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If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assen

If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school-children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the scheme of scoundrels. --Bertrand Russell

titzer 6y ago
"I love the poorly educated." - Donald J. Trump[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0
- mike00632 6y ago
  "I didn't say that." - also Donald J. Trump
Nacdor 6y ago
It's depressing to read this quote and then realize it was delivered in 1922, meaning our media has been suffering from this problem of extreme political bias for likely more than a century now. A lot of my friends spend all day "Liking" Facebook posts that mocking Trump supporters as ignorant simpletons, then they repeat blatant falsehoods like "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "Trump called Nazis 'very fine people'". The irony is completely lost on them because they're so deep in their own disinformation bubbles.
- singlow 6y ago
  It's been a lot longer than a century. This is the natural order of things. Bertrand was not criticizing the media as much as he was pointing out its natural tendencies, which originate in the natural tendencies of humans. His solution was not to fix the media, it is to learn how to interpret it.
  - sixothree 6y ago
    Learning how to interpret media means successfully defeating some of the best psychological tactics ever created. Bertrand didn't face these tactics and his methods are completely ineffectual at dealing with them. "Learning how to interpret" the media is not even possible any longer.
    - Terrario 6y ago
      This take is disconnected from history. The Spanish-American war is famously known as being push to the American people by the also famously known “yellow press” (a term over a hundred years old now). Malicious journalism and misinformation is not anything new. If anything our desensitization to news and our constant skepticism is a much better state of affair than the hundreds of years of all media being ran and filtered by the local authorities according to their version of the facts. In early Modern Spain, all books needed a license to be published. Also, I believe crown copyright is still a thing in Australia.
    - gnarlysasquatch 6y ago
      What tactics? Seems to me the age old skills of recognizing the source’s reputability still stand strong today. Many people just can’t be bothered to do it.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  > "very fine people" https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump... The exact quote: Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --" Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. So. Trump admitted that the neo-Nazis are very bad people, but the group ALSO had some very fine people. To Trump supporters or "enlightened centrists", this is proof that the left is also deliberately distorting the truth, but you're missing the point. The point isn't that Trump drew a distinction between the Nazis (who were bad) and the non-Nazis (who were good), and therefore he didn't call Nazis good people. The point is that there people marching with Neo-Nazis are not better than Neo-Nazis. If you have a political position and you find yourself attracting neo-Nazis, you have to take a long hard look at what you're doing. This is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_German fallacy. Silently and tacitly accepting fascism because you benefit from it is still fascism. So in conclusion, yes, Trump called Nazis "very fine people". It's just that you and Trump don't consider those people Nazis, when they are. > "Trump told people to drink bleach" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 The exact quote: "And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that." Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what." OK. First of all, let's start with the fact that Trump has a Cult of Personality. His supporters don't just love him, they TRUST him implicitly - more than any other authority figure. More than other politicians, but also more than DOCTORS. An idea from Trump matters more to his supporters than an idea from any medical expert. So. You have Trump "just asking questions" that if a disinfectant can be shown to knock out the virus on a kitchen counter (and at that point there were COUNTLESS news articles about how to protect yourself from the virus by bleaching and disenfecting all your things. He goes a step further and says maybe there is a way to do the same by taking the same disinfectant INSIDE the body. Finally, he says I'm not a doctor, but I know things. Which basically seals the deal and confirms he thinks it's a promising idea. So, no, he didn't say the words "MAGA NATION! Go buy bleach and drink it!" But he did say that he believes that: Disinfectant inside the body could help with the virus through injection or something like it. It is a plausibly deniable one, but it is an endorsement nonetheless.
warlord1 6y ago
There has been obvious evidence of voter fraud. Please see the videos of the poll workers running ballots at the State Farm Arena in Detroit after they kicked out the poll challengers from the room. I know many people will eagerly spin this evidence (and countless others) so I'll compound it with tangential evidence not related to voter fraud, per se. 1. Why hasn't Kamala Harris resigned from her senate seat? 2. Why hasn't any of the Dominion Voting Systems <or> Smartmatic executives been willing to comply to subpoenas to testify? 3. Why did voting stop on Tuesday night? Historically, vote counting has continued non-stop; even with the Gore-Florida fiasco. That should be sufficient to pique anyone's attention that there's something funny business happening.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  If there is "obvious evidence of voter fraud", that sure sounds like something that should be taken to the courts! Hmmm, I wonder what all the Republican judges (some of which were Trump appointees) have had to say about all of the "evidence" that has been presented to them so far...
  - prucomaclu 6y ago
