Category: Fake News

Consequences of Critical Thinking

Chapter 2 of David Levy’s popular text book warns us that concepts must be judged by their consequences, rather than trying to fit them in to a rigid pigeonhole of true or false.

Sadly, the Republicans have made full use of this theory, but without paying attention to the other tenets of critical thinking: ensuring a relevant and comprehensive frame of reference.

While a few Republicans have started saying “Life” must refer to more than the fetal stage of humanity, Democrats have failed to make hundreds of points about the damage that Trump and Friends have done to the environment and industrial safety, to name just two subjects. Science is only of interest to Trump if it’s related to enhancing the military.

But that isn’t how science works. The whole reason for the strength and power of science is that it gives humans an epistemologically robust way to understand and influence the world.

Science has had beneficial and detrimental effects on humanity over the years. If we include the early technological achievements of humanity, domestication of plants and animals, then civilization, we got complexity, choice, and more chances for expression of our individual potential. But at the cost of the creation of a huge social underclass, deprived, to varying degrees, over the last 10,000 years, of many of the sweet fruits the upper tip of this complex hierarchy enjoy.

Education, and particularly science education, is the basic foundation for any remedy to humanity’s ills.

Teaching illogical faith based “facts” to young children rots the structure to which any future knowledge will be fastened. If Mary was a literal physical virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, then no facts that we can discover or verify for ourselves are ever necessarily relevant. If 3=1, then no facts that we can discover or verify for ourselves are ever necessarily relevant.

Illogical faith based facts corrode any potential for developing knowledge in the absence of a group of similarly brainwashed people.

If God is individually protecting people from CoVid19, why bother with masks? The lessons of the great plagues of 600+ years ago, that even the cardinals were not immune to the bacteria, seem to be lost on the evangelical right. It’s medical science, a PORTION of the web of scientific progress, that has, over many centuries, allowed us to regain the lifespan of our “primitive” ancestors.

Science, more than literature, religion, history, allows humanity to double, and triple (etc.) check, our theories and ideas.

Neils Bohr, the great physicist, taught that the opposite of a fact is a lie, but the opposite of a GREAT TRUTH is ANOTHER GREAT TRUTH.

Values are great truths. But the society that doesn’t base its values on a factual foundation is eventually in for rough going.

I hope that those people who are aligned with a fact based reality can find a way to help the rest of the world clean their glasses. That includes me. It’s been very depressing to hear people saying that they are voting based on their 401k or their friend’s jobs making military equipment so we can sell it to the Saudis to kill starving baby Yeminis. That sure is Pro Life. (The last sentence is sarcastic, for those who are challenged in those matters.)

Nuclear Family in Ancient Rome?

The March 18, 2018 Ionia Sentinel-Standard ran an opinion piece which had a comparison of the USA today and the impending doom of the Roman Empire, way back when.

The writer noted that another writer had commented on the “Breakdown of the nuclear family…. [which had provided] a common set of norms and values and in turn drives the moral compass of a nation.”

The problem isn’t that parallels are not visible. The problem is that the Romans did not have a nuclear family structure, which could have broken down.

The Romans, like most ancient peoples, had other family arrangements, more extended than nuclear. And women and the young had little or no rights. Maybe it’s a good thing the Roman family structure broke down, and maybe ours will eventually get some needed improvements in this same manner.

 

Fake News and the First Amendment

Fake news is very hard to distinguish       from the real thing, and we have to     balance actions against fake news with    First Amendment rights.

REALLY? Is that true, I wondered, as I listened to NPR’s talk show version of CNN style hyper news, “On Point,” hosted by Tom Ashcroft, from WBUR.

This topic is perhaps more important now than it was when I first posted this. I’ve added some new links at the bottom of the post, and will try to keep this updated.

The event that precipitated the show was the “Pizzagate” scandal. A man, acting on his own to investigate the completely false accusations of Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington, DC area family pizza restaurant, (if she was so tired and weak from the campaign activities, I wondered how would she find time to run a sex ring??? And oh, by the way, according to CNN, the pizza place has NO basement)  fired an assault rifle in a room crowded with families enjoying their pizzas.

