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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horrorcore] | [TOKENS: 2285] |
Contents Horrorcore Horrorcore (also known as shock rap, psycho rap, horror hip hop, horror rap, death hip hop, death rap, or murder rap) is a subgenre of hip hop music based on horror-themed and often darkly transgressive lyrical content and imagery. Its origins derived from certain hardcore hip hop and gangsta rap artists, such as the Geto Boys, who began to incorporate supernatural, the occult, and psychological horror themes into their lyrics. Other early originators and influences on the genre include Gravediggaz, Flatlinerz, Three 6 Mafia, Brotha Lynch Hung, Tech N9ne, Necro, and Kool Keith. Unlike most hardcore hip hop and gangster rap artists, horrorcore artists often push the violent content and imagery in their lyrics beyond the realm of realistic urban violence, to the point where the violent lyrics become gruesome, ghoulish, unsettling, or inspired by slasher films or splatter films. While exaggerated violence and the supernatural are common in horrorcore, the genre also frequently presents more realistic yet still disturbing portrayals of mental illness and drug abuse. Some horrorcore artists eschew supernatural themes or exaggerated violence in favor of more subtle and dark psychological horror imagery and lyrics. Horrorcore has incited controversy, with some members of the law enforcement community asserting that the genre incites crime. Fans and artists have been blamed for numerous high-profile instances of violent criminal activity, including the Columbine High School massacre, the Farmville murders, murders of law enforcement officers, and gang activity. Characteristics Horrorcore defines a style of hip hop music that focuses primarily on dark, violent, gothic, transgressive, macabre and/or horror-influenced topics such as death, psychosis, psychological horror, mental illness, satanism, self-harm, cannibalism, mutilation, suicide, murder, torture, drug abuse, and supernatural or occult themes. The lyrics are often inspired by horror movies and are performed over moody, hardcore beats. According to rapper Mars, "If you take Stephen King or Wes Craven and you throw them on a rap beat, that's who I am". Horrorcore was described by Entertainment Weekly in 1995 as a "blend of hardcore rap and bloodthirsty metal". The lyrical content of horrorcore is sometimes described as being similar to that of death metal, and some have referred to the genre as "death rap". Horrorcore artists often feature dark imagery in their music videos and base musical elements of songs upon horror film scores. History LA Weekly listed Jimmy Spicer's 1980 single "Adventures of Super Rhyme" as the first example of "proto-horrorcore", due to a lengthy segment of the song in which Spicer recounts his experience of meeting Dracula. The group Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde specialized in horror-themed music. Dana Dane's song "Nightmares" related a frightening narrative. Since 1986, Ganxsta N.I.P. has performed horror-themed lyrics that he has described as "Psycho Rap", but he was not commonly considered to be horrorcore until the term came into mainstream prominence. Ganxsta N.I.P. has written lyrics for other groups, including Geto Boys, who were also an influence on the early horrorcore sound. In 1988, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince released "A Nightmare on My Street", which described an encounter with Freddy Krueger, and the Fat Boys recorded the similarly themed "Are You Ready for Freddy" for the film A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and its soundtrack. 1988 is also the year Insane Poetry (at the time called His Majesti) released "Armed & Dangerous", followed by their debut single as Insane Poetry, "Twelve Strokes Till Midnight", one of the first examples of music specifically made to be horrorcore. The following year saw the release of Boomin' Words from Hell, the debut album of Detroit-based rapper Esham, who would become particularly influential on Midwest horrorcore (though he rejects the term, preferring "acid rap"). Although Kool Keith claimed to have "invented horrorcore", the first use of the term appeared on the group KMC's 1991 album Three Men With the Power of Ten. Nonetheless, Kool Keith brought significant attention to horror-influenced hip hop with his lyrical content as a part of the Ultramagnetic MC's and his 1996 debut solo album, Dr. Octagonecologyst. In 2024, writers at Complex described Nas' 1994, debut studio album, Illmatic, as "shocking, borderline horrorcore (before horrorcore was a genre)". The album showcased Nas's early-'90s style of rap and was credited with generating significant hype for the MC. The Geto Boys' debut album, Making Trouble, contained the dark and violent horror-influenced track "Assassins", which was cited by Violent J of the horrorcore group Insane Clown Posse in his book Behind the Paint as the first recorded horrorcore song. He writes that the Geto Boys continued to pioneer the style with their second release, Grip It! On That Other Level, with songs such as "Mind of a Lunatic" and "Trigga-Happy Nigga". The Geto Boys' 1991 album, We Can't Be Stopped, was also influential on the horrorcore genre and contained themes of paranoia, depression, and psychological horror, especially in the track "Chuckie", and "Mind Playing Tricks on Me". While rappers in the underground scene continued to release horrorcore music, including Big L, Insane Poetry, and Insane Clown Posse, the mid-1990s brought an attempted mainstream crossover of the genre. According to the book Icons of Hip Hop, horrorcore gained mainstream prominence in 1994 with the release of Flatlinerz' U.S.A. (Under Satan's Authority) and Gravediggaz' 6 Feet Deep (released overseas as Niggamortis). The Flatlinerz and Gravediggaz, along with the Geto Boys, Insane Clown Posse and Kool Keith, remain the most important artists in the development of horrorcore as a specific genre. In 1995, an independent horror film called The Fear was released with a soundtrack consisting entirely of horrorcore songs, including Insane Clown Posse's biggest radio hit, "Dead Body Man" and a title track ("The Fear (Morty's Theme)") by Esham. 1995 also saw the release of Three 6 Mafia's debut album, Mystic Stylez, which touched on heavy drug use, ritualistic sex, mass murder, torture, and Luciferianism. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's E. 1999 Eternal, released in the same year, contains tales of the occult throughout, specifically on songs such as "Mr. Ouija 2", "Mo' Murda", "East 1999", and "Da Introduction". Tension would soon rise between Bone Thugs and Three 6 over their presumed similarities in style and use of dark imagery. In 2009, dark music-themed website Fangoria named Tech N9ne's 2001 album Anghellic as an iconic and influential album to the genre, the artist, and hip-hop as a whole. Horrorcore is generally not popular with mainstream audiences, though in some cities, like Detroit, it is the dominant style of hip-hop, with Detroit-based performers such as Insane Clown Posse and Eminem, as well as Twiztid, having been commercially successful throughout the US. Horrorcore has thrived in Internet culture. Every Halloween since 2003, horrorcore artists worldwide have gotten together online and released a free compilation titled Devilz Nite. According to the January 2004 BBC documentary Underground USA, the subgenre "has a massive following across the US" and "is spreading to Europe". Rolling Stone in 2007 referred to it as a short-lived trend that generated "more shlock than shock". In 2019, experimental trio clipping. released There Existed an Addiction to Blood, described as a "transmutation of horrorcore". Controversy In September 1996, Joseph Edward "Bubba" Gallegos, an 18-year-old from Bayfield, Colorado, killed his roommates after ingesting methamphetamine and listening repeatedly to horrorcore rapper Brotha Lynch Hung's song "Locc 2 da Brain". Brotha Lynch Hung is considered a horrorcore pioneer and even created his own horrorcore sub-category called "Ripgut" which is known for even more graphic lyrics dealing with hardcore gore, torture, and cannibalism. After attempting to kill his ex-girlfriend and taking two other students hostage, Gallegos was in turn killed by police. Gallegos was said to be a massive fan of Brotha Lynch Hung and his minister suggested that the music played a role in the killings, although he provided no evidence to back up that claim. Similar claims have been made about other violent acts and music, although there is "wide disagreement among experts over what effect—if any—music with violent content has on listeners". In 1999, horrorcore group Insane Clown Posse (ICP) was considered a potential influence on school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. ICP responded that if the shooters had been "Juggalos" (fans of ICP), they would have "gotten the whole damn school". However, Brooks Brown, the best friend of Dylan Klebold and a friend of both the shooters, was a Juggalo and had introduced Klebold to Insane Clown Posse's music. Some police departments in the United States claim that Juggalo gangs have been linked to violent crimes. Arizona Department of Public Safety Detective Michelle Vasey has expressed concern at what she describes as the Juggalos' high potential for violence, stating, "The weapons, they prefer, obviously, hatchets ... We've got battle-axes, we've got machetes, anything that can make the most violent, gruesome wound", and, "Some of the homicides we're seeing with these guys are pretty nasty, gruesome, disgusting homicides, where they don't care who's around, what's around, they're just out to kill anybody". A 2017 Denver Police Department guide claimed that even Juggalos who are not affiliated with a gang are prone to commit "murder, shootings, kidnapping, rape, necrophilia, cannibalism, assault, and arson", and that "such acts give a Juggalo a sense of pride and street credit amongst peers", although it acknowledged that the author had not "been able to find a significant source of collected data on the Juggalos" to substantiate those claims. Allegedly horrorcore-related criminal activity has, in rare cases, even included ad-hoc domestic terrorism, such as when a Juggalo-led terrorist cell calling itself the Black Snake Militia attempted to raid a National Guard armory in 2012. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine] | [TOKENS: 3477] |
Contents Pulp magazine Pulp magazines, also called "the pulps", were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The word pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine was 128 pages, 7 by 10 in (18 by 25 cm), and 0.5 in (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and some of the short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid, exploitative, and sensational subject matter, even though this was but a small part of what existed in the pulps. Digest magazines and men's adventure magazines were incorrectly regarded as pulps, though they have different editorial and production standards and are instead replacements. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as Flash Gordon, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective. The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature. Successors of pulps include paperback books, such as hardboiled detective stories and erotic fiction. History Before pulp magazines, Newgate novels (1840s-1860s) fictionalized the exploits of real-life criminals. Later, British sensation novels gained peak popularity in the 1860s-1870s. Sensation novels focused on shocking stories that reflected modern-day anxieties, and were the direct precursors of pulp fiction. The first "pulp" was Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy magazine of 1896, with about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue, on pulp paper with untrimmed edges, and no illustrations, even on the cover. The steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels; prior to Munsey, however, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to young working-class people. In six years, Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million. Street & Smith, a dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, was next on the market. Seeing Argosy's success, they launched The Popular Magazine in 1903, which they billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of its being two pages (the interior sides of the front and back cover) longer than Argosy. Due to differences in page layout however, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy. The Popular Magazine did introduce color covers to pulp publishing, and the magazine began to take off when in 1905 the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha (1905), by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novel She (1887). Haggard's Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt. In 1907, the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue; along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy. Street and Smith's next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, with each magazine focusing on a particular genre, such as detective stories, romance, etc. At their peak of popularity in the 1920s–1940s, the most successful pulps sold up to one million copies per issue. In 1934, Frank Gruber said there were some 150 pulp titles. The most successful pulp magazines were Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book and Short Stories, collectively described by some pulp historians as "The Big Four". Among the best-known other titles of this period were Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Love Story Magazine, Marvel Tales, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown, Weird Tales and Western Story Magazine. During the economic hardships of the Great Depression, pulps provided affordable content to the masses, and were one of the primary forms of entertainment, along with film and radio. Although pulp magazines were primarily an American phenomenon, there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between the Edwardian era and World War II. Notable UK pulps included The Pall Mall Magazine, The Novel Magazine, Cassell's Magazine, The Story-Teller, The Sovereign Magazine, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story. The German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten had a similar format to American pulp magazines, in that it was printed on rough pulp paper and heavily illustrated. During the Second World War, paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Following the model of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, some magazines began to switch to digest size: smaller, sometimes thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks. Competition from comic-books and paperback novels further eroded the pulps' market share, but it has been suggested the widespread expansion of television also drew away the readership of the pulps. In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, men's adventure magazines also began to draw some former pulp readers. The 1957 liquidation of the American News Company, then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the "pulp era"; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation, including Black Mask, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Weird Tales, were defunct (though some of those titles have been revived in various formats in the decades since). Almost all of the few remaining former pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines, now in formats similar to "digest size", such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, though the most durable revival of Weird Tales began in pulp format, though published on good-quality paper. The old format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan (over 3,000 issues as of 2019).[citation needed] Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; Harry Steeger of Popular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month. Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly. The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories.[citation needed] Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers trying to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces. Some ex-pulp writers like Hugh B. Cave and Robert Leslie Bellem had moved on to writing for television by the 1950s.[citation needed] The last pulp to cease publication was Ranch Romances in 1971. Genres Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction, including, but not limited to: The American Old West was a mainstay genre of early turn of the 20th-century novels as well as later pulp magazines, and lasted longest of all the traditional pulps. In many ways, the later men's adventure ("the sweats") was the replacement of pulps.[citation needed] Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Black Mask. Notable original characters While the majority of pulp magazines were anthology titles featuring many different authors, characters and settings, some of the most enduring magazines were those that featured a single recurring character. These were often referred to as "hero pulps" because the recurring character was almost always a larger-than-life hero in the mold of Doc Savage or The Shadow. Popular pulp characters that headlined in their own magazines: Popular pulp characters who appeared in anthology titles such as All-Story or Weird Tales: Illustrators Pulp covers were printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper. They were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines. The early pulp magazines could boast covers by some distinguished American artists; The Popular Magazine had covers by N. C. Wyeth, and Edgar Franklin Wittmack contributed cover art to Argosy and Short Stories. Later, many artists specialized in creating covers mainly for the pulps; a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Walter M. Baumhofer, Earle K. Bergey, Margaret Brundage, Edd Cartier, Virgil Finlay, Frank R. Paul, Norman Saunders, Emmett Watson, Nick Eggenhofer, (who specialized in Western illustrations), Hugh J. Ward, George Rozen, and Rudolph Belarski. Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.[citation needed] Later pulps began to feature interior illustrations, depicting elements of the stories. The drawings were printed in black ink on the same cream-colored paper used for the text, and had to use specific techniques to avoid blotting on the coarse texture of the cheap pulp. Thus, fine lines and heavy detail were usually not an option. Shading was by crosshatching or pointillism, and even that had to be limited and coarse. Usually the art was black lines on the paper's background, but Finlay and a few others did some work that was primarily white lines against large dark areas.[citation needed] Authors and editors Another way pulps kept costs down was by paying authors less than other markets; thus many eminent authors started out in the pulps before they were successful enough to sell to better-paying markets, and similarly, well-known authors whose careers were slumping or who wanted a few quick dollars could bolster their income with sales to pulps. Additionally, some of the earlier pulps solicited stories from amateurs who were quite happy to see their words in print and could thus be paid token amounts. There were also career pulp writers, capable of turning out huge amounts of prose on a steady basis, often with the aid of dictation to stenographers, machines or typists. Before he became a novelist, Upton Sinclair was turning out at least 8,000 words per day seven days a week for the pulps, keeping two stenographers fully employed.[citation needed] Pulps would often have their authors use multiple pen names so that they could use multiple stories by the same person in one issue, or use a given author's stories in three or more successive issues, while still appearing to have varied content. One advantage pulps provided to authors was that they paid upon acceptance for material instead of on publication. Since a story might be accepted months or even years before publication, to a working writer this was a crucial difference in cash flow.[citation needed] Some pulp editors became known for cultivating good fiction and interesting features in their magazines. Preeminent pulp magazine editors included Arthur Sullivant Hoffman (Adventure), Robert H. Davis (All-Story Weekly), Harry E. Maule (Short Stories), Donald Kennicott (Blue Book), Joseph Shaw (Black Mask), Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales, Oriental Stories), John W. Campbell (Astounding Science Fiction, Unknown) and Daisy Bacon (Love Story Magazine, Detective Story Magazine). Authors featured Well-known authors who wrote for pulps include: Sinclair Lewis, first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, worked as an editor for Adventure, writing filler paragraphs (brief facts or amusing anecdotes designed to fill small gaps in page layout), advertising copy and a few stories. Publishers Legacy The term pulp fiction is often used for mass market paperbacks since the 1950s. The Browne Popular Culture Library News noted: Many of the paperback houses that contributed to the decline of the genre–Ace, Dell, Avon, among others–were actually started by pulp magazine publishers. They had the presses, the expertise, and the newsstand distribution networks which made the success of the mass-market paperback possible. These pulp-oriented paperback houses mined the old magazines for reprints. This kept pulp literature, if not pulp magazines, alive. The Return of the Continental Op reprints material first published in Black Mask; Five Sinister Characters contains stories first published in Dime Detective; and The Pocket Book of Science Fiction collects material from Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories. But note that mass market paperbacks are not pulps. In 1991, The Pulpster debuted at that year's Pulpcon, the annual pulp magazine convention that had begun in 1972. The magazine, devoted to the history and legacy of the pulp magazines, has been published each year since. It now appears in connection with PulpFest, the summer pulp convention that grew out of and replaced Pulpcon. The Pulpster was originally edited by Tony Davis and is currently edited by William Lampkin, who also runs the website ThePulp.Net. Contributors have included Don Hutchison, Robert Sampson, Will Murray, Al Tonik, Nick Carr, Mike Resnick, Hugh B. Cave, Joseph Wrzos, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Chet Williamson, and many others. In 1992, Rich W. Harvey came out with a magazine called Pulp Adventures reprinting old classics. It came out regularly until 2001, and then started up again in 2014. In 1994, Quentin Tarantino directed the film Pulp Fiction. The working title of the film was Black Mask, in homage to the pulp magazine of that name, and it embodied the seedy, violent, often crime-related spirit found in pulp magazines. In 1997 C. Cazadessus Jr. launched Pulpdom, a continuation of his Hugo Award-winning ERB-dom which began in 1960. It ran for 75 issues and featured articles about the content and selected fiction from the pulps. It became Pulpdom Online in 2013 and continues quarterly publication. After 2000, several small independent publishers released magazines which published short fiction, either short stories or novel-length presentations, in the tradition of the pulp magazines of the early 20th century. These included Blood 'N Thunder, High Adventure and a short-lived magazine which revived the title Argosy. These specialist publications, printed in limited press runs, were pointedly not printed on the brittle, high-acid wood pulp paper of the old publications and were not mass market publications targeted at a wide audience. In 2004, Lost Continent Library published Secret of the Amazon Queen by E.A. Guest, their first contribution to a "New Pulp Era", featuring the hallmarks of pulp fiction for contemporary mature readers: violence, horror and sex. E.A. Guest was likened to a blend of pulp era icon Talbot Mundy and Stephen King by real-life explorer David Hatcher Childress.[citation needed] In 2002, the tenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly was guest edited by Michael Chabon. Published as McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, it is a collection of "pulp fiction" stories written by such current well-known authors as Stephen King, Nick Hornby, Aimee Bender, and Dave Eggers. Explaining his vision for the project, Chabon wrote in the introduction, "I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be, and I hope that if nothing else, this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but fundamental truth." The Scottish publisher DC Thomson publishes "My Weekly Compact Novel" every week. It is literally a pulp novel, though it does not fall into the hard-edged genre most associated with pulp fiction.[citation needed] From 2006 through 2019, Anthony Tollin's imprint Sanctum Books has reprinted all 182 Doc Savage pulp novels, all 24 of Paul Ernst's Avenger novels, the 14 Whisperer novels from the original pulp series and all but three novels of the entire run of The Shadow (most of his publications featuring two novels in one book). See also References Sources Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Misinformation] | [TOKENS: 226] |
Contents Template:Misinformation This template's initial visibility currently defaults to expanded, meaning that it is fully visible. To change this template's initial visibility, the |state= parameter may be used: Usage This template is used to tag articles related to disinformation, misinformation, and related topics. It maps what Wikipedia “knows” about these topics, to improve findability and identify gaps, and to help people understand, counter, and deal with these issues. The "Core content" section is intended for high-quality articles that are likely to receive high traffic and be looked for by many people. Articles in that section may also be listed in other sections of the template. The "WikiProjects" section at the end lists WikiProjects that specifically focus on countering disinformation in specific areas. If adding articles, check to see if the template includes a link to a higher level Wikipedia page (e.g. List of disinformation attacks by country) where it would be more appropriate to add your link, rather than listing individual cases of misinformation. Please also generally distinguish from the topics covered by Template:Fraud or Template:Media manipulation. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop] | [TOKENS: 512] |
Contents Gish gallop The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality. The term "Gish gallop" was coined in 1994 by the anthropologist Eugenie Scott who named it after the creationist Duane Gish, whom she described as the technique's "most avid practitioner".[non-primary source needed] Strategy During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics. The difference in effort between making claims and refuting them is known as Brandolini's law or informally "the bullshit asymmetry principle". Another example is firehose of falsehoods. Countering the Gish gallop The journalist Mehdi Hasan suggests using three steps to beat the Gish gallop: Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than a free-form one. If a debater is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique may be countered by pre-empting and refuting the opponent's commonly used arguments before the opponent has an opportunity to launch into the Gish gallop. Reverse Gish gallop A related technique is the reverse Gish gallop, where the galloper listens to the opponent's rebuttal; finds an error, approximation, or omission; then attacks that as a way to attack the opponent's credibility. For example, if the correct value is 43 and the opponent says "40" instead of "about 40", then the galloper can use that to suggest the opponent is sloppy and their other arguments are full of errors. Another name suggested for this is weaponized pedantry. See also References General and cited sources |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance] | [TOKENS: 946] |
Contents False balance False balance, known colloquially as bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a cause of misinformation. False balance is a bias which often stems from an attempt to avoid bias and gives unsupported or dubious positions an illusion of respectability. It creates a public perception that some issues are scientifically contentious, although in reality they are not, therefore creating doubt about the scientific state of research. This can be exploited by interest groups such as corporations like the fossil fuel industry or the tobacco industry, or ideologically motivated activists such as vaccination opponents or creationists. False balance can be the result of viewpoint discrimination or political bias. Political bias can be evaluated relative to the median voter for particular topics. Description and origin False balance emerges from the ideal of journalistic objectivity, where factual news is presented in a way that allows the reader to make determinations about how to interpret the facts, and interpretations or arguments around those facts are left to the opinion pages. Because many newsworthy events have two or more opposing camps making competing claims, news media are responsible for reporting all (credible or reasonable) opposing positions, along with verified facts that may support one or the other side of an issue. At one time, when false balance was prevalent, news media sometimes reported all positions as though they were equally credible, even though the facts clearly contradicted a position, or there was a substantial consensus on one side of an issue, and only a fringe or nascent theory supporting the other side. In the 2020s, in contrast to prior decades, most media are willing to advocate for a particular viewpoint which they regarded as better evidenced. For instance, claims that the Earth is not warming are regularly referred to in news (vs. only editorials) as "denial", "misleading", or "debunked". Prior to this shift, media would sometimes list all positions without clarifying that one position is known or generally agreed to be false. Unlike most other media biases, false balance may result from an attempt to avoid bias; producers and editors may consider treating competing viewpoints fairly—in proportion to their actual merits and significance—as equivalent to treating them equally, giving them equal time to present their views, even though one of the viewpoints may be overwhelmingly dominant. Media would then present two opposing viewpoints on an issue as equally credible, or present a major issue on one side of a debate as having the same weight as a minor one on the other. False balance can also originate from other motives such as sensationalism, where producers and editors may feel that a story portrayed as a contentious debate would be more commercially successful than a more accurate (or widely-agreed) account of the issue. Science journalist Dirk Steffens mocked the practice as comparable to inviting a flat Earther to debate with an astrophysicist over the shape of the Earth, as if the truth could be found somewhere in the middle. Liz Spayd of The New York Times wrote: "The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking." Examples Examples of false balance in reporting on science issues include the topics of human-caused climate change versus natural climate variability, the health effects of tobacco, the disproven relation between thiomersal and autism, alleged negative side effects of the HPV vaccine, evolution versus intelligent design, and immigration. Although the scientific community almost unanimously attributes a majority of the global warming since 1950 to the effects of the Industrial Revolution, there are a very small number – a few dozen scientists out of tens of thousands – who dispute the conclusion. Giving equal voice to scientists on both sides makes it seem like there is serious disagreement within the scientific community, when in fact there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change that anthropogenic global warming exists. Observers have criticized the involvement of mass media in the MMR vaccine controversy, what is known as "science by press conference", alleging that the media provided Andrew Wakefield's study with more credibility than it deserved. A March 2007 paper in BMC Public Health by Shona Hilton, Mark Petticrew, and Kate Hunt postulated that media reports on Wakefield's study had "created the misleading impression that the evidence for the link with autism was as substantial as the evidence against". Earlier papers in Communication in Medicine and the British Medical Journal concluded that media reports provided a misleading picture of the level of support for Wakefield's hypothesis. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy] | [TOKENS: 697] |
Contents Formal fallacy In logic and philosophy, a formal fallacy[a] is a pattern of reasoning with a flaw in its logical structure (the logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion). In other words: A formal fallacy is contrasted with an informal fallacy. A formal fallacy must have an invalid logical form and thus be unsound. An informal fallacy, however, may have a valid logical form and yet be unsound because one or more premises are false. An argument can be both a formal fallacy and an informal fallacy. In everyday conversation, the term logical fallacy usually refers to a formal fallacy. While "the logical argument is a non sequitur" is synonymous with "the logical argument is invalid", the term non sequitur typically refers to those types of invalid arguments which do not constitute formal fallacies covered by particular terms (e.g., affirming the consequent). In other words, in practice, "non sequitur" refers to an unnamed formal fallacy. Related concept Propositional logic is concerned with the meanings of sentences and the relationships between them. It focuses on the role of logical operators, called propositional connectives, in determining whether a sentence is true. An error in the sequence will result in a deductive argument that is invalid. The argument itself could have true premises, but still have a false conclusion. Thus, a formal fallacy is a fallacy in which deduction goes wrong, and is no longer a logical process. This may not affect the truth of the conclusion, since validity and truth are separate in formal logic. Common examples In the strictest sense, a logical fallacy is the incorrect application of a valid logical principle or an application of a nonexistent principle, such as reasoning that: This is fallacious: a zoo could have a large proportion of flightless birds. There is no logical principle that states: An easy way to show the above inference as invalid is by using Venn diagrams. In logical parlance, the inference is invalid, since under at least one interpretation of the predicates it is not validity preserving. People often have difficulty applying the rules of logic. For example, a person may say the following syllogism is valid, when in fact it is not: "That creature" may well be a bird, but the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Certain other animals also have beaks, such as turtles. Errors of this type occur because people reverse a premise. In this case, "All birds have beaks" is converted to "All beaked animals are birds." The reversed premise is plausible because few people are aware of any instances of beaked creatures besides birds—but this premise is not the one that was given. In this way, the deductive fallacy is formed by points that may individually appear logical, but when placed together are shown to be incorrect. Special example A special case is a mathematical fallacy, an intentionally invalid mathematical proof, often with the error subtle and somehow concealed. Mathematical fallacies are typically crafted and exhibited for educational purposes, usually taking the form of spurious proofs of obvious contradictions. Non sequitur in everyday speech In everyday speech, a non sequitur is a statement in which the final part is totally unrelated to the first part, for example: Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. — West with the Night, Beryl Markham See also Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)] | [TOKENS: 3703] |