    The Arizona case was denied essentially because the affidavits were declared hear-say, because the testimony wasn't provided during court. I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't make sense to me. First, it took weeks to document their testimony - it would likely take further weeks to basically re-do their testimony in court / depositions. Second, if it was so important that their testimony be sworn in to his court, why dismiss the case entirely, instead of just allowing the plaintiff to bring the witnesses to the stand? It's pretty easy to dismiss a case as "having no evidence" when you ignore the 100's of affidavits as hear-say. Sure, it's not sworn testimony in court, but to automatically assume every one of them is lying, is a bit of a stretch. Another rationale that has been used to dismiss cases is that evidence that the law was broken is not evidence that fraud that took place. It's pretty much beyond dispute at this point that in several states, credentialed Republican poll observers were not allowed to do their job in a meaningful way - contrary to state law. (referring to MI/PA) When literally hundreds of thousands of ballots are being counted without any oversight, those ballots should be thrown out. Not because its proof that fraud happened, but it is proof that the controls to prevent fraud were not in place (that were legally required to be in place). "No evidence of widespread fraud", is true. But what is also true, is that there are mountains of evidence of election laws that were ignored/broken, that in a fair election, would result in those ballots being thrown out.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> some impartial account of what really happened We do see students, even at the college level, claiming that the high quality academic writing they are assigned in curricula is "liberal indoctrination". This method does not function because even the most well researched academic study of these topics can be simply rejected out of hand by students who have been fed lies about the very structure of education.
- throwaway262 6y ago
  "Cornell University announced this week that its faculty has voted to change the name of the English department as part of a broader campaign to eradicate “structural forms” of racism at the university. The department will now be referred to as the “department of literatures in English.”"[0] When the same people who draft the curricula are responsible for ridiculous stunts like the one above, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the students who reject them out of hand. [0] https://campusreform.org/article?id=16112 https://campusreform.org/article?id=16112
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    As opposed to the department of linguistics in English? Or to avoid the implication that they study the literature of and by English people? If it had been named the "department of literature in English" to begin with, would you support a name change to "The English Department"?
  - mike00632 6y ago
    It's weird that we have people on the right calling for the death of gay people yet you find this objectionable. If this represents the tyranny of liberal hegemony then I'll gladly take it.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    I can't understand at all what the problem with that is. "Ridiculous stunts?" They changed the name. So what? This is your example?
- admiralspoo 6y ago
jl2718 6y ago
In my 'education', I can't think of a single element of the historical record that was presented through conflicting accounts of contemporary sources. One side is simply labeled as evil and ignored, but, as far as I know, nobody has ever agreed with this characterization of themselves. Evidence too, if at all, was always used to support a narrative account of events, rather than to eliminate possibilities until a particular version of history is proven. You could never teach a class like this. It would unleash epistemological chaos throughout the school.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 542458 6y ago
  I feel what you’re saying is an exaggeration. In highschool history class we definitely had conflicting viewpoints on the causes and blame for WW1, varying perspectives on the use of gas in warfare, the arguments about the ethics of bombing civilian targets in WW2, and the debates about the necessity and ethics of the conflicts between “western” and communist powers during the Cold War. This hardly unleashed “chaos” - it was an above average but otherwise normal Canadian highschool history class.
- frenchy 6y ago
  My history education was mostly one-sided like this in primary school, but not in secondary & post-secondary school. Perhaps the difference is that I wasn't studying in the US, but I don't remember any grave epistemological chaos. History is full of things that can't be proven. We'll never be able to know for sure if the (battleship) Maine was destroyed by Spanish sabotage or if it was simply a tragic accident. Or take for example, the question "Did Germany start WWI". It sounds like a yes or no question, but the reality is far more complicated. Failure to understand this complication causes real problems (in this case WWII). edit: removed American sabotage theory regarding the Maine, as it is rather unlikely.
- singlow 6y ago
  My public U.S. high school history classes all included conflicting accounts from contemporary sources. Additionally we were several times asked to write position papers from an arbitrarily assigned side, regardless of our own opinions or those of the teacher, using those contemporary sources as a model for the arguments. I would assume that that level of discourse in a history class is not the most common, but the opposing viewpoints were expressed directly in the textbooks as a standard appendix to each chapter, which were adopted district wide and probably statewide in Texas. This was not a special curriculum that our teachers designed, although they probably expanded on the concept more than most, given that it was a magnet high school.
sixothree 6y ago
That's not how the human brain works. Repeat a lie often enough and it become true no matter how analytical you pretend to be.
- bra-ket 6y ago
  so true, repeating false accusations against Trump for 4 years ( of 'racism' and other made-up evils) worked marvels for the Dems.
  - sixothree 6y ago
    He literally posted a video of people yelling "white power".
    - bra-ket 6y ago
