technically be lying, but it is clear that I would be implying more than I actually did.
Likewise, Gore could have said something like, “I recognized the potential of the computer network that became the Internet of today, and led the push to provide funding in its early days.” While I am no fan of Gore, I wouldn’t have a problem with this statement, and would have to admit that it is an example of foresight and good judgement as to what kind of government program deserves funding.
Rather than ask, “Is what he said technically correct?”, I think we should apply the wife test. “If I told a story like this to my wife, would she buy it?” That rule has kept me out of trouble on many an occassion.
sam stone
Would something like the Internet have developed? Maybe. It is an unprovable position at this point. Certainly there were independent networks which existed before the Internet. Most that I am aware of used the TCP protocals which had been established under government contract for arpanet. Certainly anything that allowed global email delivery and file transfer relied upon TCP.
Gore’s statement was obviously self serving. It was not obviously a lie. When a politician says he “took the initiative in creating something”, most reasonable people do not assume he meant that he built it by hand. Politicians act by providing government funding, regulatory control, building consensus, making resources available, etc. Gore acted in exactly those ways in supporting the early development of networked computing techniques.
The Lousiana Purchase was instrumental in shaping the geography of this country. The politicians who negotiated that purchase developed no land personally. They mapped no rivers. The grew no crops. Nevertheless, if one of them had claimed to have been instrumental in shaping the nation I would not brand them a liar.
That would be refreshing. I wait in anticipation.
A better analogy would be to a Senator who lobbied consistently and effectively for the space shuttle program during times when the majority of his colleagues saw no benefit in space exploration.
First, my reasoning was not circular. You might wish to refresh yourself on the definition of that fallacy. jag asked whether, “the internet [would] have come to be what it is today without the government?” Since the Internet is an extenion of the arpanet infrastructure which was funded entirely under government auspices, my answer was indeed no. If I ask whether the Viet Nam Memorial would be what it is today if the government had not commisioned the architect to design it, would it require circular reasoning for you to answer no?
Second, it might be that the free market would have driven the creation of a global computer network. It might also be that numerous sompeting networks would have failed to establish efficient common protocols and given us a fracured and less navigable electronic landscape. Such specualtions, fo course, can never be more than fiction. I do think it is a fair extrapolation, though, to say that without ARPA/IPTO any development of a nationwide computer networking infrastructure would have been delayed by at least a decade. It’s not like there was a driving free market effort to establish such a creature in the days before arpanet came into existence.
Would FIDOnet have existed at all without arpanet and the TCP protocols? Free market entrprenuerism is much easier when the government has already picked up the bill for your infrastructure and initial R&D. Or are you going to tell me now that FIDOnet was developed in a vaccuum and gained nothing from the government’s sponsorship of more than two decades of research and practice in developing networked computing?
smitty
What if a patron hired Will Shakespeare to write a play about two young lovers from fueding families who suffer a tragic end? It isn’t like the government threw a pile of money at UCLA and UM with no expectations of what the money would be used for.
Your football analogy makes sense only if you begin with the proposition that Al Gore’s place in sponsoring networked computing solutions was as ineffective as your failed attempt to make an NFL team. Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf clearly feel otherwise. On what do you base your position?
jag
Perhaps you could rephrase this into conventional english?
It is normal for some people. You, in fact, have made several untrue statements in this thread.
You have admited ignorance to the facts when you branded Gore a liar about his early patronage of Internet technology. Therefore I assume that your statements innocent of deceitful intent.
You mad a retraction.
You have exagerated the extent of Gore’s dishonesty more than once.
I cannot read minds, therefore I do not know whether you knew you were exagerating the truth as you posted. It seems increasingly likely, though, given your persistent return to the same rhetoric.
More than three times in this thread it has been pointed out that the second statement was not a misrepresentation of the information Gore had been given.
No supporting evidence has been offered to brand the third statement a lie. You mention that yourself (“not even the anti-Gore Republicans seem to be bothered with proving the third point”) and yet you continue to classify this as a proven lie.
Thank you, I think we can now judge clearly whether or not you know at the time you post that you are exagerating your position beyond truthfulness.
I leave my own deductions as an exercise for the reader.
