Paul Rosenberg – This week I’d like to go through some mass attacks on our thinking… high-cost, large, professional manipulations. We’ve gone through some of these before, as with the big lie of our Fallacy #13, but the ones we’ll cover today are unique, new (100 years old or less), and dangerous.
What’s also unique about these attacks is that people can be very sensitive about them. Nearly everyone has fallen for one or more of them, and people don’t like admitting their errors. As we noted in Other Attacks, Part 2, people tend to defend their mistakes, which is how errors perpetuate themselves and end up at wild extremes.
Propaganda
Large-scale propaganda has old roots, of course, but it rose far beyond all previous efforts in the 1920s, taking advantage of new broadcasting technologies. Continue reading
William L. Gensert – The left has redefined language, what is said and what it means — words now mean what they say they mean, “nothing more and nothing less.” Silence can become “violence.” Actual violence and destruction can sometimes be “mostly peaceful” at other times, “insurrection” or “sedition.”
Emily Zanotti – Despite Twitter’s best efforts at slowing the spread of a New York Post story alleging evidence of international influence peddling within the Biden family, the story blanketed social media, becoming the lead political story last week, according to a Wednesday report from Axios.
Allum Bokhari – President Donald Trump used part of his speech before the United Nations Tuesday to warn of the growing accumulation of power by big tech companies.
Paul Rosenberg – I can still remember the first time someone told me that they believed in the Calvinist doctrine of “the depravity of man.” It shocked me. To complain about human behavior I very well understood; there’s plenty of bad behavior in the world. But to flatly call the human species depraved… hopelessly unredeemable… that was, and remains, obscene to me.