      nope. He said "there are very fine people on both sides" in regards to protectors of Robert E Lee statue on one side, and BLM protestors who wanted to deface that statue, on the other. The next day when asked to clarify, he explicitly condemned white supremacists. There are people who don't want Confederates statues to be defaced, and they have nothing to do with white supremacists. In fact he condemned racism dozens of times but you never saw it on mainstream news because of their agenda. If you slander someone as 'racist' many times people will start to believe the lie. Your comment is an evidence of how effective that is. It's an excellent political strategy that worked out great for the Democratic party. Edit: Here you go 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6PFZNruJes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6PFZNruJes 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hybkzCWb_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hybkzCWb_w 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPwS5qwxXYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPwS5qwxXYs 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JmOSsv-KSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JmOSsv-KSg
      - edgyquant 6y ago
        He condemned white supremacy only after receiving more backlash than he expected. Don’t be a revisionist we were all there it was just three years ago. The old adage is than when white supremacists believe you’re one of them you might as well be.
endymi0n 6y ago
"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a major cause of spreading misinformation.[1]" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
- tomc1985 6y ago
  GP's quote implores the reader to do the balancing. When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias. That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    Ah, yes... that only works if we are not being actively manipulated. In ideal world all people would be weighing evidence, try to think logically and appeal to timeless, basic principles. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and (what a shocker) half of people have less than 100 IQ. While it is easy to see through most lies most of the time (the logic just isn't there), the goal is not to fool everybody. It is enough to fool just enough people to sow confusion.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - endymi0n 6y ago
    An important distinction, granted. Although my quote rather questions whether there is always something to balance in the first place. If you try to find the middle ground between truth and a blatant, confident lie that was pulled from thin air to sow doubts on that truth, you get a half-lie — or truth casted in doubt, which was exactly what the lie was made for. Find a fringe case about a dead body voting and you can sow doubts about a whole election. Call out a politician lying once and suddenly it does not matter anymore whether you are lying every day to the casual onlooker. I am absolutely not sure whether censoring such content is the right answer, but I'm pretty sure providing an open microphone and an uncontrolled echo chamber to narcisstic sociopaths backed by Wall Street interests and foreign bot armies isn't either.
chrisandchips 6y ago
> some impartial account of what really happened This can be very hard to acquire, especially for events that we are far removed from. Then again, maybe it isn't necessary. Simply reading about a story twice with a deliberate bias on each side can be extremely revealing. Would more people be inclined to do this if we taught it in schools? I hope so. These days it feels like the reporting of the news is more real to the general population than the news itself ..
- throwaway_l33t 6y ago
  Not only is it hard to acquire, such viewpoints are impossible to acquire: every attempt to put experience and research into words has a point of view and that point of view colors the story being told. Attempts to be impartial are themselves often a persuasive technique intended to make your appear view more plausible.
scalablenotions 6y ago
That doesn't match how good researchers find quality information. Critical thinking is a ponderous tool, and can even be counter-productive in isolation. Efficient research techniques should be taught in school, with attention to awareness about personal biases, assessing sources of information and cross-referencing
Sophistifunk 6y ago
This would indeed be excellent. Unfortunately, "surrender to authority and do as you are told" is the main lesson of modern schooling, as they're mostly concerned about controlling (as in keep them physically close and supervised and presumably safe) as many students as possible with a limited budget and staff.
- cheese_van 6y ago
  No, that's not what is taught, even subliminally. One might expect a more cowed populace were that true. Rather, public education in the US needs a deep overhaul, and a renewed discussion of what we collectively believe necessary to know and understand, and how best to accomplish that. The public are not stupid. They have been tragically under-served by US public schools. Need to fix this.
WalterBright 6y ago
People also can and do read the same description of events and come to wildly different conclusions.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Today I had a frightening interaction on Facebook with a friend of my wife's cousin. He claimed "the new COVID-19 virus had never been tested on humans, only animals" and when I called him on his misinformation and pointed out that the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people he shrugged and told me he was entitled to his opinions, and he just had different sources. This is somehow terrifying.
- natmaka 6y ago
  Did you ask for further explanations? What are his sources? "His opinions" may refer to the fact that he doesn't trust the secondary source you quoted in "the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people", or the primary source, or the very process/protocol of this trial...
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    He sent me some "sources" in a private google drive link that was access restricted and required me to enter email address to request access -- which I wasn't going to do, as said personal also makes his living doing multilevel marketing and as a "life coach"; not a contact list I have any desire to be on. And, yeah, seems legit, right?
    - natmaka 6y ago
