Of trains, violent thugs, Arabic insults and partial journalism

A seemingly insignificant, albeit disturbing, local news episode. On a regional train near Milan. Five youngsters brazenly lying down on their seats, despite the train being packed with commuters, lots of people standing. A passenger rebukes them, they immediately proceed to beat him savagely. He’ll spend a month or so in the hospital due to multiple facial fractures. He’s been saved by an off-duty policeman who happened to be on the same car. Three of the offenders have been arrested. They’re Italian. First of all. They’ve been presented by the media as “ragazzi”, i.e. a word that indicates young teenagers or boys, but they’re between 18 and 25 years old.…

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Google and the power to distort

Some religions are more equal than others Talk about distortion. Let’s say you are looking for information about the following topic: violence against Jews. I just discovered that even the autocomplete function on Google is biased… After you type violence against it suggests women with a few variants (ok, feminism and stuff, par for the course). Adding the letter J the suggestion turns to journalists. Typing the E brings us the surprising bit jehova witnesses …you see, it’s a major crisis, with all those attacks on Jehova Witnesses you hear about every day… (?) Finally, adding W causes Google to stop suggesting anything at all… evidently violence against jews is…

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