I like that I caught an anti-Hoff blogger in the same frame, walking away.

Here is Damon Winter’s defense (paraphrased): “My subjects weren’t comfortable around my camera. I used a popular iPhone app because they didn’t feel threatened by my phone and I liked how the app made pictures look.” He expounds for paragraphs upon paragraphs, making it sound as if the iPhone didn’t come with a regular camera app he could’ve used instead, and as if nobody had ever succeeded at taking candid photographs of soldiers before.

If I had had the choice at the time, I would have used a program that applied less of an effect. But this was all I had available to me. Without an Internet connection, I could not download a plug-in for the application with more subtle processing, as I would have preferred. This is what I had. And this is what I used. And that is that.

[...]

Using this phone brought me into little details that I would have missed otherwise. The image of the men resting together on a rusted bed frame could never have been made with my regular camera. They would have scattered the moment I raised my 5D with a big 24-70 lens attached. But with the phone, the men were very comfortable. They always laughed when they saw me shooting with it while professional cameras hung from my shoulders.

My problem with this is that Hipstamatic’s use of effects that deliberately mimic the light leaks and other flaws common to vintage photography. It is a false authenticity if you try to pass it off as “photojournalism.” I wouldn’t have an issue if Damon Winter’s intent was to document war and downtime between missions using the same tools as the soldiers did. (David Guttenfelder did this with another iPhone app as an embed in Afghanistan earlier last year: “… I was trying to create those kinds of real-life, non-newsy snapshots that Marines might shoot for themselves.”) However, this was not Damon’s intent.

Charles Blow enjoys his fair share of making up fake, misleading, and otherwise nonexistent “trends” to fill up space around the advertisements and obituaries in the NYT. (In a past weird column, he asserted that hooking up is an entirely new phenomena only done by people under age 30.) One such trend that doesn’t exist in the natural world is the current media meme in which President Obama is quickly losing steam amongst American Jews.

Aside from the general weirdness of specifically singling out Jews, this isn’t really happening at all:

From January to July 2010, Jews gave Obama a 61 percent approval rating, down from 66 percent from July to December 2009. Muslims gave him a 78 percent approval rating during the first half of 2010, and Mormons a 24 percent rating. The overall approval rating is 48 percent, down 15 points from the first half of 2009.

Obama received average job approval ratings from Catholics, and below-average ratings from Protestants.

Despite drops in the overall job approval rating from January 2009 to July 2010, Muslims have consistently given Obama the highest rating and Mormons the lowest. Jews’ approval ratings have remained above average.

This week, Minnesota Public Radio was able to access state employee data on Lookout Services’ Web site without using a password or encryption software. Employee names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and hire dates were visible on the Web site for every state agency using the service.

This week, the state and MPR are being countersued for breach of contract, stealing trade secrets and “hacking.”

It’s bullshit, of course.

The Lookout Services Inc. countersuit is a frivolous lawsuit which attempts to intimidate and quash people from exercising their First Amendment rights regarding publicizing information about their site’s complete lack of security.

Let’s see what’s up:

• Lookout Services CEO Elaine Morley runs a law firm out of the same address (5909 West Loop S Fwy # 300 in Bellaire, TX) with her husband, Arden Morley, called Morley & Morley P.C.
• On LinkedIn, Morley & Morley P.C. claims to have 5 employees and Lookout Services, Inc. claims to have 10 employees.
• Morley & Morley P.C. shares at least two other employees with Lookout Services, Inc.: Alisha Campos and David Person. In related news stories, David Person is referred to as “the company’s attorney” and you can find Alisha Campos’ email address on the Lookout site in reference to customer service. (The demo has been taken down, but is cached by Google.)
• The Morleys are on Twitter, and have registered the following accounts: @Everifyandi9, @Lookoutservices, @L00koutservices, @ArdenMorleyLaw, @ArdenMorley, @Houstonlawfirm, @SugarLandLawyer, and who knows what else.
• The Morleys are Republicans, which was kind of obvious from their gross misunderstanding of the First Amendment, although Arden Morley is particularly fond of the Second Amendment (plus 137 other things, damn):
• The Morleys/Lookout Services Inc./Morley & Morley, P.C. were taken to court in 2008 for failing to pay their “computer consultants” nearly $20k. This is publicly-available information: [PDF]
• On the Secrets of the City blog, someone calling themselves “Ashley” with a Sugar Land, TX IP address posted the Lookout press release and comparisons to a journalist burglarizing a house, along with things such as, “The power of the press is enormous and virtually unchecked.”

When you get 36 local women-owned companies and nearly 1,200 women in one room at Minneapolis’ Graves Hotel, there’s only one possible result — high-energy shopping.

Best/worst part: it was written by a woman.

Personally, I don’t believe that newspaper sites should have comment sections. That’s what blogs are for, so nobody has to read the dumb stuff that you write! If it wasn’t written well enough to even be published in print as a letter to the editor, why should it go online? (Hint: “freedom of speech” is incorrect.)

Yeah, you bet if you leave a shitty remark anonymously on my blog, I’ll WHOIS your IP address. Which I already have done in the past, so my ex-boyfriends have learned to use proxies when visiting my blog.

The coverage of this case is, across the board, sickening.  Here are a few headlines:
George Sodini, Health Club Gunman, Went On Rampage Over Sexual Rejection
George Sodini’s Blog Tells of Years of Rejection By Women Before Gym Shooting
Gunman at Pennsylvania Health Club Was Bitter Over Women
Sex-Starved Aeoribcs Killer George Sodini Was Upset By Women
Failures In Love Bred LA Fitness Center Killer’s Hate

And the list goes on.  In each case, we see that Sodini is the victim.  Nowhere do we see a headline like this: Misogynist Commits Mass Murder or Three Women Murdered in Hate Crime. The articles are clear that Sodini hated women, which of course he did, but for the media, if Sodini hated women, then there must be a reason for it.  A good reason. If George Sodini, a proven racist, had murdered African-Americans simply because of their race, would we be asking why George Sodini hated African-Americans?  No, because what possible legitimate reason could he have?  There isn’t one.  He’s a racist asshole and that’s the end of it.  But apparently, there are legitimate reasons to hate all women.  The articles try to explain, in rational terms, why Sodini hated women, thus making his rampage seem like the next logical step given his mental instability.  If women hadn’t deprived him of sex, none of this would have happened.

[...]

For a moment, just imagine if George Sodini had had a girlfriend. There can be virtually no doubt that she would have been physically and emotionally abused during the relationship, because George Sodini hated women. If the woman had tried to escape from him, she would have been stalked and likely murdered. And after he killed her, he would have probably committed a mass murder of women anyway. The headline: Heartbroken Man Goes on Rampage After Being Dumped.

The real story here is not lonely men (there are plenty of lonely women as well), but instead, the real story is male violence against women and girls, which occurs every second of every day in the form of domestic abuse, molestation, harassment, rape and murder. There is no rational, legitimate reason for this hatred of women, yet it is widespread in our culture and everyday, women die as a result.

(via)