A Thought for the Week
Nov 4, 2014
Misinformation and the Conservation of Liberty
Offered by David Apollo
Misinformation.
Suggest to a person that they are being lied to in order to manipulate the choices that they make and you are likely to make someone angry.
They will either be angry with the liar, or, they will be angry with you. Either way, they are likely to become angry, offended, maybe even outraged.
That they will actually take the time now to verify what they have been told ... well that's far less likely.
The short explanation for this extraordinary phenomenon is that people are People of Faith. Few are People of Fact.
People of Fact verify. They instinctually verify. They instinctually verify because, like all humans, they recognize patterns. Since they value Fact quite highly, they are thus aware that most of what we are told comes in the form of misinformation. Not all misinformation is intentional. But misinformation does mean that the facts are not so well known as they have been presented. So, someone who prizes actual Fact (vs. simple Belief that Something is a Fact) is going to notice and remember each time s/he is told something that isn't wholly true. And they are going to see the general pattern that this happens way more frequently than that it does not happen. Thus, since People of Fact prize the actual Fact, they generally instinctually feel the need to verify.
Of course, one doesn't have the time to verify everything, and in fact, everything cannot be verified. So, prioritizations are made. We "go with" what we cannot verify that isn't so important, but we prioritize verifying information that we believe we are going to make a significant decision with.
Very, very few people (percentage-wise) are People of Fact. (Let that statement be another reminder to the reader that this resource has no commitment to being Politically Correct. It has only the commitment to being as accurate as possible.) Those who are not People of Fact often chafe at the suggestion that they value facts less than someone else. Either type of person believes that when they are thinking, they are weighing "facts." Importantly, what distinguishes the Person of Fact from the Person of Faith, is that one finds it necessary to verify what is being communicated as actually being true. The other simply finds it necessary to "believe" that what is being communicated is true.
Without a disciplined verification approach, the simple believer is left to consider all sorts of unrelated elements when assessing what they will believe. Voice tone. Color choice. Well delivered narrative. The attractiveness of the messenger. Various prior hunches and biases. It's a con man's paradise.
Truth belongs to the skeptics. Skeptics verify. Skeptics frustrate the Believers. And the Connivers.
It is because so many more people are People of Faith rather than People of Fact that a plausible explanation for why it has taken our species so long to become technologically advanced can be made. I will offer that plausible explanation elsewhere. Here, I would just be getting ever more so off track.
ConserveLiberty does not advocate for political candidates or political parties. Today is an election day, and since this posting is being made late in the day, it cannot be construed to have a purpose in political advocacy - regardless of its topic.
However, taking a look at political speech, and what the general population believes after hearing it (at whatever level of analytical interest or disinterest is usual for them) is useful for both illustrating "misinformation" (or actual lying!) and for assessing just how many people (including you, dear reader) are given to verifying it.
Read the essay posted by Thomas Sowell below. The original article can be found at Voter Fraud and Voter I.D., 04 Nov 2014, Townhall.com.
Consider thoughtfully:
Voter Fraud and Voter I.D.
By Thomas Sowell
November 04, 2014
One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.
Reporter John Fund has written three books on voter fraud and a recent survey by Old Dominion University indicates that there are more than a million registered voters who are not citizens, and who therefore are not legally entitled to vote.
The most devastating account of voter fraud may be in the book "Injustice" by J. Christian Adams. He was a Justice Department attorney, who detailed with inside knowledge the voter frauds known to the Justice Department, and ignored by Attorney General Holder and Company.
One of these frauds involved sending out absentee ballots to people who had never asked for them. Then a political operator would show up -- uninvited -- the day the ballots arrived and "help" the voter to fill them out. Sometimes the intruders simply took the ballots, filled them out and forged the signatures of the voters.
These were illegal votes for Democrats, which may well be why Eric Holder sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil.
As for race-based "voter suppression," amid all the political hysteria, how many hard facts have you heard? Probably none that supports that claim. Widely available free photo identification cards mean that poverty is no barrier to voting.
Since blacks and whites both have to show photo I.D. for everything from cashing checks to getting on a plane, why has requiring a photo I.D. for voting caused such shrill outcries?
Unfortunately, this is part of the cynical politics of promoting as much racial polarization and paranoia as possible, in hopes of getting more black voters to turn out to vote for the Democrats.
Nothing is too gross when promoting racial hysteria in an election year. Veteran Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel from Harlem declared that Republicans "don't disagree -- they hate!" According to Rangel, "Some of them believe that slavery isn't over and that they won the Civil War!"
Republicans did win the Civil War. That's why there is no more slavery. It was a Republican president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It was a Republican-controlled Congress that voted for the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery.
In the 1960s, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If we are going to talk about history, let's at least get the facts right.
Only an utter ignorance of history, in this era of dumbed-down education, could allow demagogues like Rangel to get away with the absurdities that abound in election year politics.
Images of lynching and Jim Crow laws that made blacks sit in the back of buses are used against Republicans, even though the "solid South" was solidly controlled by Democrats during that era.
Bull Connor, who turned police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators, was a Democrat. So were other Southern segregationists. In those days, you could go hundreds of miles through the Jim Crow South without seeing a single Republican official. That is why political observers called it "the solid South."
Perhaps the biggest voter fraud of all is the fraud against black voters, by telling them bogey man stories, in order to try to get them to come out on election day to vote for Democrats.
The most cynical of these bogey man ploys is Attorney General Holder's threats of legal action against schools that discipline a "disproportionate" number of black boys. Unless you believe that black boys cannot possibly be misbehaving more often than Asian American girls, what does this political numbers game accomplish?
It creates another racial grievance, allowing Democrats like Holder to pose as rescuers of blacks from racist dangers. The real danger is allowing disruptive students in ghetto schools to destroy the education of other black students -- in a world where education is the only hope that most ghetto youngsters have for a better life.
Sacrificing these young people's futures, in hopes of gaining some additional black votes today, is as cynical and fraudulent as it gets.
The point of posting Sowell's essay was not to educate the reader about voter fraud, or about Republican and Democrat historical differences. Sowell's article was simply an example of a much larger, more profound issue.
Verify what you are told. Conserve your Liberty.
Check out other Weekly Thought posts
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