Detailed Thoughts on Possibility of Unmasking Phoney-Folksy (and full of clever deception) Emails:

This is an email to Timothy Jost, who appeared on NPR Morning Edition to discuss how "Death Panel" and other wild myths got spread about the healthcare reform act.

(Emails from an unsuccessful attempt in 9/2010 at some anti-propaganda action.)

                                                                                        Sat, 4 Sep 2010
I listened with interest to what you had to say with Julie Rovner on Morning Edition, 9/3. I'm glad you are looking into this matter, but I don't think it is as simple as "People combing the Web found these microchips and saw this implantable medical device registry as an attempt to implant microchips in people," Jost says. "And then the rumor expanded to say that all people who signed up for the public plan that was in that bill would have to have a microchip implanted."

My belief, based on what I've seen, is that these wild rumors get much, and possibly most of their strength from carefully planted disinformation which looks to people like "Email from a friend of a friend". I am 58 years old and have never seen such wide belief in preposterous claims (nearly all of which seem aimed at bringing down the Obama presidency and/or Democrat majority in Congress).

The Latest in Email "News" Madness

Over the last months, I have tried to shed some light on photographic "proofs" that
(1) the President will not salute or make any gesture when the National Anthem is Played
(2) Gaza Palestinians held a mass marraige of 450 grown men to girls under the age of 10, and
(3) a couple of Texas Muslim Shopkeepers Posted notice on their store window that they were taking the day off to celebrate the martyrdom on one of the 9/11 suicide hijackers
(named "Imam Ali" -- who actually died in the 8th century, not on 9/11/2001).

So what's the latest? Well, there is this claim that "President Obama's finance team and Nancy Pelosi are recommending a 1% transaction tax on all financial transactions.". This is prefaced with
"I checked this out on www.truthorfiction.com and it is mostly TRUE!! This is just astonishing! When are we going to get this IDIOT out ..."
Actually, what "TruthOrFiction" Reports is that there is such a proposal -- NOT that it is being pushed by the Obama Team or Pelosi, but rather "The bill was sponsored (and introduced on 2/23/2010) by Democratic Congressional Representative Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania and says that it is to "establish a fee on transactions which would eliminate the national debt and replace the income tax on individuals.". So the truth is that there is one crackpot Democrat (the bill has only one sponsor) who thinks putting a 1% tax on each and every financial transaction (ATM withdraways, checks, any sale whatsovever ...) will pay off the national debt while allowing income tax to be abolished, which actually, if it were true, would be good news. Nancy Pelosi may have said, back in December 2009 (before it was introduced?) that it "had some merit -- This, according to "Real Clear Politics". If this was introduced in February 2010, and has gone nowhere, why are we hearing about it now? Because it's been so long since it was last floated about that most email recipients will have forgotten about it by now. This is a common tactic. We get links to YouTube videos with no date, denouncing some immigration bill. Why no date? Because it was introduced in 2007 and supported by Bush, and has nothing to do with the present and President Obama.

I should say something about the "Sic-ing the UN or poor Arizona". Yes, the US is complying with a UN resolution for nations to submit statements about their human rights records. Try actually reading the "29-page Universal Periodic Review". It is mostly full of how wonderful American freedoms are. E.g.:

... the most enduring contribution of the United States has been as a political experiment. The principles that all are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights were translated into promises and, with time, encoded into law. These simple but powerful principles have been the foundation upon which we have built the institutions of a modern state that is accountable to its citizens and whose laws are both legitimated by and limited by an enduring commitment to respect the rights of individuals. It is our political system that enables our economy and undergirds our global influence. As President Obama wrote in the preface to the recently published National Security Strategy, "democracy does not merely represent our better angels, it stands in opposition to aggression and injustice, and our support for universal rights is both fundamental to American leadership and a source of our strength in the world."...

Somewhere, it mentions Arizona:

A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.