Contents Dog whistle (politics) In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named after ultrasonic dog whistles, which are audible to dogs but not humans. Dog whistles use language that appears normal to the majority but communicates specific things to intended audiences. They are generally used to convey messages on issues likely to provoke controversy without attracting negative attention.[not verified in body] Origin and meaning According to William Safire, the term dog whistle in reference to politics may have been derived from its use in the field of opinion polling. Safire quotes Richard Morin, director of polling for The Washington Post, as writing in 1988: subtle changes in question-wording sometimes produce remarkably different results ... researchers call this the "Dog Whistle Effect": Respondents hear something in the question that researchers do not. He speculates that campaign workers adapted the phrase from political pollsters. In her 2006 book Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia, academic Amanda Lohrey writes that the goal of the dog-whistle is to appeal to the greatest possible number of electors while alienating the smallest possible number. She uses as an example politicians choosing broadly appealing words such as "family values", which have extra resonance for Christians, while avoiding overt Christian moralizing that might be a turn-off for non-Christian voters. Australian political theorist Robert E. Goodin argues that the problem with dog-whistling is that it undermines democracy, because if voters have different understandings of what they were supporting during a campaign, the fact that they were seeming to support the same thing is "democratically meaningless" and does not give the dog-whistler a policy mandate. History and usage The term was first picked up in Australian politics in the mid-1990s, and was frequently applied to the political campaigning of John Howard. Throughout his 11 years as Australian prime minister and particularly in his fourth term, Howard was accused of communicating messages appealing to anxious Australian voters using code words such as "un-Australian", "mainstream", and "illegals". One notable example was the Howard government's message on refugee arrivals. His government's tough stance on immigration was popular with voters, but was accused of using the issue to additionally send veiled messages of support to voters with racist leanings, while maintaining plausible deniability by avoiding overtly racist language. Another example was the publicity of the Australian citizenship test in 2007. It has been argued that the test may appear reasonable at face value, but is really intended to appeal to those opposing immigration from particular geographic regions. During the 2015 Canadian federal election, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported on a controversy involving the Conservative party leader, incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper, using the phrase "old-stock Canadians" in a debate, apparently to appeal to his party's base supporters. Commentators, including pollster Frank Graves and former Quebec Liberal MP Marlene Jennings, saw this as a codeword historically used against non-white immigrants. Midway through the election campaign, the Conservative Party had hired Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby as a political adviser when they fell to third place in the polls - behind the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party. On 17 September 2015, during a televised election debate, Stephen Harper, while discussing the government's controversial decision to remove certain immigrants and refugee claimants from accessing Canada's health care system, made reference to "Old Stock Canadians" as being in support of the government's position. Marlene Jennings called his words racist and divisive, as they are used to exclude Canadians of colour. Darmawan Prasodjo [id] notes the use of the concept of "strong leadership" as a dog whistle in the context of Indonesian politics. The popular Palestinian nationalist and anti-Zionist slogan "from the river to the sea" has been called a dog-whistle for the complete destruction of Israel by Charles C. W. Cooke and Seth Mandel. Pat Fallon called its usage "a thinly veiled call for the genocide of millions of Jews in Israel," and the Anti-Defamation League notes that, "It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland." According to United States Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian-American representative in Congress, the slogan is "an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate." According to Maha Nassar, Associate Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona, "the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights and their vision for the land they call Palestine. And while attempts to police the slogan's use may come from a place of genuine concern, there is a risk that tarring the slogan as antisemitic – and therefore beyond the pale – taps into a longer history of attempts to silence Palestinian voices." In an interview with Al Jazeera, Nimer Sultany, a lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, said the adjective expresses "the need for equality for all inhabitants of historic Palestine". From a historical perspective and the perspective of Palestinian civilians, the full slogan has had several variations: The multiplicity of political meanings behind the full chant—for some a call to freedom and others a call to ethnic cleansing— characterizes it as a dog whistle.[citation needed] Roberto Saviano of The Guardian claimed that Italian right-wing politician Giorgia Meloni used the Mussolini-era slogan "God, homeland, family" as a dog-whistle to signal her anti-immigration stance, and in 2019, she used her identity as a dog whistle, proclaiming at a rally: "I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian." Washington Post columnist Philip Bump contended that Meloni has used the term "financial speculators" as a dog-whistle to conceal antisemitism. Starting in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine leading to the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine War. With the war underway many dog whistles were starting to be more commonly used in Russia to describe Ukraine and the people of Ukraine. These words include “Deukrainianization” and “Ukrainization” which are used to show support for Russia in the Russia-Ukraine War. Lynton Crosby, who had previously managed John Howard's four election campaigns in Australia, worked as a Conservative Party adviser during the 2005 UK general election, and the term was introduced to British political discussion at this time. In what Goodin calls "the classic case" of dog-whistling, Crosby created a campaign for the Conservatives with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?": a series of posters, billboards, TV commercials and direct mail pieces with messages like "It's not racist to impose limits on immigration" and "how would you feel if a bloke on early release attacked your daughter?" focused on controversial issues like insanitary hospitals, land grabs by squatters and restraints on police behaviour. During the EU Referendum, the Leave campaign was accused by members of the Remain campaign such as Labour MP Yvette Cooper and Green MP Caroline Lucas of stirring up racial hatred against Eastern Europeans and ethnic minorities through anti-immigration dog whistles. Vote Leave distanced itself from Leave.EU and UKIP after the Breaking Point poster, showing predominantly Syrian and Afghan refugees near the Croatia-Slovenia border with the sole white person in the image being obscured by text. Boris Johnson stated it was "not our campaign" and "not my politics". During the 2024 General Election, Reform UK was accused of racist dog whistling when leader Nigel Farage stated that then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is of Indian descent, "doesn't understand our culture" and "is not patriotic" after leaving commemorations for the 80th anniversary of D-Day early. The phrase "states' rights", literally referring to powers of individual state governments in the United States, was described in 2007 by journalist David Greenberg in Slate as "code words" for institutionalized segregation and racism. States' rights was the banner under which groups like the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties argued in 1955 against school desegregation. In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an anonymous interview discussing former president Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, speculated that terms like "states' rights" were used for dog-whistling: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes. And all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this" is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." Atwater was contrasting this with then-President Ronald Reagan's campaign, which he felt "was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference". However, Ian Haney López, an American law professor and author of the 2014 book Dog Whistle Politics, described Reagan as "blowing a dog whistle" when the candidate told stories about "Cadillac-driving 'welfare queens' and 'strapping young bucks' buying T-bone steaks with food stamps" while he was campaigning for the presidency. He argues that such rhetoric pushes middle-class white Americans to vote against their economic self-interest in order to punish "undeserving minorities" who, they believe, are receiving too much public assistance at their expense. According to López, conservative middle-class whites, convinced by powerful economic interests that minorities are the enemy, supported politicians who promised to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime but inadvertently also voted for policies that favor the extremely rich, such as slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, union busting, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state. He argues that these same voters cannot link rising inequality which has affected their lives to the policy agendas they support, which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent of the population since the 1980s. In the U.S., the phrase "international bankers" is a well-known dog whistle code for Jews. Its use as such is derived from the anti-Semitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was frequently used by the fascist-supporting radio personality Charles Coughlin on his national show. His repeated use of the term was a factor in the distributor CBS opting not to renew his contract. The word "globalists" is similarly widely considered an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Journalist Craig Unger wrote that President George W. Bush and Karl Rove used coded "dog-whistle" language in political campaigning, delivering one message to the overall electorate while at the same time delivering quite a different message to a targeted evangelical Christian political base. William Safire, in Safire's Political Dictionary, offered the example of Bush's criticism during the 2004 presidential campaign of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision denying the U.S. citizenship of any African American. To most listeners the criticism seemed innocuous, Safire wrote, but "sharp-eared observers" understood the remark to be a pointed reminder that Supreme Court decisions can be reversed, and a signal that, if re-elected, Bush might nominate to the Supreme Court a justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade. This view is echoed in a 2004 Los Angeles Times article by Peter Wallsten. During Barack Obama's campaign and presidency, a number of left-wing commentators described various statements about Obama as racist dog-whistles. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, writer Enid Lynette Logan criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign's reliance on code words and innuendo seemingly designed to frame Barack Obama's race as problematic, saying Obama was characterized by the Clinton campaign and its prominent supporters as anti-white due to his association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as able to attract only black votes, as anti-patriotic, a drug user, possibly a drug seller, and married to an angry, ungrateful black woman. A light-hearted 2008 article by Amy Chozick in The Wall Street Journal questioned whether Obama was too thin to be elected president, given the average weight of Americans; commentator Timothy Noah wrote that this was a racist dog-whistle, because "When white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin." In a 2010 speech, Sarah Palin criticized Obama, saying "we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern". Harvard professor (and Obama ally) Charles Ogletree called this attack racist, because the true idea being communicated was "that he's not one of us". MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell called a 2012 speech by Mitch McConnell, in which McConnell criticized Obama for playing too much golf, a racist dog-whistle because O'Donnell felt it was meant to remind listeners of black golfer Tiger Woods, who at the time was going through an infidelity scandal. During the 2016 presidential election campaign and on a number of occasions throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was accused of using racial and antisemitic "dog whistling" techniques by politicians and major news outlets. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat remarked that the Trump campaign "slogan 'Make America Great Again' can be read as a dog-whistle to some whiter and more Anglo-Saxon past". Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has been reported to use dog-whistling tactics on his former commentary show Tucker Carlson Tonight. During the 2018 gubernatorial race in Florida, Ron DeSantis came under criticism for comments that were allegedly racist, saying: "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That is not going to work. That's not going to be good for Florida." DeSantis was accused of using the verb "monkey" as a racist dog whistle; his opponent, Andrew Gillum, was an African American. DeSantis denied that his comment was meant to be racially charged. Terms such as "woke", "CRT", and "DEI" have been described as dog whistles against Black people. Criticism Academics disagree on whether the dog-whistle notion has conceptual validity and furthermore on the mechanisms by which discourses identified as dog-whistles function. For instance, the sociologist Barry Hindess criticized Josh Fear's and Robert E. Goodin's respective attempts to theorize dog-whistles on the grounds that they did not pass the Weberian test of value neutrality: "In the case of the concept of ‘dog-whistle politics,' we find that the investigator's—in this case, Fear's—disapproval enters into the definition of the object of study. Goodin avoids this problem, clearly signalling his disapproval—for example, with his ‘particularly pernicious' (2008, p. 224)—but not letting it interfere with his own conceptualisation of the phenomenon. The difficulty here is that this abstinence leaves him with no real distinction between the general phenomena of coded messaging […] and dog whistling in particular, leaving us to suspect that dog whistling should be seen not so much as a novel form of rhetoric, but rather, to borrow an image from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, as a familiar form misliked." In effect, the philosopher Carlos Santana corroborates Hindess' criticism of the dog-whistle notion as being dependent on the investigator's social and moral values during his own attempted definition, writing: "We don't want every instance of bi-level meaning in political discourse to count as dog whistles, because not every instance of political doublespeak is problematic in the way prototypical dog whistles like welfare queen and family values are. Some, like backhanded compliments to political rivals, aren't a major source of social ills. Some, like aspirational hypocrisy (Quill 2010) and deliberate doublespeak meant to bring diverse constituencies together (Maloyed 2011), might even be socially beneficial. Keep in mind what makes dog whistles problematic: they harm disadvantaged groups, undermine our ability to have a functioning plural society, and muddle our ability to reliably hold political figures responsible for their actions. Given our interest in addressing these harms, it makes sense to limit our definition of dog whistles to the types of bi-level meaning which engender them." For another instance of criticism, albeit from another direction, the psychologist Steven Pinker has remarked that the concept of dog whistling allows people to "claim that anyone says anything because you can easily hear the alleged dogwhistles that aren't in the actual literal contents of what the person says". Mark Liberman has argued that it is common for speech and writing to convey messages that will only be picked up on by part of the audience, but that this does not usually mean that the speaker is deliberately conveying a double message. Finally, Robert Henderson and Elin McCready argue that plausible deniability is a key characteristic of dog whistles. See also References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies] | [TOKENS: 592] |
Contents List of fallacies A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument. All forms of human communication can contain fallacies. Because of their variety, fallacies are challenging to classify. They can be classified by their structure (formal fallacies) or content (informal fallacies). Informal fallacies, the larger group, may then be subdivided into categories such as improper presumption, faulty generalization, error in assigning causation, and relevance, among others. The use of fallacies is common when the speaker's goal of achieving common agreement is more important to them than utilizing sound reasoning. When fallacies are used, the premise should be recognized as not well-grounded, the conclusion as unproven (but not necessarily false), and the argument as unsound. Formal fallacies A formal fallacy is an error in the argument's form. All formal fallacies are types of non sequitur. A propositional fallacy is an error that concerns compound propositions. For a compound proposition to be true, the truth values of its constituent parts must satisfy the relevant logical connectives that occur in it (most commonly: [and], [or], [not], [only if], [if and only if]). The following fallacies involve relations whose truth values are not guaranteed and therefore not guaranteed to yield true conclusions. Types of propositional fallacies: A quantification fallacy is an error in logic where the quantifiers of the premises are in contradiction to the quantifier of the conclusion. Types of quantification fallacies: Syllogistic fallacies – logical fallacies that occur in syllogisms. Informal fallacies Informal fallacies – arguments that are logically unsound for lack of well-grounded premises. Faulty generalization – reaching a conclusion from weak premises. Questionable cause is a general type of error with many variants. Its primary basis is the confusion of association with causation, either by inappropriately deducing (or rejecting) causation or a broader failure to properly investigate the cause of an observed effect. A red herring fallacy, one of the main subtypes of fallacies of relevance, is an error in logic where a proposition is, or is intended to be, misleading in order to make irrelevant or false inferences. This includes any logical inference based on fake arguments, intended to replace the lack of real arguments or to replace implicitly the subject of the discussion. Red herring – introducing a second argument in response to the first argument that is irrelevant and draws attention away from the original topic (e.g.: saying "If you want to complain about the dishes I leave in the sink, what about the dirty clothes you leave in the bathroom?"). In jury trial, it is known as a Chewbacca defense. In political strategy, it is called a dead cat strategy. See also irrelevant conclusion. See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring] | [TOKENS: 1861] |
Contents Red herring A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies (e.g., in politics), or may be used in argumentation inadvertently. The term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a strong-smelling smoked fish to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit. Logical fallacy As an informal fallacy, the red herring falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies. Unlike the straw man, which involves a distortion of the other party's position, the red herring is a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant, diversionary tactic. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a red herring may be intentional or unintentional; it is not necessarily a conscious intent to mislead. The expression is mainly used to assert that an argument is not relevant to the issue being discussed. For example, "I think we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, and we do not want our salaries affected." The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic. Intentional device In fiction and non-fiction, a red herring may be a false clue intended to lead readers or audiences toward a mistaken conclusion. For example, the character of Bishop Aringarosa in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is presented for most of the novel as if he is at the centre of the church's conspiracies, but is later revealed to have been innocently duped by the true antagonist of the story. The character's name is a loose Italian translation of "red herring" (aringa rosa; rosa actually meaning 'pink', and very close to rossa, 'red'). There is a red herring in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, where the murderer writes at the crime scene the word Rache ('revenge' in German), leading the police—and the reader—to mistakenly presume that a German was involved. A red herring is often used in legal studies and exam problems to mislead and distract students from reaching a correct conclusion about a legal issue, intended as a device that tests students' comprehension of underlying law and their ability to properly discern material factual circumstances. History When I was a boy, we used [to], in order to draw off the harriers from the trail of a hare that we had set down as our own private property, get to her haunt early in the morning, and drag a red-herring, tied to a string, four or five miles over hedges and ditches, across fields and through coppices,[a] till we got to a point, whence we were pretty sure the hunters would not return to the spot where they had [been] thrown off; and, though I would, by no means, be understood, as comparing the editors and proprietors of the London daily press to animals half so sagacious and so faithful as hounds, I cannot help thinking, that, in the case to which we are referring, they must have been misled, at first, by some political deceiver. There is no fish species called "red herring", rather it is a name given to a particularly strong kipper, made from fish (typically herring) strongly cured in brine or heavily smoked. This process makes the fish particularly pungent smelling and, with strong enough brine, turns its flesh reddish. In this literal sense, as a strongly cured kipper, the term can be dated to the late 13th century in the Anglo-Norman poem The Treatise by Walter of Bibbesworth, which then first appears in Middle English in the early 14th century: "He eteþ no ffyssh / But heryng red." A 15th-century text known as the Heege Manuscript includes a joke about fighting oxen chopping one another apart until only "three red herrings" remain. The figurative sense of "red herring" has traditionally been said to originate from a supposed technique of training scent hounds. There are variations of the story, but according to one version, the pungent red herring would be dragged along a trail until a puppy learned to follow the scent. Later, when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odour of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring perpendicular to the animal's trail to confuse the dog. The dog eventually learned to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent. A variation of this story is given, without mention of its use in training, in The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (1976), with the earliest use cited being from W. F. Butler's Life of Napier, published in 1849. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1981) gives the full phrase as "Drawing a red herring across the path", an idiom meaning "to divert attention from the main question by some side issue"; here, once again, a "dried, smoked and salted" herring when "drawn across a fox's path destroys the scent and sets the hounds at fault." Another variation of the dog story is given by Robert Hendrickson (1994) who says escaping convicts used the pungent fish to throw off hounds in pursuit. According to a pair of articles by Professor Gerald Cohen and Robert Scott Ross published in Comments on Etymology (2008), supported by etymologist Michael Quinion and accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary, the idiom did not originate from a hunting practice. Ross researched the origin of the story and found the earliest reference to using herrings for training animals was in a tract on horsemanship published in 1697 by Gerland Langbaine. Langbaine recommended a method of training horses (not hounds) by dragging the carcass of a cat or fox so that the horse would be accustomed to following the chaos of a hunting party. He says if a dead animal is not available, a red herring would do as a substitute. This recommendation was misunderstood by Nicholas Cox, published in the notes of another book around the same time, who said it should be used to train hounds (not horses). Either way, the herring was not used to distract the hounds or horses from a trail, rather to guide them along it. A slightly different metaphorical usage of "red herring" appears in a 1682 pamphlet printed by Richard Baldwin, defending the Earl of Shaftesbury: "But your Lordships business is, to keep your Hounds in full cry, against the pretended Association, for since you cannot find one really in being; a red-herring from your own Kitchen, must be hunted and trail'd through the Kingdom, to make a noise." The earliest reference to using herring for distracting hounds is an article published on 14 February 1807 by radical journalist William Cobbett in his polemical periodical Political Register.[b] According to Cohen and Ross, and accepted by the OED, this is the origin of the figurative meaning of red herring. In the piece, William Cobbett critiques the English press, which had mistakenly reported Napoleon's defeat. Cobbett recounted that he had once used a red herring to deflect hounds in pursuit of a hare, adding "It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone." Quinion concludes: "This story, and [Cobbett's] extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen." Although Cobbett popularized the figurative usage, he was not the first to consider red herring for scenting hounds in a literal sense; an earlier reference occurs in the pamphlet Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, published in 1599 by the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, in which he says "Next, to draw on hounds to a scent, to a red herring skin there is nothing comparable." The Oxford English Dictionary makes no connection with Nashe's quote and the figurative meaning of red herring to distract from the intended target, only in the literal sense of a hunting practice to draw dogs toward a scent. The use of herring to distract pursuing scent hounds was tested on Episode 148 of the series MythBusters. Although the hound used in the test stopped to eat the fish and lost the fugitive's scent temporarily, it eventually backtracked and located the target, resulting in the myth being classified by the show as "Busted". See also Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt] | [TOKENS: 2719] |
Contents Fear, uncertainty, and doubt Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a manipulative propaganda tactic used in technology sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling, and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and is a manifestation of the appeal to fear. In public policy, a similar concept has been referred to as manufactured uncertainty, which involves casting doubt on academic findings, exaggerating their claimed imperfections. A manufactured controversy is a contrived disagreement, typically motivated by profit or ideology, designed to create public confusion concerning an issue about which there is no substantial academic dispute. Etymology The similar formulation "doubts, fears, and uncertainties" first appeared in 1693. The phrase "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" first appeared in the 1920s. It is also sometimes rendered as "fear, uncertainty, and disinformation". By 1975, "FUD" was appearing in contexts of marketing, sales, and in public relations: One of the messages dealt with is FUD—the fear, uncertainty and doubt on the part of customer and sales person alike that stifles the approach and greeting. FUD was first used with its common current technology-related meaning by Gene Amdahl in 1975, after he left IBM to found Amdahl Corp. FUD is the fear, uncertainty and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products. This usage of FUD to describe disinformation in the computer hardware industry is said to have led to subsequent popularization of the term. As Eric S. Raymond wrote: The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. After 1991, the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon. By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well-known products, an established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its own, regardless of the relative technical merits. This is a recognized phenomenon, epitomized by the traditional axiom of purchasing agents that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment". The aim is to have IT departments buy software they know to be technically inferior because upper management is more likely to recognize the brand.[citation needed] Examples Manufacturing controversy has been a tactic used by ideological and corporate groups to "neutralize the influence of academic scientists" in public policy debates. Cherry picking of favorable data and sympathetic experts, aggrandizement of uncertainties within theoretical models, and false balance in media reporting contribute to the generation of FUD. Alan D. Attie describes its process as "to amplify uncertainties, cherry-pick experts, attack individual scientists, marginalize the traditional role of distinguished scientific bodies and get the media to report "both sides" of a manufactured controversy." Those manufacturing uncertainty may label academic research as "junk science" and use a variety of tactics designed to stall and increase the expense of the distribution of sound scientific information. Delay tactics are also used to slow the implementation of regulations and public warnings in response to previously undiscovered health risks (e.g., the increased risk of Reye's syndrome in children who take aspirin). Chief among these stalling tactics is generating scientific uncertainty, "no matter how powerful or conclusive the evidence", to prevent regulation. Another tactic used to manufacture controversy is to cast the scientific community as intolerant of dissent and conspiratorially aligned with industries or sociopolitical movements that quash challenges to conventional wisdom. This form of manufactured controversy has been used by environmentalist advocacy groups, religious challengers of the theory of evolution, and opponents of global warming legislation. Ideas that have been labeled as manufactured uncertainty include: The tobacco industry playbook, also called the tobacco strategy or simply the tobacco disinformation playbook, describes a public relations strategy used by the tobacco industry in the 1950s to protect revenues in the face of mounting evidence of links between tobacco smoke and serious illnesses, primarily cancer. Such tactics were used even earlier, beginning in the 1920s, by the oil industry to support the use of tetraethyllead in gasoline. They continue to be used by other industries, notably the fossil fuel industry, even using the same PR firms and researchers. Much of the playbook is known from industry documents made public by whistleblowers or as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. These documents are now curated by the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents project and are a primary source for much commentary on both the tobacco playbook and its similarities to the tactics used by other industries such as the fossil fuel industry. A 1969 R. J. Reynolds internal memorandum noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public." In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the way that tobacco companies had campaigned over several decades to cast doubt on the scientific evidence of harm caused by their products, and noted the same techniques being used by other industries whose harmful products were targets of regulatory and environmental efforts. This is often linked to climate change denialism promoted by the fossil fuel industry: the same tactics were employed by fossil fuel groups such as the American Petroleum Institute to cast doubt on climate science from the 1990s and some of the same PR firms and individuals engaged to claim that tobacco smoking was safe, were later recruited to attack climate science. In the United States, the generation of manufactured uncertainty about scientific data has affected political and legal proceedings in many different areas. The Data Quality Act and the Supreme Court's Daubert standard have been cited as tools used by those manufacturing controversy to obfuscate scientific consensus. Concerns have been raised regarding the conflicts of interest inherent in many types of industry regulation. For example, many industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry, are a major source of funding for the research necessary to achieve government regulatory approval for their product. In developing regulations, agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency rely heavily on unpublished studies from industry sources that have not been peer reviewed. This can allow a given industry control over the extent of available research, and the pace at which it is reviewable, when challenging scientific research that may threaten their business interests.