This Precious Life

There are many political blogs over here which generate heated comments. As a result, governments around the world have become quite concerned that these type of blogs may cause them to fall from power. They are wondering what they can do to keep political blogs under control and among the ways they have devised of is to force a blanket ban or get all bloggers registered so that each can be held accountable for one’s own words.

Personally, I do feel concerned because there are times when lies are being spread and we don’t even know it. I don’t think bloggers are immune from falling into the trap of lying and I think, thinking citizens should make effort to learn how to discern if what they read is truth or fallacy. It is hard to admit that we may be fooled at times, but if you know the myriad of ways you can be fooled, you wouldn’t be all that surprised. Here are some ways that I’ve thought of that we could end up believing a lie.

• The article is published in a national newspaper and most of the pages of the paper is filled with proven news
• The article is published on a citizen’s blog and the blogger seem very distressed by what he claimed to have experienced
• The article is published on an opposition politician’s blog and the politician have a proven track record of sacrificing for the cause
• The article is published on the internet with supposed photographic evidence

There are more ways, of course. As I pondered over these things, how so many of us have been made into fools, I decided to search around and found this book, The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Six Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning, which a lot of people have said is very good.

Unfortunately, the book is not available locally so all I could do is subscribe to the Free Newsletter. This would mark the first time in my life that I think a newsletter should be published more often. The things I have learned from the newsletter is valuable. They include the many ways people use to convince me of things such as propaganda techniques, basic fallacy, genetic fallacy, statistical fallacy and more. For example, I learned that a Transfer is a propaganda technique when someone tries to transfer good feelings about something else to himself. The advertisement below uses this technique, it makes you laugh so that you will begin to think that it is fun to go to the particular language school.

If you were to buy this book, you will learn more that you can learn from the free newsletter. There are 50 pages in the book that’s dedicated to propaganda techniques alone. However, the free newsletter is still valuable as it stirs your thoughts at unexpected times as it arrives into your inbox.
Would you like to know what is the difference between a fact, an inference and an opinion?
Would you like to know what is a red herring, an ad hominem, a tu quoque, an appeal to authority, an appeal to people, strawman, exigency, argumentum ad populum, innuendo, assumptions, equivocation, loaded question, part-to-whole, whole-to-part, either-or, generalization, analogy, post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc, proof-by-lack-of-evidence, bandwagon, exigency, repetition, snob appeal, appeal to tradition and appeal to hi-tech? Then get The Fallacy Detective.

We really ought to prepare our minds so that no one can take us for a ride. The newsletter from two weeks ago taught me what is the difference between a discussion, a disagreement, an argument and a fight and when is the appropriate time for them. I value the article very much.

The Fallacy Detective is written by two brothers, Nathaniel and Hans Bluedorn from the US. You can subscribe to the free Fallacy Detective newsletter here. I would also like to recommend Hans’ enjoyable Hi, I’m Kevin blog.

Related posts:

1. Don’t Shut Away Truth Think of the poorest country in the world. Which did...
2. Boy Chained to Lamp Post I’ve been wondering what to blog about for days when...