Ranting Against Facebook

Once again, a scribe for the WokeLib Guardian raised her pen (or jabbed her pad) to excoriate Zuckerberg and Facebook for....

Actually, I'm not quite clear what the article was supposed to be about but the gist and drift of it appears to be a complaint that Facebook allows "right wing demagogues" to post content.  Bleh.  I'm pretty tired of pseudo-left warriors calling for censorship, which is what all the wokeness boils down to.

All media at all times have engaged in omissions, half-truths, exaggeration, misrepresentations, doctored images and rhetorical manipulation. Anyone who thinks that the New York Times or the Guardian don't filter their output to conform to their ideological views and political agendas is living in a land of self delusion. The same can be said for Le Figaro or Razón.

The underlying fallacies of the outraged, woke brigades are the assumptions (1) that "true facts" exist and (2) that information is something we are fed... like food. Actually, the realm of true, indisputable facts is rather small. Most so-called "facts" are based on individual perceptions and opinions -- "testimony" in lawyer talk. Even polls are subject to distortions. As Mark Twain cracked, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

What this means is that "news" and "information" is never anything we should trust or rely on. What is called being informed is not passive intaking but an occasion to exercise our mental faculties. Anything we read calls for us to bring to bear our experience and use our judgement. What makes us informed is exposing our brains to as many lies, damned lies and statistics as possible.

If people want to be stupid and just gulp down anything that CNN or Facebook or Junge Europa put before them, that really is their problem but it should not be used as an excuse to make safe and sanitize information for the rest of us.

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