Everyone has their own level of where their head goes as pertains to what they are going to believe. That has a lot to do with fitting things into what they already have come to believe, mixed with an element of what they want to believe. The more caught up in what a person believes the easier it is to lead them into things that are getting further and further from the truth as defined by facts. No matter how open minded a person thinks they are there are things that take place that even the most open minded will refuse to believe. Later we might find out that something we couldn’t believe in fact happened, but to start with the idea of it will be rejected by most.
Most on KOS will acknowledge that we are seeing the science of misinformation, propaganda, and how beliefs play into making the science of misinformation work.
In mathematics an advanced form of selecting and rejecting the parameters needed to solve a physics problem is used. My cousin wanted to become a nuclear physicist, possibly because his ego demanded that he shoot for the ultimate pinnacle of the hardest to achieve disciplines. He thought he had the IQ to get there, and he in fact sailed through the first three years. He was getting into math that the problems took eight hours to work out. But...if he selected any wrong input into the calculation hours of work would not come out to the right answer. A problem would give the actual numbers involved with the angle a car was rolling down a hill, it would state the gravitational pull in terms of G force, numbers defining the acceleration factor might be provided which would allow you to figure out other things that were not provided. But most troublesome would be the addition of totally irrelevant facts that had nothing to do with the factor needed in the solution.
So John one night after six hours or so couldn’t figure the problem because he had extraneous factors in his equation. He was so frustrated he was on the edge of crying. He threw a book across the room and was swearing, so I went in to see what was up. I asked him if I could look at the problem and see what information he had used. He came back with a scathing retort and asked what made me think I could be of help when there was no way I could do the math he was involved in, I told him it can’t hurt and maybe I could jog his mind a bit by asking questions. So we spent almost half an hour and I asked him about the relationships between different facts. As he broke things down I could point our numbers that were irrelevant to the equation and which were relevant and how they would be used to provide a value that wasn’t given that would be needed.
A few hours later he had solved the equation. He wanted to know how the hell I could home in on relevance, I used to tease him and say there is IQ brains, and there’s common sense (CS) brains, and I just have a higher, and I must have a higher CS factor than him.
My point here is that we are going to be up against trying to figure out what our government is telling us. It will take reading between the lines, it will take as much understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes, who’s been gotten to in terms of being forced to misrepresent the facts.
We are seeing an obvious right wing propaganda machine going into play. As this gears up we are going to see things coming out that can’t be relied on, but more importantly that people who think they have good BS meters are going to believe our government couldn’t possibly be involved in.
It is going to be very important for people to get better at rejecting stupid stories with the understanding that there is something behind the stories that needs to be defined. We are seeing master propaganda and spin plays being put into motion, and the blatant lie about crowd size is a part of that process.