[citation needed] In the 1990s, the term became most often associated with Microsoft. Roger Irwin said: Microsoft soon picked up the art of FUD from IBM, and throughout the '80s used FUD as a primary marketing tool, much as IBM had in the previous decade. They ended up out FUD-ing IBM themselves during the OS/2 vs Win3.1 years. In 1996, Caldera, Inc. accused Microsoft of several anti-competitive practices, including issuing vaporware announcements, creating FUD, and excluding competitors from participating in beta-test programs to destroy competition in the DOS market. In 1991, Microsoft released a beta version of Windows 3.1 whose AARD code would display a vaguely unnerving error message when the user ran it on the DR DOS 6.0 operating system instead of Microsoft-written OSs: Non-Fatal error detected: error #2726Please contact Windows 3.1 beta supportPress ENTER to exit or C to continue If the user chose to press C, Windows would continue to run on DR DOS without problems. Speculation that this code was meant to create doubts about DR DOS's compatibility and thereby destroy the product's reputation was confirmed years later by internal Microsoft memos published as part of the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case. At one point, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent a memo to a number of employees, reading You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MS-DOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there [a] feature they have that might get in our way? Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS. In 2000, Microsoft settled the lawsuit out-of-court for an undisclosed sum, which in 2009 was revealed to be $280 million. At around the same time, the leaked internal Microsoft "Halloween documents" stated "OSS [Open Source Software] is long-term credible… [therefore] FUD tactics cannot be used to combat it." Open source software, and the Linux community in particular, are widely perceived as frequent targets of Microsoft's FUD: The SCO Group's 2003 lawsuit against IBM, funded by Microsoft, claiming $5 billion in intellectual property infringements by the free software community, is an example of FUD, according to IBM, which argued in its counterclaim that SCO was spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt". Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells wrote (and Judge Dale Albert Kimball concurred) in her order limiting SCO's claims: "The court finds SCO's arguments unpersuasive. SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM, 'sorry, we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know...' SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated... the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is... not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual were stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole, I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'it's in there somewhere, you figure it out.'" Regarding the matter, Darl Charles McBride, President and CEO of SCO, made the following statements: SCO stock skyrocketed from under US$3 a share to over US$20 in a matter of weeks in 2003. It later dropped to around US$1.2—then crashed to under 50 cents on 13 August 2007, in the aftermath of a ruling that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights. Apple's claim that iPhone jailbreaking could potentially allow hackers to crash cell phone towers was described by Fred von Lohmann, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), as a "kind of theoretical threat...more FUD than truth". FUD is widely recognized as a tactic to promote the sale or implementation of security products and measures. It is possible to find pages describing purely artificial problems. Such pages frequently contain links to the demonstrating source code that does not point to any valid location and sometimes even links that "will execute malicious code on your machine regardless of current security software", leading to pages without any executable code.[citation needed] The drawback to the FUD tactic in this context is that, when the stated or implied threats fail to materialize over time, the customer or decision-maker frequently reacts by withdrawing budgeting or support from future security initiatives. FUD has also been utilized in technical support scams, which may use fake error messages to scare unwitting computer users, especially the elderly or computer-illiterate, into paying for a supposed fix for a non-existent problem, to avoid being framed for criminal charges such as unpaid taxes, or in extreme cases, false accusations of illegal acts such as child pornography. The FUD tactic was used by Caltex Australia in 2003. According to an internal memo, which was subsequently leaked, they wished to use FUD to destabilize franchisee confidence, and thus get a better deal for Caltex. This memo was used as an example of unconscionable behaviour in a Senate inquiry. Senior management claimed that it was contrary to and did not reflect company principles. In 2008, Clorox was the subject of both consumer and industry criticism for advertising its Green Works line of allegedly environmentally friendly cleaning products using the slogan, "Finally, Green Works." The slogan implied both that "green" products manufactured by other companies which had been available to consumers prior to the introduction of Clorox's GreenWorks line had all been ineffective, and also that the new GreenWorks line was at least as effective as Clorox's existing product lines. The intention of this slogan and the associated advertising campaign has been interpreted as appealing to consumers' fears that products from companies with less brand recognition are less trustworthy or effective. Critics also pointed out that, despite its representation of GreenWorks products as "green" in the sense of being less harmful to the environment and/or consumers using them, the products contain a number of ingredients advocates of natural products have long campaigned against the use of in household products due to toxicity to humans or their environment. All three implicit claims have been disputed, and some of their elements disproven, by environmental groups, consumer-protection groups, and the industry self-regulatory Better Business Bureau. See also References Further reading External links This article is based in part on the Jargon File, which is in the public domain. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism] | [TOKENS: 2989] |
Contents Yellow journalism In journalism, yellow journalism is the use of eye-catching headlines and sensationalized exaggerations for increased sales, while the yellow press are American newspapers which do so. This term is chiefly used in American English, whereas in the United Kingdom, the similar term tabloid journalism is more common. Other languages, e.g. Russian (жёлтая пресса zhyoltaya pressa), sometimes have terms derived from the American term. Yellow journalism emerged in the intense battle for readers by two newspapers in New York City in the 1890s. It was not common in other cities. Joseph Pulitzer purchased the New York World in 1883 and told his editors to use sensationalism, crusades against corruption, and lavish use of illustrations to boost circulation. William Randolph Hearst then purchased the rival New York Journal in 1895. They engaged in an intense circulation war, at a time when most men bought one copy every day from rival street vendors shouting their paper's headlines. The term "yellow journalism" originated from the innovative popular "Yellow Kid" comic strip that was published first in the World and later in the Journal. This type of reporting was characterized by exaggerated headlines, unverified claims, partisan agendas, and a focus on topics like crime, scandal, sports, and violence. Historians have debated whether yellow journalism played a large role in inflaming public opinion about Spain's atrocities in Cuba at the time, and perhaps pushing the U.S. into the Spanish-American War of 1898. Most historians say it did not do so. The two papers reached a large working class Democratic audience, while the nation's upscale Republican decision makers (such as President William McKinley and leaders in Congress) seldom read the yellow press. Definitions Journalism historian W. Joseph Campbell described yellow press newspapers as having daily multi-column front-page headlines covering a variety of topics, such as sports and scandal, using bold layouts (with large illustrations and perhaps color), heavy reliance on unnamed sources, and unabashed self-promotion. The term was extensively used to describe two major New York City newspapers around 1900 as they battled for circulation.: 156–160 Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five characteristics to identify yellow journalism: Another common feature was emphasizing sensationalized crime reporting to boost sales and excite public opinion. Origins: Pulitzer vs. Hearst An English magazine in 1898 noted, "All American journalism is not 'yellow', though all strictly 'up-to-date' yellow journalism is American!" The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical usage often refers specifically to this period. Both papers were sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well. Richard F. Outcault, the author of a popular cartoon strip, the Yellow Kid, was tempted away from the World by Hearst and the cartoon accounted substantially towards a big increase in sales of the Journal. The term was coined by Ervin Wardman, the editor of the New York Press. Wardman was the first to publish the term but there is evidence that expressions such as "yellow journalism" and "school of yellow kid journalism" were already used by newsmen of that time. Wardman never defined the term exactly. Possibly it was a mutation from earlier slander where Wardman twisted "new journalism" into "nude journalism".: 32–33 Wardman had also used the expression "yellow kid journalism": 32–33 referring to the then-popular comic strip which was published by both Pulitzer and Hearst during a circulation war. Joseph Pulitzer purchased the New York World in 1883 after making the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the dominant daily in that city. Pulitzer strove to make the New York World an entertaining read, and filled his paper with pictures, games and contests that drew in new readers. Crime stories filled many of the pages, with headlines like "Was He a Suicide?" and "Screaming for Mercy". In addition, Pulitzer charged readers only two cents per issue but gave readers eight and sometimes 12 pages of information (the only other two-cent paper in the city never exceeded four pages). While there were many sensational stories in the New York World, they were by no means the only pieces, or even the dominant ones. Pulitzer believed that newspapers were public institutions with a duty to improve society, and he put the World in the service of social reform. Pulitzer explained that: The American people want something terse, forcible, picturesque, striking, something that will arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, [and] awaken their conscience. Just two years after Pulitzer took it over, the World became the highest-circulation newspaper in New York, aided in part by its strong ties to the Democratic Party. Older publishers, envious of Pulitzer's success, began criticizing the World, harping on its crime stories and stunts while ignoring its more serious reporting—trends which influenced the popular perception of yellow journalism. Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun, attacked The World and said Pulitzer was "deficient in judgment and in staying power." Pulitzer's approach made an impression on William Randolph Hearst, a mining heir who acquired the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887. Hearst studied the World and resolved to make the San Francisco Examiner as bright as Pulitzer's paper. Under his leadership, the Examiner devoted 24 percent of its space to crime, presenting the stories as morality plays, and sprinkled adultery and "nudity" (by 19th-century standards) on the front page. A month after Hearst took over the paper, the Examiner ran this headline about a hotel fire: HUNGRY, FRANTIC FLAMES. They Leap Madly Upon the Splendid Pleasure Palace by the Bay of Monterey, Encircling Del Monte in Their Ravenous Embrace From Pinnacle to Foundation. Leaping Higher, Higher, Higher, With Desperate Desire. Running Madly Riotous Through Cornice, Archway and Facade. Rushing in Upon the Trembling Guests with Savage Fury. Appalled and Panic-Stricken the Breathless Fugitives Gaze Upon the Scene of Terror. The Magnificent Hotel and Its Rich Adornments Now a Smoldering heap of Ashes. The Examiner Sends a Special Train to Monterey to Gather Full Details of the Terrible Disaster. Arrival of the Unfortunate Victims on the Morning's Train – A History of Hotel del Monte – The Plans for Rebuilding the Celebrated Hostelry – Particulars and Supposed Origin of the Fire. Hearst could be hyperbolic in his crime coverage; one of his early pieces, regarding a "band of murderers", attacked the police for forcing Examiner reporters to do their work for them. But while indulging in these stunts, the Examiner also increased its space for international news, and sent reporters out to uncover municipal corruption and inefficiency. In one well remembered story, Examiner reporter Winifred Black was admitted into a San Francisco hospital and discovered that poor women were treated with "gross cruelty". The entire hospital staff was fired the morning the piece appeared. With the success of the Examiner established by the early 1890s, Hearst began looking for a New York newspaper to purchase, and acquired the New York Journal in 1895, a penny paper. Metropolitan newspapers started going after department store advertising in the 1890s, and discovered the larger the circulation base, the better. This drove Hearst; following Pulitzer's earlier strategy, he kept the Journal's price at one cent (compared to The World's two-cent price) while providing as much information as rival newspapers. The approach worked, and as the Journal's circulation jumped to 150,000, Pulitzer cut his price to a penny, hoping to drive his young competitor into bankruptcy. In a counterattack, Hearst raided the staff of the World in 1896. While most sources say that Hearst simply offered more money, Pulitzer—who had grown increasingly abusive to his employees—had become a difficult man to work for, and many World employees were willing to jump for the sake of getting away from him. Although the competition between the World and the Journal was fierce, the papers were temperamentally alike. Both were Democratic, both were sympathetic to labor and immigrants (a sharp contrast to upscale papers like the New-York Tribune's Whitelaw Reid, that blamed poverty on moral defects). Both invested enormous resources in their Sunday editions, which functioned like weekly magazines, going beyond the normal scope of daily journalism. Their Sunday entertainment features included the first color comic strip pages. Hogan's Alley, a comic strip revolving around a bald child in a yellow nightshirt (nicknamed The Yellow Kid), became exceptionally popular when cartoonist Richard F. Outcault began drawing it in the World in early 1896. When Hearst hired Outcault away, Pulitzer asked artist George Luks to continue the strip with his characters, giving the city two Yellow Kids. The use of "yellow journalism" as a synonym for over-the-top sensationalism thus started with more serious newspapers commenting on the excesses of "the Yellow Kid papers". Spanish–American War Pulitzer and Hearst in the 1920s and 1930s were blamed as a cause of entry into the Spanish–American War due to sensationalist stories or exaggerations of the terrible conditions in Cuba.: 608 However, the majority of Americans did not live in New York City, and the decision-makers who did live there relied more on staid newspapers like the Times, The Sun, or the Post.[citation needed] James Creelman wrote an anecdote in his memoir that artist Frederic Remington telegrammed Hearst to tell him all was quiet in Cuba and "There will be no war." Creelman claimed Hearst responded "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Hearst denied the veracity of the story, and no one has found any evidence of the telegrams existing.: 72 Historian Emily Erickson states: Serious historians have dismissed the telegram story as unlikely. ... The hubris contained in this supposed telegram, however, does reflect the spirit of unabashed self-promotion that was a hallmark of the yellow press and of Hearst in particular. Hearst became a war hawk after a rebellion broke out in Cuba in 1895. Stories of Cuban virtue and Spanish brutality soon dominated his front page. While the accounts were of dubious accuracy, the newspaper readers of the 19th century did not expect, or necessarily want, his stories to be pure nonfiction. Historian Michael Robertson has said that "Newspaper reporters and readers of the 1890s were much less concerned with distinguishing among fact-based reporting, opinion and literature." Pulitzer, though lacking Hearst's resources, kept the story on his front page. The yellow press covered the revolution extensively and often inaccurately, but conditions on Cuba were horrific enough. The island was in a terrible economic depression, and Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, sent to crush the rebellion, herded Cuban peasants into concentration camps, leading hundreds of Cubans to their deaths. Having clamored for a fight for two years, Hearst took credit for the conflict when it came: A week after the United States declared war on Spain, he ran "How do you like the Journal's war?" on his front page. In fact, President William McKinley never read the Journal, nor newspapers like the Tribune and the New York Evening Post. Moreover, journalism historians have noted that yellow journalism was largely confined to New York City, and that newspapers in the rest of the country did not follow their lead. The Journal and the World were pitched to Democrats in New York City and were not among the top ten sources of news in regional papers; they seldom made headlines outside New York City. Piero Gleijeses looked at 41 major newspapers and finds: War came because public opinion was sickened by the bloodshed, and because leaders like McKinley realized that Spain had lost control of Cuba. These factors weighed more on the president's mind than the melodramas in the New York Journal. Nick Kapur says that McKinley's actions were based more on his values of arbitrationism, pacifism, humanitarianism, and manly self-restraint, than on external pressures. When the invasion began, Hearst sailed directly to Cuba as a war correspondent, providing sober and accurate accounts of the fighting. Creelman later praised the work of the reporters for exposing the horrors of Spanish misrule, arguing, "no true history of the war ... can be written without an acknowledgment that whatever of justice and freedom and progress was accomplished by the Spanish–American War was due to the enterprise and tenacity of yellow journalists, many of whom lie in unremembered graves." Hearst was a leading Democrat who promoted William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896 and 1900. He later ran for mayor and governor and even sought the presidential nomination, but lost much of his personal prestige when outrage exploded in 1901 after columnist Ambrose Bierce and editor Arthur Brisbane published separate columns months apart that suggested the assassination of William McKinley. When McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, critics accused Hearst's Yellow Journalism of driving Leon Czolgosz to the deed. It was later presumed that Hearst did not know of Bierce's column, and he claimed to have pulled Brisbane's after it ran in a first edition, but the incident would haunt him for the rest of his life, and all but destroyed his presidential ambitions. When later asked about Hearst's reaction to the incident, Bierce reportedly said, "I have never mentioned the matter to him, and he never mentioned it to me." Pulitzer, haunted by his "yellow sins," returned the World to its crusading roots as the new century dawned. By the time of his death in 1911, the World was a widely respected publication, and would remain a leading progressive paper until its demise in 1931. Its name lived on in the Scripps-Howard New York World-Telegram, and then later the New York World-Telegram and Sun in 1950, and finally was last used by the New York World-Journal-Tribune from September 1966 to May 1967. At that point, only one broadsheet newspaper was left in New York City. See also Notes Sources Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumors] | [TOKENS: 2072] |
Contents Rumor A rumor (American English), or rumour (British English; see spelling differences; derived from Latin rumorem 'noise'), is an unverified piece of information circulating among people, especially without solid evidence. In the social sciences, a rumor involves a form of a statement whose truthfulness or honesty is not quickly or ever confirmed. In addition, some scholars have identified rumor as a subset of propaganda. Sociology, psychology, and communication studies have widely varying definitions of rumor. Rumors are also often discussed with regard to misinformation and disinformation (the former often seen as simply false and the latter seen as deliberately false, though usually from a government source given to the media or a foreign government). Early work French and German social science research on rumor locates the modern scholarly definition of it to the pioneering work of the German William Stern in 1902. Stern experimented on rumor involving a "chain of subjects" who passed a story from "mouth to ear" without the right to repeat or explain it. He found that the story was shortened and changed by the time it reached the end of the chain. His student was another pioneer in the field, Gordon Allport. The experiment is similar to the children's game Chinese whispers. A Psychology of Rumor (1944) "A Psychology of Rumor" was published by Robert H. Knapp [fr] in 1944, in which he reports on his analysis of over one thousand rumors during World War II that were printed in the Boston Herald's "Rumor Clinic" Column. He defines rumor as a proposition for belief of topical reference disseminated without official verification. So formidably defined, rumor is but a special case of informal social communications, including myth, legend, and current humor. From myth and legend it is distinguished by its emphasis on the topical. Where humor is designed to provoke laughter, rumor begs for belief. Knapp identified three basic characteristics that apply to rumor: Crucial to this definition and its characteristics is the emphasis on transmission (word of mouth, which then was heard and reported in the newspaper); on content ("topical" means that it can somehow be distinguished from trivial and private subjects—its domain is public issues); and on reception ("emotional needs of the community" suggests that though it is received by an individual from an individual, it is not comprehended in individual but community or social terms). Based on his study of the newspaper column, Knapp divided those rumors into three types: Knapp also found that negative rumors were more likely to be disseminated than positive rumors. These types also differentiate between positive (pipe dream) and negative (bogie and wedge-driving) rumors. The Psychology of Rumor (1947) In the 1947 study, The Psychology of Rumor, Gordon Allport and Leo Postman concluded that, "as rumor travels it [...] grows shorter, more concise, more easily grasped and told." This conclusion was based on a test of message diffusion between persons, which found that about 70% of details in a message were lost in the first 5-6 mouth-to-mouth transmissions. In the experiment, a test subject was shown an illustration and given time to look it over. They were then asked to describe the scene from memory to a second test subject. This second test subject was then asked to describe the scene to a third, and so forth and so on. Each person's reproduction was recorded. This process was repeated with different illustrations with very different settings and contents. Allport and Postman used three terms to describe the movement of rumor. They are: leveling, sharpening, and assimilation. Leveling refers to the loss of detail during the transmission process; sharpening to the selection of certain details of which to transmit; and assimilation to a distortion in the transmission of information as a result of subconscious motivations. Assimilation was observed when test subjects described the illustrations as they ought to be but not as they actually were. For example, in an illustration depicting a battle-scene, test subjects often incorrectly reported an ambulance truck in the background of the illustration as carrying "medical supplies," when, in fact, it was clearly carrying boxes marked "TNT (102)." Social Cognition In 2004, Prashant Bordia and Nicholas DiFonzo published their Problem Solving in Social Interactions on the Internet: Rumor As Social Cognition and found that rumor transmission is probably reflective of a "collective explanation process." This conclusion was based on an analysis of archived message board discussions in which the statements were coded and analysed. It was found that 29% (the majority) of statements within these discussions could be coded as "sense-making" statements, which involved, "[...] attempts at solving a problem." It was noted that the rest of the discussion was constructed around these statements, further reinforcing the idea of collective problem solving. The researchers also found that each rumor went through a four-stage pattern of development in which a rumor was introduced for discussion, information was volunteered and discussed, and finally a resolution was drawn or interest was lost. For the study, archived discussions concerning rumors on the internet and other computer networks such as BITnet were retrieved. As a rule, each discussion had a minimum of five statements posted over a period of at least two days. The statements were then coded as being one of the following: prudent, apprehensive, authenticating, interrogatory, providing information, belief, disbelief, sense-making, digressive, or un-codable. Each rumor discussion was then analysed based on this coding system. A similar coding system based on statistical analysis was applied to each discussion as a whole, and the aforementioned four-stage pattern of rumor discussion emerged. There are four components of managing rumors that both of you need to understand for the sake of your relationship's success.[clarification needed] The first, anxiety (situational and personality), is when people who either have a more anxious personality, or people who are in an anxiety- lifting situation are more likely to create rumors in order to relieve some of their insecurities. The second component of managing rumors is ambiguity. Ambiguity is when someone is not sure about what is going on, so they end up assuming the worst. The third component is information importance. . Information is key, and if that information is not juicy or if it does not interest people, there won't be rumors, but information can often be false. Information can also be ambiguous. The last component of managing rumors is credibility. Rumors are often spread by sources that are not credible. A rumor itself is not credible unless it is proven to be true. That is why people say to never trust the tabloids. Political Communication Strategy Rumor has always played a major role in politics, with negative rumors about an opponent typically more effective than positive rumors about one's own side. "Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion." In the past, much research on rumor came from psychological approaches (as the discussion of Allport and DiFonzio demonstrates above). The focus was especially on how statements of questionable veracity (absolutely false to the ears of some listeners) circulated orally from person to person. Scholarly attention to political rumors is at least as old as Aristotle's Rhetoric; however, not until recently has any sustained attention and conceptual development been directed at political uses of rumor, outside of its role in war situations. Almost no work had been done until recently on how different forms of media and particular cultural-historical conditions may facilitate a rumor's diffusion. The Internet's recent appearance as a new media technology has shown ever new possibilities for the fast diffusion of rumor, as the debunking sites such as snopes.com, urbanlegend.com, and factcheck.org demonstrate. Nor had previous research taken into consideration the particular form or style of deliberately chosen rumors for political purposes in particular circumstances (even though significant attention to the power of rumor for mass-media-diffused war propaganda has been in vogue since World War I; see Lasswell 1927). In the early part of the 21st century, some legal scholars have attended to political uses of rumor, though their conceptualization of it remains social psychological and their solutions to it as public problem are from a legal scholarly perspective, largely having to do with libel and privacy laws and the damage to personal reputations. Strategic Communication Similar to their appearance and function in political communication, wherein rumors can be deployed for specific deleterious effect (rumor bomb) or can otherwise plague a candidate for office, rumors also play an important role in strategic communication. Strategic communication is the process of crafting messages in support of specific organizational goals, and is usually concerned with governments, militaries and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Adroit strategic communication requires an understanding of stories, trends and memes circulating within a culture. Rumors can be viewed as stories that seem rational but that are steeped into speculation, in connection with a certain narrative landscape (the vast array of cultural expression circulating within a community or region). In their book, Narrative Landmines: Rumors, Islamist Extremism and the Struggle for Strategic Influence, co-authors Daniel Bernardi, Pauline Hope Cheong, Chris Lundry and Scott W. Ruston coin the term narrative IED to help explain the function and danger of rumors in a strategic communication context. Rumors, as narrative IEDs, are low-cost, low-tech communication weapons that can be used by anyone to disrupt the efforts of communication, civil affairs or outreach campaigns such as those undertaken by governments in crisis response situations or militaries in insurgencies. As Bernardi notes, "Like their explosive cousins, rumors can be created and planted by nearly anybody, require limited resources to utilize, can be deadly for those in its direct path, and can instil fear". See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites] | [TOKENS: 1212] |
Contents List of fake news websites Page version status This is an accepted version of this page Fake news websites are those which intentionally, but not necessarily solely, publish hoaxes and disinformation for purposes other than news satire. Some of these sites use homograph spoofing attacks, typosquatting and other deceptive strategies similar to those used in phishing attacks to resemble genuine news outlets. Definition Fake news sites deliberately publish hoaxes and disinformation to drive web traffic inflamed by social media. These sites are distinguished from news satire (which is usually intended to be humorous) as they mislead and sometimes profit from readers' gullibility. While most fake news sites are portrayed to be spinoffs of other news sites, some of these websites are examples of website spoofing, structured to make visitors believe they are visiting major news outlets like ABC News or MSNBC. The New York Times pointed out that within a strict definition, "fake news" on the Internet referred to a fictitious article which was fabricated with the deliberate motivation to defraud readers, generally with the goal of profiting through clickbait. PolitiFact described fake news as fabricated content designed to fool readers and subsequently made viral through the Internet to crowds that increase its dissemination. The New York Times noted in a December 2016 article that fake news had previously maintained a presence on the Internet and within tabloid journalism in the years prior to the 2016 U.S. election. Except for the 2016 Philippine elections, prior to the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, fake news had not impacted the election process and subsequent events to such a high degree. Subsequent to the 2016 election, the issue of fake news turned into a political weapon, with supporters of left-wing politics saying those on the opposite side of the spectrum spread falsehoods, and supporters of right-wing politics arguing such accusations were merely a way to censor conservative views. Due to these back-and-forth complaints, the definition of fake news as used for such polemics became more vague. Lists The following is a list of websites created by individuals (aside from those associated with corporations or political actors) that have been considered by journalists, fact-checkers or researchers as distributing false news - or otherwise participating in misinformation or disinformation. As of 2024, is now an e-commerce site. The Philippines has been called "Patient Zero" in the current era of disinformation, with Rodrigo Duterte's presidential campaign being regarded as the index case, having preceded widespread global coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian trolls. There is an extensive archive list of fake news websites based in the Philippines or targeting Philippine audiences which has been moved from this international list article to the Fake news in the Philippines article due to its size. Examples of disinformation campaigns from companies include Eliminalia, a reputation management firm that created a network of over 600 websites for its clients, and Regency Enterprises, which created sites to promote the movie A Cure for Wellness. Examples of countries with political actors that have been confirmed or suspected to be involved with fake news website networks include Brazil, India, Iran, Italy, the People's Republic of China, the Philippines, Russia, Ukraine (Luhansk), and the United States. According to the Poynter Institute, there are four categories of false fact-checking websites: As of October 2025, NewsGuard has tracked at least 2,089 news/information websites automatically generated by machine learning models that span 16 languages. The following table lists websites that have been both considered by fact-checkers, journalists or researchers as distributing false news and are run by organizations that have been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups. The following is a list of websites that have been characterized by journalists and researchers as promoting pseudoscience or junk science. Censured by the Advertising Standards Authority in 2018 for distributing a Facebook ad targeted towards parents with misleading claims about vaccines. Accused by the Guardian of "[using] Facebook’s advertising tools to target their propaganda exclusively at women." Publishes "accounts from parents who claim that a baby's death was the result of a vaccination. Many of those viral articles have been debunked with official, medically supported explanations that include sudden infant death syndrome, pneumonia and accidental asphyxiation." Misinformation from the group has resulted in at least one death: a child whose mother was urged by other group members not to give her son Tamiflu after he had a bout of the flu. Accounts associated with the site and its founder have been suspended from Facebook and Twitter in 2020 for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. The founder's YouTube channel was demonetized in 2019 due to "[promoting] anti-vaccination content". Ads to the site were also removed by Facebook in 2019 for violating Facebook's policies on misinformation about vaccines. The founder's Twitter account was reinstated in 2023. Numerous websites have been created by companies or individuals that contain satirical or news parody content that is intended to be or has been designated by fact-checkers, journalists or researchers as fake news. Examples of countries with troll farms that have been confirmed or suspected to be involved with fake news website networks include Cambodia, Ghana, North Macedonia, the Republic of Georgia, and Russia. The following table lists websites that have allowed users to generate their own hoaxes that appear in the form of news articles. While the stated purpose is for users to prank their friends, many of the resulting false stories have spread on social media and have led to harassment. Many fake news websites can be assessed as likely being part of the same network campaign if some combination of the following are true: Part of the same network as abcnews-us.com. Used a technique called "domain hopping" - repeatedly switching domain names to stay ahead of advertising blacklists on social media. The following article lists miscellaneous sites that are one-offs or otherwise lack information that would place them into one of the other categories above. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_Corporation] | [TOKENS: 999] |
