Search the Community

"Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. • Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. • Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. • Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us." The author of the book is Donald A Barclay, librarian, who gave an interview to Publisher's Weekly last September. This excerpt mirrors a part of the preface, which I will dictate and post below. Dude sounds like a dang Objectivist here, if a plodder ... -- cross-linking here to a dedicated Front Porch topic thread "Fake News," and to a "fake news" OL-internal-search page of this blog, "Friends and Foes." There are at this moment 732 items in the "Fake News" phrase search returns of the whole of the Objectivist Living community. The subtitle to Barclay's book is "How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age."

Trading Up The Chain Persuasion--Sweet Poison Poor Tim Pool. He obviously is not familiar with the term "trading up the chain." But he figured it out on his own and man, is he pissed. You see, Tim Pool is in love with journalism, holds to the highest journalistic integrity he can muster, but sees a world where he is punished for it. If he were not left-leaning, he would be right out of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. In tracing sources, he does what I do when reading news stories. Watch this video to see the process, but also see Tim go on one hell of a nice rant. Note, this video is about a political issue that is important now, but soon forgotten. The main point is the process behind how fake news comes into being and spreads so easily. I have used the term "trading up the chain" several times here on OL. I don't want to rewrite everything, so here are some of my former posts. It's important to learn this technique if you want to persuade in the culture or fight toxic propaganda. Here's basically how it works and where it was first formalized as a technique (by Ryan Holiday). Here's a simpler explanation: Journalists all quote each other without running down the original source. Also, this process can turn a lie into reality over time. Here's another way of saying trading up the chain. Sorry to be a bit repetitious, but after you read this opening post, you will be a master of the basics. So there you have it. Trading up the chain--sweet poison for journalists to serve to the public. It tastes like legitimate candy, but it poisons people with lies. As journalists are discovering, it also poisons them. Just look at today's stories about mainstream news layoffs and how many are going out of business. The sweetness for journalists comes from the fact that they don't need a whole lot of effort to manufacture this form of propaganda and still come off as credible. They don't need to do real research, just quote someone else (who is quoting someone else and so on). The poison comes from their stories ultimately being garbage and being debunked over and over and over. They lose their credibility. Then they lose their audience and paying customers. And for honest journalists like Tim Pool, it drives them crazy. Michael

What's Up With Harvey? Just so people know what I'm talking about months and years later, here's a NYT story from yesterday: Harvey Weinstein Is Fired After Sexual Harassment Reports People can talk about the pros and cons and victims and gossip and creepiness and abuses and so on about this dude, but something more is going on than taking down a pervert. The left is piling on Weinstein and they mean hardcore business. They want blood and they want it to hurt real bad before the kill. Don't forget, he is (or was ) pals with former President Obama. After a lot of right wing mockery about the silence of Meryl Streep and other A list actors (and sundry A list celebrities) on Harvey's sexual bullying over decades, it seems like the gates of hell have now been opened on him from those very same stars. Everybody and their brother is soapboxing all of a sudden. Hell, they didn't even do that with Anthony Weiner and there were photos of his junk all over the Internet. And everybody and their brother is saying they didn't know about Harvey, had no clue about Harvey, etc. etc. etc. They are shocked, shocked, shocked about Harvey, they piously clamor! (When everybody knew or heard stories for decades, of course. Like with Cosby.) So what's up with Harvey? Why is Harvey Weinstein all of a sudden the scapegoat of a leftwing mainstream that magically has become more Puritanical than fundamentalist Christians? If I find out anything, I will let you know. And if you find out anything, please share... Michael EDIT: Breitbart is keeping a live update thing going with a constantly changing headline (started two days ago, this edit being on Oct. 12): **Live Updates** — Harvey Weinstein Scandal

Bill Nye the Silence Guy I thought of putting this in science, but being jailed for thought control is more about politics and propaganda. Bill Nye now wants to jail people he deems Climate Change deniers. Bill Nye, "Science Guy," Open to Jail Time for Climate Change Skeptics Nick Gillespie Apr. 15, 2016 Hit & Run Blog Reason He thinks intimidating scientific inquiry with jail time is good if it disagrees with his views. That's why he's now "The Silence Guy." He wants to silence his opponents not with reason and arguments, but with the police. I have to disagree with Sarah Palin on one point recently. Palin: Bill Nye ‘as much a scientist as I am’ By Timothy Cama 04/14/16 The Hill Well, according to Bill Nye's Wikipedia entry, he is more than a kid's show actor, at least to some extent. He's an actual scientist. He invented a sundial. Seriously... You can't make this shit up. Calling Bill Nye a scientist is more of a sinecure-like honor from the scientists and government climate cartel because of his propaganda. Calling his sundial a scientific discovery is like letting one of the Kardashians conduct a few bars of a Beethoven Symphony in Carnegie Hall and calling her a conductor... Michael

I have some moderate acquaintence with Objectivist-influenced psychological theories, but there is something that has been bothering me the last few months. Quite frequently, if one finds an article about Ayn Rand in some media outlet you will see all sorts of shrill and absolutely insane claims made about her. I've heard the same sort of things at University - one guy from New York I was trying to talk to asked me what Objectivism was, and after I made a brief explanation he went on to tell me that Ayn Rand was behind modern depopulation movements so that "the elite could have more for themselves". I tried to explain that this made no economic sense, given Rand's views on division of labor and capital formation, but it was too late for this gentlemen. I've seen 'documentaries' and conspiracy yarns (often from the Lyndon LaRouche camp) that portray her as some sort of sadist and a cartoon caricature of a 'social Darwinist' (a nebulius anti-concept invented to attack anything smacking of inegalitarianism). Anyone who actually reads Rand will find zero support for any of this. Her actual language is highly reminescent of eudaemonism and liberalism, even if someone disagreed with her individualism and various epistemic views the things they say about here are beyond possibility of even being mistakes; they're witless slander that no one who has ever read Rand could actually believe.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3666824/You-couldnt-make-it-up.html Clifford Irving - call your office Reed Richards - you too