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Who would have felt comfortable in these circumstances?
A Massachusetts man was driving in the town of Medford last Saturday night. He admits he took a wrong turn and ended up going the wrong way down a traffic circle. The angry man steps out of a truck and approaches him. Michael, seemingly -- and perhaps understandably -- frightened, reverses. The angry man follows him and Michael stops.
The angry man appears to show his badge and identifies himself as a police officer. Some, though, might be troubled by the officer's greeting: "I'll put a hole in your head." Michael is apologetic and explains to the officer -- now identified as Det. Stephen LeBert -- that he is being recorded. LeBert suggests that he will seize the camera.
"I'm a f***ing Medford detective and you went through that f***ing rotary," says LeBert. As Michael insists he didn't see a sign, LeBert demands his license. "You're lucky I'm a cop, otherwise I'd be beating the f***ing piss out of you right now," LeBert adds, shortly after calling the driver an a**hole. LeBert ultimately calls for on-duty cops who at least do a little to calm the situation. However, the fact that Michael posted his video to YouTube has led to an investigation.
Medford Police Chief Leo Sacco told MyFoxBoston: "It's not the proper behavior, but we only know about it when people tell us. And unfortunately, we had to get up this morning and see it on a YouTube video."
In the days before cameras proliferated, you had to rely on witnesses and hearsay. The police were more likely to be believed by those in authority. Cameras have begun to change that -- on both sides.
Sacco told the Medford Transcript: "The video is troubling enough, and it requires investigation just based on what we see here. The driver does not have to file his own complaint. He may, but he does not have to."
[...] Sacco told the Medford Transcript that LeBert was a good policeman. He added, perhaps unfortunately: "If you work hard you do step on people's toes, which generates complaints."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hankwang on Saturday August 01 2015, @12:42PM
Hey, I'm seeing this happen all the time on SN: long blurbs that are a copy-paste of almost the entire article. Only a couple of sentences from the article are left out and not a single original word appears in the summary. I don't think this is the way to go; you're opening yourself to DMCA takedown requests and in any case it reflects bad on SN.
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(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday August 01 2015, @04:12PM
Good points.
The problem is we're not submitting enough stories. I myself am guilty of this, I've had one I've been meaning to complete for almost a week now but never gotten around to it.
Often when one finds something interesting it's something one doesn't know all that much about, then one starts digging a bit (which can be a challenge in itself like using Google translate to parse broken Chinese) and things can get complicated and lock up as one feels one has to extract context and stuff to do a good job.
Maybe we should all submit more and lower our expectations a bit, I don't know.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday August 01 2015, @05:45PM
I didn't submit this article, but I've been trying to keep the queue as full as I can since this spring when LaminatorX (I think it was LamX) sent up the cry for help with editing. Enough new editors were certified before I had finished the training, so I opted to help with submissions.
I do employ the copy & paste method for two reasons, though. First, I'm not an expert on everything and I don't want to mis-summarize an article or put words in the mouth of the article. Second, I don't have time to spend 30 minutes on a single submission; I scan a dozen sources I like, pick out the ones I think would be interesting or educational or fodder for a good discussion for the Soylent community, and throw it into the hopper.
In an ideal world we'd have an expert on gene therapy submitting an article on a new DNA manipulation technique and putting it into layman's terms for all of us non-geneticists, a rocket scientist submitting something about a new drive technology, etc. But we don't yet. I'd say about half of what you're seeing in the submission queue have been submitted by the editors, not by submitters, so they're actually doing double duty.
There have been a couple other prolific submitters who are not editors like HughPickens and gewg, but there have been so many slamming them for what & how they've submitted that their output has fallen off significantly. I too have been drawing a lot of flak recently from a couple of users for what & how I submit, too. Alas for them I have 25 years of grassroots activism under my belt and am long since inured to mewling, haha.
The absolute best way for submissions on SN to get "better" (for some value of "better") is for those who want things to be better to step up and make it so. It's a community site. If the community doesn't build it, then it will be built by a handful and the rest will have to content themselves with the maxim taught to my children in preschool: "You get what you get, and you don't get upset."
That sounds a bit vituperative, and it is. But for me it's more a plea and collegial invitation to pitch in and help make it better. I know what I read and where I get articles from, but I hunger to learn about more and see things in a way I haven't done before. That only happens when the rest of SN digs in.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by BK on Saturday August 01 2015, @05:59PM
I've pointed this out before:
Ex: here [soylentnews.org]
It seems to me that a paragraph or so from TFA should be direct quoted and the rest should be summary, commentary, or analysis.
We could blame this on bad submissions or lack of submissions, but this is a editorial function. Submitters should be able to send TMI and the editors should feel confident in pruning this a little (or more) to meet aesthetic, journalistic, organizational, or legal standards.
I know that we have a couple of cases in the past where editors have been criticized for doing this. This is not an excuse to not attempting to be good editors. Since we have added links to original submissions, the OP can always point to the original submission if he/she feels misrepresented.
We should remember that while the Comments are the speech of users and SN is protected when posting them, the articles posted by the editors are the speech of SN and are held to a higher standard.
Food for thought.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday August 01 2015, @10:36PM
The story is being submitted using a bot that trolls rss feeds and posts stories via copypasta.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday August 01 2015, @10:47PM