If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

—Joseph Goebbels

Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot

 

"...growing up in church desensitizes you to logical inconsistencies, and that opens up large numbers of people to manipulation tactics employed by individuals and institutions keen on controlling groups of people for their own self-serving purposes."

 

—Neil Carter in How Faith Breaks Your Thinker 

APRIL 10, 2018

SOURCE: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/04/10/how-faith-breaks-your-thinker/

Excellent resource on logical inconsistencies:
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

"A single dot on a canvas is not a painting and a single bet cannot resolve a complex theoretical dispute.  This will take many questions and question clusters.  Of course it's possible that if large numbers of questions are asked, each side may be right on some forecasts but wrong on others and the final outcome won't generate the banner headlines that celebrity bets sometimes do.  But as software engineers say, that's a feature, not a bug.  A major point of view rarely has zero merit, and if a forecasting contest produces a split decisions we will have learned that the reality is more mixed than either side thought.  If learning, not gloating, is the goal, that is progress."
--Tetlock, Philip and Gardner, Dan, in p269 in Superforecasting; The Art and Science of Prediction 2015.

"Get your facts first,
then you can distort them
as you please."
--Mark Twain

Maher crossed a line with his joke, but that's what comedians do. It's the taboos that make jokes funny, the fact that they refer to something that is painful or secret. The US history of enslaving Africans is not secret, but it is painful. The pain is felt by many of us, perhaps not the same for those with other colors of skin, but there is no doubt that it has marred many generations of our society. When/how will we ever get past it? Can the descendants of slavery ever forgive?

My great grandmother lived in the piedmont of North Carolina and owned a slave. Am I guilty? Should I be punished for that? I have been punished, and I'm sure I will be punished more. Do I deserve this punishment? I go out of my way to protect and include black people. Does my calling them black people make me a racist? How about brown people, red people, white people? Does my effort to be inclusive make me an ass? Is there any way for a white person to broach this subject without it being negatively received? I know I am priviledged but I am not immune to the attitudes of people around me of every description.

Racial relations get worse when people are unfairly punished. I was born with no ill will toward any group. Painful experiences in my life have led me to be wary of certain groups of people. Usually it is the people who have historically been abused who later become agressive or condescending. Jewish people have treated me badly, moreso than Blacks but some of them too have assumed that I am a racist and helped to make me into one. It is understandable, but it does not result in the whirled peas that we seek.

Those who say Maher should be fired for racism, seriously now? He did not call anyone else a nigger, he was referring to himself. His joke was on TV and showed that he understood the class system that was applied to black slaves in our nation. Who else but a comedian can publicly break taboos and get people talking about it? If we are to heal these wounds, we need to talk about it. Keeping it secret and taboo does nothing to reduce the pain. Time passing, generations shifting, that reduces the pain... but I wish we could do it faster.

This brings me to the question about words. The word nigger is apparently 100% taboo, at least for a white person to say on TV. It appears to me that it is just a word. It is not the word that I am worried about, it is the attitude. Certainly words and attitudes are linked, but it is not a 100% correlation between saying the word nigger and being a racist or promoting racism. I do not believe that Maher is a racist. I think he is trying to defuse the tensions around our dark history and get us all to laugh, together, and let the pain slip away.

What other words are taboo? I can't think of any that the two white men I live with react to as strongly. Honky? LOL.

I wish "bitch" were less acceptable. The word has been applied to me many times in my life, usually because I refused to do what a white man wanted me to do, or because I got angry. The word bitch has been used to suppress the will of a huge class of people, and it is still in common usage and acceptable in rap music and other places. I am allowed to get angry and to assert myself without deserving denigration. But women have been put down for a long time and a large segment of our population would like to keep us down. If Maher had said "I'm a bitch", I would not have been offended. That is not the same as him calling someone else a bitch.

I would like to hear from the descendants of slaves in the US as to whether they think Maher should be fired. I bet they will say no. He is doing his job, making us laugh out things that hurt.

The uglification of which I speak didn't exactly start with Ailes (Fox), but he certainly boosted it. One of the hats that I wear is at a natural products pharmacy; we dispense herbs and supplements and a few hormonal products. I spend some time sitting behind the counter simply helping the next person who comes to the window. Most people are decent, kind, and even patient. But lately I've noticed a trend. The proportion of cranky, mean and abusive people is increasing.