This is the sole reference to the Arizona Law -- a far cry from inviting the UN to send attack helicoptors to Arizona.

More to come, probably, but I have to stop for now and try to make a living.

"Obama Crotch Salute": Lies, Damned Lies and Right WIng Forwards

A recent posting on this blog:
"Mass Muslim Marriage in Gaza 450 Grooms Wed GIRLS Under Ten In Gaza"(http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2010/07/re-mass-muslim-marriage-in-gaza-450.html) illustrated how real news photos can be used to illustrate totally made up stories.

I use the expression "Right Wing Forward" to refer to a phenomenon I explained inMy Not-Really Right-Wing Mom and her Adventures in Email-Land
Of course not all misleading forwarded emails come from right wing, or whatever you would call it, sources.

NPR's "On the Media" radio magazine did a story on false rumor-mongering emails, and (bending over backwards to be "fair-minded", IMHO), they only mentioned a spate of email slurs against Sarah Palin. Such slurs were very much in the news just after the Palin nomination.  Still, if there is a well-oiled machine for putting out patently untrue Left Wing attack emails by the hundreds, please show me some evidence.

Re the use of the term "Right Wingers"-- to me, whoever is responsible these emails (not to mention the more extreme blogs) behave more like 60s/70s "Yippees", and they want to tear down existing institutions and traditions, so I am unable to call them conservatives. Frankly, conservativism is something we could use, but there are precious few real conservatives left -- certainly very few to be found in the Republican party.

Anyway, I wanted to show another example of the tactic used in a whole class of emails, of pairing real news photos with made-up stories to which too many people have the reaction"Pictures don't lie" and accept the whole story.

The most recent "Crotch Salute" email consisted of a picture and a one-paragraph preface:

At the Ft. Hood  Memorial Service.



The  Crotch Salute Returns.....



I'm sorry folks, but  is this the turkey that was elected President of our

country?  You  know, the United States of America ?  I do believe that

saluting the  flag goes with that, and also to honor the servicemen who  died, or

is he above that? Shower us all with flowery words and dazzle us  with B.S.

but actions speak louder.



This stinks!!!

and it claims to illustrate the myth that Obama pointedly fails to salute or cross his heart when the national anthem is played.

Supposedly, it shows Obama at the Fort Hood shooting memorial service, but it is the same picture used earlier to make the same claim about a Veterans' Day, 2009 ceremony.

In the previous use of the same picture, the text says:

Subject: Picture from last week's Veterans Day Ceremony
Check out this latest picture from Veterans Day Ceremony, 11/11/09, Arlington National Cemetery. It may be the National Anthem or the Flag being presented, but EVERYBODY in the picture is either saluting or has his hand over the HEART ... except ONE.
You form your own opinion.

The picture has been traced to newsreel footage of Obama standing with his hands folded in front of him (hence "crotch salute"), while as one can tell by viewing the full footage, "Hail to the Chief" is being played, and 3 officers on the stand are saluting and one civilian has his hand over his heart.

Feel free to dispute what is really going on in the picture, but I offer a couple of refutations of the claims in the emails:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_obama_non_salute.htm

and

http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/the-crotch-salute-returns/blog-312535/

"Sodahead", which seems to be if anything anti-Obama, had presented one variant of this email with no comment, implying agreement with its message, but tucked in among the many expressions of outrage at the "disrespectful" president, was this comment, presented in full:

I have to interject, not because I support BHO (Obama) , but because there are so many real things to be upset about. The left can ignore the REAL issues when false rumors are spread that have been discredited by snopes, urbanlegends, and ever other fact checking site (and backed up by actual video of the events). It gives them ammunition and could lend credence to libs who argue that those opposed to Obama are just extremists who will 1. lie to manipulate the public and 2. say and believe anything.It doesn't help the cause and makes us seem like loons.

