Tag: Truth

‘Quid Est Veritas?’ Biden Unveils Ministry of Truth

Jon Gabriel, Ed.
Jon Gabriel, Ed.
6123
 

The Biden administration is creating a group to counter “disinformation” and “misinformation.” It will be led by a woman who repeatedly pushed both.

The Department of Homeland Security appointed Nina Jankowicz to head the group. Her previous job title was “disinformation fellow” at the Wilson Center, a title that seems a bit on the nose. While at Wilson, she frequently offered false narratives about Hunter Biden’s incriminating “laptop from hell” and Trump’s involvement with Russia. One might even call it misinformation.

On October 20, 2020, the AP interviewed Jankowicz who insisted the laptop was a non-story:

Preview Open

Trust No One, Trust Not Even Yourself

OmegaPaladin
OmegaPaladin
92181668
 

We are facing a massive crisis of trust in America, with good reason.

After vast amounts of lying and gaslighting by the media and government, along with plenty of sketchy news sources, we are in the realm where even people on the same side don’t have any common sources.

Preview Open

Ukraine’s War Is Our War

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
7020
 

In case your blood pressure just took a leap, I’m not saying that we should be standing alongside Ukrainians fighting against the Russians. I don’t think anyone in their right mind thinks that’s a good idea. But as I watch their war unfold and analyze what is happening, more and more their war is beginning to sound more and more like the “war” we are experiencing in our own country. If you get past the cultural and structural differences comparing the relationship of Ukraine and Russia, and our own Communists who are finally admitting who they are, with patriots who love this country and its founders, the similarities are eerie.

The United States has been fighting a civil war, but we’ve only recognized that truth in recent years. The seeds for war were being planted by the political Left at all levels of our country right under our noses: government, education, and the corporate world. But we either ignored the signs or didn’t bother to notice them. Worse, we may have seen them, but in our own arrogance, we assumed those doing the work of the Left were nutcases and were no threat to the country.

We made the same assumption about Russia and Ukraine. We chose to ignore Putin’s actions and words, believing Putin was just reminiscing, and assumed that Ukraine’s difficulties were not our difficulties.

Preview Open

Quote of the Day: Truth

Seawriter
Seawriter
96841
 

“The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” – Eric Blair (George Orwell)

We certainly saw that illustrated this week in Canada. Lying has become reflexive there among those in government. Rather than engage in discussion with the Freedom Convoy, the Liberal politicians there instead choose to lie about it. They are violent.  When you push for examples you get explanations that they are not violent yet, but they will be. Or they have violent potential. To undercut support they claim – with negligible proof – the truckers are Nazis or Confederate sympathizers or White supremacists or (most risible of all) Trump supporters.

Preview Open

Silent No More

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
4071259
 

If you were beaten and bullied as a child, if you lived for nine years in constant fear of being tortured or killed, if you and your family fled your home, losing everything, and were forced to live in a tent, would you call yourself ‘lucky’?

I used to be somewhat ambivalent about the “celebration” of Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27; in one sense, I felt it was important to remind the world that six million Jews and six million other folks were killed by the Nazis and their enablers. The phrase, “Never Forget” is embedded in my psyche. On the other hand, I wonder if this particular memorial day serves as a devastating reminder to many people—survivors and their families–who want to forget that horrific time. And ironically, I also wonder if it is an irritant to those people who experience resentment or even hatred toward the Jews, exacerbating their negative perspective.

Still, Abraham Pizam is the man described at the beginning of this post by a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel. Today he is the founding dean of UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management. He survived the Holocaust and gave a presentation at the January 27 event about his own experience. It was the first time he had spoken publicly about the Holocaust. Here’s a report on part of what he shared:

Preview Open

Quote of the Day: Truth and Fiction

Seawriter
Seawriter
910609
 

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” — Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, Mark Twain

Ain’t it the truth. All you have to do is look at the news today. If in 1960 someone had written a science fiction novel about the 2020s with even half the things that are going on today his editors would have laughed at the draft when they encountered it on the slush pile. The world would lock down for a respiratory virus with a 1% fatality rate? Get outta here!  That will never happen. The FBI would be colluding with a major political party and the New York Times to subvert justice? That’s wacko conspiracy theory territory. Big Brother would not come from the government but rather from public sector technology companies? That idea’s kinda out there, isn’t it?

Preview Open

While We Were Sleeping

Lawst N. Thawt
Lawst N. Thawt
3114842
 

The alarming thing has nothing to do with health or elections or wars. The alarming thing is the control of lies. It would be nice if we could eliminate all the lies and have nothing but truth left, as that would clear a lot of things up. The problem and what makes it the alarming thing is, who gets to decide?

