A lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes. -Mark Twain The original Marky-Mark was a pretty smart guy. Lies and misinformation are really sneaky things, and our own (human) penchant for self-deception makes us rather naturally gullible and prone to confirmation bias. (Note that I use the pronouns we and us, as I include myself as normal member of the human race.) Some things we want to believe, others we want to not believe. The funny thing is, while those wants have a very strong influence on what we eventually believe, they have no bearing on whether or not said beliefs are valid or sane. To counter our natural biases and to keep ourselves from self-deception, its necessary to develop a healthy amount of skepticism (not cynicism) and critical thinking skills, sadly things we arent taught in lower levels of education or in the pews. A neat little weird trick which a mom whos also a teacher whom doctors hate once taught me is to look for changing definitions and moving goalposts when detecting deception. We do this for ourselves all the time, and when you see others doing it, you know theyre up to something. Examples: torture is not torture, its enhanced interrogation techniques. Makes it easier to swallow right? A 14 year old bride isnt 14, shes several months before her 15th birthday. Wow! That changes everything! Fat isnt fat, its big boned. I cant help mah genetics! Knowingly presenting factually incorrect information as truth (i.e. lying) isnt lying, its presenting things in a positive light. Ahh yes, good sales techniques. On and on we can make justifications for things which we dont want to believe are true. Torture is bad. But America is good. But Americans are torturing people on our behalf. I dont want to be bad. How do we resolve this? Make up a new term for it! We want to not believe ourselves on the same level as the bad guys, so we fool ourselves into believing a lie. Other people want to believe theres a boogieman out there named Monsanto. A story went viral a while back where my sister, of all people, got called out as an agent of Monsanto. Really. You cant make this stuff up. So folks, before you go believing that they are spraying our skies with chemtrails, that fluoridated water is meant to pacify the populace, that GMOs are killing us, that an angel with a flaming sword would command a 37 year old to take a 14 year old as his 32nd wife or whatever, that Bush was secretly behind 9/11, that resurrection is real, that Sandyhook was a false flag by Obamas agents to take away yer gunz, that Mohammed flew to heaven on his horse, that FEMA death camps exist, or that Im a paid agent for the Illuminati (still waiting for my paycheck...), just remember the tl;dr: https://youtube/watch?v=YWdD206eSv0
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 15:58:07 +0000
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