Miscellaneous thoughts about miscellaneous matters
I was working on a work of fiction, when I realized that what I had one character complain about was a major problem in today's world. The character was talking about setting up a school that would teach the basics of Rhetoric and Logic, so that the graduates would later be able to make better arguments and to detect fallacious arguments. The problem is that most people never learn the basics of argumentation and logic, so they can't tell when someone is using a logical fallacy, and much of the ...
This was written as an informative and was not intended to denigrate religion. There is an ancient tradition of starting religions for fun or profit or as tools for propaganda, and as ancient as the tradition is, it is thoroughly modern also. I first became interested in that practice while watching the TV show "Route 66". In that episode, the heroes met an evangelist whose car had broken down. Todd and Buzz got the car going, but the evangelist had the lovely line, "I ...
Updated 10-01-2018 at 07:10 PM by PeterL
This started as just being about exaggeration, but it became more general. Enjoy Part of the zeitgeist of these times is that the people producing news coverage exaggerate most of the time. It isn't enough for them that there is a snowstorm coming; not now it is "Bomb Cyclone". I don't know if it simply became part of the American psyche, or if it's just imitating Trump, but if there's a more shocking way to put something, then the people producing news coverage put it that ...
Updated 01-11-2018 at 09:23 PM by PeterL
Part of the zeitgeist of these times is that the people producing news coverage exaggerate most of the time. It isn't enough for them that there is a snowstorm coming; not now it is "Bomb Cyclone". I don't know if it simply became part of the American psyche, or if it's just imitating Trump, but if there's a more shocking way to put something, then the people producing news coverage put it that way. It has been a fact for decades that "controversy sells papers". So they tried ...
Once again I was thinking about propaganda and why people believe it, so I did a little searching to see what others might think of the matter. It appears that a major problem is that it is difficult to tell the difference between real news and fake news. Both real and fake news assert things and provide alleged witnesses and sometimes expert opinions. I suspect that another component is whether the news fits what the reader wants to find out. In political news the desires of the ...
Updated 04-29-2017 at 07:13 PM by PeterL