Your analogy is irrelevant. In the hypothetical case you present, the sponsor would be the creative force, and Shakespeare would be reduced to a ghost writer fleshing out the details. This is clearly not the case with Gore and internet funding. The government at the the time was funding a way to facilitate communication for government research. Neither Gore nor anyone else at the time could forsee the existance of what we now know as the internet.
As for my football analogy, you miss the point entirely. I was not talking about end results. I was pointing out Gore’s habit of implying that he deserves more credit than he does. I never said he deserves no credit, I said the there is no need to overreach, and his tendency to do so is disturbing.
Wow. My analogy is irrelevant and I have missed the point of yours entirely. I am obviously out of my depth in dealing with a master of metaphor such as yourself. Since I am so out of my septh here, perhaps you could provide me a poin-by-point analysis of your Shakespearean metaphor relating how obviously superior it is to my own in accurately embodying the relationship between government research projects and the technological construct we now call the Internet.
BTW
This is not an accurate statement. The research and projects of DARPA were in no way restricted to only governmental systems.
As to the football analogy, the case for Gore overstating his contribution relies entirely upon one’s understanding of that contribution. The opinion of two people intimately connected with the early growth of computer networks in this country has already been given. I have asked you what information you use to invalidate their judgment. I have yet to see your response on that point.
I am not even going back to the internet statement, you agreed he lied about his involvement, I agree with that. It’s an old and tired topic. I stated quite plainly that I was making an assumption that the internet would exist without the government. I stated quite plainly that I did not know what I was talking about, perhaps if I had put in a question mark you could have seen it for the request for information that it was. I discovered the error and admitted to it. I never made a retraction of any statements made, only of an incorrect assumption that I labeled as such. I never retracted concerning the veracity of the Vice President’s statements.
There is a quote by a psychoanalyst in the Baltimore Sun today, page 7A, concerning Al Gore’s propensity to falsehoods.
“When something happens once, you think about it as random,” says Stanley Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist. “When something happens twice, it’s a trend. When something happens three and many more times, it’s a pattern. And when an analyst sees a pattern like that, they want to know what accounts for it. Gore is a man who has really terrific, solid accomplishments. But he continually overstates the case on his own behalf.”
Reading my posts, I don’t see the vehemence in my comments that your posts seem to allege. I do however, see that rather than address the points of this post, you continue to address the people making the posts, labeling them hypocrits or comparing them to their statements. I believe, though I am too lazy to look for the reference, that I called you a liberal or a Democrat, so I can understand if that set you off to personally attack me. I will reap what I have sown.
This is a simple matter of did he lie three times in the national debate? I went further to label him a pathological liar. Whether I am one or not is quite irrelevant to the topic. This post is labeled Gore tells a lie (or three), not JAG tells a lie. My statements are not based upon personal observations and have been obtained through the links of other posters on this subject, of third party information, all verifiable without my existence.
What is relevant are three alleged lies which have yet to be proven as true by anyone in this post, but which have been proven false on two counts.
FEMA says “nope”. Turns out Gore happened to be going to TX
for a fund-raiser
I have seen no dispute of this lie. I have read Vice President Gore’s retraction.
Principal of school says “nope”.Turns out there weren’t enough seats because $100,000 worth of new science equipment had just been delivered to the classroom
I pulled the exact quote on a former post, here it is again,
“Her science class was supposed to be for 24 students,”
the vice president said during the debate. “She is the 36th
student in that classroom. . . . They can’t squeeze another
desk in for her, so she has to stand during class.”
They had another desk in for her that same day…
I doubt there was any squeezing at all…
She had to stand for one class, not she HAS to stand during
class…
That last sentence is false because it states the reason that she has (had) to stand during (a) class was because the desk hadn’t been delivered, not because they couldn’t squeeze another one in.
School superintendent says (you guessed it)“nope, ridiculous”. And she knows of no schools in the entire state with this policy.
The school is not named, the superintendent is not named. Since my view of the ludicracy of the concept of a shift of students being permitted to eat lunch at 9:30 AM after even half their parents found out is not evidence, I leave it to the judgement of the reader. If I say I saw an elephant fly, you cannot disprove that, but you can assuredly make a judgement as the veracity of my statement.