As we begin the debates and the next round of political jostling for public office, I\u2019m reminded that I\u2019ve been interested since my early teen years 65 years ago in propaganda, the way the newspapers and other media can and do distort the truth. The old term for this is \u201crhetoric,\u201d and I think they should teach about this form of manipulation in middle school. (That\u2019s when I sublimated my rebellious impulses into critical thinking.)<\/p>\n
I noticed that lots of folks see no problem in supporting popular arguments, however the publicity agents (propagandists) twisted the message to support a product or their candidate. I read up not only on propaganda analysis and semantics\u2014the study of \u201chow\u201d words mean\u2014that is, the emotional tone of ideas or words, much of it being unconscious. I studied logical fallacies, all the short-cuts that seem true but are really false. It\u2019s as if I studied prestidigitation (tricks of the hand), magic tricks, card tricks\u2014which my older brother did\u2014but for me they were more cerebral, not just hand passes. I grew subtly rebellious and doubtful. I realized that seemingly good, honest men lie! They use an ethos of \u201call\u2019s fair in love and war.\u201d Then the candidate with get all sincere and overlook their publicity agents\u2019 lies. <\/p>\n
So I think that these \u201ctricks\u201d of semantic distortions (playing with words) and logical fallacies are mental manipulations that should be part of the standard late middle school or early high school curriculum! As I said, it\u2019s critical thinking, what so many people talk about instilling in young people\u2019s minds. It also helps to counter peer pressure. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As we begin the debates and the next round of political jostling for public office, I\u2019m reminded that I\u2019ve been interested since my early teen years 65 years ago in propaganda, the way the newspapers and other media can and do distort the truth. The old term for this is \u201crhetoric,\u201d and I think they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,19,20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-events","category-follies","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2086,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions\/2086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}