Thus, we have entered a new age, where fake news not only influences people’s opinions about who to vote for, or what to think, but starts chains of actions that have a lethal potential. Of course, there might be those out there who think that it should be a capital offense (benefiting from vigilante action, and needing no criminal proceedings) to eat in a pizza parlor that is owned by someone who donated money to the Democrats. But assuming for now that most Americans have not gone that far, what other lessons might we look for in Pizzagate and it’s origins?

What was surprising to me was the juxta-position of the First Amendment with the right to publish fake news.

But what is the First Amendment FOR EXACTLY? Is it to protect liars and libelers? That was never my impression from my civics classes in school. I thought it was to protect the expression of opinions about how we SHOULD live. Even the Nazis have a right to to assemble and speak and try to convince the rest of the country that we should kill or oppress all those they don’t like. That is protected speech. However, we do have laws against libel and slander, and that is much of what fake news is.

Here is what Scholastic.com says (red is Shona’s highlight)

Freedom of Speech. This freedom entitles American citizens to say what they think, provided they do not intentionally hurt someone else’s reputation by making false accusations. Neither may they make irresponsible statements deliberately harmful to others, such as yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. There are many issues about which Americans disagree, from child-rearing practices to baseball teams to Presidential candidates. Freedom of speech enables people to state their opinions openly to try to convince others to change their minds.

The First Amendment also gives you the right to disagree with what others say without fear of punishment by the government authorities….

Freedom of the Press. This freedom makes it possible for Americans to keep informed about what is going on in government. It helps them to be responsible citizens. Reporters and editors can criticize the government without the risk of punishment, provided they do not deliberately tell lies. Newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as television and movie scripts, do not have to be submitted for government inspection before they are published. This censorship would violate the First Amendment.

Back to Shona’s thoughts now… What I can’t figure out is why the journalism and philosophy professors, the journalist, and the host of the show could not see that the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the individual going about their business as a free citizen. The idea of the First Amendment is not and never was to protect liars whose goal is to interfere with the democratic process, or to intentionally harm law abiding citizens they do not like. In other words, we don’t have the right to help God punish those who we don’t like, for something they did not do.

My understanding of the First Amendment was in line with what Scholastic.com wrote. Now maybe some would consider this a “dumbing down” of the First Amendment. All parents teach their kids not to lie, since they don’t want their kids lying to THEM about household matters. But the God of the Hebrew Bible did not make a commandment against lying. That God knows that lies have a valid purpose in life. The God of the Hebrew Bible prohibited BEARING FALSE WITNESS. This is  a specific TYPE of lying, that would undermine the foundations of a just society. Bearing false witness in a court proceeding before a judge is a crime in American law as well. We call it perjury, and if we bear false witness we can be held in “contempt of court,” since the court proceedings include swearing that the witness will tell the truth.

I understand that becoming a public figure widens the opening for allowed criticism. However, outright lies that harm an individual’s reputation should not be protected “speech,” whether they are a public or private person.

Currently, if someone slanders or libels an individual, the individual is responsible for bringing the legal action against the perpetrator. Maybe this should change. If someone physically or psychologically harms or kills an individual, the STATE (the government) takes the action against the alleged perpetrator. If I am killed, my family members do not have to sue the alleged murderer in order for the murderer to be brought before the justice system. There are problems with this system, as the OJ Simpson trial showed, and the victims’ families did end up having to go to civil court to get some justice… But there will always be times where individual justice fails in the interest of having a “neutral justice system.”

Maybe it is time to rethink the way libel and slander laws operate. When the target is a public figure, a political figure, maybe it is of interest to all of the people to know the truth, and the State (Government) should represent THE PEOPLE in an action against the liars.

I just keep scratching my head about why the two professors and the journalist could not come up with this “angle” on how to slow the tsunami of fake news while protecting the First Amendment. The First Amendment is not there to protect liars. It’s there to protect the ignorant. And we are all ignorant of a lot of things, even if we are experts in others.

NEW LINK: Check out this interesting editorial about how fake news is used by those in search of power.

The Sacred Media: Another new link to some thoughts about freedom of the press, from a fellow writer of Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers.

Another link to how to tell fact from opinion. A well done video.

Critical thinking and fake news webinar in French https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6544146427755409409

Yet another link on how tech companies are dealing with hateful speech.