skippy the bush kangaroo

Thursday, March 01, 2007

askew? geshundteit!

[ed. note: the post we discuss was not written by gateway pundit but by patrick ishmael of news buckit. we have replaced gateway pundit's name with patrick's in the followig post. our apologies to gateway pundit for the confusion]

our buddy actor212 of simply left behind sent us this proof that we are indeed a-list bloggers up there with markos and duncan...a post from gateway pundit "proving" that liberal bloggers use profanity at a far greater rate than conservative bloggers:

and this is what i found, using what i deemed -- through a mix of ttlb and 2006's weblog award lists -- to be the 18 biggest lefty blogs, and 22 biggest righty blogs. (not counting this one. :)) i couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and i even gave the lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. but it didn't make much of a difference.

so how much more does the left use carlin's "seven words" versus the right? according to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

yowsers.

how did i get this result? i searched google using the following format and recorded the page results that were returned:

site:xyz.com "search term 1" or "search term 2" or "search term 3"... et al.

nine search terms total -- the seven profanities as single words, and two of those as their own two-word variations. i then added the individual site results together and compared them. the results are below.

Example

Example

yes, we are there on the lefty blog table, having used carlin's 7 dirty words a total of "419 times."
we are pleased to know that, contrary to every technorati, alexa, and truth laid bear traffic counting system devised for measuring impact of a blog, we are one of the "18 biggest" liberal blogs. but then, when have facts ever meant anything to a conservative trying to make a point?

(we are guessing gateway pundit patrick ishmael used our status as a finalist in the 2006 weblog awards as criteria. thanks, we think.)

several commenters on gateway pundit's patrick's post remarked that counting all diarists and commenters on blogs skews the results.

we personally wonder why gp patrick left protein wisdom off the conservative table. was he afraid jeff "slap your face with my c*ck" goldstein's inclusion would skew the results in the exact opposite direction? (we can see it now: "liberal to conservative use of dirty words, 1 to 5,347??? no, we'd better leave protein wisdom off!")

tho we are happy to be included with the big guys, we were left quite perplexed. aside from a handful of purposeful usage of swear words for comic effect, skippy's policy is to insert asterisks for vowels, so you can't really read the f*cking expletive.

but luckily we liberals have the scientific method on our side, and rule one of the sm is reproducable results, eg, if we do what gateway pundit patrick ishmael did, we should come up with the same results.

so, we took him at his word when he said

how did i get this result? i searched google using the following format and recorded the page results that were returned:

site:xyz.com "search term 1" or "search term 2" or "search term 3"... et al.


and we used google for our site alone.

and what did we find?

skippy the bush kangaroo's occurrences of george carlin's famous 7 dirty words:

2 times.

actually, 136 times. luckily actor 212 pointed out our original search included the "www" which is not necessary for google. still and all, 136 times is less than a third as many times as gateway pundit patrick ishmael has for us.

so gateway pundit patrick ishmael somehow got more than three times the number than we did for our site (and there were examples in ours of quoting other people, such as this musing on fcc fines. and a cursory trip thru the results shows us that most of the nasty words comes from commenters, which we covered above.

(also, some of that comes from quoting amanda marcotte quoting the comments left on pandagon during the edwards fracas. in other words, we are just repeating what the hardly-ever-right wingers said on someone else's blog.

(and actor212 points out to us that "tits" and "piss" are now allowed on tv. we find that if we used the word "piss," it was in the manner of "ticked off" or "angry.")

john lott. paging mr. john lott...gosh, where's tim lambert when you need him?

addendum: our google search for little green footballs comes up with results of 461 instances of dirty words. ishmael came up with 230. so, let's review: ishmael under-reports a conservative site by half, and over-reports our liberal site by 300%. do we see a pattern?

Labels: ,

posted by skippy at 4:05 PM |

11 Comments:

This post has been removed by the author.
commented by Blogger Patrick Ishmael, 5:28 PM PST  
Now, Skip, you'll notice that a) the author is claiming some mystical mojo-inducing algorithm, b) hasn't paid attention to your "no profanity" rules (with rare exceptions) and c) put you *ahead* of Crooks & Liars, which gets so raunchy, they've had to hire a platoon of cens-- I mean, moderators!