The pictures were taken at the Wreath Laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Memorial Day, 2009. It was taken as Hail to the Chief was playing just as he took his place on the stage. They were saluting him, and whether we like it or not, it's not appropriate for
him to salute himself. You can verify this yourself if you fast forward to 11minutes into the ceremony: video of the whole ceremony is at http://www.sodahead.com/unite...

Again, whether we like it or not (and I think we all can agree that we SHOULD like it when the president behaves appropriately), he saluted at all the right points and put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. He did this both at the Memorial day ceremony AND at
the Ft Hood ceremony (video of that is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?... and on Fox).

We need to cross check and double check everything before we post. Although I believed it too when I first saw the photos, I realize that the more honest and forthright we are, the better our own moral standing when it comes to fighting the things that are truly wrong and devastating to our country.

In case you think I'm just making up a random defense, please watch the videos and search the internet for keywords: "ft hood" obama salute (you can add "hoax" or "snopes" to see related videos and to see photos of moments before and this one was taken.

Please don't flame me...I believe that the number one hope for America right now is that people are willing to research claims and discover the truth. I just want what they read from us to be 100% true, in contrast to the lies they may discover when they research things 'political leaders' have said or even what they hear from the mainstream media.

I've already sent a correction out to everyone I forwarded this to (and I forwarded the email I got to my entire mailing list!!). I think it'd be a good idea for us all to do that, because when they discover someone lied about the date and the events, some people will assume we're liars, will shut down, and won't listen to anything else.

If I thought this kind of thing was being turned out by an uncoordinated set of individuals misunderstanding the news, or it could be explained by the "telephone effect" -- each time you retell a story it is likely to get embellished until it bears no resemblance to the original -- I'd say it's sad but what can we do?
Granted, I believe many anti-liberal emails are indeed written by regular people exorcizing their outrage and displaying their cleverness -- e.g. Obama in a beret which is actually a giant acorn cap.  But I think it takes a different sort of person to turn out such cleverly constructed deceptions.
But I have just seen far too many such emails full of deliberate deceptions and lies which are uniformly well written with no spelling errors and the deceptions are very clever. Emails like this are not the work of amateurs.

Why Would a Right Wing Source Make Up a Phoney 'Charles Krauthammer' Speech? And What Might This Say About Right Wing Forwards?

I started this blog with far broader, and more exploratory and less argumentative aims than just trying to combat "Right Wing Forwards" and their misinformation. But I suspect their effect is far beyond what most people imagine, and there is a near-total lack of media focus on them.

I've recently noticed a subclass of the Right Wing Forward which may shed some light on them. Many of them seek, in one way or another, an air of legitimacy through putting outrages statements in the mouths of people who never said them. But one type of RMF makes up whole speeches or editorials by right wing celebrities. Why not let these people speak for themselves?

There is an email centered on a purported intimate speech by Charles Krauthammer (the original that I received is at http://www.panix.com/~hal/RWF/counterfeit-krauthammer.txt), which is shown to be made-up at:

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/k/Charles-Krauthammer.htm

Summary of the eRumor:
A forwarded email with comments by journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer about President Obama.
The Truth:
Charles Krauthammer has issued a statement about this eRumor saying it is "neither accurate nor authoritative."

He said the email is "somebody putting his own ideological stamp on and spin on my views."

Krauthammer said, "One giveaway of the superimposition of someone else's views on mine is the rather amusing use of phrases that I never use. To take just a few examples randomly: 'God forbid,' 'far left secular progressive,' 'this is the first president ever who has chastised our allies and appeased our enemies!' 'no country had ever spent themselves into prosperity,' and, the real doozy, 'states rights.'"

He said his views are clearly spelled out in a series of columns that can
be found on his web site.

My mother was rather impressed with the email. One clue to why someone faked a Krauthammer speech is one of her comments that she'd read some of his articles but "always found it a little confusing what side he was on".

So it seems like Krauthammer for people who don't read Krauthammer and wouldn't, because they'd find him too abstract or something. But they've heard of him as a great intellectual, and are primed to be impressed by his thoughts if they can understand them.


