by KaiserJeep » Wed 01 May 2019, 09:40:03
The telling comparison is when one compares the online version of almost anything with the fixed and unchanging version in printed texts and other sources. The conclusion you soon reach is that the online version is being edited in realtime and to (an) agenda(s) that are uncertain at best.
My usual collaborator at Boston College and myself are hard at work for our Historical Association editor chronicling the end of the whaling era in the early 20th Century. This is about a century out of my comfort zone, most of my research and writing being about that clichéd era of "wooden ships and iron men".
I have a secret weapon. The wife's grandmother - who was also a History buff and avid collector of books - left a collection of texts in which she had entered her "corrections" in the margins, not infrequently with some acerbic commentary. I observe her comments, do the research to back them up, and collect the praise for my "rare insight into the period". I do plan to confess all before publication, and to dedicate this book to her. 35 years ago, I carried her coffin, and the wife was devastated. I now wish I had known her better, but I was then pre-occupied with the new phase of my career in Silicon Valley.
If you think you can believe anything you read online, without independant offline confirmation, you have already lost your way. I do not know how this will work out in the long run. I suspect that had Stalin had as powerfull a tool as the internet, Americans would be learning Russian in school.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0