Contents Ethyl Corporation Ethyl Corporation is a fuel additive company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States. The company is a distributor of fuel additives. Among other products, Ethyl Corporation distributes tetraethyl lead, an additive used to make leaded gasoline. History Founded in 1923, Ethyl Corp was formed by General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso). General Motors had the "use patent" for tetraethyllead (TEL) as an antiknock fuel additive, based on the work of Thomas Midgley Jr., Charles Kettering, and later Charles Allen Thomas,: 340–41 and Esso had the patent for the manufacture of TEL. Since the patents affected the marketing of TEL, General Motors and ESSO formed Ethyl Corp; each parent company had a 50% stake in the new corporation. Since neither company had chemical plant experience, they hired Dupont to operate the manufacturing facilities. After patents ran out, Dupont started manufacture of TEL on their own, and Ethyl started running its own operations. Within the first year of its operation, the company’s plants were plagued by cases of lead poisoning, hallucinations, insanity, and even the deaths of its employees due to exposure to lead. While the company tried to hush the news, at times it was impossible, for example in 1924, within the first two months of its operation, the facility had 17 cases of severe lead poisoning leading to hallucinations and insanity, then five production workers died in quick succession, and 35 more turned into staggering wrecks at one ill-ventilated facility.: 194–5, 204–5 To counter these accusations, Thomas Midgley Jr. participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL on October 30, 1924, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without any problems. In fact, he knew the dangers of lead poisoning, having been made seriously ill from overexposure a few months earlier.: 195 The State of New Jersey ordered the TEL plant located at the Bayway Refinery in Linden NJ to be shut down a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL again without state permission. In 1962, Albemarle Paper Manufacturing Company, in Richmond, borrowed $200 million and purchased Ethyl Corporation (Delaware), a corporation 13 times its size. Albemarle then changed its name to Ethyl Corporation. It is believed that General Motors sought to divest itself of "Ethyl Corporation," owing to concern about liabilities of TEL. The 1962 transaction was the largest leveraged buyout at that time. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Ethyl Corporation expanded and diversified in response to the gradual decline of the market for TEL, as the automotive industry shifted to unleaded gasoline in response to the recently passed Clean Air Act, which effectively ended the use of leaded gas in new automobiles.: 204 In the late 1980s, Ethyl began to spin off a number of divisions. The aluminum, plastics, and energy units became Tredegar Corporation in 1989. In 1993, it spun off its life insurance company, First Colony Life, and then in 1994, the specialty chemicals business was spun off as an independent, publicly traded company named Albemarle Corporation. In 2004, Ethyl Corporation became a subsidiary of NewMarket Corporation (NYSE: NEU). In 2022, the YouTube channel Veritasium released a video titled The Man Who Accidentally Killed the Most People in History, which examined Thomas Midgley Jr.'s role in the development of leaded gasoline and CFCs. The video, which had over 40 million views by 2025, brought renewed public attention to Ethyl Corporation’s historical involvement in leaded fuel production. Tetraethyllead Tetraethyllead has been recognized as a contributor to soil, air and water lead pollution, and is toxic to humans. While leaded gasoline made engines more efficient, lead pollution has increased by over 625 times previous levels in the past century due partly to pollution by leaded fuel. Ethyl Corporation historically denied that tetraethyllead poses significant public health risks in excess of those associated with gasoline itself. Tetraethyllead was supplied for blending with raw gasoline in the form of "Ethyl Fluid", which blended tetraethyllead with the lead scavengers 1,2-dibromoethane and 1,2-dichloroethane. Ethyl fluid contained a dye which would distinguish treated gasoline from untreated gasoline and discourage the diversion of gasoline for other purposes, such as cleaning. References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness] | [TOKENS: 3334] |
Contents Truthiness Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions. The concept of truthiness has emerged as a major subject of discussion surrounding U.S. politics during the late 20th and early 21st centuries because of the perception among some observers of a rise in propaganda and a growing hostility toward factual reporting and fact-based discussion. Etymology American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness in this meaning as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse. He particularly applied it to U.S. President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Colbert later ascribed truthiness to other institutions and organizations, including Wikipedia. Colbert has sometimes used a Dog Latin version of the term, "Veritasiness". For example, in Colbert's "Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando" the word "Veritasiness" can be seen on the banner above the eagle on the operation's seal. Truthiness was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster. Linguist and OED consultant Benjamin Zimmer pointed out that the word truthiness already had a history in literature and appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as a derivation of truthy, and The Century Dictionary, both of which indicate it as rare or dialectal, and to be defined more straightforwardly as "truthfulness, faithfulness". Responding to claims by Michael Adams that the word already existed with a different meaning, Colbert, presumably exploiting his definition of the word, said, "Truthiness is a word I pulled right out of my keister". Use by Stephen Colbert Stephen Colbert, portraying his character Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, chose the word truthiness just moments before taping the premiere episode of The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005, after deciding the originally scripted word – "truth" – was not absolutely ridiculous enough: "We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist", he explained. He introduced his definition in the first segment of the episode, saying: "Now I'm sure some of the 'word police', the 'wordinistas' over at Webster's are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word'. Well, anybody who knows me knows I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true. Or what did or didn't happen." When asked in an out-of-character interview with The Onion's A.V. Club for his views on "the 'truthiness' imbroglio that's tearing our country apart", Colbert elaborated on the critique he intended to convey with the word: Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word ... It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President [George W. Bush] because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? ... Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality. During an interview on December 8, 2006, with Charlie Rose, Colbert stated: I was thinking of the idea of passion and emotion and certainty over information. And what you feel in your gut, as I said in the first Wørd we did, which was sort of a thesis statement of the whole show – however long it lasts – is that sentence, that one word, that's more important to, I think, the public at large, and not just the people who provide it in prime-time cable, than information. At the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, Colbert, the featured guest, described President Bush's thought processes using the definition of truthiness. Editor and Publisher used "truthiness" to describe Colbert's criticism of Bush, in an article published the same day titled "Colbert Lampoons Bush at White House Correspondents Dinner – President Not Amused?" E&P reported that the "blistering comedy 'tribute' to President Bush ... left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close" and that many people at the dinner "looked a little uncomfortable at times, perhaps feeling the material was a little too biting – or too much speaking 'truthiness' to power". E&P reported a few days later that its coverage of Colbert at the dinner drew "possibly its highest one-day traffic total ever", and published a letter to the editor asserting that "Colbert brought truth wrapped in truthiness". On the same weekend, The Washington Post and others also reported on the event. Six months later, in a column titled "Throw The Truthiness Bums Out", The New York Times columnist Frank Rich called Colbert's after-dinner speech a "cultural primary" and christened it the "defining moment" of the United States' 2006 midterm elections. Colbert refreshed "truthiness" in an episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on July 18, 2016, using the neologism "Trumpiness" regarding statements made by Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. According to Colbert, while truthiness refers to statements that feel true but are actually false, "Trumpiness" does not even have to feel true, much less be true. As evidence that Trump's remarks exhibit this quality, he cited a Washington Post column stating that many Trump supporters did not believe his "wildest promises" but supported him anyway. Coverage by news media After Colbert's introduction of truthiness, it quickly became widely used and recognized. Six days after, CNN's Reliable Sources featured a discussion of The Colbert Report by host Howard Kurtz, who played a clip of Colbert's definition. On the same day, ABC's Nightline also reported on truthiness, prompting Colbert to respond by saying: "You know what was missing from that piece? Me. Stephen Colbert. But I'm not surprised. Nightline's on opposite me ..." Within a few months of its introduction by Colbert, truthiness was discussed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the Associated Press, Editor & Publisher, Salon, The Huffington Post, Chicago Reader, CNET, and on ABC's Nightline, CBS's 60 Minutes, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. The February 13, 2006 issue of Newsweek featured an article on The Colbert Report titled "The Truthiness Teller", recounting the career of the word truthiness since its popularization by Colbert. In its issue of October 25, 2005, eight days after the premiere episode of the Report, The New York Times ran its third article on The Colbert Report, "Bringing Out the Absurdity of the News". The article specifically discussed the segment on "truthiness", although the Times misreported the word as "trustiness". In its November 1, 2005 issue, the Times ran a correction. On the next episode of the Report, Colbert took the Times to task for the error, pointing out, ironically, that "trustiness" is "not even a word". The New York Times again discussed "truthiness" in its issue of December 25, 2005, this time as one of nine words that had captured the year's zeitgeist, in an article titled "2005: In a Word; Truthiness" by Jacques Steinberg. In crediting truthiness, Steinberg said, "the pundit who probably drew the most attention in 2005 was only playing one on TV: Stephen Colbert". In the January 22, 2006 issue, columnist Frank Rich used the term seven times, with credit to Colbert, in a column titled "Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito", to discuss Republican portrayals of several issues (including the Samuel Alito nomination, the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and Jack Murtha's Vietnam War record). Rich emphasized the extent to which the word had quickly become a cultural fixture, writing, "The mock Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert's slinging of the word 'truthiness' caught on instantaneously last year precisely because we live in the age of truthiness." Editor & Publisher reported on Rich's use of "truthiness" in his column, saying he "tackled the growing trend to 'truthiness,' as opposed to truth, in the U.S." The New York Times published two letters on the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, where Stephen Colbert was the featured guest, in its May 3, 2006 edition, under the headline "Truthiness and Power". Frank Rich referenced truthiness again in The New York Times in 2008, describing the strategy of John McCain's presidential campaign as being "to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness", Rich explained that the campaign was based on truthiness because "McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it." Rich also noted, "You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on 'The View'. Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word 'lies' to his face." Recognition Usage of "truthiness" continued to proliferate in media, politics, and public consciousness. On January 5, 2006, etymology professor Anatoly Liberman began an hour-long program on public radio by discussing truthiness and predicting it would be included in dictionaries in the next year or two. His prediction seemed to be on track when, the next day, the American Dialect Society announced that "truthiness" was its 2005 Word of the Year, and the website of the Macmillan English Dictionary featured truthiness as its Word of the Week a few weeks later. Truthiness was also selected by The New York Times as one of nine words that captured the spirit of 2005. Global Language Monitor, which tracks trends in languages, named truthiness the top television buzzword of 2006, and another term Colbert coined with reference to truthiness, wikiality, as another of the top ten television buzzwords of 2006, the first time two words from the same show have made the list. The word was listed in the annual "Banished Word List" released by a committee at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, in 2007. The list included "truthiness" among other overused terms, such as "awesome" celebrity couple portmanteaus such as "Brangelina", and "pwn". In response, on January 8, 2007, Colbert said Lake Superior State University was an "attention-seeking second-tier state university". The 2008 List of Banished Words restored "truthiness" to formal usage, in response to the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. On January 6, 2006, the American Dialect Society announced that "truthiness" was selected as its 2005 Word of the Year. The Society described its rationale as follows: In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on The Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Central television channel, truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." On December 10, 2006, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary announced that "truthiness" was selected as its 2006 Word of the Year on Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year, based on a reader poll, by a 5–1 margin over the second-place word google. "We're at a point where what constitutes truth is a question on a lot of people's minds, and truth has become up for grabs", said Merriam-Webster president John Morse. "'Truthiness' is a playful way for us to think about a very important issue." However, despite winning Word of the Year, the word does not appear in the 2006 edition of the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary. In response to this omission, during "The Wørd" segment on December 12, 2006, Colbert issued a new page 1344 for the tenth edition of the Merriam Webster dictionary that featured "truthiness". To make room for the definition of "truthiness", including a portrait of Colbert, the definition for the word "try" was removed with Colbert stating "Sorry, try. Maybe you should have tried harder." He also sarcastically told viewers to "not" download the new page and "not" glue it in the new dictionary in libraries and schools.[non-primary source needed] In the June 14, 2008 edition of The New York Times, the word was featured as 1-across in the crossword puzzle. Colbert mentioned this during the last segment on the June 18 episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and declared himself the "King of the Crossword".[non-primary source needed] In December 2009, the BBC online magazine asked its readers to nominate suggestions of things to be included on a poster which would represent important events in the 2000s (decade), divided into five different categories: "People", "Words", "News", "Objects" and "Culture". Suggestions were sent in and a panel of five independent experts shortened each category to what they saw as the 20 most important. The selection in the "Words" category included "Truthiness". There is a growing amount of research on how the truthiness of a claim is inflated by the accompanying nonprobative information. In particular, in 2012, a study examining truthiness was published by a group of students from three universities in the paper "Nonprobative photographs (or words) inflate truthiness". The experiments showed that people are more likely to believe a claim is true regardless of evidence when a decorative photograph or irrelevant verbosity appears alongside the claim. Also in 2012, Harvard University's Berkman Center hosted a two-day symposium at Harvard and MIT, "Truthiness in Digital Media", exploring "concerns about misinformation and disinformation" in new media. The Truthiness Collaborative is a project at USC's Annenberg School "to advance research and engagement around the misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and other challenges to discourse fueled by our evolving media and technology ecosystem". See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_conspiracy_theory] | [TOKENS: 13707] |
Contents New World Order conspiracy theory The New World Order (NWO) is a term often used in conspiracy theories which speculate about a secretly emerging totalitarian world government. The common theme in conspiracy theories about a New World Order is that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian one-world government—which will replace sovereign nation-states—and an all-encompassing propaganda whose ideology hails the establishment of the New World Order as the culmination of history's progress. Many influential historical and contemporary figures have therefore been alleged to be part of a cabal that operates through numerous front organizations to orchestrate significant political and financial events, including taking advantage of crises or even causing them in order to push through controversial policies at both national and international levels, as steps in an ongoing plot to achieve world domination. Before the early 1990s, New World Order conspiracism was limited to two American countercultures, primarily the militantly anti-government right, and secondarily the part of fundamentalist Christianity concerned with the eschatological end-time emergence of the Antichrist. Academics who study conspiracy theories and religious extremism, such as Michael Barkun and Chip Berlet, observed that right-wing populist conspiracy theories about a New World Order not only have been embraced by many seekers of stigmatized knowledge but also have seeped into popular culture, thereby fueling a surge of interest and participation in survivalism and paramilitarism as many people actively prepare for apocalyptic and millenarian scenarios. These political scientists warn that mass hysteria over New World Order conspiracy theories could eventually have devastating effects on American political life, ranging from escalating lone wolf terrorism to the rise to power of authoritarian ultranationalist demagogues. History of the term During the 20th century, political figures such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill used the term "new world order" to refer to a new period of history characterized by a dramatic change in world political thought and in the global balance of power after World War I and World War II. The interwar and post-World War II period were seen as opportunities to implement idealistic proposals for global governance by collective efforts to address worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to resolve, while nevertheless respecting the right of nations to self-determination. Such collective initiatives manifested in the formation of intergovernmental organizations such as the League of Nations in 1920, the United Nations (UN) in 1945, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, along with international regimes such as the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), implemented to maintain a cooperative balance of power and facilitate reconciliation between nations to prevent the prospect of another global conflict. These cosmopolitan efforts to instill liberal internationalism were regularly criticized and opposed by American paleoconservative business nationalists from the 1930s on.[need quotation to verify] Progressives welcomed international organizations and regimes such as the United Nations in the aftermath of the two World Wars, but argued that these initiatives suffered from a democratic deficit and were therefore inadequate not only to prevent another world war, but also to foster global justice, as the UN was chartered to be a free association of sovereign nation-states rather than a transition to democratic world government. Thus, cosmopolitan activists around the globe, perceiving the IGOs as too ineffectual for global change, formed a world federalist movement. British writer and futurist H. G. Wells went further than progressives in the 1940s, by appropriating and redefining the term "new world order" as a synonym for the establishment of a technocratic world state and of a planned economy, garnering popularity in state socialist circles. During the Second Red Scare, both secular and Christian right American agitators, largely influenced by the work of Canadian conspiracy theorist William Guy Carr, increasingly embraced and spread dubious fears of Freemasons, Illuminati and Jews as the alleged driving forces behind an "international communist conspiracy". The threat of "Godless communism", in the form of an atheistic, bureaucratic collectivist world government, demonized as the "Red Menace", became the focus of apocalyptic millenarian conspiracism. The Red Scare came to shape one of the core ideas of the political right in the United States, which is that liberals and progressives, with their welfare-state policies and international cooperation programs such as foreign aid, supposedly contribute to a gradual process of global collectivism that will inevitably lead to nations being replaced with a communistic/collectivist one-world government. James Warburg, appearing before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1950, famously stated: "We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest." Right-wing populist advocacy groups with a paleoconservative world-view, such as the John Birch Society (JBS), disseminated a multitude of conspiracy theories in the 1960s claiming that the governments of both the United States and the Soviet Union were controlled by a cabal of corporate internationalists, "greedy" bankers and corrupt politicians who were intent on using the UN as the vehicle to create a "One World Government". This anti-globalist conspiracism fueled the campaign for U.S. withdrawal from the UN, given the United Nations were viewed as a manifestation of a malevolent and shadowy international government seeking world domination. American writer Mary M. Davison, in her booklet The Profound Revolution (1966), traced the alleged New World Order conspiracy to the establishment of the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1913 by international bankers, whom she claimed later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as a shadow government.[citation needed] At the time the booklet was published, many readers would have interpreted "international bankers" as a reference to a postulated "international Jewish banking conspiracy" masterminded by the Rothschild family.[additional citation(s) needed] Arguing that the term "New World Order" is used by a secretive global elite dedicated to the eradication of the sovereignty of the world's nations, American writer Gary Allen—in his books None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971), Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order (1974), and Say "No!" to the New World Order (1987)—articulated the anti-globalist theme of contemporary right-wing conspiracism in the U.S. After the fall of communism in the early 1990s, the de facto subject of New World Order conspiracism shifted from crypto-communists, perceived to be plotting to establish an atheistic world communist government, to globalists, perceived to be plotting to implement a collectivist generally, unified world government ultimately controlled by an untouchable oligarchy of international bankers, corrupt politicians, and corporatists, or the United Nations itself. The shift in perception was inspired by growing opposition to corporate internationalism on the American right in the 1990s.[additional citation(s) needed] In his speech, Toward a New World Order, delivered on 11 September 1990 during a joint session of the US Congress, President George H. W. Bush described his objectives for post-Cold War global governance in cooperation with post-Soviet states. He stated: Until now, the world we've known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict, and the cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the genuine prospect of new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a "world order" in which "the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong ..." A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations. The New York Times observed that progressives were denouncing this new world order as a rationalization of American imperial ambitions in the Middle East at the time. At the same time conservatives rejected any new security arrangements altogether and fulminated about any possibility of a UN revival. Chip Berlet, an American investigative reporter specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the US, wrote that the Christian and secular far-right were especially terrified by Bush's speech. Fundamentalist Christian groups interpreted Bush's words as signaling the End Times. At the same time, more secular theorists approached it from an anti-communist and anti-collectivist standpoint and feared for hegemony over all countries by the United Nations. The New World Order has been a focus of the American Christian right, and specifically the Protestant right. The NWO is seen as a prophesied anti-Christian enemy established by globalists which uses perceived secular philosophies such as environmentalism, feminism, and socialism (collectively referred to as globalism) to thwart Christianity through the work of organizations such as the United Nations, European Union, World Trade Organization, and World Health Organization. Organizations like the UN, as well as concepts such as the New World Order and globalism have played a significant role in right-wing Protestant prophecy media. American televangelist Pat Robertson, with his best-selling book The New World Order (1991), became the most prominent Christian disseminator of conspiracy theories about recent American history. He describes a scenario where Wall Street, the Federal Reserve System, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission control the flow of events from behind the scenes, constantly nudging people covertly in the direction of world government for the Antichrist. It has been observed that, throughout the 1990s, the galvanizing language used by conspiracy theorists such as Linda Thompson, Mark Koernke and Robert K. Spear led to militancy and the rise of the American militia movement. The militia movement's anti-government ideology was spread through speeches at rallies and meetings, books and videotapes sold at gun shows, shortwave and satellite radio, fax networks, and computer bulletin boards. It has been argued that it was overnight AM radio shows and propagandistic viral content on the internet that most effectively contributed to more extremist responses to the perceived threat of the New World Order. This led to the substantial growth of New World Order conspiracism, with it retroactively finding its way into the previously apolitical literature of numerous Kennedy assassinologists, ufologists, lost land theorists and—partially inspired by fears surrounding the "Satanic panic"—occultists. From the mid-1990s onward, the amorphous appeal of those subcultures transmitted New World Order conspiracism to a larger audience of seekers of stigmatized knowledge, with the common characteristic of disillusionment of political efficacy. From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, Hollywood conspiracy-thriller television shows and films also played a role in introducing a general audience to various fringe, esoteric theories related to New World Order conspiracism—which by that point had developed to include black helicopters, FEMA "concentration camps", etc.—theories which for decades previously were confined to largely right-wing subcultures. The 1993–2002 television series The X-Files, the 1997 film Conspiracy Theory and the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future are often cited as notable examples. Following the start of the 21st century, and specifically during the 2008 financial crisis, many politicians and pundits, such as Gordon Brown and Henry Kissinger, used the term "new world order" in their advocacy for a comprehensive reform of the global financial system and their calls for a "New Bretton Woods" taking into account emerging markets such as China and India. These public declarations reinvigorated New World Order conspiracism, culminating in talk-show host Sean Hannity stating on his Fox News program Hannity that the "conspiracy theorists were right". Progressive media-watchdog groups have repeatedly criticized Fox News in general, and its now-defunct opinion show Glenn Beck in particular, for not only disseminating New World Order conspiracy theories to mainstream audiences, but possibly agitating so-called "lone wolf" extremism, particularly from the radical right. In 2009, American film directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel released New World Order, a critically acclaimed documentary film which explores the world of conspiracy theorists—such as American radio host Alex Jones—who vigorously oppose what they perceive as an emerging New World Order. The growing dissemination and popularity of conspiracy theories has also created an alliance between right-wing agitators and hip hop music's left-wing rappers (such as KRS-One, Professor Griff of Public Enemy and Immortal Technique), illustrating how anti-elitist conspiracism can create unlikely political allies in efforts to oppose a political system. Conspiracy theories There are numerous systemic conspiracy theories through which the concept of a New World Order is viewed. The following is a list of the major ones in roughly chronological order: Since the 19th century, many apocalyptic millennial Christian eschatologists, starting with John Nelson Darby, have predicted a globalist conspiracy to impose a tyrannical New World Order governing structure as the fulfillment of prophecies about the "end time" in the Bible, specifically in the Book of Ezekiel, the Book of Daniel, the Olivet Discourse found in the Synoptic Gospels, 2 Esdras 11:32 and Revelation 13:7. They claim that people who have made a deal with the Devil to gain wealth and power have become pawns in a supernatural chess game to move humanity into accepting a utopian world government that rests on the spiritual foundations of a syncretic-messianic world religion, which will later reveal itself to be a dystopian world empire that imposes the imperial cult of an "Unholy Trinity" of Satan, the Antichrist and the False Prophet.