YouTube announced it is removing accounts it considers to be providing misinformation. It could be right, and maybe it is misinformation. If it is, it should be removed, or should it? I think it probably has a right under its terms of use. But should it remove information, even if it’s proven to be bad information?

Preview Open

Fracture and Power

Aaron Miller
Aaron Miller
4610
 

Bishop Barron argues that totalitarian governments of the past century resulted from lack of unity in truth. To the extent that people lose interest in objective truth and prefer isolated fantasies for their own pleasures or ease, government replaces truth as the unifying authority. Control of government becomes a contest of self-interested wills rather than a contest of arguments.  

Preview Open

Quote of the Day: ‘Whether It Is True or Not…’

She
She
399
 

It’s my fond hope (I’m using the word “fond” in the old-fashioned sense of “foolish,” because I really do know better, given the fondness–using it this time in the modern sense–of the mainstream media for memory-holing inconvenient facts), that those words, spoken by Joe Biden to the President of Afghanistan on July 23, 2021 as follows (emphasis mine):

Hey look, I want to make it clear that I am not a military man any more than you are, but I have been meeting with our Pentagon folks, and our national security people, as you have with ours and yours, and as you know and I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.

live to haunt Joe Biden for whatever remains of his sorry time in office, every time he opens his mouth.

Preview Open

Nobody Tells the Truth

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
3716
 

Why would anyone have faith in the government’s telling the truth? It’s clear that if the facts get in the way of their agenda, they aren’t interested in “complicating” their message. We always knew that government, and especially politicians, “mishandled” the truth, but we figured that behavior went with the job. After all, they desperately wanted to fool as many people as possible. But now the lying is so ubiquitous that the word “truth” has lost its meaning. I’d like to think the lying happens less on the Right, but I simply don’t know if that’s true anymore. Even more disappointing is that more than ever, the media has decided that its mission is to defend the Leftist agenda, so they are happy to collude in the lying.

The fact is, digging up the truth can be inconvenient: who wants to conduct an investigation, with the time and effort it will require, when you can just make it up? Not only is making that effort tiresome, but you might discover facts that simply don’t support your agenda. A much more “helpful” approach is to be creative; make up your own facts from innuendo when you report on the Right, and ignore or embellish your facts when they aren’t flattering to the Left.

The rest of us are left to try to determine the truth on our own. How are we supposed to do that? We’ve known that the media has slanted Left for a very long time, but it is now dominated by the Left’s agenda. How did the media become so committed to making up their own facts?

Preview Open

Group Writing: Fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
208
 

Do you remember the days when we had heroes like Superman, who were strong, powerful, unique, and inspiring? I didn’t read comic books, but I fell in love with Superman/Clark Kent from the first TV show, Adventures of Superman. The dates of the show are in dispute, but the dates 1952-1958 are generally accepted. And since I only remember the black and white shows, I may very well have seen re-runs.

Preview Open

Member Post

Aaron Miller
Aaron Miller
06
 

Happiness or emotional peace signals a harmony between the external and the internal. When what we witness or experience in circumstance conforms with who and how we are, then we are content.  The catch is that every one of us is imperfect. We are not exactly who we hope to be or who we think […]
Join Ricochet!

This is a members-only post on Ricochet's Member Feed. Want to read it? Join Ricochet’s community of conservatives and be part of the conversation. Join Ricochet for Free.

Truth Wars, an Update on This Week’s Skirmishes

Kelly D Johnston
Kelly D Johnston
88
 

“…deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.”

That quote above isn’t mine. It comes from the New York Times, and a story entitled, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College.”

I suspect you’ve heard the story by now, at least parts of it. It is about a young black student at Smith College who was eating a meal alone in a closed dorm when she was visited by an unarmed campus security officer and took offense. Turns out the dorm was closed and she wasn’t supposed to be there, but that didn’t stop accusations of racism to fly, or prevent Smith’s woke president from apologizing to her profusely for her victimhood and take all kinds of actions to make up for it. You should read the whole story. Smith College is considered one of America’s most elite women’s colleges with tuition, fees, and board adding up to more than $78,000 per year.

Preview Open

On the Why of Poetry

Internet's Hank
Internet's Hank
1610
 

A Sierpinski sieve. Thanks to the magic of Ricochet this one is even more fractal than it looks; there’s a sixth level of the pattern hidden in the image resizing.

Last time I wrote about poetry I took a scientist’s view of the matter. This time I’m starting in math. Clearly, I understand what all this poetry stuff is about. Do y’all remember what a fractal is? It’s a pattern that repeats itself all the way down.