      > He sent me some "sources" ((...)) > required me to enter email address to request access Such a "source" often lets you better understand what/how such material works on some people. I played this a few times and was never disappointed. A disposable email address may work.
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s terrifying. Sure it’s dumb and poorly informed. There have always been dumb people spreading bad ideas. It is not our responsibility to force them to agree with us or de-platform them if they won’t agree with a certain narrative. This is called common human decency.
learnstats2 6y ago
> the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. Given that YouTube is not school, I read this to understand that Bertrand Russell is here saying that YouTube shouldn't give equal weight to presumed falsehoods. He is saying that people should be explicitly educated, in a controlled environment, to recognise the schemes of scoundrels - so that decent people can act accordingly.
singron 6y ago
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. --Bertrand Russell It's an important skill to independently discern the likely from the unlikely on your own, but any idea repeated often enough becomes "truth", and it's an important function of society to recognize fake truths and purge them.
- switchbak 6y ago
  "Fake truth" - that hurts my head almost as much as "alternative facts". Maybe this is a term we can keep out of circulation.
- nbardy 6y ago
  You get rid of bad ideas by engaging with them, not by shoving them out of sight.
  - dTal 6y ago
    You seem rather confident of that. Engaging bad ideas gives them volume, legitimacy, momentum. Sidelining them is a powerful response.
    - colordrops 6y ago
      Until you are the one sidelined.
wpietri 6y ago
He wrote that nearly 100 years ago. With an additional century's experience, I think it's clearer that teaching media literacy just isn't enough. One reason is the bullshit asymmetry principal: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Another is that liars get a lot more practice in selling their lie than people do in analyzing and refuting a particular lie. A third is that people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive; if I blow $10 on a stupid purchase due to lying ads, I'm out $10, but the liar is making a living. And that's before we even get to the asymmetry in mass communication, where a liar can reach millions. Or the modern micro-targeting era, where lies can be tuned to the audience and hidden from debunkers. Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation. So we really can't expect individuals to keep up on their own. As much as I love cynical skepticism, it's not enough these days.
- meekmind 6y ago
  Respectfully disagree. > media literacy just isn't enough How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning." Very little of that is taught because the educational institutions who would be responsible for teaching it have curriculums that cannot withstand it. Hand-waving to students that "u shuld do critical thinking" is not sufficient to actually teach critical thinking. Also our educational institutions totally ignore the distribution of intelligence in the population. The curriculum is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator which does an incredible disservice to high (or even average) intelligence individuals. > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. This is true, to an extent. But, that's what journalism is supposed to solve. Instead of spending 1000 hours researching some issue as an individual, have 100 journalists spend 10 hours researching it and collaborate on the reporting. Sadly, we have very little actual journalism anymore, which I'll explain next.. > people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive This, I totally agree with. Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. If not through advertising, but by buying the media companies directly. Further, if you give a "journalist" a choice between working for 10 hours to tell the truth or working for 1 hour to tell a lie, getting paid the same amount either way, the outcome is obvious. Moreover, declining educational standards, and especially lack of critical thinking skills, has led to a deadening of the public palette. The market is not incentivizing actual journalism because objectivity is hard, opposes too many special interests, and the public (at large) doesn't have a taste for it. The only takeaway from this ought to be obvious. We can't rely on the institutions and corporations who created this problem to solve it. Clearly they're leading us to "thought police" and censorship. I think, however, the lights should be turned on and the public at large should get a crash course in critical thinking.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Google is lifting a ban on political ads tomorrow, about a month ahead of a Jan 5th runoff election in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate. Perhaps the message here from subsidiary YouTube is that potentially viral videos that could damage voter confidence in past elections (and thereby affect their responsiveness to political ads for future ones) will not be tolerated while parent Google is trying to sell political ads for the Jan 5th election. How much money will Google make selling ads for this runoff election in Georgia.
- sova 6y ago
  Incisive and based in clear economic motivation -- that sounds more like the big G these days. George Washington himself warned against the meddling of foreign powers in our democracy, but if we cannot entertain discussion on such things it's unlikely we'll be able to detect it.
rakkhi 6y ago
Great idea. No chance my school in Australia will do this so will be upto me. That Bloomberg China supply chain compromise article. Never forget
z3t4 6y ago
Just like computer programs are not perfect the first time it's released, printed text is not either. Most people have good intensions, but we are stupid.
dandare 6y ago
The reason why this never become a reality? Religion. The religious party/side will never agree to teaching critical thinking in the school.
blarg1 6y ago
During the run up to the Iraq war, my history teacher in high school showed us front page articles and headlines about it, basically reading between the lines and extracting information that the casual reader didn't pick up on.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

