“When you tweet out a thing, and this bothered me, I gotta tell you, you tweeted that, whites
killed by blacks, these are statistics you picked up from somewhere, at a rate of 81%,
and that’s totally wrong, um, whites killed by blacks are 15%, yet you tweeted it was
81%, now … “Bill, I didn’t tweet, I re-tweeted from somebody that was supposedly
an expert and it was also a radio show.”
“Why do you want to be in that zone?”
“Hey Bill, Bill, am I gonna check every statistic I’ve got millions and millions
of people at real Donald Trump by the way”, “You gotta, you’re a presidential contender”
“You know what?
Fine, but this came out of a radio show and everything else.”
“Oh, come on, radio show?”
See, I have a problem with that.
Ever since Donald Trump’s name surfaced the media for his presidential campaign, the
world became an interesting place.
Interesting, not in a good way.
Every continent is dealing with some form of hatred and separation.
The society right now seems like it’s on the verge of something big.
I can feel the anxiety in the air.
I am not saying that all of this is Donald Trump’s fault.
But at times like this, we look up to the media to provide us with information and facts
about what’s going on around us and the media looks up to, people in power, people
with responsibility, people who are inside the loop, to provide them with what’s going
on.
And there’s a lot of trust, bestowed upon these people in power.
US presidency is one of the most powerful positions in the world, and that post comes
with a great deal of responsibility and trust.
That’s why it is dangerous when Trump claims that it is only a retweet and he doesn’t
have to check every statistics that comes to his way.
He absolutely has to.
Everybody has to, especially him.
He is a president for a country and I can’t believe that he doesn’t understand the intensity
of the problem, or maybe he does.
We can clearly see that he doesn’t even see why this is a bad thing.
He still probably thinks that he is right.
There are a lot of people who are looking up to him and who would blindly believe information
that comes directly from their president.
In this case, there are people who genuinely believe that the percentage of ‘White Killed
By Blacks’ is actually 81%.
This is just one of his many, many false statements or lies.
It was so much, that the New York Times and CNN ran an article solely on Trump’s lies.
In today’s social media age, everybody is given a center stage.
Anyone can say anything and it’ll become a fact.
Actually fact checking is frowned upon.
If 10 people say that pigs can fly, the 11th person will agree.
Conformity seems more important than the actual facts.
But a bizarre incident happened involving Trump’s inauguration.
During the very first conference with journalists, the press secretary for the white house Sean
Spicer angrily confronted and accused the journalists of misreporting the crowd size
in an effort to “minimize the enormous support that gathered.”
But even the Washington Metro, which said that the ridership on the day of the inauguration
was less than the average weeday, falsified most of what he said in the conference.
He contradicted himself by saying this,
“No one had numbers, because the national park service which controls the national mall
does not put any out!”
“This was the largest audience to witness an inauguration.
PREIOD”
He doesn’t have the numbers, but he knows for a fact that this is the largest number
of people ever attended.
How is that even possible?
How does that sentence work?
But, why talk about the crowd size at all?
Does it matter?
Well, yeah!
It does.
Because you have high profile people in government that’s making a false claim for a matter
as trivial as this, how can we trust them when it comes to big issues, like the health
care or immigration?
When Chuck Todd of NBC interviewed Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s senior advisor, he confronted
her on the lies that were told about the inauguration crowd size.
She replied to the question with a bizarre sentence.
“Why the president asked the white house secretary to come out in front of the podium
for the first time, and utter a falsehood?
Why did he do that?
It undermines the credibility of the entire white house press office.”
“No it doesn’t, don’t be so, don’t be so, overly dramatic about it Chuck.
What is ..i..i, you’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they are giving Sean Spicer, our press
secretary gave ‘Alternative Facts’ to that, but the point remains …”
“Wait a minute, alternative facts?
Alternative Facts for the five facts he uttered.
The one thing he got right is Zeik Miller, for the five facts he uttered which is not
true.
Look, Alternative Facts are not facts, they are falsehoods.”
There is no such thing as Alternate Facts.
Facts are facts.
Opposite of a fact is a lie.
But I don’t think that it is something that’s said on a whim.
It is an extremely clever statement.
Because what is the difference between ‘Lying’ and ‘Alternate Facts’.
Lying is usually associated with negativity.
Lying is bad.
But with terms like ‘Alternate Facts’ the negativity of lying is stripped away.
All of this is happening in 2017, right?
But a man tried to warn us all about the current scenario, back in 1949.
His name is George Orwell, an English novelist who wrote the dystopian novel ‘1984’.
If you had read 1984, you probably know what I am going to talk about.
But for those who haven’t read this book, I can’t recommend it enough.
I am not the one to force my opinion onto another person, but I feel like these are
extreme circumstances.
It is my opinion that 1984 should be read by every single person on this planet as it
gives you a chance to look at society and the government and all the chaos from outside
and that’s an important perspective to have, especially in today’s society.
1984 is about a place called Oceania where the party or the government controls every
aspect of its citizen’s life through carefully constructed social engineering processes.
Under the government, the citizens are always watched, and their actions are monitored.
Even their language serves the government’s agenda; to control the people.
The old and proper English language is banned, and the citizens are encouraged to speak a
language called Newspeak.
Newspeak is vast and can’t be covered in a single video.
But one aspect that I want to discuss today is that how in Newspeak, the words with negative
connotations are removed because they are redundant.
For example; Instead of Good and Bad, there is Good and Ungood.
Bad is a separate word and is redundant.
But by eliminating the word bad and replacing it with ‘Ungood’, the government also
eliminated the negativity associated with Bad.
By eliminating the words, you are eliminating the concepts behind the word.
In Newspeak, you cannot have slogans like ‘Freedom is Slavery’ because the very
concept of Freedom doesn’t exist.
So control the language and in turn control the people and their thoughts.
To put it simply, Newspeak is a method to control thoughts through language.
In Orwell’s another book Politics and English language, he says
“Political Language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness … the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Where there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms”
This idea of using euphemisms and obscurity to conceal or direct people away from the
truth is termed as Double Speak.
Edward S. Herman, a political economist describes the term Double Speak in his book ‘Beyond
Hypocrisy’
“What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether
knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose
and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program”
which is exactly what Kellyanne Conway did, and Trump’s Government is doing with their
‘Alternative Facts’.
I know what you are thinking.
Many politicians around the world lie.
Lying and embellishing is quite common in politics.
But this is different.
The sheer audacity to lie effortlessly to millions of people, even when knowing that
the lies can easily be spotted and debunked, is dangerous.
It means a blatant disregard to people.
But what can we do?
We are just common citizens, right?
But we can resist and confront the lie, every time we see it and spread the truth.
But how do we do that, when we don’t even recognize a lie?
Or when it is obscured by terms like Alternate Facts.
We can do that by investigating a little more.
Researching further whenever we are provided with new information or statistics, even if
it’s from the president of our country.
Maybe we shouldn’t form an opinion or worldview from a tweet.
Because when you confront a lie for what it is, all the illusions fade away and you are
left with only the facts, and facts are absolute, there are no alternatives to that.
I was so hesitant to do this episode.
I never speak politics, ever.
But I wanted to vent.
This was all inside and I wanted to spread what I know and learned.
Please do me a favor, whoever you are, somehow get a copy of 1984 and read it.
When the book was first published, it was banned in many countries and states just because
it told an important truth.
I feel like 1984 will probably be banned again.
So, before that happens, please give it a read.
What are your thoughts about lying when it comes to politics?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter in the comments below.
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