Oct 19 2007

writing in the raw: leave-your-facts-at-the-door edition

( – promoted by pfiore8)

Facts… silver bullets in the war against the ignorant, the uninformed, and the intolerant.

Facts. That’s all we need. Forget love, faith, religion, God, even reason or logic. It’s all about the facts. Why can’t these damned neocons and wingnuts just ACCEPT the fucking FACTS???

I’ve come to the conclusion that facts have no power just because they may be real. Only the TRUTH has power and, dear ones, the facts do not own the truth… not even reality can compete with truth.

As it turns out, the facts can be retrofitted, overhauled, changed, misused…

I love Russ Rymer’s description that the Bush administration’s “…negation of truth is systematic. Dishonest accounting, willful scientific illiteracy, bowdlerized federal fact sheets, payola paid to putative journalists, ‘news’ networks run by right-wing apparatchiks, think tanks devoted to propaganda rather than thought, the purging of intelligence gatherers and experts throughout the bureaucracy whose findings might refute the party line — this is the machinery of mendacity…The point here is not the hypocrisy involved, though that is egregious. The point is the downgrading of truth and honesty from principles with universal meaning to partisan weapons to be sheathed or drawn as necessary.”

How lies bought us “The Best War Ever”…

from The Lie of the Century by Michael Rivero

… while other leaders in history have lied to start wars, for the first time in history, the lie stands exposed while the war started with the lies still rages on… The writing is on the wall; having gotten away with lying to start the war in Iraq, the US Government will lie to start a war in Iran, and after that another, and after that another, and another and another and another because as long as you remain silent, and as long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.

As long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.

None.


And no matter what kind of facts you fly, they can always be customized: John Kerry, war hero or liar? That’s one of my particular favorites, btw. I hope those Swift Boaters burn in hell… if there is one. Anyway, facts alone do not make the case for reason or meaning…  in fact, facts have no meaning unless people give them credibility… so John Kerry, who jumped off his boat into enemy fire, turns out to be unpatriotic and a liar. Incredible, isn’t it?

Yet, until we understand that very thing – and accept it –  we will never penetrate those we think are ignorant… because, really, they aren’t… they give meaning in ways that are just foreign to us.

The truth is where power is… the facts be damned. If you want to start real dialogue, then start by respecting what is true to those you don’t understand. Because the people we think of as neocons and wingnuts are our neighbors, in-laws, dentists, and co-workers… And, by the way, they are NOT getting respect from BushCo. They are being used. Consider David Kuo’s perspective… very useful I think.

I’m writing this because I’ve been overwhelmed by what I perceive as the frustration of my fellow bloggers… many of whom are banging their heads against the wall at the insanity. But if we are to expose and stop this madness at the grass or net roots, we’ve got to start talking to our neighbors, get rid of democrat or republican, and start talking American to American.

Why aren’t the facts good enough? Yeah, why? Because there are an infinite number of ways to skin a pootie, that’s why…

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    • pfiore8 on October 19, 2007 at 04:19
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    …

  2. He says that frames are incredibly impervious to the facts. So frame Kerry as unpatriotic and a liar and if the frame is repeated enough, people who want to believe it won’t ever accept the truth.

    Even though Lakoff has, through the Rockridge Institute, been advising the Democrats, they just never seem to recognize the strength they could build if they would just frame their issues better, and then just stick to it, over and over again.

    My observation of their behavior is that because they’re afraid of being seen as weak, they then actually become weak. It’s incredibly frustrating. That’s why Congress has an 11% approval rating right now. The Republicans are just downright evil, and the democrats won’t stand up for themselves, under any circumstances it seems. Somehow they see electoral avantage in that, but it baffles me.

    I got an email from the DCCC the other day asking for, what else, $$$. I told them not a red cent until they stand firm on getting us out of Iraq.

    I just don’t know what else to say. I give up on them really. And that’s why I’m desperate to see Al Gore in the race, and frustrated at his seeming lack of interest.

    And, really if you look at him, Chris Dodd is a good candidate. He’s only getting noticed now because he’s the only one standing up for what’s right. And what does Pelosi do? Get pissed off.

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  3. in architectural studies about the offspring of the German Werkbund school, I found a “fact:”  that arched doorways were a symbol of decadent bourgeoise, therefore they would emphasize simple rectilinear portals.

    Go to Africa, native America, behold all the arched forms on mud huts.

    People ever make up maxims from afar, based on their parochial impressions.

    The playing field became terminally slanted in the US through ‘edjamacation’ whereby Heaven forbid scholars should go abroad to dabble in socialist influence or worse… the US people should be a one-language (“we’re number one!”) people, well-disciplined in one-dimensional thought, taking debt slavery for granted, there to serve the corporate monolith that came to be named freedom…

    Freedumb.  Free to be dumb.  No outside influence need apply.  Lie, tell the people there is no inflation, slant economics to where people can no longer afford their weekends or for one parent to stay home with the children, gotta pay up on all that debt for the McMansion and the SUV gizmo.

    How few people born in the US speak a second language, haltingly even?

    The great ivory tower.

    I could go on and on, but suffice it to say it has become a very abstract culture reminiscent to the aesthetic kneejerkism at the top of my rantette here (not to be confused with a ranchette).  Our very lives, if we admit much TV, are abstract. 

    In art, the heart of modern abstraction is the self-conscious statement that you are not conveying a mere idea, but an idea of an idea.

    Such has become life in the US, an idea of an idea.

    Meanwhile back at the ranchette, people are centralized, fearful, urbanized, extremely dependent on federal government for everything including the food and water rolling in from hundreds of miles away on trucks via plenteous oil. 

