#alternative facts

[palatinewolfsblog]

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley.

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - "Fake News"

[nodynasty4us]

From the April 11, 2023 opinion piece:

This is no longer just a lobbying effort shored up with big, often untraceable money, coming from players outside the system. What’s no longer hidden is the involvement of lawmakers and their staffs, who say the quiet parts out loud. Their enthusiastic participation in these efforts shows that these groups are not offering false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud merely to raise funds or even to delegitimize Democratic electoral victories by convincing the Republican base that when Democrats win elections, it is inevitably by fraud. Instead, the conference is powerful evidence of coordination between the decades-old voter fraud–industrial complex and state and government officials who actually have the power to make rules over how elections are run. To put it in the simplest terms, the election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.

[usefulquotes7]

"We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality." Ayn Rand.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Walker Einenkel at Daily Kos:

Former Trump campaign manager, White House adviser, and “alternative facts” aficionado Kellyanne Conway spoke at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night to tell the delegates what a terrific feminist Donald Trump is. Conway didn’t use the “F word” during her speech, of course. She just talked about how swell a guy he is for hiring women sometimes. She also did not mention abortion, which historically is one of her favorite topics. In fact, abortion hasn’t received much attention at all during the RNC. No one has mentioned yet how the Republican-controlled Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, an decadeslong plan that used to get plenty of attention at conventions past.  Back in February, Conway was urging Republicans to “own” their draconian abortion stances.

[...] “In 2024, there should be no more hidden undercover Trump voters. It's time to put that flag on your front porch, that red hat on your head,” Conway told the RNC audience Wednesday night. “Because we don't cave and we don't cower. And we do not capitulate. Instead, we get up. We show up. We stand up and we speak up.”

Speaking at last night’s RNC, serial liar Kellyanne Conway spoke about how there should be “no more hidden undercover Trump voters.” Conway also touted that the misogynistic, sexist, serial rapist, and sexual assaulter Donald Trump as a “champion of women.”

She, however, omitted any mention of abortion, despite encouraging Republicans to talk about supporting harsh abortion bans.

[intelligentchristianlady]

Time to Reread It

“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

– George Orwell, 1984

[sixbucks]

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:

If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.

We’re no longer interested in finding out the.

The bamboozle has captured us.

It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.

Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

~Carl Sagan

[sannyo-appreciation-posts]

Blanks for Kakashi Spirit News

1st edit

2nd edit

Kakashi Spirit News header, stolen from Alternative Facts In Eastern Utopia

[sspacegodd]

"What you see....isn't....what's happening."

[violence-is-literally-stupid]

Title: The Expanded Nature of Violence: Beyond the Physical

Violence is not always physical. While the term commonly evokes images of bodily harm, its scope extends far beyond visible wounds. Intellectual violence, such as lying, offers a subtler but equally destructive form of aggression.

Lying is an act of domination over truth and perception. It distorts reality, manipulating the framework by which individuals understand their world. By controlling knowledge, the liar exerts power over their target, undermining autonomy. This form of intellectual violence degrades trust, silences critical thought, and destabilizes human connection. It thrives on ambiguity, leaving its victims disoriented and questioning their own judgment.

While bruises heal, the effects of intellectual violence linger. Trust, once shattered, is difficult to repair. Lies create an intellectual environment in which doubt, rather than truth, becomes the dominant force. Violence, therefore, should not be confined to the realm of physical harm, but recognized as any act that damages the integrity of another’s mental or emotional landscape.

Violence has many faces. Lying is one of them.

[palatinewolfsblog]

"We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality." Ayn Rand.

[nodynasty4us]

From the October 29, 2024 essay:

Kamala Harris has finally begun to call out the extreme danger of the Trumpian reality, but she also can’t help herself; she still normalizes him by labeling his statements unhinged, rather than strategic. The press neurotically follows suit, putting ironic scare quotes around his political plans: “Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’ ” reads a headline in the New York Times. But Trump is not threatening an imaginary “enemy”; he is making plans to jail enemies and has already begun to name people included on the list. He has already worked out how he will use the National Guard and the larger military to silence and jail anyone he deems a threat to his power.

