Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label search for truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search for truth. Show all posts

Sunday, September 08, 2019

"Alternative Facts"

The Daddy State will change the meaning of words to suit their immediate needs.

They denounce Historical Fact as Political Correctness, while demanding that we accept their demagoguery as truth.


WaPo:

CHARLOTTESVILLE — A Monticello tour guide was explaining how enslaved people built, planted and tended a terrace of vegetables at Thomas Jefferson’s estate earlier this summer when a woman interrupted to share her annoyance.

“Why are you talking about that?” she demanded, according to Gary Sandling, vice president of Monticello’s visitor programs and services. “You should be talking about the plants."

At Monticello, George Washington’s Mount Vernon and other plantations across the South, an effort is underway to deal more honestly with the brutal institution that the Founding Fathers relied on to build their homes and their wealth: slavery.

Four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia, some sites are also connecting that ugly past to modern-day racism and inequality.

Here's the thing - nobody owes you a customized version of history. If you need it to be scrubbed clean so it fits with your narrow viewpoint, go to Disneyland. The rest of us know enough to prefer learning about real things in real ways.
Weirdly, if you spend enough time online, you'll encounter oddball web skulkers barking about some of the weirdest shit you ever heard, swearing to its authenticity, and proclaiming it as the truth that everybody is just too blind to see - specifically citing its wacky oddball-ness as proof of its veracity.  As if the more incredible something is, the more believable it has to be.


Monday, September 24, 2018

A Question

Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by an "illegal" and Cult45 started jumping and and down screaming, and otherwise losing their shit over it.

"Immigrant" Celia Barquin Arozamena is murdered by a white American-born guy, and  -


So, my question(s): 

Are we looking for balance here? 

Are we seeing something from the Press Poodles that points a finger at GOP cherry-picking? 

And if either or both of those is the case, what's the fuckin' difference?

Welcome to (hopefully) the height of The Propaganda War.

For what it's worth:

Monday, January 23, 2017

The Balls

In 1993, the Clintons attended 14 inaugural balls.

Laura & W went to 8 of 'em in 2001.

And the Obamas had 10 in 2009.

Trump had 2, and they were lightly attended - Trump's 2 itty-bitty sad little balls.

*Is any of this true? Who gives a fuck - this is the Post-Truth World of Alt-Fact.
It's not a question of True vs False. The only thing that matters now is what you choose to believe at any given moment.
And that's how the bad guys get power; and how they stay in power.

Sunday, January 01, 2017

Pick A Side

In today's little fit of nostalgia, I'll say that we used to have movies for grownups where the lines were drawn pretty clearly. I'm not saying there's always a perfect dichotomy, but most of the time, there's a fairly obvious distinction between what's right and what's not, and art should illustrate those values for us - or at least reflect the values we manifest in living our everyday lives.

At some point you have to be able to step back and take a look at your own position. An art-form is supposed to help us with this self-examination thing, but it seems like something's shifted, and we've been pushed off kilter.

When I look back on some of the great movies that helped us figure ourselves out, and I start to wonder about overlaying those lessons onto our ideological alignments today, I can't help but think an awful lotta people would find themselves on the wrong side.

12 Angry Men




Seven Days In May



It's A Wonderful Life



Executive Suite


I promise this is not just me wanting to go back to some simpler time - there's no such thing in the first place. 

But what I'm always going to be harping on is that we have to be committed to believing as many true things as possible and not believing as many false things as possible. And we have to keep learning and relearning the skills we need to know the difference.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Once More From The Top

Test for truth:
The presence of Confirming Evidence
--and--
The absence of Conflicting Evidence

Test for bullshit:
The absence of Confirming Evidence
--or--
The presence of Conflicting Evidence

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Happy Whatever Doesn't Offend You

... or does... or something else entirely.  We do get to choose.


The world starts to die every year at the beginning of Summer, and the world starts to come back to life every year at the end of Autumn. Just get past the bottom and you're on your way back up again.

Monday, April 20, 2015

Found My Guy

If Hillary wins the nomination, I'll shove a coupla pounds of Limburger in each nostril and vote for the Queen of Triangulated Favor Trading, but then again, I may hafta write in Martin O'Malley.

Starting at about 4:00, he gets to the heart of the problems with the GOP's "economic policy", and the payoff is right at 4:30.


This guy'd best be more careful with that whole truth-telling shit.  That's not the kinda thing these Press Poodles are equipped to handle.

(from the NPR website)
hat tip = JR

And one last thing, NPR - that headline you guys put up on the piece - O'Malley: America's Economy Needs 'Sensible Rebalancing,' Not 'Pitchforks' - that's a lie, fellas.  That's not what he said, and that's not what he meant.  And now ya know one more reason so many thousands of us stopped sending in our nickels and dimes.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

You Are Not So Smart

Another one I stumbled across yesterday:

The Narrative Bias --David McRaney


You Are Not So Smart is a blog I started to explore self delusion. Like lots of people, I used to forward sensational news stories without skepticism and think I was a smarty pants just because I did a little internet research. Little did I know about confirmation bias and self-enhancing fallacies, and once I did, I felt very, very stupid. I still feel that way, but now I can make you feel that way too.
Here is how the blog started: One week, I saw both the Derren Brown person swap and the Invisible Gorilla videos on YouTube, and they blew my mind. Also, at that time, I was marathoning Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! on DVD. I felt like there was a common thread in all of that, something about how flawed perception and reasoning goes unnoticed because we are all so unwittingly overconfident. It reminded me of the experiments that seemed to stir up the most conversation in class when I was taking lots of college psychology courses, and it all just clicked. That would make a cool blog.