From a 2007 Christopher Hayes article in The Nation titled "The New Right Wing Smear Machine":

For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!" says Gerald DeSimone, a 74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I forwarded every one on, everyone would hate me.... I'm trying to cut back. I try to send no more than two or three a day. I must get thirty or forty a day."

I think part of the key may be the need for volume: what seems to be effective is such a constant high-volume flow of these messages that people will (1) come to rely on them as an alternative news source (for stories that the mainstream media is "suppressing", like that Obama is a Muslim), and (2) even to those who are somewhat skeptical, there is just so much, and it seems to be stuff that friends of friends of friends simply transposed from some source, that some of it is bound to be true.

The web site MyRightWingDad.blogspot.com has archived, by my count of some weeks ago, 1285 emails of this general type. I believe somebody has a need to crank out a lot of stuff to make this work, so all sorts of shortcuts are taken. It helps that they are mostly false, because if they were true, they wouldn't be "adding" to the general public knowledge. All sorts of articles, speechs, chopped scrambled, or just collections of thoughts that someone thinks a celebrity might have said -- Jokes about Obama that Jay Leno never actually made, have to be thrown into the mix. If Obama is accused of having committed some outrageous behavior (with "photographic proof") on Memorial Day 2009, the same picture and context (except some details) will reappear on Labor Day, 2010.

[to be continued??]

Comments on another "Proof" that Obama is a Muslim

Owing to my extreme lack of free time, I am posting an email to my "not really right-wing Mom", essentially unedited. The email that she found alarming follows my comments

It's hard to deal with on a point by point basis. To find any stats on how often wives accompany husband heads of state on state visits is difficult. I suspect they frequently don't. It's not clear what she'd do there -- probably be kept out of public sight as are all women in Saudi Arabia.

There are a lot of dubious "facts" that I find very difficult to check on, but why is it believable that Obama is a Muslim? If he was, there would be much more solid
evidence than this coming out. Why does a Muslim attend a Christian church for a decade or 2? Are there scads of stories of his refusing pork on campaign stops? No, and there are stories of him sampling exotic ham in a New York food shop. It seems to me you have to believe Obama was invented just to become the U.S. president and do all the terrible things some people imagine he will do. That sort of thing just doesn't work except in thriller novels and movies He's been in the U.S. since he was a young boy, but they can't find a couple of dozen credible people to say they saw him perform this or that Muslim activity? The very fact that they have to resort to such convoluted logic to "prove" he's a Muslim is practically a proof that he's not.

Overview of "Right Wing Forwards"

Am I nuts to see these right-wing anonymous emails as a major source of the insanity that permeates our politics today -- the labeling of anybody who'd consider a return to 40% tax brackets for multimillionaires as Marxists or at the least "dangerous ideologues" never mind the 90% rates still current in Eisenhower's day?

In the 1st Spring and Summer of the Obama administration, I started getting these things forwarded from my parents, who were always Republican, but never inclined to this sort of extremism, and my mother, at least seemed totally taken in by them, and this was exactly when "tea partiers" started going to congressman's "Town Hall" meetings to discuss the issues of health care, and drowning out any voice but their own.

My strong impression is that there is quite a consistency to a large number of these messages that indicates someone is churning them out regularly -- someone who absolutely knows he or they are spreading lies, and I am trying to come up with tactics for exposing it en masse, but nothing will happen unless first my intuition can be confirmed that this having a tremendous impact, and may well be a sine qua non of the Tea Party movement.

I think this tool is being wielded like one of those utterly brilliant on-the-cheap tactics, that when nobody suspects their existence can turn the world upside down -- like, say, getting suicidally inclined fanatics to learn how to pilot an airliner, taking over planes with a handful of men with boxknives -- too little metal to trip the old metal detectors, and you know the rest.

