Opinionated Facts

Fake News, self-deception, demagoguery of ideas

Years ago I wrote a blog called , Journaling on Paper. For many reasons, most of them quite personal, I ended up deleting that blog, but it can be found in TheWaybackMachine.

One of the things I endeavored to do at the time was to discuss words, and parse ideas. We had not gotten to the point as yet in society that everyone had become a TikTok expert on any subject imaginable, especially on the October War. But it was in its infancy. Yet, very few actually saw the avalanche that was coming. Ok, at that time, nobody saw COVID too, or the rise of MAGA and popularism either.

Now I am leaving the article verbatim as I wrote it on December 26, 2016. From it you can simply extrapolate to 10 years later and what the world has become.

And yes, I thought about this article simply because of the brouhaha that abounded because Douglas Murray, whose new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, which is exceptional, had the nerve to say that to be an expert on a subject, especially something to do with the Middle East or Ukraine, you really actually should go there. Journalism 101. Cue the internet meltdown about him being posh or stuck up, or ridiculous.

Bill Maher, who I understand now is the nadir of liberals because he had the nerve to have dinner with Trump and he found him rather, what do we call it, human, likes to remind people that you can’t learn history, or the truth, from a 30 second TikTok video. Of course that makes the snowflake generation and leftist know-it-alls, lose their minds.

Listen, today in our podcastian world anyone can claim expertise and then simply say well its my opinion. Well, yes, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but as the great late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your opinion, you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Of course, Senator Moynihan didn’t live in the age of Joe Rogan where if you have a microphone, a computer, and an ego you can decide that the moon landing never happened, Hitler was misunderstood, Churchill was the bad guy in WW2, Ukraine attacked Russia, Tiananmen Square massacre was a western lie, and the Elders of Zion control the weather, the media, the banking system, use the blood of Christian children to bake matzah and they also secretly control the US border and the Pentagon (ok this last group is kinda an oldie but a goodie). Oh and vaccines are a conspiracy of big pharma to keep everyone sick so they make money. Meanwhile, Bill Gates put nanobots in the COVID vaccines to control everyone to use Amazon, even though Microsoft and Amazon have nothing to do with each other, yet they are all secretly meeting at DAVOS in order to rule the world and control the serfs to make sure the alien lizard overlords are kept happy.

Listen, I remember, decades ago, once having a discussion about Israel with my husband’s step mother. She of course, thought she knew everything about everything (she is gone now and definitely not missed) She was lambasting Israel, as so many liberal, democratic Jewish Americans are want to do then and now, because Israel defending herself makes them uncomfortable among their leftist friends (if you thought the Israel-hate was new among progressives I can tell you it’s not.).

She never studied anything to do with the middle east. She never read a book on the subject. At that time she had not even been to Israel. But she watched the news, which of course has never been proIsrael since 1967.

When I told her she was wrong about her suppositions, she told me she was Jewish and entitled to her opinion on Israel.

I retorted, “Yes, you are entitled to your opinion, but it is an uneducated opinion.”

(My background is in middle eastern studies, Jewish history, international affairs, and law. I am self taught in special needs out of personal necessity.)

Bitch didn’t talk to us for over 6 months, until I let her win an argument over some idiotic topic during a family event. Then she called the next day so we, hubby, me and the grandchildren, could all have dinner with her and my FIL. That my husband’s father never demanded that he see his son and grandchildren in that 6 month period only shows that men are unbelievably stupid.

Meanwhile, what follows can be summed up simply: “stupid is as stupid does…..”

******

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams

I wonder what our esteemed second President would make of the state of the world today. Facts are stubborn things. But are they always real facts? Now of course, facts by their very nature are imbued with truth and honesty. But facts can be twisted and rearranged so that they appear less like facts, and more like how we want to view our sense of reality. In other words, we are opinionating facts.

I don’t think, opinionating facts, is even a recognized in a dictionary, but something I just made up. Which of course would be apropos for today’s world, in which so much of our reality is not real at all, but an amalgam of social media posts, humble bragging, and self-promotion. Our self-deceptive lives as the end result of our self-esteem reality trophy.

In the age of the Internet, photoshop, and twitter, can we really say that everything we know to be true, is true? And if that is not true how much of what we rely on for our own edification is false?

Last week the Pakistani defense Minister threatened Israel with nuclear annihilation because of a fake news story. That threat, even though based upon a proven lie, has not been withdrawn. The threats to world coherence is unimaginable.