titzer 6y ago

"I love the poorly educated." - Donald J. Trump[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0

mike00632 6y ago
"I didn't say that." - also Donald J. Trump

Nacdor 6y ago

It's depressing to read this quote and then realize it was delivered in 1922, meaning our media has been suffering from this problem of extreme political bias for likely more than a century now. A lot of my friends spend all day "Liking" Facebook posts that mocking Trump supporters as ignorant simpletons, then they repeat blatant falsehoods like "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "Trump called Nazis 'very fine people'". The irony is completely lost on them because they're so deep in their own disinformation bubbles.

singlow 6y ago
It's been a lot longer than a century. This is the natural order of things. Bertrand was not criticizing the media as much as he was pointing out its natural tendencies, which originate in the natural tendencies of humans. His solution was not to fix the media, it is to learn how to interpret it.
- sixothree 6y ago
  Learning how to interpret media means successfully defeating some of the best psychological tactics ever created. Bertrand didn't face these tactics and his methods are completely ineffectual at dealing with them. "Learning how to interpret" the media is not even possible any longer.
  - Terrario 6y ago
    This take is disconnected from history. The Spanish-American war is famously known as being push to the American people by the also famously known “yellow press” (a term over a hundred years old now). Malicious journalism and misinformation is not anything new. If anything our desensitization to news and our constant skepticism is a much better state of affair than the hundreds of years of all media being ran and filtered by the local authorities according to their version of the facts. In early Modern Spain, all books needed a license to be published. Also, I believe crown copyright is still a thing in Australia.
  - gnarlysasquatch 6y ago
    What tactics? Seems to me the age old skills of recognizing the source’s reputability still stand strong today. Many people just can’t be bothered to do it.
deanCommie 6y ago
> "very fine people" https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump... The exact quote: Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --" Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. So. Trump admitted that the neo-Nazis are very bad people, but the group ALSO had some very fine people. To Trump supporters or "enlightened centrists", this is proof that the left is also deliberately distorting the truth, but you're missing the point. The point isn't that Trump drew a distinction between the Nazis (who were bad) and the non-Nazis (who were good), and therefore he didn't call Nazis good people. The point is that there people marching with Neo-Nazis are not better than Neo-Nazis. If you have a political position and you find yourself attracting neo-Nazis, you have to take a long hard look at what you're doing. This is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_German fallacy. Silently and tacitly accepting fascism because you benefit from it is still fascism. So in conclusion, yes, Trump called Nazis "very fine people". It's just that you and Trump don't consider those people Nazis, when they are. > "Trump told people to drink bleach" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 The exact quote: "And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that." Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what." OK. First of all, let's start with the fact that Trump has a Cult of Personality. His supporters don't just love him, they TRUST him implicitly - more than any other authority figure. More than other politicians, but also more than DOCTORS. An idea from Trump matters more to his supporters than an idea from any medical expert. So. You have Trump "just asking questions" that if a disinfectant can be shown to knock out the virus on a kitchen counter (and at that point there were COUNTLESS news articles about how to protect yourself from the virus by bleaching and disenfecting all your things. He goes a step further and says maybe there is a way to do the same by taking the same disinfectant INSIDE the body. Finally, he says I'm not a doctor, but I know things. Which basically seals the deal and confirms he thinks it's a promising idea. So, no, he didn't say the words "MAGA NATION! Go buy bleach and drink it!" But he did say that he believes that: Disinfectant inside the body could help with the virus through injection or something like it. It is a plausibly deniable one, but it is an endorsement nonetheless.

warlord1 6y ago

There has been obvious evidence of voter fraud. Please see the videos of the poll workers running ballots at the State Farm Arena in Detroit after they kicked out the poll challengers from the room. I know many people will eagerly spin this evidence (and countless others) so I'll compound it with tangential evidence not related to voter fraud, per se. 1. Why hasn't Kamala Harris resigned from her senate seat? 2. Why hasn't any of the Dominion Voting Systems <or> Smartmatic executives been willing to comply to subpoenas to testify? 3. Why did voting stop on Tuesday night? Historically, vote counting has continued non-stop; even with the Gore-Florida fiasco. That should be sufficient to pique anyone's attention that there's something funny business happening.

