"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
A lie doesn't become the truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it is accepted by a majority.
Author: Booker T. Washington
Truth Detector (07-19-2019)
I agree. However, that's not what that was about. It was a govt. agency asking ppl to report possible disinformation regarding health care plans -- not other citizens. As I said, it's the exact same thing that state attorneys general ask citizens to do all the time. Here is an example from my state:
https://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,4534,7...1331--,00.html
This was from the Whitehouse web site, note the part about casual conversation:
Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, “facts are stubborn things.”
Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to “uncover” the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.
There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
It's working fine for me, no regrets whatsoever
how's it working out for the nation?...……...are you saying liberals and other anti-facists gave us DJT because they're so rude and inconsiderate of their feelings?
I'm simply telling you these are the same pieces of shit who gave us the Civil War, Jim Crow, church fire bombings, lynchings, ghettos, and Timothy McVeigh - only to skim the surface
you can be nice and polite to these assholes all ya want, won't see me complaining
Note that it did NOT say to report "casual conversations." It said to forward emails/possible disinformation web pages to that email addy.
Now how many times have you had a friend or family member tell you about something they read in an email or on a web site? Hundreds, I'm sure. How many times did what you were told turn out to be bogus? Dozens, most likely.
This is no sinister govt. plot urging citizens to spy on each other. It's merely informing ppl about misinformation that they might encounter, and to let them know if it's in an email or on a web site. The End of Life Care thing was a HUGE conservative disinformation campaign back when the ACA was being debated. I saw dozens of comments, and heard just as many more IRL, regarding the ACA and end of life care. Basically ppl were being told that if the ACA passed, the plug would be pulled on your grandma in a nursing home, or your dad in the hospital. As a nurse who cared for end of life patients, I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth regarding EOL care and how it is paid for by either Medicare, Medicaid, or private plans... and how we treat our patients/residents at the end of their days.
Phantasmal (07-19-2019)
Sad part is Trumpet will deny all those examples are far worse than what triggered the whiny leftist.
As a joke, a friend of mine put a Hillary For President sticker on the car of another friend of both of us. He didn't know it was a joke when he first saw it nor did he whine, moan, and act like a snowflake either.
Sadly, what it's going to take is some stupid lefty stealing a MAGA hat, assaulting a Trump supporter, etc. and getting their ass whipped beyond recognition. What's worse is, although the lefty will have started the ball rolling, said lefty will try to blame the person that teaches him a lesson.
….throughout history the same cycle keeps repeating itself. Authoritarianism rears its ugly head, must be beaten down.....repeat....repeat...etc
here we are again, just like it was 80 yrs ago in Europe and Japan
Why Authoritarian Followers Believe What They Believe
Compared to most people, studies have shown that authoritarian followers get their beliefs and opinions from the authorities in their lives, and hardly at all by making up their own minds. They memorize rather than reason. Religion provides a good example of this: authoritarians tend to believe strongly in whatever religion they were raised, the result of having had their religion strongly emphasized to them while they were growing up. But at some point in their youth—typically in early to mid-adolescence—they usually have doubts about what they have been taught. When this happens they typically go to their parents for guidance, or clerics, or scriptures, or friends who profess strong belief. They are mainly seeking reassurance, and not surprisingly, they keep their beliefs.
Persons who grew up in homes where religion was not stressed as much also develop doubts about the things they had been taught when they reached adolescence. But they are much more likely to do a two-sided search for the answers, such as reading Genesis and learning about the theory of evolution, talking to believers and nonbelievers, and so on. Some then keep their faith, but others become “weak believers” or even apostates.)
By the way, the failure to do a two-sided search for the truth of their beliefs leaves scar tissue on the psyches of authoritarian followers. A “very safe survey” revealed that most of the followers in a large sample of university students had doubts about their religious beliefs, which you would never have guessed from their answers to normal surveys. And most of these doubters said that no one whatsoever knew they had these doubts. They were a deep secret.