Today it was a lady by the name of Hammer. What's in a name, I ask? Did your name make you into a prosecutor in the pharmacy line? How many hammering questions does one have to tolerate before you are satisfied? Is there an inkling of generosity in you? A morsel of patience? An ounce of kindness? I saw none. I experienced questions hammering in faster than they could be answered, demands stacked up while I was trying to answer the questions, topped with an insult. Ms Hammer is just the most recent experience of this sort. There was one yesterday, and the day before more than one. Too bad it's nice people who get cancer and not the bitches.

This is Oregon. People in general are nice here. But not the raving maniac that stabbed two men to death the other day trying to get to some young women who were a different color than him. This disease of condemnation and hatred is seeping deeper and deeper into our culture, and leaking out in more settings all the time. I do not know how to fix it. I don't believe in phony niceness, but I also don't believe in punishing people just because you can. I am sensitive and not cut out to tolerate verbal abuse in the course of my work. I try to contain my anguish until I am in private. Then I weep. I try to be kind to the people that I meet. And I may have to find a way to not serve the public any more.

In Japan they have a name for it. Hikikomori. It's a sociological phenomenon in which people simply stop participating in society. If society is ugly, then decent people will not show up. If decent people do not show up, society will uglify even more. If we all retreat into our tiny little bubbles even more than we already have, the fractures in our supposed union of states and free people becomes null and void. This culture is headed for the bloodbath.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is just that, concerned.  They've created a system by which any government-funded scientist can report the situation or the data if their science is challenged by politics.  The UCS is not partisan, they are simply interested in maintaining this process by which we approach the truth in an objective manner.  They want to see science continue in spite of the increasingly anti-science culture of our nation.  Anyone who is not science trained is increasingly likely to have a negative opinion of science.  Scientists in general are working to understand how things work which allows us to develop medicines and technologies that improve our lives.  But television appears to be more entertaining when the doctor is the devil.

Recently my partner and I have watched almost two seasons of a series on Netflix called The 100.  The premise is that a nuclear holocaust has occurred on earth, and the only humans surviving are the residents of the space stations that were in orbit when the earth was irradiated.  The leaders there decide to send 100 (young and beautiful) criminals down to earth's surface ("the ground") after 200 years of waiting for the radiation to dissipate.  The pretty criminals are outfitted with bracelets that transmit vital medical data back to the Ark (a composite of many space stations), so that those who stay in orbit can tell if they are dying of radiation poison or something else.  It turns out there are some humans who've survived the radiation and are living on the earth's surface.  There are also a set of humans who've survived because they are inside a radiation-sheltered palace underground.  The evil elites living underground have been surviving by tapping the blood of the "grounders" who survive outdoors, and by enslaving them by way of addiction.  The violence escalates as these groups all battle for dominance, rendering the show almost unwatchable by yours truly.  I have never been habituated to bloodshed.  I don't want to be.

The evil elites in their underground palace use science and medicine to live well, with infinite hydropower, delicious food, and vicious defenses from the humans on the surface. They only care about themselves, and consider that they have a right to the planet.  They do not care about human suffering or life.  Captured humans are either "harvested" for their blood or bone marrow or converted into slaves called "reapers" who do the work of fetching more humans to be harvested.  The reapers are also cannibals, disposing of the harvested bodies.  The medical scenes have two sides.  One side of the wall shows white sheets and fluorescent lights like a hospital, and the other side of the wall is inhumane, with people in cages waiting to be used, giant needles penetrating people's necks and limbs, bone marrow being harvested without pain management or concern for the survival of the source person, and humans being scrubbed down like animals before a slaughter so that they can be hung upside down and drained of blood.  It is utterly sickening.

The good people in the series are the "grounders"--barbarians who hack at each other with swords--and the "sky people" who crashed to earth and didn't die because they were smart and found a stash of guns.  This series creates a world in which the educated are hateful and the barbarians and criminals are reasonable.  It is a populist story without the overweening power of big business, and without the inquisitive media.  The only media in sight is the television series itself.

This series is targetted at the young, and it is perpetuating a worldview in which science and medicine are evil and bad.  Education is not valued except for the mandatory techie in each group who saves the day by being smart.  Heartless "strength" is valued over and above love.  This is the kind of television that sets us up culturally for longterm rebellious ignorance.  If this one series has this perspective, how many more are there?

The worst criticism
seeks to have the last word
and leave the rest of us in silence;
the best opens up an exchange
that need never end.
--Critic Rebecca Solnit, quoted in Brainpickings.org

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