Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Of Iraq only

"On second thought, why don't we just send Cheney, Ashcroft and Ralph Reed to permanently reside in Iraq as their new leaders?"
Mary Anne — (archived)

This was the text to which Tom replied, "They'd be one hell of an improvement over the leaders they've got now."

To which I replied with a reference to "the leaders they've [Iraq, as per the text of the first post] got now", i.e., the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. I replied this way because I saw that Tom had not read the text, and used the opportunity to point that out obliquely.

To which you replied in a way that made plain you had not read the text of the first post, at the top, either.

Not reading the whole post is a common problem here. It's related to the larger problem of information literacy and non-literate lack of depth of information-gathering practices in the Information Age.

Print journalists have been taught for over a century to make their salient points within the first two paragraphs of any article, because most people will not read past there, and a substantial number of those will only read the headline and the first paragraph. This observation and its resulting application has translated itself into soundbites and powerpoint presentations in the audiovisual media, which is making us stoopider and stoopider.

Read past the hook, OK?

Regards--
Mary Anne

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