We can laugh along with late-night TV and leading Democrats about Trump’s dancing, just as we can call how the press is normalizing Trump’s statements “sanewashing.” But these responses are best understood as symptoms of our national neurotic delusion: the delusion that no one can really be that evil; the delusion that our system will prevent him from doing what he says he will do; the delusion that sociopaths don’t really exist. But sociopaths do exist—and in American society they become billionaires. Or they become president. Or both.

...

The only way to stop him is to act as if Trump does have a plan, and is deadly serious about all of it. Only we can call this engagement off.

[blogtaculous]

If you like Graham Hancock you’re just stupid. I’m not sorry. All of his ideas are devoid of merit and he is only capable of convincing fools.

[the-greatest-fool]

How do people use the internet still. Opening up tumblr or twitter to find deep amounts of misinformation ranging from ignorance about basic geography or economics to the classic “the media hasn’t reported about [x inflammatory issue]” (which I, a Newspaper Reader, know for a fact isn’t true) has made me pretty pessimistic about the future. If, as it looks to me, everyone gets their news from misleading screenshots on Twitter or Tumblr or some snarky TikToks where some rando talks to you from their bedroom, I really don’t see how we’ll ever escape the hyperreal hellscape of Alternative Facts. Facts aren’t a tool for you to debate with or manipulate towards your cause or identity. Truth has to be the starting point for any meaningful discourse, or we will be forever in the dark.

Having seen people fall into the alt right media ecosystem, it’s always disturbing to see people fall into similar patterns of fact denial, selective media consumption, echo chambers, and conspiratorial thinking (which as of late has caused an “unholy alliance” of left/right accusations about evil Globalists controlling the media—I think it would be good for people to read Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument about antisemitism being the “fool’s socialism”, whereby capital gets tokenized into a convenient racialized scapegoat to be banished by The People).

In this case, it’s not about your specific positions about policy or diplomacy. Specific debates about how the consequences of certain policies can magnify or decrease the risk or intensity or suffering are all well and good. But I am worried about a Manicheanism infecting young people who mean well, which could very well convince them that they are Good, but the ones who oppose them: They are Evil, They are Liars, They Hate You, They Control Everything, They Own Everything, They Must be Destroyed, etc. Such a nihilism—there is no hope, they control everything, we cannot trust anyone except for our own kind, we see apocalypse on the horizon, we must set fire to everything impure—is not conducive to being able to articulate reasonable specific courses of action for optimal outcomes. It is instead the basis for seeing the world in terms of angels and demons. The world may never see peace if the fever of forever revolution took hold such that we no longer wished for a better world, only to win and defeat our enemies, over and over until there is nothing and no one else to purge.

Then the world becomes a script for constant hermeneutics of suspicion. Read between the lines, we would say. Who knows what They are up to. They could be anywhere. It is how Naomi Wolf went from a decently known feminist writer into a full blown antivaxxer. Beware. Fake news is everywhere. The desire to subvert reality and bend it towards a narrative of justice that tickles our fancy is universal. We would do well to do what Naomi Klein did (in her book Doppelganger) instead and really consider if our doppelgangers on the “wrong side” are really any different than us, since I think what is ultimately at play is basic psychology and social interactions, and the consequences could be devastating if we don’t interrogate them. It should terrify more people that the basic truth is harder and harder to find in online conversations.

[cartoonradfem]

apparently "alternate facts" translates to "settled science" in TRA language. transoneese...

🤡

the world is stupid.

fucking clown world.

[quotesfromall]

Because Victorians believed in the inevitability of progress, they insisted that the dinosaurs must necessarily be inferior - why else would they be extinct? So the Victorians made them fat, lethargic, and dumb

Michael Crichton. The Lost World