Sunday Stealing – Let’s Blog about Blogging

alternative facts

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week’s meme is swiped from If By Yes, a Canadian blogger who describes herself as a “left-wing left-hander with two left feet.” It’s a shame she doesn’t update her blog anymore. Anyway, she participated in a meme that she tells us was popular way back when.

About Blogging

1. When are you at your blogging best – a.m. or p.m.?

Absolutely in the morning. At some level, if I have an idea about a post, I sleep on it, and often I have at least an approach mapped out in the morning. The only time I work on the blog after about noon is doing something mechanical, such as adding links to articles and music posts.

2. How many blogs do you have? Please include the links in your answer.

This is it, at least publicly. The rogerogreen.com blog content morphed from the rogerowengreen.blogspot.com on May 2, 2010. The old content from those first five years is here, but not all comments have been moved, so there’s that. My old work is defunct, as are a bunch of others I’ve participated in. I had a blog on the Albany Times Union from 2008 to 2021, but that ended; the content is uploaded here.  

The rest is silence

3. Do you prefer silence when you compose your posts and write your comments?

Absolutely not. I write to music, and it doesn’t matter if it has words or not. I am listening to Rossiniana by Ottorino Respighi, which Kelly posted. But usually, I listen to compact discs of artists whose birthdays are in the current month, such as John Hiatt, Joe Strummer (The Clash), and Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin). Indeed, I can’t do very much without music. I use it when I’m cleaning or filing.

Conversely, I can’t listen to talk, such as the NPR news shows my wife likes to listen to. Sidebar: I’m very sad/angry about the death of the CPB— the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

4. What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever spilled on your keyboard?

Probably Diet Coke.

What’s the use of getting sober

5. Ever posted while intoxicated?

I don’t generally write on Facebook immediately. I might write a blog post and then post that, but that requires time, thought, and a cooling-down period. The only immediate things I have posted on FB and BlueSky lately are public service announcements about accidents and severe weather.  

I don’t even post immediately when ticked off, but let the thoughts simmer. These recent examples bother me as a librarian because they are not fact-based decisions. The FBI redacted djt’s name from several references in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files. The Smithsonian said it restored a display to an earlier version, which notes that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” djt accused the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Erika McEntarfer, of faking jobs numbers, directing his team to fire the former President Biden appointee. These are, to quote a former White House staffer, “alternative facts,” which are bad for democracy.

But see how c-c-c-alm-m-m-m I am? And sober. 

 Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

Alternative facts, The assault on truth.

fact checks be damned

Alternative factsMy experience is that there are some people with whom I cannot reasonably debate. I keep pondering why. A piece of it, I suppose, is that they don’t know what to believe. And that confusion, it seems, is quite intentionally devised.

At the end of December 2019, there was a special segment of Meet the Press called Alternative Facts, the assault on truth. My wife and I didn’t watch it for four months but found it quite interesting.

And disturbing. “When folks were asked, in a CBS poll, where do they go for trusted information, among Trump supporters, they cited the president himself. 91% of Trump supporters said he’s where they go for accurate information, fact checks be damned.” This explains a lot.

Someone named Ben Nimmo explained the four things that disinformation actors do if they want to attack their enemies or defend themselves against criticism, #1, dismiss. Attack critics to erode their credibility and invalidate the facts. #2, distort: If the facts are against you, make up your own facts. #3, distract. Whataboutism, or the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” defense. If you’re accused of something, accuse someone else of the same thing. #4, dismay — threats and intimidation.

Kernel of truth

The next segment was the anatomy of a lie. “All successful lies begin with a kernel of truth…” The topic happened to be CrowdStrike being hired to investigate the DNC server hack. “So if you want to propel your lie, just keep issuing falsehoods. The truth has one voice. But lies are infinite. Eventually, IMPOTUS was lying, “The Democrats, National Committee, they gave the server to CrowdStrike. It’s a very wealthy Ukrainian. It’s a Ukrainian company. That’s what the word is.

“You can continue to make more and more lies, which then wears out anybody trying to rebut them… You can make lies faster than you can refute them. And THAT is often the goal. I had erroneously thought the goal of disinformation was to make people believe something that’s not true.

Rather it’s to get people to say, “It’s SO confusing, I don’t know WHAT to believe.” This is even true of things they might have seen with their own eyes. The truth is squeezed out, or at best is in competition with what Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts.”

Ramblin' with Roger
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