Imagine, if you will, that those white triangles are islands in a sea of black. You have a continent in the middle, a couple isles nearby, and more and more islands and islets the further away you get from that central continent. It’s bad water for navigating in because there’s an infinite number of rocks, pebbles, and even smaller navigation hazards poking up out of the surface of the water. Maybe it’s more of a swamp than an ocean. Okay, now zoom in. Let’s say you’re small enough that you live on one of the islands. You can deduce the pattern; you know that just over thataways there’s a bigger island. Is there another, larger one beyond it, or are we looking at the top of the pattern?

Preview Open

In the Face of Victim Privilege, Truth Outs Itself at the University of Minnesota

She
She
1812
 

I don’t write all that many posts whose primary purpose is to link to another webpage and discuss, either in terms of stern outrage or drooling hagiography, what is being said elsewhere. (I suppose it’s because, in defiance of the old adage, I’d actually rather do my own copious and–I think–generally effective, barking.) On the rare occasions that I do link to such pages, it’s usually to celebrate good news (photographer in lockdown captures amazing photos of wild birds through kitchen window) or to have a robust belly-laugh at the antics of fools (Google “AOC” and start anywhere).

Once in a great while, though, one of the sites that I follow in a desultory fashion (no “push” notifications here), comes up with a gem that I think is worth sharing. Powerline threw up one such, just yesterday: Defund The Bastards.

It seems that a student at the University of Minnesota was stopped by university cops (so, not the actual Minnesota Police Department which, Lord knows, has had its own set of public relations disasters over the past few years), who were investigating an armed robbery on campus in the wee hours of February 1. The encounter with law enforcement was so horrific that this student felt compelled to tell his story on Instagram. Naturally, the brutality of the officers, and the suffering he experienced at their hands, plays a huge role in his recounting. A portion of his Instagram post follows:

Preview Open

Life Lessons from Tom Brady? Well…. Maybe

Front Seat Cat
Front Seat Cat
129
 

Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers just beat the mighty Green Bay Packers and are on their way to Super Bowl 55; coincidentally being played this year in Tampa Bay. The Buccaneers have won one Super Bowl. Tom Brady has taken his teams to the Super Bowl nine times and won six. We were New England Patriots fans for over twenty years while living in Boston. We’ve been in Florida since 2003 and never thought Tom Brady (or Gronkowski) would relocate their careers and homes to Florida. I asked my husband this evening: Is it because Tom Brady is such a good football player? He said he’s more than that, he’s an exceptional athlete, one of those rare people that is not only a team player but excels in leadership.

I thought about that comment because I had just gotten off the phone with my older cousin in Las Vegas, who asked me if I had watched the Biden Inauguration and the program after. I said no, and let her talk. She gushed about how she taped it and wept through the whole thing, “the young poet and her words and hand gestures reduced me to tears”, she said, “how Lady Gaga sang the National Anthem while gazing with so much love at our flag, then there was Jennifer Lopez and Tom Hanks.” She said they were cathartic tears after four years of hell. I knew my cousin and her husband were very liberal, and I thought she knew I was conservative, but I let her have her moment and stayed silent.

Preview Open

Social Construction

Keith Lowery
Keith Lowery
98
 

“As soon as someone says that truth is socially constructed, unless he is simply addled, he has already declared himself to be a liar, or at least to be in no great opposition to liars.”

“If a man claims to be a woman, which he can never be, and demands to be addressed as such, he is not merely asking for right etiquette. He is demanding that we enter his delusion, or his lie. It is not true. He is demanding that believers in God fall in worship of an idol. Some idols are hideous, like Moloch, and some are beautiful, like Dionysus. The Hebrew prophets did not care. They did not condemn the idols for their style. They condemned them for being false. We have names for people who accustom themselves to speaking what they know to be untrue. We call them scoundrels, or cowards.”

Preview Open

The Greatness of America, Part III: Fighting for this Country

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
137
 

In my first post, I demanded that the Left stop their actions which are intended to destroy this country . In my second post, a partial list of America’s contributions to the world followed, given that the Left is determined to shame us and discredit those contributions with lies and the re-writing of our history. In this final post, I will declare what actions I am taking to call out the devastation that the Left plans for this country and steps I will take to strengthen those who are being left behind.

I will not engage in your (the Left’s) rhetoric. It’s become abundantly clear that you are not interested in learning the error of your ways; you much prefer to operate in a self-styled echo chamber. Fortunately, for those who oppose you, we will watch you busy yourselves in encouraging each other, so that you are unlikely to notice our ignoring your declarations. You will be speaking only to your co-conspirators, not to those of us who realize the destruction you are trying to wreak. Eventually you may notice that when you look around you, no one but your friends are with you. The rest of us are aligning with each other to save this country.

Preview Open