Trasmatta 6y ago
If there is "obvious evidence of voter fraud", that sure sounds like something that should be taken to the courts! Hmmm, I wonder what all the Republican judges (some of which were Trump appointees) have had to say about all of the "evidence" that has been presented to them so far...
- prucomaclu 6y ago
  The Arizona case was denied essentially because the affidavits were declared hear-say, because the testimony wasn't provided during court. I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't make sense to me. First, it took weeks to document their testimony - it would likely take further weeks to basically re-do their testimony in court / depositions. Second, if it was so important that their testimony be sworn in to his court, why dismiss the case entirely, instead of just allowing the plaintiff to bring the witnesses to the stand? It's pretty easy to dismiss a case as "having no evidence" when you ignore the 100's of affidavits as hear-say. Sure, it's not sworn testimony in court, but to automatically assume every one of them is lying, is a bit of a stretch. Another rationale that has been used to dismiss cases is that evidence that the law was broken is not evidence that fraud that took place. It's pretty much beyond dispute at this point that in several states, credentialed Republican poll observers were not allowed to do their job in a meaningful way - contrary to state law. (referring to MI/PA) When literally hundreds of thousands of ballots are being counted without any oversight, those ballots should be thrown out. Not because its proof that fraud happened, but it is proof that the controls to prevent fraud were not in place (that were legally required to be in place). "No evidence of widespread fraud", is true. But what is also true, is that there are mountains of evidence of election laws that were ignored/broken, that in a fair election, would result in those ballots being thrown out.

UncleMeat 6y ago

> some impartial account of what really happened We do see students, even at the college level, claiming that the high quality academic writing they are assigned in curricula is "liberal indoctrination". This method does not function because even the most well researched academic study of these topics can be simply rejected out of hand by students who have been fed lies about the very structure of education.

throwaway262 6y ago
"Cornell University announced this week that its faculty has voted to change the name of the English department as part of a broader campaign to eradicate “structural forms” of racism at the university. The department will now be referred to as the “department of literatures in English.”"[0] When the same people who draft the curricula are responsible for ridiculous stunts like the one above, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the students who reject them out of hand. [0] https://campusreform.org/article?id=16112 https://campusreform.org/article?id=16112
- freeone3000 6y ago
  As opposed to the department of linguistics in English? Or to avoid the implication that they study the literature of and by English people? If it had been named the "department of literature in English" to begin with, would you support a name change to "The English Department"?
- mike00632 6y ago
  It's weird that we have people on the right calling for the death of gay people yet you find this objectionable. If this represents the tyranny of liberal hegemony then I'll gladly take it.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  I can't understand at all what the problem with that is. "Ridiculous stunts?" They changed the name. So what? This is your example?
admiralspoo 6y ago

jl2718 6y ago

In my 'education', I can't think of a single element of the historical record that was presented through conflicting accounts of contemporary sources. One side is simply labeled as evil and ignored, but, as far as I know, nobody has ever agreed with this characterization of themselves. Evidence too, if at all, was always used to support a narrative account of events, rather than to eliminate possibilities until a particular version of history is proven. You could never teach a class like this. It would unleash epistemological chaos throughout the school.

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542458 6y ago
I feel what you’re saying is an exaggeration. In highschool history class we definitely had conflicting viewpoints on the causes and blame for WW1, varying perspectives on the use of gas in warfare, the arguments about the ethics of bombing civilian targets in WW2, and the debates about the necessity and ethics of the conflicts between “western” and communist powers during the Cold War. This hardly unleashed “chaos” - it was an above average but otherwise normal Canadian highschool history class.
frenchy 6y ago
My history education was mostly one-sided like this in primary school, but not in secondary & post-secondary school. Perhaps the difference is that I wasn't studying in the US, but I don't remember any grave epistemological chaos. History is full of things that can't be proven. We'll never be able to know for sure if the (battleship) Maine was destroyed by Spanish sabotage or if it was simply a tragic accident. Or take for example, the question "Did Germany start WWI". It sounds like a yes or no question, but the reality is far more complicated. Failure to understand this complication causes real problems (in this case WWII). edit: removed American sabotage theory regarding the Maine, as it is rather unlikely.
singlow 6y ago
My public U.S. high school history classes all included conflicting accounts from contemporary sources. Additionally we were several times asked to write position papers from an arbitrarily assigned side, regardless of our own opinions or those of the teacher, using those contemporary sources as a model for the arguments. I would assume that that level of discourse in a history class is not the most common, but the opposing viewpoints were expressed directly in the textbooks as a standard appendix to each chapter, which were adopted district wide and probably statewide in Texas. This was not a special curriculum that our teachers designed, although they probably expanded on the concept more than most, given that it was a magnet high school.

sixothree 6y ago

That's not how the human brain works. Repeat a lie often enough and it become true no matter how analytical you pretend to be.