[citation needed] In many contemporary Christian conspiracy theories, the False Prophet will be either the last pope of the Catholic Church (groomed and installed by an Alta Vendita or Jesuit conspiracy), a guru from the New Age movement, or even the leader of an elite fundamentalist Christian organization like the Fellowship, while the Antichrist will be either the President of the European Union, the Caliph of a pan-Islamic state, or even the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Some of the most vocal critics of end-time conspiracy theories come from within Christianity. In 1993, historian Bruce Barron wrote a stern rebuke of apocalyptic Christian conspiracism in the Christian Research Journal, when reviewing Robertson's 1991 book The New World Order. Another critique can be found in historian Gregory S. Camp's 1997 book Selling Fear: Conspiracy Theories and End-Times Paranoia. Religious studies scholar Richard T. Hughes argues that "New World Order" rhetoric libels the Christian faith, since the "New World Order" as defined by Christian conspiracy theorists has no basis in the Bible whatsoever. Furthermore, he argues that not only is this idea unbiblical, it is positively anti-biblical and fundamentally anti-Christian, because by misinterpreting key passages in the Book of Revelation, it turns a comforting message about the coming kingdom of God into one of fear, panic and despair in the face of an allegedly approaching one-world government. Progressive Christians, such as preacher-theologian Peter J. Gomes, caution Christian fundamentalists that a "spirit of fear" can distort scripture and history through dangerously combining biblical literalism, apocalyptic timetables, demonization and oppressive prejudices, while Camp warns of the "very real danger that Christians could pick up some extra spiritual baggage" by credulously embracing conspiracy theories. They therefore call on Christians who indulge in conspiracism to repent. Freemasonry is one of the world's oldest secular fraternal organizations and arose in Great Britain during the 18th century. Over the years, several allegations and conspiracy theories have been directed towards Freemasonry, including the allegation that Freemasons have a hidden political agenda and are conspiring to bring about a New World Order, a world government organized according to Masonic principles or governed only by Freemasons. The esoteric nature of Masonic symbolism and rites led to Freemasons first being accused of secretly practicing Satanism in the late 18th century. The original allegation of a conspiracy within Freemasonry to subvert religions and governments to take over the world traces back to Scottish author John Robison, whose reactionary conspiracy theories crossed the Atlantic and influenced outbreaks of Protestant anti-Masonry in the United States during the 19th century. In the 1890s, French writer Léo Taxil wrote a series of pamphlets and books denouncing Freemasonry and charging their lodges with worshiping Lucifer as the Supreme Being and Great Architect of the Universe. Despite the fact that Taxil admitted that his claims were all a hoax, they were and still are believed and repeated by numerous conspiracy theorists and had a huge influence on subsequent anti-Masonic claims about Freemasonry. Some conspiracy theorists eventually speculated that some Founding Fathers of the United States, such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were having Masonic sacred geometric designs interwoven into American society, particularly in the Great Seal of the United States, the United States one-dollar bill, the architecture of National Mall landmarks and the streets and highways of Washington, D.C., as part of a master plan to create the first "Masonic government" as a model for the coming New World Order. Freemasons rebut these claims of a Masonic conspiracy. Freemasonry, which promotes rationalism, places no power in occult symbols themselves, and it is not a part of its principles to view the drawing of symbols, no matter how large, as an act of consolidating or controlling power. Furthermore, there is no published information establishing the Masonic membership of the men responsible for the design of the Great Seal. While conspiracy theorists assert that there are elements of Masonic influence on the Great Seal of the United States and that these elements were intentionally or unintentionally used because the creators were familiar with the symbols, in fact, the all-seeing Eye of Providence and the unfinished pyramid were symbols used as much outside Masonic lodges as within them in the late 18th century. Therefore, the designers were drawing from common esoteric symbols. The Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum", appearing on the reverse side of the Great Seal since 1782 and the back of the one-dollar bill since 1935, translates to "New Order of the Ages", and alludes to the beginning of an era where the United States of America is an independent nation-state; conspiracy theorists often mistranslate it as "New World Order". Although the European continental branch of Freemasonry has organizations that allow political discussion within their Masonic Lodges, Masonic researcher Trevor W. McKeown argues that the accusations ignore several facts. Firstly, the many Grand Lodges are independent and sovereign, meaning they act independently and do not have a common agenda. The points of belief of the various lodges often differ. Secondly, famous Freemasons have always held views that span the political spectrum and show no particular pattern or preference. As such, the term "Masonic government" is erroneous; there is no consensus among Freemasons about what an ideal government would look like. The Order of the Illuminati was an Enlightenment-age secret society founded by university professor Adam Weishaupt on 1 May 1776, in Upper Bavaria, Germany. The movement consisted of advocates of freethought, secularism, liberalism, republicanism, and gender equality, recruited from the German Masonic Lodges, who sought to teach rationalism through mystery schools. In 1785, the order was infiltrated, broken up, and suppressed by the government agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, in his preemptive campaign to neutralize the threat of secret societies ever becoming hotbeds of conspiracies to overthrow the Bavarian monarchy and its state religion, Roman Catholicism. There is no evidence that the Bavarian Illuminati survived its suppression in 1785. In the late 18th century, reactionary conspiracy theorists, such as Scottish physicist John Robison and French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, began speculating that the Illuminati had survived their suppression and become the masterminds behind the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The Illuminati were accused of being subversives who were attempting to secretly orchestrate a revolutionary wave in Europe and the rest of the world by spreading the most radical ideas and movements of the Enlightenment—anti-clericalism, anti-monarchism, and anti-patriarchalism— which the accusers feared would lead to the destruction of the natural order of things. During the 19th century, fear of an Illuminati conspiracy was a real concern of the European ruling classes, and their oppressive reactions to this unfounded fear provoked in 1848 the very revolutions they sought to prevent. During the interwar period of the 20th century, fascist propagandists, such as British revisionist historian Nesta Helen Webster and American socialite Edith Starr Miller, not only popularized the myth of an Illuminati conspiracy but claimed that it was a subversive secret society which served the Jewish elites that supposedly propped up both finance capitalism and Soviet communism to divide and rule the world. American evangelist Gerald Burton Winrod and other conspiracy theorists within the fundamentalist Christian movement in the United States—which emerged in the 1910s as a backlash against the principles of Enlightenment secular humanism, modernism, and liberalism—became the main channel of dissemination of Illuminati conspiracy theories in the U.S..[citation needed] Right-wing populists, such as members of the John Birch Society (JBS), subsequently began speculating that some collegiate fraternities (Skull and Bones), gentlemen's clubs (Bohemian Club), and think tanks (Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission) of the American upper class are front organizations of the Illuminati, which they accuse of plotting to create a New World Order through a one-world government. In his book Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskind refers to JBS co-founder Revilo P. Oliver as "the person responsible for introducing the idea of a conspiracy by the Illuminati into Birch circles." The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a series of three satirical novels by American writers Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, first published in 1975, which attributed the alleged major cover-ups of the era – such as who shot John F. Kennedy – to the Illuminati, was extremely influential in popularizing the myth of an Illuminati superconspiracy during the 1960s and onward. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an antisemitic canard, originally published in Russian in 1903, alleging a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to achieve world domination. The text purports to be the minutes of the secret meetings of a cabal of Jewish masterminds, which has co-opted Freemasonry and is plotting to rule the world on behalf of all Jews because they believe themselves to be the chosen people of God. The Protocols incorporate many of the core conspiracist themes outlined in the Robison and Barruel attacks on the Freemasons and overlay them with antisemitic allegations about anti-Tsarist movements in Russia. The Protocols reflect themes similar to more general critiques of Enlightenment liberalism by conservative aristocrats who support monarchies and state religions. The interpretation intended by the publication of The Protocols is that if one peels away the layers of the Masonic conspiracy, past the Illuminati, one finds the rotten Jewish core. Numerous polemicists, such as Irish journalist Philip Graves in a 1921 article in The Times, and British academic Norman Cohn in his 1967 book Warrant for Genocide, have proven The Protocols to be both a hoax and a clear case of plagiarism. There is general agreement that Russian-French writer and political activist Matvei Golovinski fabricated the text for Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, as a work of counter-revolutionary propaganda prior to the 1905 Russian Revolution, by plagiarizing, almost word for word in some passages, from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a 19th-century satire against Napoleon III of France written by French political satirist and Legitimist militant Maurice Joly. Responsible for feeding many antisemitic and anti-Masonic mass hysteria of the twentieth century, The Protocols has been influential in the development of some conspiracy theories, including some New World Order theories, and repeatedly appears in certain contemporary conspiracy literature. For example, the authors of the 1982 controversial book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail concluded that The Protocols was the most persuasive piece of evidence for the existence and activities of the Priory of Sion. They speculated that this secret society was working behind the scenes to establish a theocratic "United States of Europe". Politically and religiously unified through the imperial cult of a Merovingian Great Monarch—supposedly descended from a Jesus bloodline—who occupies both the throne of Europe and the Holy See, this "Holy European Empire" would become the hyperpower of the 21st century. Although the Priory of Sion itself has been exhaustively debunked by journalists and scholars as a hoax, some apocalyptic millenarian Christian eschatologists who believe The Protocols is authentic became convinced that the Priory of Sion was a fulfillment of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation and further proof of an anti-Christian conspiracy of epic proportions signaling the imminence of a New World Order. Skeptics argue that the current gambit of contemporary conspiracy theorists who use The Protocols is to claim that they "really" come from some group other than the Jews, such as fallen angels or alien invaders. Although it is hard to determine whether the conspiracy-minded actually believe this or are simply trying to sanitize a discredited text, skeptics argue that it does not make much difference, since they leave the actual, antisemitic text unchanged, giving The Protocols credibility and circulation. During the second half of Britain's "imperial century" between 1815 and 1914, English-born South African businessman, mining magnate, and politician Cecil Rhodes advocated the British Empire reannexing the United States of America and reforming itself into an "Imperial Federation" to bring about a hyperpower and lasting world peace. In his first will, written in 1877 at the age of 23, he expressed his wish to fund a secret society (known as the Society of the Elect) that would advance this goal: To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia [Crete], the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity. In 1890, thirteen years after "his now-famous will," Rhodes elaborated on the same idea: establishment of "England everywhere," which would "ultimately lead to the cessation of all wars, and one language throughout the world." "The only thing feasible to carry out this idea is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world ["and human minds of the higher-order"] to be devoted to such an object." Rhodes also concentrated on the Rhodes Scholarship, which had British statesman Alfred Milner as one of its trustees. Established in 1902, the original goal of the trust fund was to foster peace among the great powers by creating a sense of fraternity and a shared world view among future British, American, and German leaders by having enabled them to study for free at the University of Oxford. Milner and British official Lionel George Curtis were the architects of the Round Table movement, a network of organizations promoting closer union between Britain and its self-governing colonies. To this end, Curtis founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in June 1919 and, with his 1938 book The Commonwealth of God, began advocating for the creation of an imperial federation that eventually reannexes the U.S., which would be presented to Protestant churches as being the work of the Christian God to elicit their support. The Commonwealth of Nations was created in 1949, but it would only be a free association of independent states rather than the powerful imperial federation imagined by Rhodes, Milner, and Curtis. The Council on Foreign Relations began in 1917 with a group of New York academics who were asked by President Woodrow Wilson to offer options for the foreign policy of the United States in the interwar period. Originally envisioned as a group of American and British scholars and diplomats, some of whom belonging to the Round Table movement, it was a subsequent group of 108 New York financiers, manufacturers, and international lawyers organized in June 1918 by Nobel Peace Prize recipient and U.S. secretary of state Elihu Root, that became the Council on Foreign Relations on 29 July 1921. The first of the council's projects was a quarterly journal launched in September 1922, called Foreign Affairs. The Trilateral Commission was founded in July 1973, at the initiative of American banker David Rockefeller, who was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time. It is a private organization established to foster closer cooperation among the United States, Europe, and Japan. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations. In the 1960s, right-wing populist individuals and groups with a paleoconservative worldview, such as members of the John Birch Society, were the first to combine and spread a business nationalist critique of corporate internationalists networked through think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations with a grand conspiracy theory casting them as front organizations for the Round Table of the "Anglo-American Establishment", which are financed by an "international banking cabal" that has supposedly been plotting from the late 19th century on to impose an oligarchic new world order through a global financial system. Anti-globalist conspiracy theorists therefore fear that international bankers are planning to eventually subvert the independence of the U.S. by subordinating national sovereignty to a strengthened Bank for International Settlements. The research findings of historian Carroll Quigley, author of the 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, are taken by both conspiracy theorists of the American Old Right (W. Cleon Skousen) and New Left (Carl Oglesby) to substantiate this view, even though Quigley argued that the Establishment is not involved in a plot to implement a one-world government but rather British and American "benevolent imperialism" driven by the mutual interests of economic elites in the United Kingdom and the United States. Quigley also argued that, although the Round Table still exists today, its position in influencing the policies of world leaders has been much reduced from its heyday during World War I and slowly waned after the end of World War II and the Suez Crisis. Today the Round Table is largely a ginger group, designed to consider and gradually influence the policies of the Commonwealth of Nations, but faces strong opposition. Furthermore, in American society after 1965, the problem, according to Quigley, was that no elite was in charge and acting responsibly. Larry McDonald, the second president of the John Birch Society and a conservative Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives who represented the 7th congressional district of Georgia, wrote a foreword for Allen's 1976 book The Rockefeller File, wherein he claimed that the Rockefellers and their allies were driven by a desire to create a one-world government that combined "super-capitalism" with communism and would be fully under their control. He saw a conspiracy plot that was "international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent." In his 2002 autobiography Memoirs, David Rockefeller wrote: For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents ... to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. Barkun argues that this statement is partly facetious (the claim of "conspiracy" and "treason") and partly serious—the desire to encourage trilateral cooperation among the U.S., Europe, and Japan;[citation needed] for example — an ideal that used to be a hallmark of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party (known as "Rockefeller Republicans" in honor of Nelson Rockefeller) when there was an internationalist wing.[citation needed] The statement, however, is taken at face value and widely cited by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Council on Foreign Relations uses its role as the brain trust of American presidents, senators and representatives to manipulate them into supporting a New World Order in the form of a one-world government.[citation needed] In a 13 November 2007 interview with Canadian journalist Benjamin Fulford, Rockefeller countered that he felt no need for a world government and wished for the world's governments to work together and collaborate. He also stated that it seemed neither likely nor desirable to have only one elected government rule worldwide. He criticized accusations of him being "ruler of the world" as nonsensical. Some American social critics, such as Laurence H. Shoup, argue that the Council on Foreign Relations is an "imperial brain trust" which has, for decades, played a central behind-the-scenes role in shaping U.S. foreign policy choices for the post-World War II international order and the Cold War by determining what options show up on the agenda and what options do not even make it to the table; others, such as G. William Domhoff, argue that it is in fact a mere policy discussion forum which provides the business input to U.S. foreign policy planning.[citation needed] Domhoff argues that "[i]t has nearly 3,000 members, far too many for secret plans to be kept within the group. All the council does is sponsor discussion groups, debates, and speakers. As far as being secretive, it issues annual reports and allows access to its historical archives." However, all these critics agree[citation needed] that "[h]istorical studies of the CFR show that it has a very different role in the overall power structure than what is claimed by conspiracy theorists." In his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy British writer and futurist H. G. Wells promoted cosmopolitanism and offered blueprints for a world revolution and World Brain to establish a technocratic world state and planned economy. Wells warned, however, in his 1940 book The New World Order that: ... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by the frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people. Wells's books were influential in giving a second meaning to the term "new world order", which would only be used by state socialist supporters and anti-communist opponents. However, despite the popularity and notoriety of his ideas, Wells failed to exert a deeper and more lasting influence because he was unable to concentrate his energies on a direct appeal to intelligentsias who would, ultimately, have to coordinate the Wellsian new world order. British neo-Theosophical occultist Alice Bailey, one of the founders of the so-called New Age movement, prophesied in 1940 the eventual victory of the Allies of World War II over the Axis powers (which occurred in 1945) and the establishment by the Allies of a political and religious New World Order. She saw a federal world government as the culmination of Wells' Open Conspiracy but favorably argued that it would be synarchist because it was guided by the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, intent on preparing humanity for the mystical second coming of Christ, and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. According to Bailey, a group of ascended masters called the Great White Brotherhood works on the "inner planes" to oversee the transition to the New World Order but, for now, the members of this Spiritual Hierarchy are only known to a few occult scientists, with whom they communicate telepathically, but as the need for their personal involvement in the plan increases, there will be an "Externalization of the Hierarchy" and everyone will know of their presence on Earth. Bailey's writings, along with American writer Marilyn Ferguson's 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy, contributed to conspiracy theorists of the Christian right viewing the New Age movement as the "false religion" that would supersede Christianity in a New World Order. Skeptics argue that the term "New Age movement" is a misnomer, generally used by conspiracy theorists as a catch-all rubric for any new religious movement that is not fundamentalist Christian. By this logic, anything that is not Christian is by definition actively and willfully anti-Christian. Paradoxically, since the first decade of the 21st century, New World Order conspiracism is increasingly being embraced and propagandized by New Age occultists, who are people bored by rationalism and drawn to stigmatized knowledge—such as alternative medicine, astrology, quantum mysticism, spiritualism, and theosophy. Thus, New Age conspiracy theorists, such as the makers of documentary films like Esoteric Agenda, claim that globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order are simply misusing occultism for Machiavellian ends, such as adopting 21 December 2012 as the exact date for the establishment of the New World Order to take advantage of the growing 2012 phenomenon, which has its origins in the fringe Mayanist theories of New Age writers José Argüelles, Terence McKenna, and Daniel Pinchbeck.[citation needed] Skeptics argue that the connection of conspiracy theorists and occultists follows from their common fallacious premises. First, any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. Second, stigmatized knowledge—what the Establishment spurns—must be true. The result is a large, self-referential network in which, for example, some UFO religionists promote anti-Jewish phobias while some antisemites practice Peruvian shamanism. In 1994, the esoteric group the Order of the Solar Temple, in letters justifying their 1994 mass suicide, claimed they were being persecuted by the New World Order, and that this persecution was why they had been driven to mass suicide. Conspiracy theorists often use the term "Fourth Reich" simply as a pejorative synonym for the "New World Order" to imply that its state ideology and government will be similar to Germany's Third Reich.[citation needed][original research?] Conspiracy theorists, such as American writer Jim Marrs, claim that some ex-Nazis, who survived the fall of the Greater German Reich, along with sympathizers in the United States and elsewhere, given haven by organizations like ODESSA and Die Spinne, has been working behind the scenes since the end of World War II to enact at least some principles of Nazism (e.g., militarism, imperialism, widespread spying on citizens, corporatism, the use of propaganda to manufacture a national consensus) into culture, government, and business worldwide, but primarily in the U.S. They cite the influence of ex-Nazi scientists brought in under Operation Paperclip to help advance aerospace manufacturing in the U.S. with technological principles from Nazi UFOs, and the acquisition and creation of conglomerates by ex-Nazis and their sympathizers after the war, in both Europe and the U.S. This neo-Nazi conspiracy is said to be animated by an "Iron Dream" in which the American Empire, having thwarted the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy and overthrown its Zionist Occupation Government, gradually establishes a Fourth Reich formerly known as the "Western Imperium"—a pan-Aryan world empire modeled after Adolf Hitler's New Order—which reverses the "decline of the West" and ushers a golden age of white supremacy. Skeptics argue that conspiracy theorists grossly overestimate the influence of ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis on American society and point out that political repression at home and imperialism abroad have a long history in the United States that predates the 20th century. Political theorist Sheldon Wolin has expressed concern that the twin forces of democratic deficit and superpower status have paved the way in the U.S. for the emergence of an inverted totalitarianism which contradicts many principles of Nazism. Since the late 1970s, extraterrestrials from other habitable planets or parallel dimensions (such as "Greys") and intraterrestrials from Hollow Earth (such as "Reptilians") have been included in the New World Order conspiracy, in more or less dominant roles, as in the theories put forward by American writers Stan Deyo and Milton William Cooper, and British writer David Icke. The common theme in these conspiracy theories is that aliens have been among us for decades, centuries or millennia. Still, a government cover-up enforced by "Men in black" has shielded the public from knowledge of a secret alien invasion. Motivated by speciesism and imperialism, these aliens have been and are secretly manipulating developments and changes in human society to more efficiently control and exploit human beings. In some theories, alien infiltrators have shapeshifted into human form and move freely throughout human society, even to the point of taking control of command positions in governmental, corporate, and religious institutions, and are now in the final stages of their plan to take over the world.[citation needed] A mythical covert government agency of the United States code-named Majestic 12 is often imagined being the shadow government which collaborates with the alien occupation and permits alien abductions, in exchange for assistance in the development and testing of military "flying saucers" at Area 51, for United States armed forces to achieve full-spectrum dominance. Those who adhere to the psychosocial hypothesis for unidentified flying objects argue that the convergence of New World Order conspiracy theory and UFO conspiracy theory is a product of not only the era's widespread mistrust of governments and the popularity of the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs but of the far right and ufologists joining forces. Barkun notes that the only positive side to this development is that, if conspirators plotting to rule the world are believed to be aliens, traditional human scapegoats (Freemasons, Illuminati, Jews, etc.) are downgraded or exonerated. Antiscience and neo-Luddite conspiracy theorists emphasize technology forecasting in their New World Order conspiracy theories. They speculate that the global power elite are reactionary modernists pursuing a transhumanist plan to develop and use human enhancement technologies to become a "posthuman ruling caste", while change accelerates toward a technological singularity—a theorized future point of discontinuity when events will accelerate at such a pace that normal unenhanced humans will be unable to predict or even understand the rapid changes occurring in the world around them. Conspiracy theorists fear the outcome will either be the emergence of a Brave New World–like dystopia—a "Brave New World Order"—or the extinction of the human species. Democratic transhumanists, such as American sociologist James Hughes, counter that many influential members of the United States establishment are bioconservatives strongly opposed to human enhancement, as demonstrated by President Bush's Council on Bioethics's proposed international treaty prohibiting human cloning and germline engineering. Furthermore, he argues that conspiracy theorists underestimate how fringe the transhumanist movement really is. Postulated implementations Just as there are several overlapping or conflicting theories among conspiracists about the nature of the New World Order, so are there several beliefs about how its architects and planners will implement it: Conspiracy theorists generally speculate that the New World Order is being implemented gradually, citing the formation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913; the League of Nations in 1919; the International Monetary Fund in 1944; the United Nations in 1945; the World Bank in 1945; the World Health Organization in 1948; the European Union and the Euro in 1993; the World Trade Organization in 1998; the African Union in 2002, and the Union of South American Nations in 2008 as major milestones. An increasingly popular conspiracy theory among American right-wing populists is that the hypothetical North American Union and the amero currency, proposed by the Council on Foreign Relations and its counterparts in Mexico and Canada, will be the next milestone in the implementation of the New World Order. The theory holds that a group of shadowy and mostly nameless international elites is planning to replace the federal government of the United States with a transnational government. Therefore, conspiracy theorists believe the borders between Mexico, Canada, and the United States are in the process of being erased, covertly, by a group of globalists whose ultimate goal is to replace national governments in Washington, D.C., Ottawa, and Mexico City with a European-style political union and a bloated E.U.-style bureaucracy.[citation needed] Skeptics argue that the North American Union exists only as a proposal contained in one of a thousand academic and policy papers published each year that advocate all manner of idealistic but ultimately unrealistic approaches to social, economic, and political problems. Most of these are passed around in their circles and eventually filed away and forgotten by junior staffers in congressional offices. However, some of these papers become touchstones for the conspiracy-minded and form the basis of all kinds of unfounded xenophobic fears, especially during times of economic anxiety.[citation needed] For example, in March 2009, due to the 2008 financial crisis, the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation pressed for urgent consideration of a new international reserve currency and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development proposed greatly expanding the I.M.F.'s special drawing rights. Conspiracy theorists fear these proposals are a call for the U.S. to adopt a single global currency for a New World Order. Judging that both national governments and global institutions have proven ineffective in addressing global problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve, some political scientists critical of New World Order conspiracism, such as Mark C. Partridge, argue that regionalism will be the major force in the coming decades, pockets of power around regional centers: Western Europe around Brussels, the Western Hemisphere around Washington, D.C., East Asia around Beijing, and Eastern Europe around Moscow. As such, the E.U., the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the G-20 will likely become more influential as time progresses. The question then is not whether global governance is gradually emerging, but rather how will these regional powers interact with one another. American right-wing populist conspiracy theorists, especially those who joined the militia movement in the United States, speculate that the New World Order will be implemented through a dramatic coup d'état by a "secret team", using black helicopters, in the U.S. and other nation-states to bring about a totalitarian world government controlled by the United Nations and enforced by troops of foreign U.N. peacekeepers. Following the Rex 84 and Operation Garden Plot plans, this military coup would involve the suspension of the Constitution, the imposition of martial law, and the appointment of military commanders to head state and local governments and to detain dissidents. These conspiracy theorists, who are all strong believers in a right to keep and bear arms, are extremely fearful that the passing of any gun control legislation will be later followed by the abolition of personal gun ownership and a campaign of gun confiscation, and that the refugee camps of emergency management agencies such as FEMA will be used for the internment of suspected subversives, making little effort to distinguish true threats to the New World Order from pacifist dissidents. Before 2000, some survivalists believed this process would be set in motion by the predicted Y2K problem causing societal collapse. Since many left-wing and right-wing conspiracy theorists believe that the 11 September attacks were a false flag operation carried out by the United States intelligence community, as part of a strategy of tension to justify political repression at home and preemptive war abroad, they have become convinced that a more catastrophic terrorist incident will be responsible for triggering Executive Directive 51 to complete the transition to a police state. Skeptics argue that unfounded fears about an imminent or eventual gun ban, military coup, internment, or U.N. invasion and occupation are rooted in the siege mentality of the American militia movement but also an apocalyptic millenarianism which provides a basic narrative within the political right in the U.S., claiming that the idealized society (i.e., constitutional republic, Jeffersonian democracy, "Christian nation", "white nation") is thwarted by subversive conspiracies of liberal secular humanists who want "Big Government" and globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order. Conspiracy theorists concerned with surveillance abuse believe that the New World Order is being implemented by the cult of intelligence at the core of the surveillance-industrial complex through mass surveillance and the use of Social Security numbers, the bar-coding of retail goods with Universal Product Code markings, and, most recently, RFID tagging by microchip implants. Claiming that corporations and government are planning to track every move of consumers and citizens with RFID as the latest step toward a 1984-like surveillance state, consumer privacy advocates, such as Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, have become Christian conspiracy theorists who believe spychips must be resisted, because they argue that modern database and communications technologies, coupled with point of sale data-capture equipment and sophisticated ID and authentication systems, now make it possible to require a biometrically associated number or mark to make purchases. They fear that the ability to implement such a system closely resembles the Number of the beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation. In January 2002, the Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter asymmetric threats to national security. Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by the United States Congress in 2003. The second source of controversy involved IAO's original logo, which depicted the "all-seeing" Eye of Providence atop of a pyramid looking down over the globe, accompanied by the Latin phrase scientia est potentia (knowledge is power). Although DARPA eventually removed the logo from its website, it left a lasting impression on privacy advocates. It also inflamed conspiracy theorists, who misinterpret the "eye and pyramid" as the Masonic symbol of the Illuminati, an 18th-century secret society they speculate continues to exist and is plotting on behalf of a New World Order. American historian Richard Landes, who specialized in the history of apocalypticism and was co-founder and director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, argues that new and emerging technologies often trigger alarmism among millenarians. Even the introduction of Gutenberg's printing press in 1436 caused waves of apocalyptic thinking. The Year 2000 problem, bar codes, and Social Security numbers all triggered end-time warnings which either proved to be false or were no longer taken seriously once the public became accustomed to these technological changes. Civil libertarians argue that the privatization of surveillance and the rise of the surveillance-industrial complex in the United States does raise legitimate concerns about the erosion of privacy. However, skeptics of mass surveillance conspiracism caution that such concerns should be disentangled from secular paranoia about Big Brother or religious hysteria about the Antichrist. Conspiracy theorists of the Christian right, starting with British revisionist historian Nesta Helen Webster, believe there is an ancient occult conspiracy—started by the first mystagogues of Gnosticism and perpetuated by their alleged esoteric successors, such as the Kabbalists, Cathars, Knights Templar, Hermeticists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and, ultimately, the Illuminati—which seeks to subvert the Judeo-Christian foundations of the Western world and implement the New World Order through a one-world religion that prepares the masses to embrace the imperial cult of the Antichrist. More broadly, they speculate that globalists who plot on behalf of a New World Order are directed by occult agencies of some sort: unknown superiors, spiritual hierarchies, demons, fallen angels or Lucifer. They believe that these conspirators use the power of occult sciences (numerology), symbols (Eye of Providence), rituals (Masonic degrees), monuments (National Mall landmarks), buildings (Manitoba Legislative Building) and facilities (Denver International Airport) to advance their plot to rule the world. For example, in June 1979, an unknown benefactor under the pseudonym "R. C. Christian" had a huge granite megalith built in the U.S. state of Georgia, which acts like a compass, calendar, and clock. A message comprising ten guides is inscribed on the occult structure in many languages to serve as instructions for survivors of a doomsday event to establish a more enlightened and sustainable civilization than the destroyed one. The "Georgia Guidestones" has subsequently become a spiritual and political Rorschach test onto which any number of ideas can be imposed. Some New Agers and neo-pagans revere it as a ley-line power nexus, while a few conspiracy theorists are convinced that they are engraved with the New World Order's anti-Christian "Ten Commandments." Should the Guidestones survive for centuries as their creators intended, many more meanings could arise, equally unrelated to the designer's original intention.[citation needed] Skeptics argue that the demonization of Western esotericism by conspiracy theorists is rooted in religious intolerance but also in the same moral panics that have fueled witch trials in the Early Modern period, and satanic ritual abuse allegations in the United States. Conspiracy theorists believe that the New World Order will also be implemented through human population control to more easily monitor and control the movement of individuals. The means range from stopping the growth of human societies through reproductive health and family planning programs, which promote abstinence, contraception and abortion, or intentionally reducing the bulk of the world population through genocides by mongering unnecessary wars, through plagues by engineering emergent viruses and tainting vaccines, and through environmental disasters by controlling the weather (HAARP, chemtrails), etc. Conspiracy theorists argue that globalists plotting on behalf of a New World Order are neo-Malthusians who engage in overpopulation and climate change alarmism to create public support for coercive population control and ultimately world government. United Nations Agenda 21 is condemned as "reconcentrating" people into urban areas and depopulating rural ones, even generating a dystopian novel by Glenn Beck where single-family homes are a distant memory. Conspiracy theorists in Australia linked smart city technologies to an agenda to create a one world government and install "big brother" technology to control the community. Skeptics argue that fears of population control can be traced back to the traumatic legacy of the eugenics movement's "war against the weak" in the United States during the first decades of the 20th century but also the Second Red Scare in the U.S. during the late 1940s and 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, when activists on the far right of American politics routinely opposed public health programs, notably water fluoridation, mass vaccination and mental health services, by asserting they were all part of a far-reaching plot to impose a socialist or communist regime. Their views were influenced by opposition to a number of major social and political changes that had happened in recent years: the growth of internationalism, particularly the United Nations and its programs; the introduction of social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and government efforts to reduce inequalities in the social structure of the U.S. Opposition towards mass vaccinations in particular got significant attention in the late 2010s, so much so the World Health Organization listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten global health threats of 2019. By this time, people that refused or refused to allow their children to be vaccinated were known colloquially as "anti-vaxxers", though citing the New World Order conspiracy theory or resistance to a perceived population control plan as a reason to refuse vaccination were few and far between. Social critics accuse governments, corporations, and the mass media of being involved in the manufacturing of a national consensus and, paradoxically, a culture of fear due to the potential for increased social control that a mistrustful and mutually fearing population might offer to those in power. The worst fear of some conspiracy theorists, however, is that the New World Order will be implemented through the use of mind control—a broad range of tactics able to subvert an individual's control of their own thinking, behavior, emotions, or decisions. These tactics are said to include everything from Manchurian candidate-style brainwashing of sleeper agents (Project MKULTRA, "Project Monarch") to engineering psychological operations (water fluoridation, subliminal advertising, "Silent Sound Spread Spectrum", MEDUSA) and parapsychological operations (Stargate Project) to influence the masses. The concept of wearing a tin foil hat for protection from such threats has become a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists. Skeptics argue that the paranoia behind a conspiracy theorist's obsession with mind control, population control, occultism, surveillance abuse, Big Business, Big Government, and globalization arises from a combination of two factors, when he or she: 1) holds strong individualist values and 2) lacks power. The first attribute refers to people who care deeply about an individual's right to make their own choices and direct their own lives without interference or obligations to a larger system (like the government), but combine this with a sense of powerlessness in one's own life. One gets what some psychologists call "agency panic," intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy to outside forces or regulators. When fervent individualists feel that they cannot exercise their independence, they experience a crisis and assume that larger forces are to blame for usurping this freedom. Alleged conspirators According to Domhoff, many people seem to believe that the United States is ruled from behind the scenes by a conspiratorial elite with secret desires, i.e., by a small, secretive group that wants to change the government system or put the country under the control of a world government. In the past, the conspirators were usually said to be crypto-communists who were intent upon bringing the United States under a common world government with the Soviet Union, but the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 undercut that theory. Domhoff notes that most conspiracy theorists changed their focus to the United Nations as the likely controlling force in a New World Order, an idea which is undermined by the powerlessness of the U.N. and the unwillingness of even moderates within the American Establishment to give it anything but a limited role. Although skeptical of New World Order conspiracism, political scientist David Rothkopf argues, in the 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, that the world population of 6 billion people is governed by an elite of 6,000 individuals. Until the late 20th century, governments of the great powers provided most of the superclass, accompanied by a few heads of international movements (i.e., the Pope of the Catholic Church) and entrepreneurs (Rothschilds, Rockefellers). According to Rothkopf, in the early 21st century, economic clout—fueled by the explosive expansion of international trade, travel, and communication—rules; the nation-state's power has diminished shrinking politicians to minority power broker status; leaders in international business, finance, and the defense industry not only dominate the superclass, but they also move freely into high positions in their nations' governments and back to private life largely beyond the notice of elected legislatures (including the U.S. Congress), which remain abysmally ignorant of affairs beyond their borders. He asserts that the superclass' disproportionate influence over national policy is constructive but always self-interested and that across the world, few object to corruption and oppressive governments provided they can do business in these countries. Viewing the history of the world as the history of warfare between secret societies, conspiracy theorists go further than Rothkopf, and other scholars who have studied the global power elite, by claiming that established upper-class families with "old money" who founded and finance the Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Club, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, Rhodes Trust, Skull and Bones, Trilateral Commission, and similar think tanks and private clubs, are illuminated conspirators plotting to impose a totalitarian New World Order—the implementation of an authoritarian world government controlled by the United Nations and a global central bank, which maintains political power through the financialization of the economy, regulation and restriction of speech through the concentration of media ownership, mass surveillance, widespread use of state terrorism, and an all-encompassing propaganda that creates a cult of personality around a puppet world leader and ideologizes world government as the culmination of history's progress. Criticism Skeptics of New World Order conspiracy theories accuse its proponents of indulging in the furtive fallacy, a belief that significant facts of history are necessarily sinister; conspiracism, a world view that centrally places conspiracy theories in the unfolding of history, rather than social and economic forces; and fusion paranoia, a promiscuous absorption of fears from any source whatsoever. Marxists, who are skeptical of right-wing populist conspiracy theories, also accuse the global power elite of not having the best interests of all at heart, and many intergovernmental organizations of suffering from a democratic deficit, but they argue that the superclass are plutocrats only interested in brazenly imposing a neoliberal or neoconservative new world order—the implementation of global capitalism through economic and military coercion to protect the interests of transnational corporations—which systematically undermines the possibility of international socialism. Arguing that the world is in the middle of a transition from the American Empire to the rule of a global ruling class that has emerged from within the American Empire, they point out that right-wing populist conspiracy theorists, blinded by their anti-communism, fail to see that what they demonize as the "New World Order" is, ironically, the highest stage of the very capitalist economic system they defend. Domhoff, a professor in psychology and sociology who studies theories of power, wrote in 2005 an essay entitled There Are No Conspiracies. He says that for this theory to be true, it required several "wealthy and highly educated people" to do things that don't "fit with what we know about power structures". Claims that this will happen go back decades and have always been proved wrong. Partridge, a contributing editor to the global affairs magazine Diplomatic Courier, wrote a 2008 article entitled One World Government: Conspiracy Theory or Inevitable Future? He says that if anything, nationalism, which is the opposite of a global government, is rising. He also says that attempts at creating global governments or global agreements "have been categorical failures". Although some cultural critics see superconspiracy theories about a New World Order as "postmodern metanarratives" that may be politically empowering, a way of giving ordinary people a narrative structure with which to question what they see around them, skeptics argue that conspiracism leads people into cynicism, convoluted thinking, and a tendency to feel it is hopeless even as they denounce the alleged conspirators. Alexander Zaitchik from the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote a report titled "'Patriot' Paranoia: A Look at the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories", in which he personally condemns such conspiracies as an effort of the radical right to undermine society. Concerned that the improvisational millennialism of most conspiracy theories about a New World Order might motivate lone wolves to engage in leaderless resistance leading to domestic terrorist incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing, Barkun writes that "the danger lies less in such beliefs themselves ... than in the behavior they might stimulate or justify" and warns "should they believe that the prophesied evil day had in fact arrived, their behavior would become far more difficult to predict." Warning of the threat to American democracy posed by right-wing populist movements led by demagogues who mobilize support for mob rule or even a fascist revolution by exploiting the fear of conspiracies, Berlet writes that Right-wing populist movements can cause serious damage to a society because they often popularize xenophobia, authoritarianism, scapegoating, and conspiracism. This can lure mainstream politicians to adopt these themes to attract voters, legitimize acts of discrimination (or even violence), and open the door for revolutionary right-wing populist movements, such as fascism, to recruit from the reformist populist movements. Criticisms of New World Order conspiracy theorists also come from within their own community. Despite believing themselves to be "freedom fighters", many right-wing populist conspiracy theorists hold views that are incompatible with their professed libertarianism, such as Christian dominionism, authoritarian ultranationalism, white supremacy and eliminationism. See also References Further reading The following is a list of non-self-published non-fiction books that discuss New World Order conspiracy theories. External links |
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Contents Rachel Carson Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose sea trilogy (1941–1955) and book Silent Spring (1962) are credited with advancing marine conservation and the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Its success prompted the republication of her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941), in 1952, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955 — both were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths. Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially some problems she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was the book Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter. Early life and education Carson was born on May 27, 1907, on a family farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania, located by the Allegheny River near Pittsburgh. She was the daughter of Maria Frazier (McLean) and Robert Warden Carson, an insurance salesman. She spent a lot of time exploring around her family's 65-acre (26 ha) farm. An avid reader, she began writing stories, often involving animals, at age eight. At age ten, she had her first story published. She enjoyed reading St. Nicholas Magazine, which carried her first published stories, the works of Beatrix Potter, the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, and in her teen years, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The natural world, particularly that of the ocean, was the common thread of her favorite literature. Carson attended Springdale's small school through tenth grade, and then completed high school in nearby Parnassus, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925 at the top of her class of 44 students. In high school, Carson was said to have been somewhat of a loner. Carson gained admission to Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham University, in Pittsburgh, where she originally studied English but switched her major to biology in January 1928. She continued contributing to the school's student newspaper and literary supplement. She was admitted to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1928, but was forced to remain at the Pennsylvania College for Women for her senior year due to financial difficulties. In 1929, she graduated magna cum laude. After a summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, she continued her studies in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1929. After her first year of graduate school, Carson became a part-time student, taking an assistantship in Raymond Pearl's laboratory, where she worked with rats and Drosophila, to earn money for tuition. After false starts with pit vipers and squirrels, she completed a dissertation on the embryonic development of the pronephros (urinary organ) in fish. In June 1932, she earned a master's degree in zoology. She had intended to continue for a doctorate, however in 1934 Carson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins to search for a full-time teaching position to help support her family during the Great Depression. In 1935, Carson's father died suddenly, worsening their already critical financial situation and leaving Carson to care for her aging mother. Career At the urging of Mary Scott Skinker, her undergraduate biology mentor, Carson secured a temporary position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, where she wrote radio copy for a series of weekly educational broadcasts called Romance Under the Waters. The series of 52 seven-minute programs focused on aquatic life and was intended to generate public interest in fish biology and the bureau's work, a task that several writers before Carson had not managed. Carson also began submitting articles on marine life in the Chesapeake Bay, based on her research for the series, to local newspapers and magazines. Carson earned extra money as a lecturer at the University of Maryland's Dental and Pharmacy Schools and Johns Hopkins University. Carson's supervisor, pleased with the success of the radio series, asked her to write the introduction to a public brochure about the fisheries bureau; he also worked to secure her the first full-time position that became available. Sitting for the civil service exam, she outscored all other applicants and, in 1936, became the second woman hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist. Using her research and consultations with marine biologists as starting points, she wrote a steady stream of articles for The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers. However, her family responsibilities further increased in January 1937 when her older sister died, leaving Carson as the sole breadwinner for her mother and two nieces. In July 1937, the Atlantic Monthly accepted a revised version of an essay, The World of Waters, that she originally wrote for her first fisheries bureau brochure. Her supervisor had deemed it too good for that purpose. The essay, published as Undersea, was a vivid narrative of a journey along the ocean floor. It marked a major turning point in Carson's writing career. Publishing house Simon & Schuster, impressed by Undersea, contacted Carson and suggested that she expand it into a book. Several years of writing resulted in Under the Sea Wind (1941), which received excellent reviews but sold poorly. In the meantime, Carson's article-writing success continued with her features appearing in Sun Magazine, Nature, and Collier's. Carson attempted to leave the Bureau (by then transformed into the United States Fish and Wildlife Service) in 1945. However, few jobs for naturalists were available, since most money for science was focused on technical fields in the wake of the Manhattan Project. In mid-1945, Carson first encountered the subject of DDT, a revolutionary new pesticide—lauded as the "insect bomb" after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that was only beginning to undergo tests for safety and ecological effects. DDT was one of Carson's many writing interests at the time, but editors found the subject unappealing; she published nothing on DDT until 1962. Carson rose within the Fish and Wildlife Service, and in 1945 was supervising a small writing staff. In 1949, she was appointed chief editor of publications, which allowed her increased opportunities for fieldwork and freedom in choosing her writing projects; however, it also entailed increasingly tedious administrative responsibilities. By 1948, Carson was working on material for a second book and decided to begin a transition to writing full-time. That year, she took on a literary agent, Marie Rodell; they formed a close professional relationship that would last the rest of Carson's career. Oxford University Press expressed interest in Carson's book proposal for a life history of the ocean, spurring her to complete by early 1950 the manuscript of what would become The Sea Around Us. Chapters appeared in Science Digest and The Yale Review, which published a chapter, "The Birth of an Island," which won the American Association for the Advancement of Science's George Westinghouse Science Writing Prize. Beginning in June 1951, nine chapters were serialized in The New Yorker. On July 2, 1951, the book was published by Oxford University Press. The Sea Around Us remained on The New York Times Bestseller List for 86 weeks, was abridged by Reader's Digest, won the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Burroughs Medal, and resulted in Carson being awarded two honorary doctorates. She licensed a documentary film based on it, The Sea, whose success led to republication of Under the Sea Wind, which became a bestseller. With success came financial security; in 1952, Carson was able to give up her job in order to concentrate on writing full-time. Carson was inundated with requests for speaking engagements, fan mail and other correspondence regarding The Sea Around Us, along with work on the script that she had secured the right to review. She was very unhappy with the final version of the script by writer, director, and producer Irwin Allen; she found it untrue to the atmosphere of the book and scientifically embarrassing, describing it as "a cross between a believe-it-or-not and a breezy travelogue." However, she discovered that her right to review the script did not extend to any control over its content. This led to many scientific inconsistencies inside the film. Despite Carson's requests to resolve these problems, Allen went forward with the script. He succeeded in producing a very successful documentary. It went on to win the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. However, Carson was so embittered by the experience that she never again sold film rights to her work. Carson met Dorothy M. Freeman in the summer of 1953 on Southport Island, Maine. Freeman had written to Carson welcoming her to the area when she had heard that the famous author was to become her neighbor. It was the beginning of a devoted friendship that lasted the rest of Carson's life. Their relationship was conducted mainly through letters and during summers spent together in Maine. Over 12 years, they exchanged around 900 letters. Many of these were published in the book Always, Rachel, published in 1995 by Beacon Press. Carson's biographer, Linda J. Lear, writes that "Carson sorely needed a devoted friend and kindred spirit who would listen to her without advising and accept her wholly, the writer as well as the woman." She found this in Freeman. The two women had common interests, nature chief among them, and began exchanging letters regularly while apart. They shared summers for the remainder of Carson's life and met whenever else their schedules permitted. Concerning the depth of their relationship, commentators have said: "the expression of their love was limited almost wholly to letters and very occasional farewell kisses or holding of hands". Freeman shared parts of Carson's letters with her husband to help him understand the relationship, but much of their correspondence was carefully guarded. Some believe Freeman and Carson's relationship was romantic in nature. One of the letters from Carson to Freeman reads: "But, oh darling, I want to be with you so terribly that it hurts!", while in another, Freeman writes: "I love you beyond expression... My love is boundless as the Sea." Carson's last letter to Freeman before her death ends with: "Never forget, dear one, how deeply I have loved you all these years." Shortly before Carson's death, she and Freeman destroyed hundreds of letters. The surviving correspondence was published in 1995 as Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964: An Intimate Portrait of a Remarkable Friendship, edited by Martha Freeman, Dorothy's granddaughter, who wrote at publication: "A few comments in early letters indicate that Rachel and Dorothy were initially cautious about the romantic tone and terminology of their correspondence. I believe this caution prompted their destruction of some letters within the first two years of their friendship..." According to one reviewer, the pair "fit Carolyn Heilbrun's characterization of a strong female friendship, where what matters is 'not whether friends are homosexual or heterosexual, lovers or not, but whether they share the wonderful energy of work in the public sphere.'" According to her biographer, Linda Lear, there was a disagreement about the final arrangements for Rachel. Her brother, Robert Carson, insisted that her cremated remains be buried beside their mother in Maryland. This was against her wishes to be buried in Maine. In the end, a compromise was reached. Carson's wishes were carried out by an organizing committee, including her agent (Marie Rodell), her editor (Paul Brooks), and Dorothy Freeman. In the spring of 1964, Dorothy received half of Rachel's ashes in the mail sent to her by Robert Carson. In the summer of that year, Dorothy carried out Rachel's final wishes, scattering her ashes along the rocky shores of Sheepscot Bay in Maine. Early in 1953, Carson began library and field research on the ecology and organisms of the Atlantic shore. In 1955, she completed the third volume of her sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea, which focuses on life in coastal ecosystems, particularly along the Eastern Seaboard. It appeared in The New Yorker in two condensed installments shortly before its October 26 book release by Houghton Mifflin (again a new publisher). By this time, Carson's reputation for clear and poetical prose was well established; The Edge of the Sea received highly favorable reviews, if not quite as enthusiastic as for The Sea Around Us. Through 1955 and 1956, Carson worked on several projects—including the script for an Omnibus episode, "Something About the Sky"—and wrote articles for popular magazines. Her plan for the next book was to address evolution. However, the publication of Julian Huxley's Evolution in Action—and her own difficulty in finding a clear and compelling approach to the topic—led her to abandon the project. Instead, her interests were turning to conservation. She considered an environment-themed book project tentatively titled Remembrance of the Earth and became involved with The Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups. She also made plans to buy and preserve from development an area in Maine she and Freeman called the "Lost Woods." In early 1957, a family tragedy struck for the third time when one of her nieces she had cared for since the 1940s died at the age of 31, leaving her 5-year-old son, Roger Christie, an orphan. Carson took on the responsibility for Roger when she adopted him, along with caring for her aging mother. Carson moved to Silver Spring, Maryland to care for Roger and spent much of 1957 putting together a new living situation and studying specific environmental threats. By late 1957, Carson was closely following federal proposals for widespread pesticide spraying; the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) planned to eradicate fire ants. Other spraying programs involving chlorinated hydrocarbons and organophosphates were on the rise. For the rest of her life, Carson's main professional focus would be the dangers of pesticide overuse. Silent Spring, Carson's most influential book, was published by Houghton Mifflin on September 27, 1962. The book described the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment, and is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. Carson was not the first or the only person to raise concern about DDT, but her combination of "scientific knowledge and poetic writing" reached a broad audience and helped to focus opposition to DDT use. The book's publication as a mass-market paperback by Fawcett Crest in January 1964 spread Carson's message to a wider audience.