Alan: The following essay was written after the third night of the Republican National Convention in which Lara Trump made glancing contact with a quotation by Abraham Lincoln while managing to take that "partial truth" to tell a Big Lie.
Here is the full context of Lara Trump's falsified Lincoln quote. https://theweek.com/speedreads/934050/that-famous-lincoln-quote-lara-trumps-rnc-speech-never-said
"Two Things You Would Swear -- With God As Your Witness! -- That Abraham Lincoln Never Said." (And Neither Of These Observations By Honest Abe Are EVER "Shared" By Trump Cultists.)
Almost always, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth depends on detailed contextualization.
Most Americans are unaware of this fact.
And they are unaware of this fact because most Americans are not thoughtful enough to realize that contextualization is as indispensable to Truth as water is indispensable to life.
Uneducated Americans -- including all those who shout: "Hey, elitist asshole! My opinion trumps your Truth!" -- do not realize that thinking is a learned skill.
For example:
Quora Question: "Was Joe Biden Correct When He Said Antifa Is An Idea And Not An Organization During The First Presidential Debate In September, 2020?"
At bedrock, the Dunning-Kruger Hypothesis postulates that "stupid people are too stupid to know they're stupid."
It would be necessary, of course, to subject the matter to scientific research -- research that REALY needs doing -- determine how often "cogitative cripples" come to erroneous conclusions because they do not know how to think in context, and even worse, they do not know (and do not care to learn) how to conduct the collateral research that is necessary to flesh out the fullness of Truth.
Judging from this year's Republican National Convention, it is clear that simple-mindedness (and the inter-related "rush to judgment" that is on display in "To Kill A Mockingbird") misleads "cogitative cripples" so that lack of context persuades them that it is not only "right" but necessary to endorse substantive lies as self-evident truths.
For fifty years I have had a right-wing friend who did hard time at Attica for attempted murder.
For years, I fact-checked the "mass emails" Georgie forwarded to me and, all along the way, Georgie would admit that my research revealed his friends' misrepresentaion and wall-to-wall mendacity.
Finally, there came a day when I elucidated truth for Georgie one last time. And although he agreed with my analysis, he said -- and this is a verbatim quote -- "But I like being partly right."
And there's the rub, for partial truth is worse than a garden variety lie.
Partial truth makes a "factual case" (in a limited, non-contextualized way) that the mangled misrepresentation of Truth is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when substantively "partial truth" is the worst kind of lying.
"How Conservatives Use Decontextualized Shards Of Truth To Tell BIG Lies"
"Cogitative crippling" is foundational to a mindset wherein intellectually crippled people believe that political debate is settled by sheer volume, within an overarching context of noise machine nonsense (driven by "confirmation bias")
"Confirmation Bias And The Power Of Disconfirming Evidence"
"The Cogitatively Crippled" do not want to be truthful.
At any cost, they want to win.
Specifically, they want to win power - enough power that they can impose their essentially autocratic will on people they deem to be "damned," "lost souls" who richly deserve to be on the losing end of a political system in which NO compromise is reached with "the losers," even though in 2016's political election 4.56% more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.
Here is how a three-time GOP presidential candidate put it: Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.” “Where the Right Went Wrong"
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Right-Went-Wrong-Neoconservatives/dp/0312341156/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381295072&sr=8-1&keywords=where+the+right+went+wrong
In essence, American "conservatives" do not subscribe to any kind of substantive democracy. Rather, they are flag-waving theocrats who delight in democratic platitudinousness, jingoism and chauvinism.
The Corrosion Of American Democracy And The Ascendancy Of A Police State
The End Of Democracy: Trump's Love For "The Poorly Educated," And Opinion Trumping Truth
Those who most need to understand the relationship between Truth and Contextualization are the very people who will refuse -- absolutely -- to conduct enough honest research so that truth can be revealed in the only possible way, which is to say in rich context.
And if - as I believe necessary for the survival of meaningful democracy - the nation were to debate two years of American History (taught dialectally with a curriculum spanning both sides of the aisle) as a pre-requisite for high school graduation, conservatives would combat the proposal tooth and nail, not because they think it's a bad idea but because - consciously or unconsciously - they realize that such in-depth, contextualized learning would be the end of a political system that enables the predominantly "white" forces of benighted manipulation (mostly plutocratic) to stay in power -- and to expand their self-interested power -- thus perpetuating dimwit darkness.
Aldous Huxley Describes "The Perfect Dictatorship" (But Don't Worry... It Couldn't Happen Here.)
https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/08/aldous-huxley-describes-perfect.html
Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts On The Cornerstone Necessity Of Education https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/07/compendium-of-best-pax-posts-on.html
New York Times Correspondents Review The Republican Convention: Best and Worst Moments From Trump’s Big Night
To drive the point home, the RNC turned to "America's Mayor," Rudy Giuliani, whose sputtering attack on Bill De Blasio's supposedly crime-ridden New York City touted the "fact" that so far this year there has been a murder a day in The Big Apple.
Note how the actual meaning of this "fact" shifts when placed in context:
In 2001, Giuliani's last year as mayor of New York City, there were just under 2 murders per day.
To view New York City's annual murder rate from 1993 to 2019, scroll down to the second graph at https://www.factcheck.org/2020/07/giulianis-misleading-attack-on-de-blasio-and-crime/
How Conservatives Use Decontextualized Shards Of Truth To Tell BIG Lies
It is true that statistics can be massaged (and otherwise abused) to misrepresent Truth.
However, this duplicity is a consuming passion on "the right side of the aisle" where it has become standard operating procedure to lie - indeed, an entire political party has deliberately chosen to rely on falsehood (ginned up as "truth) to secure (or maintain) power by clever deception.
This 24/7 "misrepresentation machine" participates in "Satan's" core mission of representing falsehood-as-truth by deliberately seizing on decontextualized "shards of truth" in order to use these exploded fragments to tell Big Lies - and to tell those Big Lies to effectively fool people who -- far more often than not -- never learned how to think, and most certainly never learned how to think in context.
Make no mistake.
Truth does not reside in decontextualized data points.
Rather, the fullness of Truth resides in rich contextualization.
And with remarkable regularity, the right wing's "appearance of truth" is all the more false for containing a few accurate data bits.
Remember:
"Any text, without a context, is a pretext."
And Trump's "text without a context" is his pretext for winning four more years of inept (if not deliberately criminal self-aggrandizement," during which the social, economic and political degeneration of the United States will inch ever nearer total collapse.
Not only is an unprecedented Depression already baked in the cake, there is real possibililty that "four more years" might evoke a "mini Dark Age."
Umair Haque: "2020 is Such a Terrible Year Because Our Civilization is Beginning to Collapse"
"Umair Haque: Compendium Of Writing By The Only Columnist I Always Read"
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