Consensual Validation and Ethnocentrism
When your beliefs are memorized copies of other people’s opinions, you don’t really know why they are right. That means you don’t know IF your professed truths really are true. So how do you maintain your beliefs should events and discoveries contradict them?
Researchers discovered decades ago that people validate their social opinions socially to a certain extent by selecting news outlets, friends, and so on that will tell them they are right. This produces an illusion of consensus, at least among all the “right” people like themselves. Almost everybody does this, but authoritarian followers do it much more because they don’t have many ideas of their own, beliefs they have worked out for themselves and can defend. And they are much more likely to expose themselves only to sources of information that tell them what they want to believe. Getting only one side of a story raises the chances you will get it wrong, but as Ralph Peters, formerly the military analyst at Fox News, said recently, “People that only listen to Fox have an utterly skewed view of reality.”
The creation of an in-group in the lives of “right-thinkers” goes back to followers’ early childhood. The earliest such example most of them can recall involved the family religion (as opposed to say their gender, or race, or nationality). Their parents divided the world for them into people of their own faith, and an out-group consisting of everybody else. This “Us vs. Them” ethnocentrism appears to lay the foundation for many later prejudices and xenophobia.
Ethnocentrism comes naturally when we identify with a group, but authoritarian followers are profoundly ethnocentric. Whereas some people will deliberately expose themselves to different ideas, experiences, cultures to avoid living in an “echo chamber,” followers want to live smack dab in the middle of one and are glad to do their part of the echoing. Surrounding themselves with people who agree with them, clapping together, chanting together, cheering together, and marching together is convincing evidence for them that their beliefs are right.
Susceptibility to Liars
One consequence of the followers’ strong need for consensual validation, experiments have found, is that they will trust someone who says things they believe, even if there is a lot of evidence that the person does not really believe what he says. They’re just so glad to hear their views coming back to them, they ignore solid reasons why the person might be insincere or outright lying. Relatively UNauthoritarian people, on the other hand, are downright suspicious of someone who might have ulterior motives for reinforcing their beliefs.
It is therefore much easier to “con” authoritarian followers, as many a TV evangelist, radio shock-jockey and flag-waving politician knows. It’s no accident that Donald Trump, who had only loosely organized and not particularly right-wing political beliefs, became a Republican politician when he decided to declare war on both the Democrats and Republicans. That’s where the “suckers” are most concentrated, the people you can fool all of the time. (It’s another story, but the GOP largely brought this on itself by deliberately courting these folks.)
There’s a hidden danger to authoritarian leaders in all this. When they discover their followers will believe anything they say, even things that contradict something they said earlier, they get sloppy with their lies. Maybe Donald Trump always was careless with the truth. But it seems that over the past two years he has become downright reckless. His base will swallow anything, he has learned, so he just says the first thing that comes to mind.
The trouble is, for him and the future of his presidency, Truth happens. Constantly. It may be seen differently by various folks, but things did happen as they happened, not something else. You can only ignore the truth so long, and then reality will inevitably catch up with you. It will destroy you if you have been massively denying it.
Dogmatism
Dogmatism comes rather naturally to people who have copied other people’s beliefs rather than figure things out for themselves. When you don’t know why your beliefs are true, you can’t defend them very well when other people or events confront them. Once you’ve run out of whatever counter-arguments your authorities have loaded into you, you’re done. But being flabbergasted doesn’t mean you change your beliefs. You can keep on believing as much as before if you want. You can even pat yourself on the back for believing when it seems clear you are wrong. Some people do this, and you know who taught them to.
That is dogmatism, and experiments show that authoritarian followers have two or three times the normal amount of it because they believe many things strongly, but don’t know why. When the evidence and arguments against their beliefs becomes irrefutable, they simply shut down. If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson said, dogmatism is the last resort of overwhelmed followers. Thus they agree with the statement, “There are no discoveries of facts that could possibly make me change my mind about the things that matter most in life.” That says it all.
much more: https://www.theauthoritarians.org/
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