bra-ket 6y ago
so true, repeating false accusations against Trump for 4 years ( of 'racism' and other made-up evils) worked marvels for the Dems.
- sixothree 6y ago
  He literally posted a video of people yelling "white power".
  - bra-ket 6y ago
    nope. He said "there are very fine people on both sides" in regards to protectors of Robert E Lee statue on one side, and BLM protestors who wanted to deface that statue, on the other. The next day when asked to clarify, he explicitly condemned white supremacists. There are people who don't want Confederates statues to be defaced, and they have nothing to do with white supremacists. In fact he condemned racism dozens of times but you never saw it on mainstream news because of their agenda. If you slander someone as 'racist' many times people will start to believe the lie. Your comment is an evidence of how effective that is. It's an excellent political strategy that worked out great for the Democratic party. Edit: Here you go 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6PFZNruJes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6PFZNruJes 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hybkzCWb_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hybkzCWb_w 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPwS5qwxXYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPwS5qwxXYs 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JmOSsv-KSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JmOSsv-KSg
    - edgyquant 6y ago
      He condemned white supremacy only after receiving more backlash than he expected. Don’t be a revisionist we were all there it was just three years ago. The old adage is than when white supremacists believe you’re one of them you might as well be.

endymi0n 6y ago

"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a major cause of spreading misinformation.[1]" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

tomc1985 6y ago
GP's quote implores the reader to do the balancing. When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias. That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Ah, yes... that only works if we are not being actively manipulated. In ideal world all people would be weighing evidence, try to think logically and appeal to timeless, basic principles. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and (what a shocker) half of people have less than 100 IQ. While it is easy to see through most lies most of the time (the logic just isn't there), the goal is not to fool everybody. It is enough to fool just enough people to sow confusion.
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- endymi0n 6y ago
  An important distinction, granted. Although my quote rather questions whether there is always something to balance in the first place. If you try to find the middle ground between truth and a blatant, confident lie that was pulled from thin air to sow doubts on that truth, you get a half-lie — or truth casted in doubt, which was exactly what the lie was made for. Find a fringe case about a dead body voting and you can sow doubts about a whole election. Call out a politician lying once and suddenly it does not matter anymore whether you are lying every day to the casual onlooker. I am absolutely not sure whether censoring such content is the right answer, but I'm pretty sure providing an open microphone and an uncontrolled echo chamber to narcisstic sociopaths backed by Wall Street interests and foreign bot armies isn't either.

chrisandchips 6y ago

> some impartial account of what really happened This can be very hard to acquire, especially for events that we are far removed from. Then again, maybe it isn't necessary. Simply reading about a story twice with a deliberate bias on each side can be extremely revealing. Would more people be inclined to do this if we taught it in schools? I hope so. These days it feels like the reporting of the news is more real to the general population than the news itself ..

throwaway_l33t 6y ago
Not only is it hard to acquire, such viewpoints are impossible to acquire: every attempt to put experience and research into words has a point of view and that point of view colors the story being told. Attempts to be impartial are themselves often a persuasive technique intended to make your appear view more plausible.

scalablenotions 6y ago

That doesn't match how good researchers find quality information. Critical thinking is a ponderous tool, and can even be counter-productive in isolation. Efficient research techniques should be taught in school, with attention to awareness about personal biases, assessing sources of information and cross-referencing

Sophistifunk 6y ago

This would indeed be excellent. Unfortunately, "surrender to authority and do as you are told" is the main lesson of modern schooling, as they're mostly concerned about controlling (as in keep them physically close and supervised and presumably safe) as many students as possible with a limited budget and staff.

cheese_van 6y ago
No, that's not what is taught, even subliminally. One might expect a more cowed populace were that true. Rather, public education in the US needs a deep overhaul, and a renewed discussion of what we collectively believe necessary to know and understand, and how best to accomplish that. The public are not stupid. They have been tragically under-served by US public schools. Need to fix this.

WalterBright 6y ago

People also can and do read the same description of events and come to wildly different conclusions.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

Today I had a frightening interaction on Facebook with a friend of my wife's cousin. He claimed "the new COVID-19 virus had never been tested on humans, only animals" and when I called him on his misinformation and pointed out that the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people he shrugged and told me he was entitled to his opinions, and he just had different sources. This is somehow terrifying.

natmaka 6y ago
Did you ask for further explanations? What are his sources? "His opinions" may refer to the fact that he doesn't trust the secondary source you quoted in "the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people", or the primary source, or the very process/protocol of this trial...
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  He sent me some "sources" in a private google drive link that was access restricted and required me to enter email address to request access -- which I wasn't going to do, as said personal also makes his living doing multilevel marketing and as a "life coach"; not a contact list I have any desire to be on. And, yeah, seems legit, right?
  - natmaka 6y ago
    > He sent me some "sources" ((...)) > required me to enter email address to request access Such a "source" often lets you better understand what/how such material works on some people. I played this a few times and was never disappointed. A disposable email address may work.
oceanplexian 6y ago
I don’t think it’s terrifying. Sure it’s dumb and poorly informed. There have always been dumb people spreading bad ideas. It is not our responsibility to force them to agree with us or de-platform them if they won’t agree with a certain narrative. This is called common human decency.

