Tag Archives | Misinformation

Santa Clausifying Martin Luther King, Jr.

By on February 6, 2013 in News 13

Picture: Library of Congress (PD)

David Sirota writes at Truthdig:

Every year, right around the time between Martin Luther King Day and the beginning of Black History Month, the effort to distort Dr. King’s life and legacy seems to intensify. Some years, we see conservatives preposterously assert that if Dr. King were alive today, he would join today’s neo-confederate Republican Party. Other years, it is deception via omission—we see replays of Dr. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, but do not see any of his speeches about war and poverty.

Princeton professor Cornel West accurately labels all this the “Santa Clausification” of Dr. King, and if you have ever heard or read a snippet of King’s 1967 Riverside Church speech, you will understand how apt the label is. You will also understand why this year’s most grotesque attempt to Santa Clausify Dr. King’s life is at once abhorrent and yet somewhat encouraging.

… Read the rest

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Are Educated Republicans Stupider Than Uneducated Ones?

By on July 13, 2012 in News 55

Chris Mooney writes at AlterNet:

Let’s face it: We liberals and progressives are absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim, not born in the United States. Climate-change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist.

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue, argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

No less than President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren (a man whom I greatly admire, but disagree with in this instance) has stated, when asked how to get Republicans in Congress to accept our mainstream scientific understanding of climate change, that it’s an “education problem.”

But the facts, the scientific data, say otherwise.

… Read the rest

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Congressmen Seeks To “Lift” U.S. Propaganda Ban on Americans

By on May 19, 2012 in News 24

Ride With HitlerThere was a ban on propaganda? “Propaganda that was supposed to target foreigners could now be aimed at Americans, reversing a longstanding policy,” writes Michael Hastings at BuzzFeed Politics:

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns…

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The Success Myth And The Female Gaze

By on February 16, 2012 in News 32
Noah Brand

Noah Brand

Noah Brand, a mysterious figure with a very nice hat, tells of his greatest professional failure, explains his theory of “The Success Myth,” and introduces the idea of the female gaze, for the Good Men Project:

The masculine equivalent to what Naomi Wolf called The Beauty Myth is The Success Myth. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe said, “A man being rich is like a girl being pretty” and everyone nodded their head, recognizing and endorsing the sentiment. When a rich guy marries a slim young “trophy wife” we all nod our heads again, recognizing that, like it or not, this is a match of two high-value people, a conventionally-successful man and a conventionally-beautiful woman. It would take way too long to get into all the horrible things that arise out of these paired myths, from “gold-digger” stereotypes to men who kill themselves for being “failures”; for now let’s just talk about the idea that men can’t be considered attractive.

… Read the rest

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If 10% of the Population Believes a Stupid Thing, The Majority Will Too

By on July 28, 2011 in News 33

IdiocracyVia ScienceDaily:

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion.

The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.”When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski.

… Read the rest

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NASA Names ’2012′ As The Most Absurd Science Fiction Film of All Time

By on January 3, 2011 in News 10

2012 MovieI have faith that Hollywood can produce an even more ridiculous film in our new decade. (And remember kids, movies are a great way to learn about science : ) Reports Metro UK:

Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie proved to be a smash hit, taking more than £490 million [~$760 million] at the box office — but it was less popular at the US space agency. A panel of NASA experts concluded 2012 was the most scientifically flawed blockbuster ever made.

The film, which stars John Cusack, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor, includes scenes in which a physicist claims to have discovered that neutrino particles carried to earth on solar flares had caused a series of catastrophic natural disasters.

Many film fans were so worried about what they saw that NASA was inundated with questions about whether the world could end in the way suggested in the movie, prompting the organisation to put up a special website explaining that the scientific theories in 2012 were myths.

… Read the rest

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How Facts Backfire: A Surprising Threat to Democracy — Our Brains

By on July 13, 2010 in News 13

TruthinessThis article reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s character: “I don’t like books, they’re all fact, no heart.” Seems like political scientists are finally paying more attention to “Truthiness“. Joe Keohane writes in the Boston Globe:

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

… Read the rest

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Snopes’ 25 Hottest Urban Legends Gets Remarkably Political

By on December 10, 2009 in News 0

ObamaRumordomPhilip Bump writes on Mediaite:

If you have older relatives, and they have email accounts, I’d guess that you’re pretty familiar with Snopes.com. It’s likely that, for the first few months of their sending you urgent messages about free Applebee’s dinners or gang members threatening people’s lives, you dutifully found rebuttals from Snopes to pass on, intending to limit occasion for embarrassment when they send such things to others.

Then you realized that embarrassment is an emotion powerless against the potency of sheer terror. That no matter how often you demonstrated the fraud behind these emails and ones exactly like them with different brands and new murder plots, still the emails kept coming. Perhaps you even flagged these relatives as junk mail.

Snopes is the tireless and passive scold of the Internet, calmly assessing any and all madness regardless of provenance, and ensuring that the truth is told. It stands patiently in a corner of the Internet, a stationary Diogenes called into action primarily in moments of spite.

The offspring of a California couple with a penchant for urban folklore, the site originally focused on the sorts of nonsense mentioned above — rumors about people trying to give you free things or trying to rape you. As a result, that’s traditionally what was most common on the 25 Hottest Urban Legends page.

And then came Barack Obama.

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