Honesty Saves
Turning down the noise in the cultural chatter.
Reducing distraction and confusion is a high priority right now. With all the cries of “fake news” and “foreign influence” in political campaigns, “Russian bots” and AI algorithms pushing “deep fakes” on social media.
But how did we get here? Haven’t we always known that false information is not helpful, or even dangerous?
Well, no. No, not at all. No, we absolutely do not understand the high cost of lies. That is not the society that you live in. The society you live in has a cultural vocabulary and widespread practice of dealing in lies. This is not just a problem among the elites. There is broad acceptance of trading lies, especially in the realm of politics. Where honesty is favored in the practical and technical realms of activity, the political realm has become the upside-down-world of ethical interaction. Deception tactics are not only used against war-making beligerents, but are accepted tools to be used within a state against the very public that elects the rulers. Moreover, the policy of lies is even defended, and holds currency, among the electorate.
The Noble Lie
A revealing episode occurred on “The View” with guest Pamela Anderson and hosts Joy Behar and Meghan McCain. Mark Stouffer - Value Critic on Twitter
ANDERSON:
To walk in the NofaKingway you can come from anywhere, and bring anything that works. All you have to discard is what doesn’t work.
We are helping stamp out the scourge of “fake news”, and the best place to start is at it’s root: misused words, phrases, and concepts.
Modern news promoters and political organizations are actively undermining their fidelity to the truth. They are undermining the very concept of truth, even asking “Do we live in a post-truth world?”
Their motto should be “By any news necessary."
The Left and Right sides of the political spectrum have different definitions for the meanings of some very important terms.
| Term |
Left’s definition |
Right’s definition |
| Definition |
The source of the meaning of a word |
The description of the meaning of a word |
| Property |
Something to be appropriated and redistributed, ending with your life. |
That which is properly yours, starting with your life. |
| Justice |
The protection of classes, races, tribes and other abstract groups, by settling the score with other abstract groups |
The protection of individuals by settling the score with individuals who wronged them. |
Books
A collection of books I've read with notes.
Books are celebration of the effectiveness of words to transmit concepts. Machines, art, and institutions also transmit concepts but they are books are of a more consistent form and the concept delivery has been streamlined.
Here is my repository of the most significant books I’ve read and notes that I’ve made on them.
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Tweets
Short notes on contemporary issues, either already posted or intended to be posted to Twitter.
Tweets by ValueCritic2018-09-29 Kavanaugh People want you to focus on the woman, or the man, or the male-vs-female. But that’s not what’s happening. The Party leaders who want you to focus exclusively on the alleged victim, have done this before, in the 80’s during Clarence Thomas hearings. Then in the 90’s they wanted you to completely ignore the victim, Lewinsky, and actively shame her to this day.
The Democrat Party leadership do not care about women, or the poor, or minorities, or you.
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Right or Left
Right from Wrong We are at a time of great confusion, and it’s not an accident. In order to navigate in times of great controversy it is necessary to have a stable coordinate system.
The Breakdown People who act, who move in any way, have to make choices about their movements, so people tend to want to comprehend what they are looking at.
People who act also have competitors, so people who oppose their actions.
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Democratization or Liberalization
It's important what we call things, and one of the most important politicdal/ethical distinctions made in the modern world today is between two different names that we call one thing.
Personal Perspective All of this has a single implication for each and every individual, and that is the following question:
How would you rather be influenced by society:
Social influence is applied when you have to coordinate and integrate your life with other people. You decide if the arrangement would be beneficial, and they decide if it would be beneficial for them. No one can predict the outcome with certainty, but the self-interested, first-hand observers have the most detailed information and have self-evident, self-justified interest.
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Test Section
It's important what we call things, and one of the most important politicdal/ethical distinctions made in the modern world today is between two different names that we call one thing.
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Static Text Generation
Static text generated web sites, like this one, are relatively new but exhibit a model for an understanding of change that should be studied.
Standardization As I develop this site, first in Docpad then in Hugo, I can see an abstraction of text change.
All the content is contained in the content/ All content is written in a declarative text markup language such as Markdown and is then transpiled into HTML for presentation. What if we could write content in one static generation framework and reliably transfer it to any other that complied with a standard?
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AI Algorithms vs Natural Intelligence
Two vastly different interpretations of the step-wise, methodical cognition process.
The Bright Side Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions: Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
The Dark Side What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (The MIT Press) - by Ed Finn.
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble, eBook - Amazon.com
Automating-Inequality-High-Tech-Profile-Police
Halt and Catch Fire There is a scene at the begining of Halt and Catch Fire where the instructor asks what the greatest innovations of the next twenty years will be.
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Laws Based on Morality
Contrary to popular opinion, laws are based on morality. Not the other way around.
“It’s bad because it’s illegal” is a circular argument and begs the question “why is it illegal?” As a young person you may accept that laws are written for many reasons, and that someone must have made each law for some reason. After living for a few dacades and seeing the laws obeyed, disobeyed and carried out, and you’ve seen the long-term consequences of violating the law, of of poorly written laws, eventually you must ask, “What are laws based on?
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Postmodernism is Anti-Modernism
Postmodern is the historical materialist way of saying "better than modernism". Since we aren't historical materialists, we shouldn't play their word-game.
Inaccurate word usage is highly corrupting, but it is a favorite tool of anti-modernists. Every logical argument makes a case in favor of modernism, so the anti-modernist movement has to move away from logical arguments.
They realize how weak their case would be even to a superficial observer, if they had to use logic to refute logic, so instead they resort to the goal of corrupting logic itself.
One of the attacks on logic is the theory of “historical materialism”, which holds that progress occurs as a natural progression caused by the gradual accumilation of technoligical capital goods, or “factors of production”.