Women have
accounted for 92 percent of the job losses since President Obama took office.
80%
of Congressional Democrats are members of The Communist Party
Abortion
services are "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."
***
It
is a physical fact that -- beyond definable thresholds -- quantitative change
becomes qualitative change.
When
ambient temperature descends below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, water leaves its
liquid state and becomes a solid.
When
ambient temperature rises above 212 degrees Fahrenheit, water leaves its liquid
state and becomes a gas.
The
fundamental aspiration of is -- or, at least, should be -- the
conservation of Truth, the sine qua non of all human good.
The
fundamental aspiration of conservatism should not be the deliberate induction of fallacious
alarmism that lends itself to the self-imposition of systematic political terror.
***
There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating. Denis de Rougemont
***
Christians might wisely note that "The Way, The Truth and The Light" is intrinsically inconsistent with deliberate, whole-cloth falsification.
There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating. Denis de Rougemont
***
Christians might wisely note that "The Way, The Truth and The Light" is intrinsically inconsistent with deliberate, whole-cloth falsification.
Why there's no liberal ‘unskewed polls’
Paul Waldman has a strong post today pointing out that “there’s no poll trutherism on the left.” I think he understates the case.
Waldman is correct that while it’s a normal instinct of all partisans to be skeptical of information (polls in this case, economic statistics on Friday) that they don’t like, we’ve been inundated for the last month with a series of conservative arguments that the polls are deliberately and conspiratorially “skewed,” and Democrats generally don’t do that.
What I’d emphasize here, however, is how information flows to Republican rank-and-file voters. And for that, it’s almost irrelevant what “arguments” are. What matters is what filters down to voters, and I think in many cases what filters down is pretty crude indeed. For example: On Friday evening, I happened to flip over to my local conservative radio talk show and the host simply ridiculed the “supposed” employment numbers. No argument; he just treated the numbers as inherently phony. It was amazingly efficient: We went from no one ever questioning the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers on Friday morning to a fully accepted (and, it should be pointed out, totally false) story by Friday evening. I have no idea whether the host knew that he was repeating a lie, or if he had just foolishly trusted something he had read or heard earlier in the day — but anyone listening, any regular listeners who basically trusted what they hear, would have assumed that he was telling the truth and that the numbers were in fact phony.
The point is that there’s simply no equivalent institutional support for smears and falsehoods of this kind within the much more rudimentary Democratic-aligned partisan press. Most liberals don’t get the bulk of their information through liberal talk shows and blogs; they use the neutral press and supplement it. Conservatives, however, have been warned for 40 years that they can’t trust the “liberal” media (never mind that academic studies generally show that the neutral press contains all sorts of institutional biases but not partisan biases). Nor do Democrats in responsible positions – members of Congress, for example – repeat the more crazy things that fringers might come up with.
So I don’t think there’s anything at all that’s inherently virtuous about liberals or nefarious about conservatives that produces the clear different between what rank-and-file voters get exposed to. Indeed, I strongly suspect that if you crawl around the less-respectable precincts of the intertubes, you would find plenty of crazy left-wing conspiracy junk. The difference is that most liberal voters get minimal exposure to those theories and generally can check them against the (flawed, but not partisan) versions of the news in “mainstream” newspapers and TV news. And that’s all the difference in the world.
By | 06:12 PM ET, 10/08/2012
No comments:
Post a Comment