[citation needed] In 1994, an edition of Silent Spring was published with an introduction written by Vice President Al Gore. In 2012 Silent Spring was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society for its role in the development of the modern environmental movement. Starting in the mid-1940s, Carson had become concerned about the use of synthetic pesticides, many of which had been developed through the military funding of science since World War II. However, the United States federal government's 1957 gypsy moth, now called spongy moth, eradication program prompted Carson to devote her research and her next book to pesticides and environmental poisons. The gypsy moth program involved aerial spraying of DDT and other pesticides mixed with fuel oil, including the spraying of private land. Landowners on Long Island filed a lawsuit to have the spraying stopped, and many in affected regions followed the case closely. Though the suit was lost, the Supreme Court granted petitioners the right to gain injunctions against potential environmental damage in the future; this laid the basis for later successful environmental actions. The Audubon Naturalist Society also actively opposed such spraying programs and recruited Carson to help make public the government's exact spraying practices and the related research. Carson began the four-year project of what would become Silent Spring by gathering examples of environmental damage attributed to DDT. She also attempted to enlist others to join the cause, such as essayist E. B. White and several journalists and scientists. By 1958, Carson had arranged a book deal, with plans to co-write with Newsweek science journalist Edwin Diamond. However, when The New Yorker commissioned a long and well-paid article on the topic from Carson, she began considering writing more than simply the introduction and conclusion as planned; soon, it was a solo project. (Diamond would later write one of the harshest critiques of Silent Spring). As her research progressed, Carson found a sizable community of scientists who were documenting the physiological and environmental effects of pesticides. She also took advantage of her connections with many government scientists, who supplied her with confidential information. From reading the scientific literature and interviewing scientists, Carson found two scientific camps when it came to pesticides: those who dismissed the possible danger of pesticide spraying barring conclusive proof, and those who were open to the possibility of harm and willing to consider alternative methods such as biological pest control. She also found significant support and extensive evidence from a group of biodynamic agriculture organic market gardeners, their adviser, Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, other contacts, and their suite of legal actions (1957–1960) against the U.S. Government. According to recent research by Paull (2013), this may have been the primary and (for strategic reasons) uncredited source for Carson's book. Marjorie Spock and Mary T. Richards of Long Island, New York, contested the aerial spraying of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). They compiled their evidence and shared it with Carson, who used it, their extensive contacts, and the trial transcripts as a primary input for Silent Spring. Carson wrote of the content as "a gold mine of information" and says, "I feel guilty about the mass of your material I have here" and makes multiple references to Pfeiffer and his correspondence. By 1959, the USDA's Agricultural Research Service responded to the criticism by Carson and others with a public service film, Fire Ant on Trial; Carson characterized it as "flagrant propaganda" that ignored the dangers that spraying pesticides (especially dieldrin and heptachlor) posed to humans and wildlife. That spring, Carson wrote a letter, published in The Washington Post, that attributed the recent decline in bird populations—in her words, the "silencing of birds"—to pesticide overuse. That was also the year of the "Great Cranberry Scandal": the 1957, 1958, and 1959 crops of U.S. cranberries were found to contain high levels of the herbicide aminotriazole (which caused cancer in laboratory rats), and the sale of all cranberry products was halted. Carson attended the subsequent FDA hearings on revising pesticide regulations; she came away discouraged by the aggressive tactics of the chemical industry representatives, which included expert testimony that was firmly contradicted by the bulk of the scientific literature she had been studying. She also wondered about the possible "financial inducements behind certain pesticide programs." Research at the Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health brought Carson into contact with medical researchers investigating the gamut of cancer-causing chemicals. Of particular significance was the work of National Cancer Institute researcher and environmental cancer section founding director Wilhelm Hueper, who classified many pesticides as carcinogens. Carson and her research assistant Jeanne Davis, with the help of NIH librarian Dorothy Algire, found evidence to support the pesticide-cancer connection; to Carson, the evidence for the toxicity of a wide array of synthetic pesticides was clear-cut, though such conclusions were very controversial beyond the small community of scientists studying pesticide carcinogenesis. By 1960, Carson had more than enough research material, and the writing was progressing rapidly. In addition to the thorough literature search, she had investigated hundreds of individual incidents of pesticide exposure and the human sickness and ecological damage that resulted. However, in January, a duodenal ulcer followed by several infections kept her bedridden for weeks, greatly delaying the completion of Silent Spring. As she was nearing full recovery in March (just as she was completing drafts of the two cancer chapters of her book), she discovered cysts in her left breast, one of which necessitated a mastectomy. Though her doctor described the procedure as precautionary and recommended no further treatment, by December, Carson discovered that the tumor was malignant and the cancer had metastasized. Her research was also delayed by revision work for a new edition of The Sea Around Us and by a collaborative photo essay with Erich Hartmann. Most of the research and writing was done by the fall of 1960, except for the discussion of recent research on biological pest controls and investigations of a handful of new pesticides. However, further health troubles slowed the final revisions in 1961 and early 1962. While writing the book, Carson chose to hide her illness so that the pesticide companies could not use it against her (she worried that if the companies knew, they would use it as ammunition to make her book look untrustworthy and biased). Finding a title for the book proved difficult; "Silent Spring" was initially suggested as a title for the chapter on birds. By August 1961, Carson finally agreed to the suggestion of her literary agent Marie Rodell: Silent Spring would be a metaphorical title for the entire book, suggesting a bleak future for the whole natural world, rather than a single chapter title about the literal absence of birdsong. With Carson's approval, editor Paul Brooks at Houghton Mifflin arranged for illustrations by Louis and Lois Darling, who also designed the cover. The final writing was the first chapter, A Fable for Tomorrow, which Carson intended as a gentle introduction to what might otherwise be a forbiddingly serious topic. By mid-1962, Brooks and Carson had essentially finished the editing and were laying the groundwork for promoting the book by sending the manuscript out to select individuals for final suggestions. Biographer Mark Hamilton Lytle writes that Carson "quite self-consciously decided to write a book calling into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined post-war American culture." The overriding theme of Silent Spring is the powerful—and often adverse—effect humans have on the natural world. Carson's main argument is that pesticides have detrimental effects on the environment; they are more properly termed biocides, she argues, because their effects are rarely limited to the target pests. DDT is a prime example, but other synthetic pesticides come under scrutiny, many of which are subject to bioaccumulation. Carson also accuses the chemical industry of intentionally spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting industry claims uncritically. Most of the book is devoted to pesticides' effects on natural ecosystems. However, four chapters also detail cases of human pesticide poisoning, cancer, and other illnesses attributed to pesticides. Regarding DDT and cancer, the subject of so much subsequent debate, Carson only briefly mentions the topic: In laboratory tests on animal subjects, DDT has produced suspicious liver tumors. Scientists of the Food and Drug Administration who reported the discovery of these tumors were uncertain how to classify them but felt there was some "justification for considering them low grade hepatic cell carcinomas." Dr. Hueper [author of Occupational Tumors and Allied Diseases] now gives DDT the definite rating of a "chemical carcinogen." Carson predicted increased consequences in the future, especially as targeted pests develop pesticide resistance. At the same time, weakened ecosystems fall prey to unanticipated invasive species. The book closes with a call for a biotic approach to pest control as an alternative to chemical pesticides. Regarding DDT, Carson never called for an outright ban. Part of the argument she made in Silent Spring was that even if DDT and other insecticides had no environmental side effects, their indiscriminate overuse was counter-productive because it would create insect resistance, making them useless in eliminating the target insect populations: No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease by controlling insect vectors of infection. However, it has heard little of the other side of the story—the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting. Carson further noted that "Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes" and emphasized the advice given by the director of Holland's Plant Protection Service: "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity' ... Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible." Carson and the others involved with the publication of Silent Spring expected fierce criticism. They were particularly concerned about the possibility of being sued for libel. Carson was also undergoing radiation therapy to combat her spreading cancer and expected to have little energy to devote to defending her work and responding to critics. In preparation for the anticipated attacks, Carson and her agent attempted to amass as many prominent supporters as possible before the book's release. Most of the book's scientific chapters were reviewed by scientists with relevant expertise, among whom Carson found strong support. Carson attended the White House Conference on Conservation in May 1962; Houghton Mifflin distributed proof copies of Silent Spring to many of the delegates and promoted the upcoming New Yorker serialization. Among many others, Carson also sent a proof copy to Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas, a longtime environmental advocate who had argued against the court's rejection of the Long Island pesticide spraying case (and who had provided Carson with some of the material included in her chapter on herbicides). Though Silent Spring had generated a relatively high level of interest based on pre-publication promotion, this became much more intense with the serialization in The New Yorker, which began on June 16, 1962, issue. This brought the book to the attention of the chemical industry and its lobbyists and a wide swath of the American populace. Around that time, Carson also learned that Silent Spring had been selected as the Book of the Month for October; as she put it, this would "carry it to farms and hamlets all over that country that don't know what a bookstore looks like—much less The New Yorker." Other publicity included a positive editorial in The New York Times and excerpts of the serialized version in Audubon magazine, with another round of publicity in July and August as chemical companies responded. The story of the birth defect-causing drug thalidomide broke just before the book's publication as well, inviting comparisons between Carson and Frances Oldham Kelsey, the Food and Drug Administration reviewer who had blocked the drug's sale in the United States. Following the publication of Silent Spring, Carson as a woman in science faced personal attacks. Linda Lear, Carson's biographer, describes in the Introduction to Silent Spring how critics sought to undermine Carson's arguments by calling her a "bird and bunny lover." In the eyes of the chemical industry, Carson was a "woman out of control," going outside the bounds of her gender by making claims about an industry within the scientific community. In the weeks leading up to the September 27, 1962, publication, there was strong opposition to Silent Spring from the chemical industry. DuPont (a high market-share manufacturer of DDT and 2,4-D) and Velsicol Chemical Corporation (exclusive manufacturer of chlordane and heptachlor) were among the first to respond. DuPont compiled an extensive report on the book's press coverage and estimated impact on public opinion. Velsicol threatened legal action against Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker and Audubon unless the planned Silent Spring features were canceled. Chemical industry representatives and lobbyists also lodged a range of non-specific complaints, some anonymously. Chemical companies and associated organizations produced a number of their own brochures and articles promoting and defending pesticide use. However, Carson's and the publishers' lawyers were confident in the vetting process Silent Spring had undergone. The magazine and book publications proceeded as planned, as did the large Book-of-the-Month printing (which included a pamphlet endorsing the book by William O. Douglas). American Cyanamid biochemist Robert White-Stevens and former Cyanamid chemist Thomas Jukes were among the most aggressive critics, especially of Carson's analysis of DDT. According to White-Stevens, "If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Others went further, attacking Carson's scientific credentials (because her training was in marine biology rather than biochemistry) and her character. White-Stevens labeled her "...a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature," while former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, in a letter to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, reportedly concluded that because she was unmarried despite being physically attractive, she was "probably a Communist." Many critics repeatedly asserted that she was calling for the elimination of all pesticides. However, Carson had made it clear she was not advocating the banning or complete withdrawal of helpful pesticides but was instead encouraging responsible and carefully managed use with an awareness of the chemicals' impact on the entire ecosystem. In fact, she concludes her section on DDT in Silent Spring not by urging a total ban but with advice for spraying as little as possible to limit the development of resistance. The academic community, including prominent defenders such as H. J. Muller, Loren Eiseley, Clarence Cottam, and Frank Egler, by and large, backed the book's scientific claims; public opinion soon turned Carson's way as well. The chemical industry campaign backfired, as the controversy greatly increased public awareness of potential pesticide dangers, as well as Silent Spring book sales. Pesticide use became a major public issue, especially after the CBS Reports TV special The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson that aired April 3, 1963. The program included segments of Carson reading from Silent Spring and interviews with several other experts, mostly critics (including White-Stevens); according to biographer Linda Lear, "in juxtaposition to the wild-eyed, loud-voiced Dr. Robert White-Stevens in white lab coat, Carson appeared anything but the hysterical alarmist that her critics contended." Reactions from the estimated audience of ten to fifteen million were overwhelmingly positive, and the program spurred a congressional review of pesticide dangers and the public release of a pesticide report by the President's Science Advisory Committee. Within a year or so of publication, the attacks on the book and Carson had largely lost momentum. In one of her last public appearances, Carson testified before President John F. Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee. The committee issued its report on May 15, 1963, largely backing Carson's scientific claims. Following the report's release, she also testified before a United States Senate subcommittee to make policy recommendations. Though Carson received hundreds of other speaking invitations, she could not accept the great majority of them. Her health was steadily declining as her cancer outpaced the radiation therapy, with only brief periods of remission. She spoke as much as she was physically able, however, including a notable appearance on The Today Show and speeches at several dinners held in her honor. In late 1963, she received a flurry of awards and honors: the Audubon Medal (from the National Audubon Society), the Cullum Geographical Medal (from the American Geographical Society), and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Death Weakened from breast cancer and her treatment regimen, Carson became ill with a respiratory virus in January 1964. Her condition worsened, and in February, doctors found that she had severe anemia from her radiation treatments. In March, they discovered that the cancer had reached her liver. She died of a heart attack on April 14, 1964, in her home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her body was cremated, and some of her ashes were buried beside her mother at Parklawn Memorial Gardens in Rockville, Maryland. The rest were scattered along the coast of Squirrel Island near Sheepscot River in Maine. Legacy Carson bequeathed her manuscripts and papers to Yale University to take advantage of the new state-of-the-art preservations facilities of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her longtime agent and literary executor Marie Rodell spent nearly two years organizing and cataloging Carson's papers and correspondence, distributing all the letters to their senders so that only what each correspondent approved would be submitted to the archive. In 1965, Rodell arranged for the publication of an essay Carson had intended to expand into a book: The Sense of Wonder. The essay, which was combined with photographs by Charles Pratt and others, exhorts parents to help their children experience the "...lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world ... available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea, and sky and their amazing life." In addition to the letters in Always Rachel, in 1998, a volume of Carson's previously unpublished work was published as Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, edited by Linda Lear. All of Carson's books remain in print. Carson's work had a powerful impact on the environmental movement. Silent Spring, in particular, was a rallying point for the fledgling social movement in the 1960s. According to environmental engineer and Carson scholar H. Patricia Hynes, "Silent Spring altered the balance of power in the world. No one since would be able to sell pollution as the necessary underside of progress so easily or uncritically." Carson's work, and the activism it inspired, are at least partly responsible for the deep ecology movement and the overall strength of the grassroots environmental movement since the 1960s. It was also influential on the rise of ecofeminism and on many feminist scientists. While there remains no evidence that Carson was openly a women's rights activist, her work and its subsequent criticisms have left an iconic legacy for the ecofeminist movement. Attacks on Carson's credibility included criticism of her credentials in which she was labeled an "amateur." It was said that her writing was too "emotional." Ecofeminist scholars argue that not only was the dissenting rhetoric gendered to paint Carson as hysterical but was done because her arguments challenged the capitalist production of large agri-business corporations. Others, such as Yaakov Garb, suggest that in addition to not being a women's rights activist, Carson also had no anti-capitalist agenda and that such attacks were unwarranted. Additionally, the way photos of Carson were used to portray her are often questioned because of few representations of her engaging in work typical of a scientist, but instead of her leisure activities. Carson's most direct legacy in the environmental movement was the campaign to ban DDT in the United States (and related efforts to ban or limit its use throughout the world). Though environmental concerns about DDT had been considered by government agencies as early as Carson's testimony before the President's Science Advisory Committee, the 1967 formation of the Environmental Defense Fund was the first significant milestone in the campaign against DDT. The organization brought lawsuits against the government to "establish a citizen's right to a clean environment," and the arguments employed against DDT largely mirrored Carson's. By 1972, the Environmental Defense Fund and other activist groups had succeeded in securing a phase-out of DDT use in the United States (except in emergency cases). The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Nixon Administration in 1970 addressed another concern that Carson had brought to light. Until then, the same agency (the USDA) was responsible both for regulating pesticides and promoting the concerns of the agriculture industry; Carson saw this as a conflict of interest since the agency was not responsible for effects on wildlife or other environmental concerns beyond farm policy. Fifteen years after its creation, one journalist described the EPA as "the extended shadow of Silent Spring." Much of the agency's early work, such as enforcing the 1972 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, was directly related to Carson's work. In the 1980s, the policies of the Reagan Administration emphasized economic growth, rolling back many of the environmental policies adopted in response to Carson and her work. Various groups ranging from government institutions to environmental and conservation organizations to scholarly societies have celebrated Carson's life and work since her death. Perhaps most significantly, on June 9, 1980, Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. A 17¢ Great Americans series postage stamp was issued in her honor the following year; several other countries have since issued Carson postage as well. In 1973, Carson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The University of California, Santa Cruz, named one of its colleges, formerly known as College Eight, Rachel Carson College in 2016. Rachel Carson College is the first college at the university to bear a woman's name. Munich's Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society was founded in 2009. An international, interdisciplinary center for research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences, it was established as a joint initiative of Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the Deutsches Museum, with the support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Carson's birthplace and childhood home in Springdale, Pennsylvania, now known as the Rachel Carson Homestead, became a National Register of Historic Places site and the nonprofit Rachel Carson Homestead Association was created in 1975 to manage it. Her home in Colesville, Maryland, where she wrote Silent Spring, was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991. Near Pittsburgh, a 46.1 miles (74 km) hiking trail, the Rachel Carson Trail and maintained by the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy, was dedicated to Carson in 1975. A Pittsburgh bridge was renamed in Carson's honor as the Rachel Carson Bridge. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection State Office Building in Harrisburg is named in her honor. Elementary schools in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Sammamish, Washington and San Jose, California middle schools in Beaverton, Oregon Queens, New York City, Rachel Carson Intermediate School, in Herndon, Virginia, Rachel Carson Middle School, and a high school in Brooklyn, New York City were all named in her honor. Two research vessels have sailed in the United States bearing the name R/V Rachel Carson. One is on the west coast, owned by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), and the other is on the east coast, operated by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Another vessel of the name, now scrapped, was a former naval vessel obtained and converted by the United States EPA. It operated on the Great Lakes. The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary also operates a mooring buoy maintenance vessel named the Rachel Carson. The ceremonial auditorium on the third floor of EPA headquarters, the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building, is named after Carson. The Rachel Carson Room is close to the EPA Administrator's office. It has been the site of numerous important announcements, including the Clean Air Interstate Rule. A number of conservation areas have been named for Carson as well. Between 1964 and 1990, 650 acres (263 ha) near Brookeville in Montgomery County, Maryland were acquired and set aside as the Rachel Carson Conservation Park, administered by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. In 1969, the Coastal Maine National Wildlife Refuge became the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge; expansions will bring the size of the refuge to about 9,125 acres (3,693 ha). In 1985, North Carolina renamed one of its estuarine reserves in honor of Carson, in Beaufort. Carson is also a frequent namesake for prizes awarded by philanthropic, educational and scholarly institutions. The Rachel Carson Prize, founded in Stavanger, Norway in 1991, is awarded to women who have made a contribution in the field of environmental protection. The American Society for Environmental History has awarded the Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation since 1993. Since 1998, the Society for Social Studies of Science has awarded an annual Rachel Carson Book Prize for "a book length work of social or political relevance in the area of science and technology studies." The Society of Environmental Journalists gives an annual award and two honourable mentions for books on environmental issues in Carson's name, such as was awarded to Joe Roman's Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act in 2012. The Sierra Club and its foundation recognize donors who have provided for the club in their estate plans as the Rachel Carson Society. The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany) awards post-doctoral fellowships in the area of the environment and society. The Rachel Carson sculpture in Woods Hole, Massachusetts was unveiled on July 14, 2013. Google created a Google Doodle for Carson's 107th birthday on May 27, 2014. Carson was featured during the "HerStory" video tribute to notable women on U2's tour in 2017 for the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree during a performance of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" from the band's 1991 album Achtung Baby. In 2019, Time created 89 new covers to celebrate women of the year starting from 1920; it chose Carson for 1963. The centennial of Carson's birth occurred in 2007. On Earth Day (April 22), Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson released as "a centennial appreciation of Rachel Carson's brave life and transformative writing." It included 13 essays by environmental writers and scientists. Democratic Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland had intended to submit a resolution celebrating Carson for her "legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility" on the 100th anniversary of her birth. The resolution was blocked by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. On May 27, 2007, the Rachel Carson Homestead Association held a birthday party and sustainable feast at her birthplace and home in Springdale, Pennsylvania, and the first Rachel Carson Legacy Conference in Pittsburgh with E. O. Wilson as keynote speaker. Both Rachel's Sustainable Feast and the conference continue as annual events. Also in 2007, American author Ginger Wadsworth wrote a biography of Carson. List of works See also References Further reading External links Carson-related organizations |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_sandwich] | [TOKENS: 789] |
Contents Truth sandwich 1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage. 2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the specific language if possible. December 1, 2018 A truth sandwich is a technique in journalism to cover stories involving misinformation without unintentionally furthering the spread of false or misleading claims. It entails presenting the truth about a subject before covering misinformation, then ending a story by again presenting truth. Margaret Sullivan summarized it as "reality, spin, reality — all in one tasty, democracy-nourishing meal". The idea was developed by linguist George Lakoff, and the name was coined in June 2018 by Brian Stelter of CNN. Lakoff observed media organizations spreading misinformation by quoting politicians or pundits who lie or mislead. Background Lakoff was specifically interested in the ways journalists were covering Donald Trump, who made an unprecedented number of false and misleading statements over the course of his first term as President of the United States. Lakoff has written about Trump's effective use of language and framing techniques, understanding the media will cover and repeat his most controversial statements, stereotypes, and pithy mischaracterization, thus turning even his critics into part of his marketing apparatus. Standard journalistic practice involves repeating claims made by public figures or quoting them directly, but when the public figure is spreading misinformation or disinformation, repetition of the claims can amplify them and increase their harm. Sometimes lies are too consequential to ignore, however, placing journalists in a difficult position. According to Lakoff, even if you cover a lie and say afterwards that what was just said was false, the message has still been spread, and "denying a frame, activates the frame". He argues that repetition strengthens "frame-circuits" in the brain that we use to understand the world. A truth sandwich ensures the bad information is not the first thing people read or hear, nor the final impression of a story at the end. Restating false claims can reinforce them through repetition, but adding repetition of their fact-checking and rebuttal can have a similar effect. Lakoff explained his tactic to Brian Stelter on CNN's Reliable Sources podcast on 17 June 2018: Reception and adoption PBS published a blog post which explained the principle behind a truth sandwich is already something its editorial standards address: "Accuracy includes more than simply verifying whether information is correct; facts must be placed in sufficient context based on the nature of the piece to ensure that the public is not misled". Roy Peter Clark wrote for Poynter that the idea of a truth sandwich is like the rhetorical concept of "emphatic word order", where someone places "emphatic words" at the beginning and end of a sentence. In journalism, Clark wrote, "the position of least emphasis turns out to be the middle". Truth sandwiches have been used, advocated, or discussed in the context of a range of topics where misinformation is particularly widespread. A group of scientists writing about the challenge of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic advocated truth sandwiches as a communication strategy in their guide to dispelling common myths. In an article about truth sandwiches at Journalism.co.uk, Joseph Cummins uses the term "backfire effect" for when "telling people that what they believe in is false [makes] them double down on their beliefs". He urged journalists to utilize the technique, or keep in mind its principles, in not just the main writing about a story involving falsehoods, but also the images, headlines, social media, and other elements of coverage. Crispin Sartwell opined in the Wall Street Journal that using truth sandwiches is manipulative and condescending, and noted that the name is confusing because sandwiches are typically named for what is in the middle, not for the bread. Studies have been mixed on the question of whether truth sandwiches are more effective than other methods of fact-checking. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_climate_change_video_games] | [TOKENS: 4880] |
Contents Climate change video game A climate change video game, also known as a global warming game, is a type of serious game. As a serious game, it attempts to simulate and explore real life issues to educate players through an interactive experience. The issues particular to a global warming video game are usually energy efficiency and the implementation of green technology as ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus counteract global warming. Global warming games include traditional board games, video games, and other varieties such as role-playing and simulation-assisted multiplayer games. Concept The primary objectives of global warming games are threefold: The first objective is universal to global warming games. The issues surrounding global warming commonly included are CO2 emissions and the emission of other greenhouse gases, the melting of the polar ice caps, sea-level rise, natural disasters and massive changes to lifestyles caused by global warming. Games that do not go beyond the objective of knowledge and familiarity tend to be designed for younger audiences. Games designed for young children often only have the goal to engage the children enough to excite their attention to focus on these basic concepts. The second objective is integrated into games in a variety of ways. Sometimes demonstrating the challenges of confronting global warming are put directly into the style of gameplay, e.g. to demonstrate the difficulty of international cooperation, players are made to represent different countries and are required to negotiate to fulfill game objectives. Other times, the game includes the challenges as a part of the mechanics, e.g. building 'green factories' is more expensive than building 'black factories.' The final objective is shared by the most interactive and engaging global warming games. Developing solutions to global warming includes two major types of response: mitigation of emissions and global warming's effects, and adaptation to live sustainably in a new climate. Typically players are given a variety of different options so that they may come up with a number of different creative solutions. Sometimes players are even allowed freedom to create their own unique options to integrate into their strategy. Climate change games can be differentiated from other games that depict climate change for entertainment. As a type of serious game, climate change games often engage players with action-oriented goals and explicit challenges relating to the environment to encourage feedback and learning. Climate change games have been identified as a useful educational tool. Meya & Eisenack identified a climate change game as a useful source of experiential learning, with a positive association with student views on political and international co-operation to address climate change. Pfirman et al. observed a game to have higher engagement and as effective in teaching and assessing content on climate change as reading an illustrated article. However, more work is needed to confirm the extent of the impact of climate change games to broader audiences. Kwok notes that educational games may have a bias as they attract players that are already informed and concerned about climate change. Razali et al. have also observed that many climate change games are small and lack the sophistication to inform players on more complex aspects of climate change, such as the carbon cycle. History Climate change games were initially categorized as a subset of simulation video games relating to political and environmental issues. Ulrich identified 31 titles in 1997, with most games intended to instruct a professional or educational audience. A 2013 review by Reckien & Eisenack observed that the number and sophistication of climate change games accelerated in the late 2000s. Notable examples Act to Adapt, developed by PLAN International, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, and the Philippines Red Cross, is a giant board game that divides 10–30 players into a 'community team' and a 'hazard team.' The community team must prioritize and protect vulnerable community resources from the hazard team, which represents extreme weather events which become more intense and frequent with each round. The game was created as part of the Y-adapt curriculum, intended to help children understand climate change. Adaptation from Adaptation Scotland is a board game for teams of people using dice to move around the board, landing on squares which either cost money or save money due to destructive weather and adaptation investments. At the end of the game, the team with the most money wins. Adaptation Scotland would like players to play after experiencing their "Introduction to Adaptation" presentation, which is regularly updated. Interested parties can request the most recent version by emailing Adaptation Scotland. Cantor's World, created by UNESCO MGIEP (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development) and Fields of View, requires players to act as countries' chief policymakers, and to set sustainable development goals and then invest in policies to realize those goals. Players are able to see the results of their policies in Gross National Development, Human Development Index and Inclusive Wealth Index, and it focuses on Sustainability Goal #13, "Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts". The game is intended to be played in universities by students of public policy, economics, and sustainability studies. As of 2023, this game is only available through universities. Carbon City Zero is a global warming game published by the climate action charity Possible in January 2021.The game is a collaborative deck-building card game for 1–4 people in which players take on the role of city mayors working to develop sustainable cities by greening transport, transforming industries, and getting their citizens on board. Since its release on Kickstarter, the game has been made available as a free print-and-play download via PnP Arcade and as an online game on Tabletopia. Climate Action Simulation is an interactive role-playing game co-developed by Climate Interactive, the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative. for groups to explore the different stakeholders and solutions that need to cooperate in order to take action on climate change. It uses the En-ROADS simulator, allowing participants to assess the impacts of different solutions to climate change. The game mimics a United Nations emergency climate summit to develop a plan limiting global warming through collaboration between government, business, and civil society representatives. Climate Adaptation Game was developed by Swedish National Knowledge Center for Climate Change Adaptation and Linköping University. In a review published by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, the authors wrote that "aims to provide an experience of the impact of climate adaptation measures, and illustrates links with selected Agenda 2030 goals, which the player has