Make America Guileless Again

"'Nothing on this page is real,' read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. 'No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,' Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. 'Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?'” (Link here)

Frameworks and Metaphors > Facts

“A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning, and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true. People think in terms of conceptual structures called frames and metaphors. It’s not just the facts. They have values, and they understand which facts fit into their conceptual framework. You can’t understand something if your brain doesn’t allow it, if your brain filters it out in terms of your values. Democrats seem not to understand this, and they keep trying to employ reason as a persuasive vehicle. I wish Enlightenment reasoning was an accurate model for how most people think and judge, but it isn’t, and we better acknowledge that fact.” - George Lakoff

Orange is the New Blue

Counter Intuitive

"If you notice how good the drummer is, then they’re a good drummer. If you don’t notice how good the drummer is, then they’re a great drummer."

The Almaybe

"Saying that God does not exist is not so different from saying that we cannot comprehend God’s existence. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic. 'A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think,' Gray writes."