Numbers may deceive us because of their apparent objectivity, but words can deceive more comprehensively because of their emotional appeals that numbers seldom have. There may be very legitimate reasons to react adversely to words like “war,” “racism” or “murder,” but it is the illegitimate invoking of emotionally charged words that is especially dangerous—as anything that overrides thought, or substitutes for thought, can be dangerous. Emotional manipulation is, however, only one of the dangers when words are used in ways that obscure both realities and the connections of cause and effect
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