to consider, while limiting impacts of hazardous climate events. The game design builds on the key goals in Education for Sustainable Development combining comprehensive views, action competence, learner engagement and pluralism. This study draws on game sessions and surveys with high school students in Sweden, and aims to assess to what extent different aspects of the game can support an increased understanding of the needs and benefits of adaptation actions." Climate Challenge is a Flash-based simulation game produced by the BBC and developed by Red Redemption Ltd. Players manage the economy and resources of the 'European Nations' as its president, while reducing emissions of CO2 to combat climate change and managing crises. Climate Challenge is an environmental serious game, designed to give players an understanding of the science behind climate change, as well as the options available to policy makers and the difficulties in their implementation. Coral Bleaching is a simple online game for young children. Players can experiment with the effects of changing the temperature, level of pollution and storms on bleaching coral. Crabby's Reef is a classic arcade-style game created at SeriousGeoGames Lab in the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of Hull, UK. Players search for food and avoid predators. As they advance, they move into a future where increasing ocean acidity makes survival more difficult. The Cranky Uncle game was developed by Monash University scientist John Cook, in collaboration with creative agency Goodbeast. It uses cartoons and critical thinking to counter climate change denial. It is available for free on iPhone, Android, and as a browser game. CrowdWater game is based on data from the CrowdWater app. comes from the Hydrology and Climate group (H2K) within the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich. App users contribute photos of water levels worldwide. Photo pairs from the same site can then be compared to each other in the CrowdWater game to verify the incoming data and to improve the quality of water level time series. Players can earn points, and every month they can win prizes. Software company SPOTTERON developed and maintains the app and handles legal aspects of collecting such data. Dissolving Disasters was designed for the Rockefeller Foundation Workshop Series on Resilience, held in New York City during July and August 2011. This game was developed with support from the American Red Cross (International Services Team), and from a research grant to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN Action Lab Innovation Fund). Played in an open, rectangular space where players have room to walk, participants act as subsistence farmers facing changing risks due to climate change. EcoChains, a board game designed by Joey J. Lee and Stephanie Pfirman and published by Jogolabs, requires players to use action cards to prevent climate change from destroying Arctic food chains. The Energy Transition Game, intended for a wide range of stakeholders, from financial institutions and government officials to non-government organizations and community members, takes players through the process of developing a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy in spite of resistance against such change. Fate of the World is a 2011 Microsoft Windows and Mac OS game developed and published by Red Redemption, the developers of Climate Challenge. It focuses on global governance, with goals ranging from improving living conditions in Africa, to preventing catastrophic climate change, to exacerbating it. It is based around an intricate model of populations, economic production and greenhouse emissions based on real-world data. Flower is a video game developed by Thatgamecompany and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was designed by Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark and was released in February 2009 on the PlayStation 3, via the PlayStation Network. PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions of the game were ported by Bluepoint Games and released in November 2013. An iOS version was released in September 2017, and a Windows version was released in February 2019, both published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was intended as a "spiritual successor" to Flow, a previous title by Chen and Thatgamecompany. In Flower, the player controls the wind, blowing a flower petal through the air using the movement of the game controller. Flying close to flowers results in the player's petal being followed by other flower petals. Approaching flowers may also have side-effects on the game world, such as bringing vibrant color to previously dead fields or activating stationary wind turbines. The game features no text or dialogue, forming a narrative arc primarily through visual representation and emotional cues. Flower was primarily intended to arouse positive emotions in the player, rather than to be a challenging and "fun" game. This focus was sparked by Chen, who felt that the primary purpose of entertainment products like video games was the feelings that they evoked in the audience and that the emotional range of most games was very limited. The team viewed their efforts as creating a work of art, removing gameplay elements and mechanics that were not provoking the desired response in the players. The music, composed by Vincent Diamante, dynamically responds to the player's actions and corresponds with the emotional cues in the game. Flower was a critical success, to the surprise of the developers. Reviewers praised the game's music, visuals, and gameplay, calling it a unique and compelling emotional experience. It was named the "best independent game of 2009" at the Spike Video Game Awards, and won the "Casual Game of the Year" award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. Gender and Climate Game is an experiential learning and communication game for teaching the different vulnerabilities of women and men facing climate change. Similar to the Dissolving Disasters game from the same source (see above), players first take on the role of subsistence farmers facing changing risks, and then experience how that role changes with a change of gender. The game was developed with support from the American Red Cross (International Services Team), and from a research grant to the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN Action Lab Innovation Fund). Go Goals!, created by United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, is a board game available in multiple languages that is intended to help children understand the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. The Greenhouse Gas Game is part of the Y-adapt curriculum intended to help children understand climate change. The game was created by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, and the Philippines Red Cross. Players act as either incoming sunlight heat or as greenhouse gasses to learn how those gasses trap heat, and how that is related to global warming, as well as the hazardous effects of global warming. Invest in the Future, based on the Flexible Forward-thinking Decision-Making game originally designed by Antidote Games and developed with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre for use with district planners, is a card game combining strategy and story-telling to inspire players to consider climate change as they make sustainable investment choices. It has been redesigned as an experiential learning game for young people in Southeast Asia by the enGAgeMEnt Lab at Emerson College, in collaboration with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. Keep Cool is a board game created by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and published by the German company Spieltrieb in November 2004. Up to six players representing the world's countries compete to balance their own economic interests and the world's climate in a game of negotiation. The goal of the game as stated by the authors is to "promote the general knowledge on climate change and the understanding of difficulties and obstacles, and "to make it available for a board game and still retain the major elements and processes." A quantitative-empirical study with more than 200 students shows that Keep Cool facilitates experimental learning about climate change and helps "to develop individual beliefs about sustainable development by experiencing complex system dynamics that are not tangible in everyday life." LogiCity is an interactive Flash-based virtual-reality based computer game, produced by Logicom and the National Energy Foundation, an English charity. The game is set in a 3D virtual city with five main activities where players are set the task of reducing the carbon footprint of an average resident. At the end of the game they are taken forward to 2066 to see if they have done enough to save England from the worst problems associated with global climate change. The game's conclusion and focus on 2066 is designed to bring home to players the reality of the changes they may face in their lifetime. In response to low interest in the game, there was an online discussion about revamping the game to make the game and players larger. The game was created as part of Defra's (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) Climate Challenge programme to increase public awareness of Climate Change across the country. The National Energy Foundation, Logicom and British Gas also provided support to the game's development. LogiCity is designed to be used both by individuals and in an educational context. It is stated to be suitable for most children from the ages of 10 or 11 upward (English KS3+), although the main target group is young adults aged 16–26. Master that Disaster was developed in collaboration with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based on a disaster risk financing game created for the World Bank Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance (DRFI) Program. Players take the role of subsistence farmers, who face changing risks as a result of climate change. They must make individual and collective decisions and then learn the consequences of those decisions. The game is intended for disaster managers, policy makers, and donors, and it should be played in a large room with tables and chairs. In the board game Minions of Disruption, developed by Shu Liang, the founder and director of Day of Adaptation, players are colleagues in organizations or neighbors from the same community combating climate minions, Carbions and Climmies, that cause climate change. Players cooperate to activate Zillians, superheroes who provide organizations with resilience for a sustainable future. New Shores: a Game for Democracy, developed by the Centre for Systems Solutions (CRS), sets players on an imaginary island with a lush forest canopy over useful coal deposits that could improve the island's economy. They can either collaborate democratically to achieve the best outcome for all, or serve their own needs, disregarding the welfare of the rest of the island's inhabitants with attendant consequences. Support for developing the Paying for Predictions game came from the American Red Cross International Services Team, and from a research grant to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN Action Lab Innovation Fund). In a room furnished with tables and chairs, players act as humanitarian workers facing changing climate risks and making individual and collective decisions with consequences. Players can win as individuals or groups: the individual winner has the most resources remaining at the end of the game, and the group winner has the fewest humanitarian crises. The game is intended for a range of professions: disaster managers, volunteers, branch officers, meteorological service authorities, donors, etc. The PHUSICOS NBS (Nature Based Solutions) simulation was created by the Centre for Systems Solutions (CRS) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) with funding from European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The game is intended for a variety of users, including educators, sustainability experts, public administrators, and members of local communities, and it simulates how nature-based solutions may be developed by stakeholders with varying interests and worldviews. Role playing requires players to consider climate change issues from other stakeholder's viewpoints. Ready, which was developed with help from the American Red Cross International Services Team and a research grant to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN Action Lab Innovation Fund), is a physical game intended for community members with assistance from disaster managers and volunteers to inspire conversations about location-specific disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction. Rescue Polar Bears is a board game designed by Darren Black and Huang Yi Ming with art by Collin Wang. Players co-operate with each other by choosing actions and card effects in order to save all the polar bears before the ice they stand on melts. Each player chooses a ship representing a nation, and different ships have different abilities. Shocks and Shields was modified by The Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre from an activity introduced by the Applied Improvisation Network, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Players experience having to migrate following climate shocks, and the game is intended to create a sense of bonding among participants. The Stabilization Wedge Game, or what is commonly referred to as simply the "wedge game", is a serious game produced by Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The goal of the game creators, Stephen W. Pacala and Robert H. Socolow, is to demonstrate that global warming is a problem which can be solved by implementing today's technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. The object of the game is to keep the next fifty years of CO2 emissions flat, using seven wedges from a variety of different strategies which fit into the stabilization triangle. Survive the Century is a game created in part by Climate Interactive and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center in North Carolina, along with other partners. The game takes players through different climate action scenarios and their impacts using science to educate players about the climate-related political, environmental, and social choices humans will face over the next century. It can be played online or via the book version. Developed by The Minimalists Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, The 30-Day Minimalism Game requires two or more people to minimize their belongings over the course of a month. Each person gets rid of one thing on the first day of the month, two things on the second, three things on the third, and so on. Each material possession must leave the home by midnight each day. The winner is whoever keeps it going the longest wins. Created by The Financial Times and Infosys, challenges players to cut energy-related carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions significantly by 2050. Central to the game's structure was the Net Zero By 2050 report from the International Energy Agency. The game's questions follow the three pathways the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2021 report used for cutting emissions, and they relate to electricity, transport, buildings and industry: the four sectors principally responsible for energy-related CO2 emissions. Answers have a direct impact on both emissions and global temperatures. Developed by Max Pisciotta, Cassandra Xia and John Sanchez, The Road to 10 Gigatons is an interactive online game requiring players to experiment with different atmospheric carbon removal solutions. This is a simple, one-page game, where players move the marker on different types of carbon removal systems to see what combination would be necessary to remove 10 Gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2050, as recommended by the IPCC. The World's Future, developed by the Centre for Systems Solutions (CRS) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), is a card-driven board game intended for everyone from public administrators and members of non-governmental organizations to youths. Players consider tradeoffs, such as whether it is possible to provide food for all without exceeding the boundaries of natural ecosystems, or how we might increase climate change mitigation while generating enough energy to meet everyone's basic essential needs. Urban Climate Architect, created by the Hamburg University Cluster of Excellence CliSAP, is an online climate game specific to the challenges of urban settings. Players can develop the city, adding buildings for residence, commerce and industry as well as natural spaces like parks and ponds while noting the effects such changes have on the city's climate. The World Climate Simulation game from Climate Interactive, the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative, is an in-person role-playing exercise of the UN climate change negotiations. Participants learn how nations can address global climate change with the help of Climate Interactive's C-ROADS simulator, which allows users to analyze the results of the game. Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge The Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge is a collaborative effort between Microsoft and Games for Change (G4C), a subgroup of the Serious Games Initiative. The challenge is a worldwide competition to develop a global warming game with Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express software. Winners will be awarded scholarships from Games for Change and Microsoft, and the winning games will have the possibility of being available for download on the Xbox Live Arcade service. The Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge has been cast by Microsoft as a "socially-minded" initiative, joining the larger serious games movement. Suzanne Seggerman, a co-founder of Games for Change, shared these comments in a radio interview: Think about how this next generation of kids could be inspired to be environmentalists and humanitarians. You know I'd like to see also, a thousand little game seeds planted. Not all the games are going to get prizes and not even that many are going to get recognized. But think of this new generation of game-makers and game innovators we're reaching. All these kids who've perhaps never even considered the impact of the environment are going to be getting knee deep in environmental issues. That's really exciting. You know kids really respond to this medium of video games in a way they don't to a newspaper or a heavy documentary. And I think that's the key. It's that we're reaching them on their own turf. — Suzanne Seggerman See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misbar] | [TOKENS: 326] |
Contents Misbar Misbar is a fact-checking website based in Jordan. It was established in 2019. History Misbar is based in Jordan. The domain misbar.com was registered 22 October 2001. It was established as a fact-checking unit under Baaz, Inc. in 2019, becoming a standalone website later the same year. Mohammed Al-Sheikh is its managing editor. Al-Sheikh told The New Arab, "There are many fact-checking platforms and initiatives in the Arab world, but we consider ourselves the first platform working round the clock to check news, fight fake news, and also raise awareness among the public about the media." Misbar was part of the #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, a group of fact-checkers led by the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) which sought to combat COVID-19 misinformation. The project ended in 2023. Misbar has debunked misinformation in the Gaza war, including false claims that dead Palestinian children were actually dolls and a photo of IDF soldiers edited to show them holding the ISIS flag. It has also debunked misinformation that spread online following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Operation Misbar relies on photo and video verification methods to verify information from media sources, and contacts people to verify statements attributed to them. It maintains offices in the United States and Jordan. In May 2021, Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist working for Misbar, said that Instagram was censoring her content related to support for Sheikh Jarrah residents and Palestinians during the Sheikh Jarrah controversy. References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fact-Checking_Network] | [TOKENS: 1198] |
Contents Poynter Institute The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a nonprofit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. The school is the owner of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper and the International Fact-Checking Network. It also operates the fact-checking website PolitiFact. History The school began on May 29, 1975, when Nelson Poynter, the owner and chairman of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and Times Publishing Company, announced that he planned to start a small journalism school called the Modern Media Institute. In 1977, Nelson Poynter willed ownership of the Times Publishing Company to the Institute so that after his death the school would become the owner of the St. Petersburg Times. The name of the school was changed to the "Poynter Institute" in 1984. Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) is a board member of the Poynter Foundation and donated $1 million to it in 2015. In 2018, the Poynter Institute began a cooperation with the content recommendation network Revcontent, to stop misinformation and fake news in articles supplying Revcontent with fact-checking provided by their International Fact-Checking Network. January 11, 2018, the Charles Koch Foundation's Director of Free Expression, Sarah Ruger, stated in an American Society of News Editors news release that "The foundation supports many grantees committed to press freedom, including The Poynter Institute, the Newseum and Techdirt's free speech initiative." On February 12, 2018, the Tampa Bay Times, the for-profit branch of the nonprofit Poynter institute spun off the Pulitzer Prize–winning PolitiFact website to form an independent division within Poynter. Since 2019, The Washington Post has been partnering with the Poynter Institute to increase diversity in media, with the goal to expand Poynter's annual Leadership Academy for Diversity in Digital Media training journalists to become founders, top-level executives and innovators. Other sponsors are CNN, the Scripps Howard Foundations, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and TEGNA Foundation. Poynter published a list of over 515 news websites that it labeled "unreliable" in 2019. The author of the piece used various fake news databases (including those curated by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Merrimack College, PolitiFact, and Snopes) to compile the list and called on advertisers to "blacklist" the included sites. The list included conservative news websites such as the Washington Examiner, The Washington Free Beacon, and The Daily Signal as well as conspiracy outfits including InfoWars. After backlash from both readers of and contributors to some of the included publications, Poynter retracted the list, citing "weaknesses in the methodology". Poynter issued a statement, saying: "[w]e regret that we failed to ensure that the data was rigorous before publication, and apologize for the confusion and agitation caused by its publication." Reason pointed out that the author was a freelancer hired by the Institute who typically works for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Reason drew parallels between the accuracy of the list with SPLC's own work on hate groups. In 2020, after receiving funding from Facebook, the Poynter Institute expanded the MediaWise program with a national media literacy program called MediaWise Voter project (#MVP). Its goal was to reach two million American college students who were first-time voters, helping them to be better prepared and informed for the 2020 elections. Poynter received $737,400 in federal loans from the Paycheck Protection Program during the COVID-19 pandemic. President Neil Brown noted that this was not the first time the institute received government funding, noting past training contracts with Voice of America. Activities In 2015, the institute launched the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which sets a code of ethics for fact-checking organizations. The IFCN reviews fact-checkers for compliance with its code, and issues a certification to publishers who pass the audit. The certification lasts for one year, and fact-checkers must be re-examined annually to retain their certifications. Facebook has used the IFCN's certification to vet publishers for fact-checking contracts. In 2025, Facebook parent company Meta announced it would move away from using IFCN-certified fact checkers, and replace with "community notes", similar to what is done on the X social network. Membership has also been used to identify the reliability of a fact-checking organization. DW called it the most prominent fact-checking consortium. The IFCN and the American Press Institute jointly publish Factually, a newsletter on fact-checking and journalism ethics. The IFCN also organizes Global Fact, a yearly conference on fact checking. News University (NewsU) is a project of the Poynter Institute that offers journalism training through methods including e-learning courses, webinars, and learning games. NewsU is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2023, the News Leaders Association transferred stewardship of the NLA Awards to the Poynter Institute, who will administer the contest from 2024 onward, and the awards were renamed to the Poynter Journalism Prizes. That same year, Poynter announced the creation of a new prize in honor of Roy Peter Clark called the Roy Peter Clark Award for Excellence in Short Writing. Since 2015, the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism has been awarded by the Poynter Institute, recognizing journalistic relevance, ethics, and impact. Past winners include: See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahaqaq] | [TOKENS: 366] |
Contents Tahaqaq Tahaqaq (Arabic: تحقق), also known as the Palestinian Observatory for Fact-Checking and Media Literacy, is a Palestinian fact-checking organization founded in 2015 by Baker Mohammad Abdulhaq. It is a member of the Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN). History Tahaqaq was created in 2015 by Baker Mohammad Abdulhaq, a journalist and fact-checker based in Nablus, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. Abdulhaq created it as part of his master's thesis in fact-checking. It ran out of money in 2017, but restarted in 2020 to fact-check COVID-19 misinformation. In July 2022, Tahaqaq became part of the Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN). Tahaqaq has reported on the Gaza war, including about allegations of Israel using white phosphorus against civilians. It has also debunked online misinformation in the war, such as AI-manipulated content and the Pallywood disinformation campaign. On October 23, 2023, Tahaqaq was targeted by cyberattacks attempting to disable its website after it reported on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion. Operation Tahaqaq largely publishes its reporting in Arabic. As of late 2023, Tahaqaq's team consisted of Abdulhaq and nine fact-checkers. Tahaqaq fact-checker Rana Salahat said in 2023, "There are several challenges, including restricted access to the materials we publish on social media platforms, as it is considered Palestinian content. Additionally, [Tahaqaq] has faced attempted breaches and numerous instances of electronic spam appearing on our posts." See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Skepticism] | [TOKENS: 460] |
Contents Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism This is the page for the WikiProject Skepticism, which is focused on subjects which have been the subject of skeptical critique and clarifying the distinction between science and pseudoscience, history and pseudohistory, and scholarship and pseudoscholarship generally. This project needs new members, join us and get involved! Project overview WikiProject Skepticism is a WikiProject dedicated to creating, improving, and monitoring articles related to skepticism (British English spelling: scepticism), also known as scientific skepticism, rational skepticism, or skeptical inquiry. The focus includes articles about claims which are contrary to straightforward facts, the current body of scientific evidence, or which involve the paranormal and other claims of supernatural or "powerful elite" agency. The project ensures that these articles are written from a neutral point of view, follows our guidelines for writing about fringe theories, and do not put forward invalid claims as truth. The project is focused on clarifying the distinction between, among other things, science and pseudoscience, history and pseudohistory, and between philosophy and pseudophilosophy, and evidence-basis versus conspiracy theories. The project is not concerned with articles whose subject matter deals with the foundational concepts of philosophical skepticism, which is covered by the Wikiproject Philosophy. Some examples of the areas which the project monitors are alternative medicine, magic, psychics, dowsing, Ancient astronauts, etc. This WikiProject aims primarily to coordinate the efforts of Wikipedians who wish to ensure that the best sources that describe these ideas are used in an effort to improve the general quality and range of Wikipedia articles on various topics, while maintaining a neutral point of view and avoiding the undue promotion of obscure ideas for which there is little to no scholarship or serious attention paid. The goals of this WikiProject are as follows: Here are tips on where to start, using the resources listed at WP:SKEPTIC: Where to start The project organizes its resources through the Wikiproject navigation menu at the top of the page. Here is a quick run down of what you will find at each link. Quick links A list of articles needing cleanup associated with this project is available. See also the tool's wiki page and the index of WikiProjects. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Countering_Disinformation] | [TOKENS: 867] |
Contents Center for Countering Disinformation The Center for Countering Disinformation (Ukrainian: Центр протидії дезінформації, romanized: Tsentr protydii dezinformatsii) is a working body of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine established in accordance with a decision of that council dated March 11, 2021 "On the creation of the Center for Countering Disinformation", and enacted by Presidential Decree No. 106 of March 19, 2021. The Center ensures the implementation of measures to counteract current and projected threats to Ukraine's national security and national interests in the information sphere, ensuring Ukraine's information security, identifying and counteracting disinformation, effectively countering enemy propaganda, destructive information influences and campaigns, and preventing attempts to manipulate public opinion. History Established on March 11, 2021, it is a body of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. On April 2, Polina Lysenko was appointed head of the center by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's decree. She previously held the position of assistant to the first deputy director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine in 2015–2019 and worked in the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office in 2019–2020. The center started functioning on April 6, 2021. On May 7, 2021, by his Decree No. 187/2021, the President approved the regulation which stipulates that the center is subordinated to the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, the general direction and coordination of its activity is performed by the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council. The center employs 52 people. The regulation also defines the concept, aims, functions, and basic rights and responsibilities of the center. On August 19, 2021, the head of the Center Polina Lysenko took maternity leave, and the duties of the head of the center were entrusted to her first deputy Andriy Shapovalov. On April 20, 2023, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by his decree No. 233/2023, dismissed Polina Lysenko from the post of head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, according to the submitted application. Aim The Center for Countering Disinformation activities encompass such areas as defense, fight against crime and corruption, foreign and domestic policy, economy, infrastructure, environment, healthcare, social sphere, and science and technology direction. But the main focus is on countering the spread of misinformation on the Internet and fakes in the media. The Center does not have punitive functions for misinformation and will not be able to apply sanctions, but may issue submissions to the National Security and Defense Councilon certain violations. Criticism In July 2022, the Center for Countering Disinformation published a list of persons accused of promoting messages similar to Russian propaganda. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, included in the list, called it "McCarthyite idiocy" and several other persons from the list rejected the accusation. Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft criticized the list as a misstep from democratic values such as freedom of speech, an apparent attempt to discredit and silence political scientist John Mearsheimer and other U.S. and Western analysts whose views differ from the Ukrainian government. The list of Russian propagandists was removed from the website of the Center for Countering Disinformation, but its copy is saved in the Internet Archive. On October 3, 2022, an updated list appeared on the Center's website. Peter Goettler, writing for libertarian Cato Institute, notes that setting up government agencies, such as the Center for Countering Disinformation, to separate truth from disinformation is an unwise idea, since they may attack opinions that do not align with the government's view. Gettler disagrees with the blacklisting of his colleague Doug Bandow and emphasizes actions like "the establishment of ill-advised truth and disinformation bureaus, and the unfair smearing of eminent scholars" do not contribute to Ukraine’s reputation. He calls on Kyiv to drop the accusations and apologize. Notes References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Interlanguage_link_template_forcing_interwiki_links] | [TOKENS: 157] |
Contents Category:Interlanguage link template forcing interwiki links Articles using {{Interlanguage link}} (or one of its wrappers), where the interwiki links are forced to be displayed using |preserve= or |display= even if the link exists as a non-redirect page in the English Wikipedia Most such instances should be removed from the article concerned, but be careful as this is sometimes done deliberately, particularly when more than one instance of this template is used on a page. See the documentation for {{Interlanguage link}} for details. Do not remove permitted on-page circular links. See also Pages in category "Interlanguage link template forcing interwiki links" The following 200 pages are in this category, out of approximately 1,547 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. |
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