Meanwhile, the President of the US (Obama) and his UN Ambassador (Powers) misquoted Ronald Reagan in their attempt to prove that the recent US security counsel resolution, that they helped create, saying that the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem do not belong to the Jewish people, is not new US policy. Since Google is our friend, they were easily and quickly debunked HERE. But it is still a fact that Reagan said those words, it is just not a fact how the present US Administration said he used them, and in what context.

So technically Obama and Powers are not wrong, they are simply opinionating a fact. In other words, they are using a real truthful fact, to create a false narrative, to support their present ideological reality. This, without a doubt, also leads to the direct conclusion that if they had to lie about their facts, then their reality is duplicitous, malicious, and threatening. People who are honest, forthright, and your partner, do not need to manipulate the truth. Those of good intentions are not afraid to let the truth stand on its own accord.

Now what does this really mean? Have not people always used and quantified facts to back up their own opinions? Well yes and no. One area of opinionated facts is the oft used modern political survey.

This tool is employed in order to prove a point that you, or the political opinion you hold, is right in line with the rest of the country, or the world around you. Yes, surveys use math, in math there are numbers, and those numbers have one outcome when combined. But it is how you use those numbers that defines whether they are speaking the truth of the matter or not. In other words, when you take numbers, and use them to discuss an outcome of a survey, the issue isn’t the numbers, but the questions asked, and how they are asked.

We fisk political opinion surveys, which always end up having hard numbers that pundits use to prove their point. At that point though, the issue isn’t the numbers, the issue is exactly how dishonestly the survey questions were asked. Hence, once you realize that the questions are illegitimate, then the numbers themselves become contrived. In other words, when a survey is taken, it is based upon a narrative, and if the questions were leading, actually looking beforehand for a particular outcome, the numbers while truthfully characterizing how people viewed the question, are in reality false because the questions themselves are spurious.

As usual, this comes back then to the modern concept of narratives. How you view your world is your narrative. You use facts, albeit contrived facts, to prove your narrative. You bask in your narrative, and no one can tell you your narrative is not righteous, correct or on the level. Opinion uber alles, or Post-truth is the reality of our times.

Hence, opinionated facts can, and are, manipulated to suit the reality that is most comfortable to the user. Now remember too, when something is an opinion as defined by modern social convention, it is personal and therefore, never wrong. Hence, opinionated facts are never wrong in their use, formulation or discussion, since they are based upon how the user sees these facts.

Yet, those of us who hold at least one foot in the world of sense and understanding will call this fake news, conspiracy theory, or simply out and out batcrap crazy nonsense. In truth, it really is a thin line between fake news, conspiracy theorists, and opinionating facts. One is simply constructed our of thin-air facts, the other is manipulated facts out of context.

The conspiracy theorist takes disassociated facts, even made up facts, and strings them together to come up with some kind of paranoid delusion about the world. Those that opinionate facts, takes disassociated facts from their original source, and then uses them to prove a point that is actually not provable without their misappropriation of the facts from their original purpose. Hence a fantastical view of the world. In the end, it is all lies. It is the purveyors of factual mendacity feeding off delusions about a world that simply does not exist.

So in a world of fake news stories, in a world where even the most powerful opinionate facts to suit their political machinations, the question is what do we do to stay ahead of the game of hide and seek reality?

I doubt there is much we can do beyond searching for the truth of the issue ourselves. We are all now deputized in a war of words that could have come out of a novel on dystopia and Big Brother. It is not a false sense of our world, this in fact is our world.

The purpose of fake and opinionated facts is simple. It is manipulation of the masses. It is yellow journalism and jingoism and demagoguery all rolled into one. Pundits decry the Trump campaign. But in the end, when you lie to the masses on any level, how is that not demagoguery no matter who you are and no matter your political leanings?

Simply because you dress up lies in soliloquies and couplets doesn’t make it any less falsehoods used to manipulate how people think. When politicians of any ilk, opinionate facts to support their machiavellian hold onto power, how is that not demagoguery? Simply because you like what is being said, doesn’t make it any less a lie, or the politician any less a lout. Taking facts out of context, lieing to make a point, and telling people that they are too stupid to think for themselves, is all demagoguery.

We live in the age of fake news, opinionated fakes, and political demagoguery for power. Some of it gives us comfort because it supports our version of events. Some of it is disquieting because it challenges our sense of reality. The truth of the matter is, that it is all manipulative, used for one purpose and one purpose alone: To lull us all into complacency and dependency.

I think John Adams would agree with me on those facts.

IT IS DAY 567 OF THE HOSTAGES BEING STARVED AND HELD IN THE TERROR DUNGEONS OF GAZA 🎗️

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