Wednesday, January 16, 2013

1-16-13 Exhaustion of Misinformation

It's so disheartening to see the spreading of false information. The current cause du jour, of course is the debate on gun control.

This week, two different friends posted these pictures:




I'm not going to get into the insanity of comparing Hitler to O'Bama. It's not worth a single brain cell. But if you're going to call the president a socialist AND a fascist, you should probably review what those terms actually mean and pick one. 

The problem I have with this is . . .  HITLER NEVER BANNED GUNS IN NAZI GERMANY. 

The gun registration laws were in effect in 1928, years before his rise to power, and, in fact, these laws were created to try and avoid the problem of a Hitler taking over the very precarious, nascent democracy of Germany after the first World War. They imagined a world in which a Hitler would take over by force, not one where propaganda and hatred would sway the hearts of the population. Silly them.

But this doesn't stop the propaganda machine today from trying to make a case that Hitler's power rested on gun control. Little things like actual evidence cannot be allowed to get in the way. When I tried to point out that this was a false argument, do you know what the replies consisted of? Boiled down: "Uh-uh! It's TRUE!!!!" with multiple exclamation points, each one designed to put me in my place.

Why wouldn't you, if you were trying to mount an argument against a policy find it useful not to engage in false claims that can be shot down in an instant? Don't you want to base your opinion on something a little bit stronger?

And today, Marianne Williamson posts what was intended to be a counter-attack on the power of the NRA  entitled, The Audacity to Wield Power and rests her entire argument on a quote by Abraham Lincoln that he never said

Gah!!!!!!




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No, but we do enact stricter blood alcohol limits, raise the drinking age, ramp up enforcement penalties, charge bartenders for serving drunks, and launch huge public awareness campaigns to stigmatize the dangerous behavior in question, and we do all those things because it might just help bring drunk driving rates down, I don't know, by two thirds in a few decades.






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