There is a lot of talk lately about misinformation.\u00a0 What is it?\u00a0 Who decided is?<\/p>\n
I hear people say facts and truth counter misinformation.\u00a0 But what if what you are reading\/hearing isn’t misinformation at all?<\/p>\n
Consider the following situation.<\/p>\n
You meet a person on the street with petition.\u00a0 They want to ban a dangerous chemical compound, they call it DHMO.\u00a0 You’ve never heard of it before (if you have, play along).\u00a0 You’re handed a paper, on it is a list of talking points about how dangerous it is:<\/p>\n
The list goes on, but you think wow, what a dangerous chemical.\u00a0 What has nothing been done about it before?\u00a0 You’re told, well, Trump\/Biden (insert your political affiliation here) refused to take any action as he didn’t deem it important.\u00a0 That and the ‘other’ party will block and fail to protect your health and the health of others.<\/p>\n
Yikes, you grumble wondering if there is anything you can do.<\/p>\n
Yes the person replies, sign our petition and let’s get on Congress to actually do something about this.\u00a0 You sign, walk away happy while thinking you did something good.<\/p>\n
But you got so caught up in the listed facts you failed to ask the most important question.\u00a0 What is DHMO?\u00a0 Its called Dihydrogen Monoxide, H2O, or more commonly called, water.\u00a0 You’ve been mislead on purpose.\u00a0 Everything they listed was truths, facts, but was it misinformation?<\/p>\n
Everything given are truths, facts you can back it up with science.\u00a0 So is it misinformation?<\/p>\n
The definition of misinformation is giving incorrect, or false, information.\u00a0 But there was a problem with the above situation, there was no false or incorrect information.\u00a0 You were deceived, yes, but not in the way you think.\u00a0 In reality, there is no misinformation in what happened, so we have to dive deeper.\u00a0 For there to be misinformation, there must be truth to counter its lie.\u00a0 What if the overall question has no truth or lie.\u00a0 Remember what the proposal was, to ban water.<\/p>\n
No one will admit that banning water is good for your health.\u00a0 But does that mean you cannot ban it, or try to?\u00a0 It brings up the question, is there a truth to this question.\u00a0 The definition of truth is the quality, or state, of being true.\u00a0 So, is there a truth to banning water.\u00a0 No, nothing says you cannot ban water, there is truth that you cannot do it.\u00a0 Some will argue this point saying you need water to survive, yes, but that’s not the question here.<\/p>\n
Again, no, and if someone did they would be looked upon as a fool, but there is no misinformation.<\/p>\n
So if we have no truth, or misinformation, what do we have?<\/p>\n
We’re left with an agenda by the person who handed you the petition.\u00a0 And here is where the deeper problem lies.\u00a0 That person handing you the information has their own biases, political views, beliefs, and they will use whatever facts, truths and science to make you think like they want you to think.<\/p>\n
The DHMO example was pretty simple.\u00a0 You’re going to find few, if any, people who would actually be willing to ban water.\u00a0 However the issues we deal with in other aspects of our life are much more complex that figuring out fact vs. fiction or truth vs misinformation is much harder.\u00a0 The lines become grey because the truths are not black and white.\u00a0 We rely on ‘experts’ to help us, but we must remember even an expert can twist facts to support their beliefs.<\/p>\n
We comfort ourselves with the thought that the ‘other’ news agency lies, but ours does not.\u00a0 Our news gives real facts.\u00a0 The politicians of the other party are bad, but mine are good and want what is best for the country.\u00a0 We’ve become so busy in our mundane lives we no longer have the time or energy to question.<\/p>\n
Its time to drive past the distracting facts and get to the root of what is being given to us.\u00a0 We need to relearn to ask the ‘five Ws’ again.\u00a0 Who? What? Where? When? Why? (And how?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a lot of talk lately about misinformation.\u00a0 What is it?\u00a0 Who decided is? I hear people say facts and truth counter misinformation.\u00a0 But what if what you are reading\/hearing isn’t misinformation at all? Consider the following situation. You meet a person on the street with petition.\u00a0 They want to ban a dangerous chemical […]
Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[54,2057,445,337,1034,992],"class_list":["post-2540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-uncategorized","tag-facts","tag-misinformation","tag-political","tag-politics-2","tag-science","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2540"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2548,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions\/2548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativeme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}