    Some are talking revolution:  are they ready to find water when central flips the electricity switch and the pumps and the water stops flowing, McMansions freeze up in the dark in the winter, shivering sick people digging catholes on dying golfcourses?  Do you know where to find fresh water then?  I bet not.

    Life has therefore become an abstraction, severed from the land, the water, the sky.  US people, in majority, are said to spend at least 90% of their lives indoors.  Completely severed from the earth which nourishes them.

    Ah, but surely when food fails we can still eat facts…

  4. especially when they don’t work properly. Oh… facts… well, my theory is some folks end up with solidified brains in which reality cannot be allowed to intrude. We do everything in this consumer society to distract ourselves from our own thoughts and feeling with such success that there is no particular gain for some folks in the truth. Or I am talking with hay in my brain again.

    I gave up on trying to argue “facts” with my Neo-Con colleagues, I like to disarm them by agreeing pleasantly… yes, I love killing babies, yes, I hate America and the troops. It pisses them off when I don’t do the apologetic liberal routine.

  5. “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

    -einstein

    link

  6. Our species has been here many times before. Here are a few prescient passages from the master.

    On the required mentality for selling bogus wars:

    Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous, and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist….

    In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.

    –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

    On crimestop, the ability to stop short of recognizing the Party’s deceit:

    Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical…, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

    –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

    On why the true-believing Party members will refuse to acknowledge reality:

    In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never full grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

    –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

    On the unfamiliarity of the “other,” the “foreign”:

    …The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia….If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.

    –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

    On keeping people in the dark so that they cannot make informed comparisons (i.e., the Faux News approach):

    The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

    –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

    On the Party’s intentional campaign to undermine truth:

    The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

    Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

    –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

    Orwell saw it all coming. To our great misfortune, the neocons see Nineteen Eight-Four not as an instructive dystopia to be resisted, but as a template for molding a dependably compliant, hierarchical society, i.e., an aristocracy based on inherited privilege and wealth.

    So far, the neocons, by hijacking the Republican Party (the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower, for God’s sake) and by having the good fortune to be faced by a leaderless, complicit Democratic Party merely pretending to be an opposition, seem to have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

  7. Miami Herald http://www.miamihera…]

    The Gestalt is now fully formed:

    The U.S. military has expanded plans for a pop-up tent city to shelter migrants in case of a Caribbean boat crisis — now a $55 million project that would prepare a safe haven for up to 45,000 boat people.

    Since Fidel Castro took ill and ceded power of Cuba to his brother Raúl, the Bush administration has been preparing for a 10,000-person tent city.

    In May, the Navy hired a Jacksonville contractor to build cement block buildings with 525 toilets and 248 showers on an empty slice of the base. The military could rapidly erect tents around the site. The buildings should be completed next summer at a cost of $16.5 million.

    Now, under the expansion, the military has invited military contractors to bid on a $40 million project that would build a second tent city on the base for 35,000 migrants in need of humanitarian relief.

  8. Want to know about those camps? Here’s the words of a female rafter. Things improved, but talk about running amok.

    Lets call this rafter Sylvia

    Yes, and there were beatings there, there were beatings, just so you know. There were beatings. And abuse, you know, people tied hand and foot, they were handcuffed hand and foot and they were beaten. You know, that’s an abuse of power, and abuse of power.

    I saw a soldier open up a wound in a man’s foot that took five stitches [to close] with his boots. He stood on top of his foot…and he grinded his boot like this (makes motion with foot) on, on, on, there, there, until…until he created a wound like this, standing on top of his foot like that, like an orange peel. I saw that right in front of me, just so you know. They filled the wound with  dirt, and everything. Imagine, that man, he had to go [to the clinic] two times a day to heal that.  I saw them do that right in front of me. He was handcuffed and thrown on the floor… they did that to him. They handcuffed him and they threw him on the floor, and they did that to him.

    And the man hadn’t done anything, he didn’t do anything, or anything.  The man was right next to me, he even had, he had a sack of clothes, plus a sack of clothes from other people.  He was carrying a sack of clothes from some women. They let him have it him from above, they took away the sacks of clothing, the threw him face down on the ground, they put handcuffs on him, on his feet and hands, and the soldier told him, “ah, here you have a wound, here in your…” and he asked how it had happened, and the man said he got it playing on the football field in the camp.  And he put his food on it (making a grinding motion with her foot) and tracaracaracaracar, sssssst, until he opened it up and the blood flowed like this. That man, seized with such terrible pain like that. I’ll never forget that, never.

    No, ah hija, what can I tell you, veija. What can I tell you, hija, what do I have to say? The things that I saw. A deployment of, an abuse of power is what there was there. A psychological war, you know.

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    within the whirlpool you’ll see the tent city and razor wire.

    So, we got caught in a whirlpool. I remember that there was a whirlpool, and we began to turn around. We couldn’t get out of that whirlpool, and we would have died in that  place.

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    • fatdave on October 19, 2007 at 05:33
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    What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

    – Boris Pasternak

    Your tea went cold.

  14. …are generally only useful when the listener has a framework to understand them.  Truths, however, rely on the framework we get for free, however twisted up it’s gotten in the interim…

  15. I keep missing these. Sorry. It’s sort of at dinnertime, though.

  16. that has hung around in my gray matter for quite awhile.  I’m not sure that the politics of this country have ever been exposed to so much fact all at once.  Seems to me that generations before this internet media, we did experience some wonderful growth through facts but it took a long time for facts to get out and it took time for truth to prevail.  Most of our pols haven’t had to deal with as much fact leading to certain truths about themselves and their stance on issues and they all got pretty good at manipulating the old forms of media. They’re dragging their feet attempting to not have to give way to the new power of the people but it won’t work unless they can get rid of this form of communication and media.  Guess they’ll have to come along now, kicking and screaming but in the end there is no other way if you want to continue to be a pol.

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