David L. Lindsey's Blog

The New Dark Age

The New Dark Age
The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.

By Adam Serwer

I couldn’t think of a better title for this post than the one on the article whose link I’ve attached above. Obviously, I highly recommend this article from The Atlantic. Reading it puts just puts another exclamation mark behind the quote from our current President that I quoted in the previous post: “I love the poorly educated!” Well, it seems like he going to do his best to make sure the country has a lot of those people, more for him to love. This article is truly sobering. We have to understand this to fight it. And fight we must! Please–read The New Dark Age. You might say it’s a roadmap for the fight for democracy. We have to know the map before we can make the journey.

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Ask yourself …

I try not to write much about politics here because it is so pervasive everywhere else these days. But as a writer who works seven days a week in my own library, it doesn’t sit well with my conscience to remain silent in these current shocking days of global turmoil created by a U.S. President who uses lies as weapons to perpetuate, and even expand, his own power of office.

I urge you to take the time to search the Internet for the Trump administration’s efforts to ban books in public libraries and in the libraries of universities and schools and of government agencies, departments, and institutions. Ask yourself: Why? Ask yourself why he said: “I love the poorly educated.” (Nevada victory speech, Feb. 23 2016) Is this man so afraid of critical thinking that he is making such massive efforts to try to prevent people from doing so?

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” ~

George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.173, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Disappearing Words

As President Trump seeks to purge the U.S. of “wokeness”, his administration has flagged hundreds of words that government documents and website are to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents by the New York Times. This purging is already apparent on hundreds of federal government website. Read this article: These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration. It is a color-coded example of documents in which certain words and phrases are eliminated and replaced by “acceptable” substitutions. Or just eliminated altogether.

It’s astonishing.

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“Then they came for me …”

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

This quote is attributed to the prominent German pastor Martin Niemöller.

After World War II, Niemöller openly spoke about his own early complicity

in Nazism and his eventual change of heart. His powerful words about guilt

and responsibility still resonate today.

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A Simple Fact

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Justice Louis Brandeis

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Sunbeam On A Fossil

 

One late afternoon in early April I was sitting at a table with my wife while we sipped wine and looked out the windows beside us to the falling sun. I am a life-long lover of the interplay between shadows and light as they share an infinitude of their own limitless variations with each other. The magic of this never ending dance never ceases to fascinate me.

We live on a hilltop southwest of downtown Austin, overlooking a valley and the hills beyond, and another larger, adjacent sprawling valley that is a wildlife preserve called Wild Basin. All of it a vast, ever-evolving palette of shadows and light.
But on this afternoon the thing that caught my eye was only a few feet away from me and it was something that I look at many times every day. But I’d never seen it the way I saw it at that moment. On a wooden cabinet with an old antique slate clock are a collection of some of the shell fossils I’ve collected by the scores over the decades of living on this hilltop. At that moment one particular shell stood out to me, and I saw it as if I were someone else, outside of myself.

For millennia that shell fossil lay in compressed darkness. Numberless millennia passed. Rain. Wind. Storms. Heat. Erosion. Drought. All things in nature worked the fossil toward the surface. And then a man built a stone building, a library, nearby and in the process disturbed the last few feet of earth from above the fossil. Near the surface now, more years passed, rain, wind, storms. Erosion. Then one day that curious man saw the fossil peeking through the dust and picked it up. He washed it off, cleaned and it put it on a wooden chest by an old slate clock that measured time in a way the fossil had never known. And then late one April afternoon a sunbeam silently approached the fossil and rested upon it for a moment before moving on to dusk.

And in that moment the man saw it. Light on an object that had travelled untold millennia in darkness beneath the earth for its moment in the sun.

What are the odds of the slow magic of that?

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This is a test to see if I still get HTTPS 503 code

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

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Weasel Words

Three years ago I posted the following article. A lot has changed in three years. And nothing has changed at all. In fact, it’s easy to claim now that how we use words and how we understand what we hear is more important than ever as communication accelerates at warp speed and the tools of deception have become more powerful and more deeply hidden. Understanding the nuance and dangers of weasel words is a truth imperative.
________________________________
I imagine most people have used Wikipedia. It’s a common go-to site for quick reference to find out basic information about almost anything. It’s a free, nonprofit reference site supported by readers’ donations.

In this age of growing feints and deceptions in social media, politics, and the Internet in general Wikipedia’s entry on “Weasel Words” has long been one of my favorites. I first came across it years ago and continue to go to it from time to time.

A weasel word or phrase is often used when someone wants to give the impression that something specific and authoritative is being expressed when in fact it’s only a vague generalization. Weasel words are invaluable tools for people who want to deceive, and they are essential elements of propaganda. They can also be used to make a statement more ambiguous. Which lets them wiggle out of accusations that they have been intentionally deceptive by saying that the accuser simply “took it the wrong way”.

Entire books have been written about weasel words but here are a few examples from the Wikipedia article about them.

“A growing body of evidence . . .” (Where is the raw data for the reader to verify?)
“Up to sixty percent . . .” (so, 59%? 50%? 10%?)
“There is evidence that…” (What evidence? Is the source reliable?)
“The vast majority…” (75%? 85%? 99%? How many?)
“Questions have been raised…” (Implies a fatal flaw has been discovered; also who raised the questions?)
“Researchers believe . . .” (Who are they?)

A 2009 study of Wikipedia found that most weasel words in it could be divided into three main categories:

1. Numerically vague expressions (for example, “some people”, “experts”, “many”, “evidence suggests”)
2. Use of the passive voice to avoid specifying an authority (for example, “it is said”)
3. Adverbs that weaken (for example, “often”, “probably”)

As I said, books have been written about weasel words, but these examples give us a glimpse into how easy it is to accept the anonymous voices we hear and read every day if we aren’t vigilant. All of us should be reading critically. And applying critical thinking to everything we encounter on the Internet. Alice’s rabbit hole hides in plain sight just about everywhere today.

(By the way, if I had left off the two words “I imagine” at the beginning at the post, I would have been guilty of using weasel words in my opening sentence.)
__________________
To see an updated version of this article click HERE to see Wikipedia’s more thorough treatment of the subject of weasel words.

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Who Does Congress Really Work For?

Who Does Congress Really Work For?

After the elections in November I’ll back off the politics, but for now I can’t resist. Here’s an article from Politico Magazine back in May. “The 401 (k) industry owns Congress.” It still makes my ears smoke. Read it. You need to know what this very savvy investigative journalist reveals, because it’s right in front of our faces…sort of. We trust our legislators? Maybe. But if we do we ought to make sure we’re very well informed

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All Five of the Stuart Haydon Series Now Available in eBook Format

 

Images above are the eBook covers for the five Stuart Haydon novels. To buy or read the opening chapters, and my comments about each novel just click over to the NOVELS section of this site and you’ll find everything there.

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