Political Memes

To the great shame of the human race, it's not about truth or lie. It's about what a person thinks first. Like, literally, if you don't have an opinion on something, and then you hear about it, and the first thing you think is, "That sounds reasonable," then that's a big wall to overcome if that information is wrong.

And after that is even worse, because then you already have an opinion, and confirmation bias kicks in. So, everything seems to support that opinion.

And that, of course, is one reason why conservatives are so against public schools, and especially against them teaching anything verifiable like science or accurate history. A school has the chance to counter the parents' indoctrination because the children are still young.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

• Mark Twain

You just discovered Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle)

I feel like too many people took the wrong lesson from The Boy Who Cried Wolf and believe the lesson was "always believe the liars because one day you might be eaten by wolves when the liar who is famous for lying actually tells the truth for once and you don't believe them," and not "you shouldn't lie because eventually no one will believe you when you tell the truth."

A lie is your own creation. You can tweak it to make it more palatable. You can't do that with the truth - you didn't make it, you can only use what it already is.

It's because of emotion. You need a good analogy for your point rather than facts.

Facts do not care about emotion and that is their biggest flaw.

The right seeing this: “Yeah, liberals will believe anything.”

Been pretty much the entirety of their range of argument for years now. “I know you are but what am I?”

I don't believe this.

Funny how people easily believe what they like and protect it against threats?

It's an epistemological problem: How do you even know that something is true? How do you know that the newspapers aren't lying to you? How can you even know anything outside of the area that you can personally walk to?

I believe you can't. That's why we should make policies largely about our own area. Because we can't have a good picture of what happens in other regions, so we can't make policies about that either.

People believe what they want to believe

I believe this

Unfortunately cognitive biases we all have that were developed over millions of years of evolution as heuristics and intuitions to use when scared or angry to help us in survival situations aren't reliable justification for knowledge. Faith is lauded by the majority of humanity when it's the very method needed for self deception.

The problem is people believing things at face value. Asking for evidence is good though.

There are facts, there is scientific consensus, there is research, etc. However, "truth" as a word gets abused so much by quacks and nutjobs that I'm always a little wary of a person when I hear it from someone.

I can't believe that

The truth feels like a lie.

In the first case, the lie is more congruent with lived experience. This is heavily influenced by culture, since culture is where people get their morality.

In the second case, what people call true is something that they themselves find congruent with their own experience.

Both sides insist their truth is objective. Both sides are rationalizing their own experience.

We need to center human experience as a part of science and political discourse. Not replace, since pure empiricism is as idealistic as pure positivism. Objectivity in science and objectivity in morality are two sides of the same authoritarianism.

We insist our beliefs are truth and others beliefs are lies because that's what the ruling class does. They insist that our suffering isn't real, that others (but not the ruling class themselves) are the cause for it, that our truth must dominate the lies of the other. We disregard the experience of the other because our experiences are disregarded.

Therefore, this whole dynamic is essentially political. Rather than trying to spread truth by mimicking the oppression and domination of hierarchal authoritarianism we need a new politics based on democracy and socialism.

Through political struggle and real democracy, the opportunism of the people who personally benefit from the corruption of others will have their lies exposed for all people to see.

Corruption can be seen everywhere. Similar to how individuality is an expression of freedom, corrupted individuality is an expression of alienation. By fighting for freedom, we fight for the best expressions of human nature to reemerge, we expose and dismantle corrupting influence, and we cast light on everywhere that corruptors can hide their dark intentions. Sooner or later, they will have to face the corruption within themselves or be forced to place themselves in the dustbin of history.