Category: The Present

Weasel Words

A key strategy for identifying ‘fake’ or misleading ‘news’ is to look for weasel words. I put fake and news into quotation marks because weasel word writing is common in the most prestigious news sources, especially in the op-ed columns.

Wikipedia has a good list of weasel phrases to watch out for.

Examples
“A growing body of evidence…”[13] (Where is the raw data for your review?)
“People say…” (Which people? How do they know?)
“It has been claimed that…” (By whom, where, when?)
“Critics claim…” (Which critics?)
“Clearly…” (As if the premise is undeniably true)
“It stands to reason that…” (Again, as if the premise is undeniably true—see “Clearly” above)
“Questions have been raised…” (Implies a fatal flaw has been discovered)
“I heard that…” (Who told you? Is the source reliable?)
“There is evidence that…” (What evidence? Is the source reliable?)
“Experience shows that…” (Whose experience? What was the experience? How does it demonstrate this?)
“the person may have…” (And the person may not have.)
“It has been mentioned that…” (Who are these mentioners? Can they be trusted?)
“Popular wisdom has it that…” (Is popular wisdom a test of truth?)
“Commonsense has it/insists that…” (The common sense of whom? Who says so? See “Popular wisdom” above, and “It is known that” below)
“It is known that…” (By whom and by what method is it known?)
“It is recommended that…” (Who is recommending it? Upon what authority?)
“Officially known as…” (By whom, where, when, and who says so?)
“It turns out that…” (How does it turn out?[e 1])
“It was noted that…” (By whom, why, when?)
“Nobody else’s product is better than ours.” (What is the evidence of this?)
“Our product is regarded as…” (Regarded by whom?)
“Award-winning” (What type of award, when was it given and by whom?)
“A recent study at a leading university…” (How recent is your study? At what university?)
“(The phenomenon) came to be seen as…” (by whom?)
“Up to sixty percent…” (so, 59%? 50%? 10%?)
“More than seventy percent…” (How many more? 70.01%? 80%? 90%?)
“The vast majority…” (75%? 85% 99%? How many?)

When writing, be specific. When reading, look for writers who use specific language and avoid generalizations and vague pronouncements.

Headlines are part of our news problem

No one has time to read every article. We read synopses, abstracts, tweets, and headlines to get the gist of what’s happening. To save time and space we take a pernicious short-cut. We say Republicans when we mean many or some Republicans. We say ‘the left’ when we mean many, most, or some on the left. We say women when we mean some-but-not-all women.

This is the fallacy of composition.

Description: Inferring that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. This is the opposite of the fallacy of division.

Logical Form:

A is part of B
A has property X
Therefore, B has property X.

Until we can be more specific and accurate with our civic language we will never cross the communication divide. If I want to get a better understanding of conservative arguments, I reject them immediately when they that something is true of ‘the left’ or liberals, that I do not believe.

Civic communication, on a broad scale, will improve if we, and the headline writers of the world, follow the simple maxim — Be Specific.

J. G. Ballard Sees the Future

From his introduction to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí.

“The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational.”

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.” -Interview in Metaphors No. 7, (1983).

“The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.” -As quoted in J. G. Ballard Quotes : Does The Future Have A Future? (2004) edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan.”

Of Blogs Past Part Six: Hillsborough River Chronicle

UPDATE: It turns out I never felt comfortable with the title Hillsborough River Chronicle, so just before the end of 2016 I changed the title to Balderdash and the Moon. The new title, I think, ties in better with the titles of previous blogs.

***

Blogging helps me cope. I don’t know how to respond to our new political reality, so I’ve decided to take up blogging again.

If you read the series Of Blogs Past you may note I have a fondness for obscure terms and neologisms: Intelligencer, Re/Creating, patahistory, abderitic. I decided I wanted a title for this blog that didn’t come with an asterisk and an explanation. I also wanted something rooted in the real, natural world. The inspiration for the title Hillsborough River Chronicle lies with Warren Ellis’s opening to his newsletter which begins with some variation of “Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.” I like that he’s writing from a geographical landmark rather than a city or country. I want this title to serve as a reminder to stay grounded in the natural world as the mediated world churns up humanity’s psychopathologies.

The Hillsborough River Chronicle will cover whatever I want. I live in Tampa, so I’ll be blogging occasionally about local issues. I continue to work on my writing craft, so sometimes I’ll post about stories, rejections, maybe even a story or two. I like to share stuff I find on the Internet, so sometimes I’ll point to those pages. I’ll also be posting about what I’m reading or watching or eating or listening to. Sometimes there will be long silences because I want to prioritize my fiction writing over my blog writing. It will be, in effect, a combination of all the interests of blogs I’ve written over the last decade and a half. I hope that it is part entertainment, part educational, part practical, and heavily spiced with weirdness.

Welcome to the Hillsborough River Chronicle.