Yes, it's an extreme comparison, but frankly if Americans lose all ability to think clearly and govern this country sanely, the results can be (or have they already been?) far greater than the damage done by all the terrorists in the world.

I have a notion of how to test the hypothesis fairly cheaply (beyond my means, but cheap as polling studies go), which I've tried to share with various parties.

"Epistemology of Consensus"

This is from very early in my blogging

This is still very sketchy and evolving, but I'm putting it out just in case someone stumbles upon it and has a reaction.

I wanted to explore the phrase "Epistemology of Consensus". Has it inspired any serious philosophical current?
At the time I posted this, I found just seven google hits for the phrase.

Here is some exploration of the idea which may seem like wild ravings, but I post it in case someone stumbles across it who sees some kind of sense in it, especially if they will send me their thoughts.

I think as a practical matter, the way we decide what we think we know in our everyday lives is very much a matter of epistemology of consensus.
Also, another posting http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2010/07/atheism-agnosticism-and-lock-in-clause.html
suggests that in early stages of human development we relied on quite a PURE epistemology of consensus.

The Enlightenment helped spawn a "meme" (not, I think, a gratuitous use of that overused word) that is quite the opposite of Epistemology of Consensus. Now Enlightenment philosophers had good reason for attaching the consensus of their time, but this has become a sort of cliche, and frequently in my opinion, applied inappropriately -- the idea of the lonely genius who alone understands how it works -- surrounded by nattering idiots. This is often how the Glenn Becks of the world seem to see themselves (They think they're Galileos!!).

Daniel J. Boorstin however gave an accessible alternative view of the Enlightenment in The Discoverers, when he gave institutions, like first scientific journal, the Journal of the Royal Society, the salon movement, and other institutional constructs a central role.

Summary of the Seven Google Hits I Found (on 8/9/2010):
+ http://www.jstor.org/pss/2706493 (Human Nature and Truth as World Order Issues by Miriam Steiner).
+ {VERY LONG URL}
+ ASTRO.TEMPLE.EDU/~msolomon/cv.doc (Miriam Solomon CV):
+ www.springerlink.com/index/p445753171j4g376.pdf (Article or chapter:
"From New Technological Infrastructures to Curricular Activity ...
Contained in book Designs for Learning Environments of the Future
2010, 233-262, DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-88279-6_9 (Springer-Verlag).
+ http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&docId=26348438
(Excerpt from _Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays_,
Russell Hittinger 1992

If there exists a law of nature, it presumably exists
independent of our theories about it. But our theories about it
have so drastically restricted the meaning of 'nature' in human
actions to a political epistemology of consensus about basic good
or needs, that discourse about the role of the virtues, as comple-
tions rather than mere recognitions of needs, will have to find a
language other than that of modern natural law theory.

+ http://hidinginyourcupboard.blogspot.com/2008/03/dont-believe-everything-you-read-about.html
+ existenceisidentity.blogs.ie/category/philosophy/
(Uses "Epistemology of Consensus" as an epithet directed at Paul Krugman).


MY THOUGHTS: The hits probably represent several different people's independent coining of the phrase. Not surprisingly, it occurs as a term of abuse in
HTTP://existenceisidentity.blogs.ie/category/philosophy/ written by a Von Mises-ian pseudo-skeptic who is "skeptical" about the consensus of the scientific community, but swallows the "Oregon Petition" whole.
NOTE: I've been toying with this phrase pseudo-skeptic, as it seems so many people from the Glenn Beckians to new-Agers (and there are indeed New Age - Glenn Beckian - NRA members -- like some friends of ours who edit a "Metaphysical newsletter", where by metaphysics I think they mean what I would call "Weird shit").
Anyway, the pseudoskeptic, as I look at him, tends to be skeptical about "mainstream" sources of news, theories, or wisdom, while latching onto some collection of arbitrary sources with far less claim to rigor than the sources they are so skeptical about. (Not to say the mainstream is beyond criticism)