Rush Limbaugh, Siri, and the wrath of the technocrati

19.04.2012

"I don't have any other theories, but I sent this off to two people [the aforementioned 'computer people?'] who might, and none of them could believe it but they then started trying to explain it to me what various things could exist to explain this," Limbaugh says. "But it was the first two [text transcriptions] that came back that specifically mentioned Obama."

He says a bit later, "But the most common suggestion I got from the people I sent it to was, 'You've got a Bluetooth problem here. There's something wrong with Bluetooth.' That may be, but for ["]Obama and his minions["] to end up in a translated voice-to-text message when I didn't say Obama, I didn't say minions, I didn't say anything about any of that, the dictation's never been that far off."

But the blogosphere drew its own conclusions. "," was the headline at AppAdvice. "" was the headline for Buster Heine's story at CultOfMac.

Heine declares that Limbaugh "thinks the main culprit is Obama's minions trying to give him the spooks. I wish we were creative enough to make this up, but it's a "true" story.... if by true, you mean that Rush Limbaugh actually said something this wacky." In fact, as the show's transcript makes clear, Limbaugh doesn't think that and didn't say it.

One user, mtalsma, started a thread at about Limbaugh's experience, with a link to an account of it at TheBlaze. Somewhat naively, he said he was "not trying to start a thread on politics or the semantics of talk radio personalities."