Patrick, Skippy reproduced your algorithm in its entirety and his results are perfectly valid, as I have recreated them.

I realize the quote-unquote scientific method might be a bit unfamiliar to one whose knowledge of earth's history is limited to what your priest forced you to swallow (pun intended) plus the twenty minutes before you were born, but the scientific method says that if independent parties cannot recreate your results, you have created an invalid algorithm.

Your algorithm has been tested Twice. Both times it has come up wildly incorrect.

To put it mildly, you fuc-- um, screwed up! (sorry, Skip...I let my fingers get ahead of me)

I realize the Reagan Education department was probably not entirely kind to you, what with trying to destroy the school system in favor of madrassah's for Jesus, so you can go to Wikipedia and check to see if I've defined the scientific method correctly.

Capisci?
commented by Blogger Carl, 5:40 PM PST  
Does this mean that if I simply post a list of the seven words repeating infinitely, I can become the largest lefty blog?
commented by Blogger Rez Dog, 5:48 PM PST  
Rez,

No, but you'd be in the running to replace Little Green Footballs.
commented by Blogger Carl, 5:55 PM PST  
Skip,

Just to cover the "technicality" of "Patrick" "Call Me!" "Ishmael's" claim, I "put" quote marks around the "terms" in question.

Still came up with "2", "Patrick"
commented by Blogger Carl, 6:02 PM PST  
And you really ought to winnow that list down, Patrick.

Both piss and tits are acceptable on TV after ten PM.
commented by Blogger Carl, 6:06 PM PST  
"During the court case over Carlin's monologue, the Supreme Court established in the Pacifica decision the safe harbor provision that grants broadcasters the right to broadcast indecent (but not obscene) material between the hours of 22:00 and 06:00, when children are thought not to be awake. Thus the FCC has mainly been concerned with indecent content shown or heard between 06:00 and 22:00 The FCC has never maintained a specific list of words prohibited from the airways during this time period but has maintained general guidelines regarding obscenities [1]. The seven dirty words had been assumed to be likely to elicit indecency related action by the FCC if uttered on a TV or radio broadcast and thus the broadcast networks generally censor themselves with regard to the many of the seven dirty words. While most of the original seven dirty words are still viewed as inappropriate for broadcast television and radio (based on previous actions by the FCC), the words "tits" and "piss" are generally no longer deemed unacceptable for broadcast over public airwaves during restricted hours in the United States."

From Wikipedia
commented by Blogger Carl, 6:08 PM PST  
In my experience, only very puerile people with great fear that they themselves might get out of control are overly concerned with policing other people's language. It's a fool's errand and betrays a fundamentally undemocratic temperament.

Ordinary people may be amused by the use of obscenity and even shocked and suprised in some contexts, but they don't obsess on it and try to wage war on free-speech.
commented by Blogger metrodorus, 6:23 PM PST  
"Shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Those are the heavy seven... and 'tits' doesn't even belong on the list!"

And that, my friends, is how George Carlin became immortal. George bless America...
commented by Blogger Mimus Pauly, 11:29 PM PST  
Lies, Damn Lies, and Potty Mouth Rightwingnuts. Just for shits and grins I gathered the usage at LGF from the comments, which Call'em Ishmael chose to ignore.

The result:
Now, let's compare the LGF results, 123208, to that of Daily Kos, 146000. That's pretty close, however DKos is more popular than LGF, but how much popular?
...
Let's be generous and assume that everyone that visits Daily Kos that posts comments is looking at diaries only. So, Daily Kos has 469220 visits a day to LGF's 139603. Why, it appears that Daily Kos has nearly three and half times the number of visitors as LGF, but the LGF has approximately the same number of usages of the seven dirty words.

Obviously, the Potty Mouth Rightwingnuts are over three times more likely to use profanity than the members of the Leftosphere.
commented by Blogger Disgusted in St. Louis, 4:17 AM PST  
Disgusted,

I'd have to say that you called him, Ishmael I mean...
commented by Blogger Carl, 7:39 AM PST  

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