learnstats2 6y ago

> the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. Given that YouTube is not school, I read this to understand that Bertrand Russell is here saying that YouTube shouldn't give equal weight to presumed falsehoods. He is saying that people should be explicitly educated, in a controlled environment, to recognise the schemes of scoundrels - so that decent people can act accordingly.

singron 6y ago

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. --Bertrand Russell It's an important skill to independently discern the likely from the unlikely on your own, but any idea repeated often enough becomes "truth", and it's an important function of society to recognize fake truths and purge them.

switchbak 6y ago
"Fake truth" - that hurts my head almost as much as "alternative facts". Maybe this is a term we can keep out of circulation.
nbardy 6y ago
You get rid of bad ideas by engaging with them, not by shoving them out of sight.
- dTal 6y ago
  You seem rather confident of that. Engaging bad ideas gives them volume, legitimacy, momentum. Sidelining them is a powerful response.
  - colordrops 6y ago
    Until you are the one sidelined.

wpietri 6y ago

He wrote that nearly 100 years ago. With an additional century's experience, I think it's clearer that teaching media literacy just isn't enough. One reason is the bullshit asymmetry principal: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Another is that liars get a lot more practice in selling their lie than people do in analyzing and refuting a particular lie. A third is that people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive; if I blow $10 on a stupid purchase due to lying ads, I'm out $10, but the liar is making a living. And that's before we even get to the asymmetry in mass communication, where a liar can reach millions. Or the modern micro-targeting era, where lies can be tuned to the audience and hidden from debunkers. Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation. So we really can't expect individuals to keep up on their own. As much as I love cynical skepticism, it's not enough these days.

meekmind 6y ago
Respectfully disagree. > media literacy just isn't enough How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning." Very little of that is taught because the educational institutions who would be responsible for teaching it have curriculums that cannot withstand it. Hand-waving to students that "u shuld do critical thinking" is not sufficient to actually teach critical thinking. Also our educational institutions totally ignore the distribution of intelligence in the population. The curriculum is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator which does an incredible disservice to high (or even average) intelligence individuals. > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. This is true, to an extent. But, that's what journalism is supposed to solve. Instead of spending 1000 hours researching some issue as an individual, have 100 journalists spend 10 hours researching it and collaborate on the reporting. Sadly, we have very little actual journalism anymore, which I'll explain next.. > people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive This, I totally agree with. Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. If not through advertising, but by buying the media companies directly. Further, if you give a "journalist" a choice between working for 10 hours to tell the truth or working for 1 hour to tell a lie, getting paid the same amount either way, the outcome is obvious. Moreover, declining educational standards, and especially lack of critical thinking skills, has led to a deadening of the public palette. The market is not incentivizing actual journalism because objectivity is hard, opposes too many special interests, and the public (at large) doesn't have a taste for it. The only takeaway from this ought to be obvious. We can't rely on the institutions and corporations who created this problem to solve it. Clearly they're leading us to "thought police" and censorship. I think, however, the lights should be turned on and the public at large should get a crash course in critical thinking.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Google is lifting a ban on political ads tomorrow, about a month ahead of a Jan 5th runoff election in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate. Perhaps the message here from subsidiary YouTube is that potentially viral videos that could damage voter confidence in past elections (and thereby affect their responsiveness to political ads for future ones) will not be tolerated while parent Google is trying to sell political ads for the Jan 5th election. How much money will Google make selling ads for this runoff election in Georgia.

sova 6y ago
Incisive and based in clear economic motivation -- that sounds more like the big G these days. George Washington himself warned against the meddling of foreign powers in our democracy, but if we cannot entertain discussion on such things it's unlikely we'll be able to detect it.

rakkhi 6y ago

Great idea. No chance my school in Australia will do this so will be upto me. That Bloomberg China supply chain compromise article. Never forget

z3t4 6y ago

Just like computer programs are not perfect the first time it's released, printed text is not either. Most people have good intensions, but we are stupid.

dandare 6y ago

The reason why this never become a reality? Religion. The religious party/side will never agree to teaching critical thinking in the school.

blarg1 6y ago

During the run up to the Iraq war, my history teacher in high school showed us front page articles and headlines about it, basically reading between the lines and extracting information that the casual reader didn't pick up on.

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