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Mendacity

Mendacity, Seven Deadly, Trump

The Greatest Trick Trump Ever Pulled

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Of all the thousands of lies that Trump has told since becoming president, perhaps the most fundamental lie is his insistence that he somehow represents a majority of his fellow citizens. The opposite is true: he lost the popular vote by three million, and he’s even less popular now than when he was elected. John…

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, Comedy, Corporate Welfare, Development, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, WEDC, Wisconsin

Foxconn: ‘Innovation Centers’ Gone in a Puff of Smoke

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Trump insisted Foxconn in Wisconsin would be the eighth wonder of the world, and smarmy development men in places like Whitewater spoke about how much would come of the project, but in a puff of smoke that project’s ‘innovation centers’ are gone. Nick Statt reports Foxconn finally admits its empty Wisconsin ‘innovation centers’ aren’t being…

Alt-Right, America, Authoritarianism, Babbittry, Bigotry, Boosterism, Economy, Herrenvolk, Impeachment, Mendacity, Television, That Which Paved the Way, Trump, Trump-Russia, Unfit

Fox News Won’t Be Enough

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It’s a sound position to focus criticism of Trumpism on Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders. This sometimes includes Trumpism Down to the Local Level. (Those local officials across America who have this past decade spread sugary lies of boosterism during the Great Recession, during its aftermath, and during the opioid crisis are contemptibly…

Bad Ideas, Boosterism, Mendacity, Politics, Trump, Waste Digesters

Saying and Believing Anything

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Adam Serwer, writing on Twitter in response to a series of distortions from the conservative Federalist website, states plainly the truth of Trump-supporting lies: There is no incentive to correct because the targeted audience will believe anything pro-Trump they are told, whereas acknowledging error would signal weakness and insufficient devotion to the Great Leader. Yes,…

Disinformation, Mendacity, Propaganda, Putin, Trump

Kasparov on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

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Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63), the former chess champion and longtime human rights activist, recently described the role of propaganda in creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt.  The thread from Twitter is below (linked here from the first tweet) in the thread: As you watch Trump’s defenders lie, deflect, and distract today and in the coming weeks, remember…

Assault Awareness & Prevention, Crime, Disinformation, Fact Checking, Marketing, Mendacity, Misconduct, Police, Press Release, University

UW-Whitewater’s Administration Covers Crap with Catsup

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For months, UW-Whitewater has publicized on its website a sham study from a burglar-alarm company as confirmation that Whitewater has the safest campus in Wisconsin. The study is a shabby fraud, with a methodology so far below proper academic standards that it taints the serious work of faculty and students at the school, in the UW…

City, Crime, Cruelty, Education, Ethnicity, Immigration, Local Government, Mendacity, Migrants, Police, Race, University, UW System

‘Do Deportations Lower Crime? Not According to the Data’

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Anna Flagg writes Do Deportations Lower Crime? Not According to the Data: In one of Donald J. Trump’s earliest moves as president, days after his inauguration, he revived the deportation program known as Secure Communities. Proponents argue that it helps prevent crime and also increases the police’s ability to solve crime through collaboration with federal…

Bad Ideas, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Development, Foxconn, Government Spending, Mendacity, That Which Paved the Way, UW Madison, WEDC

Be Patient, UW-Madison: Only $99,300,000.00 to Go!

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If a group invited a guest speaker who said the world was flat, then that group would be rightly discarded as a credible policy advocate. In Whitewater and other towns, crony-capitalist groups of different sizes proudly declared the Foxconn project a boon for Wisconsin. (Trump, himself, declared it a boon for the whole planet: “the…

Culture, Mendacity, Technology, Video

‘Deep Fakes’ in a Deeper Context

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In the video Op-Ed above, Claire Wardle responds to growing alarm around “deepfakes” — seemingly realistic videos generated by artificial intelligence. First seen on Reddit with pornographic videos doctored to feature the faces of female celebrities, deepfakes were made popular in 2018 by a fake public service announcement featuring former President Barack Obama. Words and…

Babbittry, Boosterism, CDA, Foxconn, Mendacity, Reasoning, Science/Nature, That Which Paved the Way, Waste Digesters, WEDC

Junk Reasoning Isn’t Simply a Problem at the Top

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Helena Bottemiller Evich reports ‘It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie’ (‘A top climate scientist quit USDA, following others who say Trump has politicized science’): One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how…

Babbittry, Books, Culture, Fact Checking, Local Government, Marketing, Mendacity, Politics, Public Relations, That Which Paved the Way

Fact-Checking is an Active, Ongoing Effort

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Laura Hazard Cohen explains that “First-generation fact-checking” is no longer good enough. Here’s what comes next: “Fact checkers need to move from ‘publish and pray’ to ‘publish and act.’” “The idea that fact checking can work by correcting the public’s inaccurate beliefs on a mass scale alone doesn’t stack up,” write representatives from Full Fact…