I’m sorry,I have always thought the FDR quote was asinine!…….when your behind the source of the fear,it’s easy to be flippant.
Giving unions and collectivists certain carve-outs in the law was the DEATH-KNELL to individual rights as enshrined in the Constitution……..yeah,thanks Frank……
Or Jefferson and Mencken … sort of like a Mark Twain curmudgeon … but, like Twain, a keen observer of humanity.
VOWG
July 23, 2023 8:46 am
As far as the Jefferson quote is concerned, one can safely say that anything seen in the newspapers today should be questioned, as they are mostly wrong or lies, when it comes to politics.
“The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.” – Mark Twain
“People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels. They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them.”
― Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion
“The public relations counsel must deal with the fact that persons who have little knowledge of a subject almost invariably form definite and positive judgments upon that subject.” ― Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1184315-crystallizing-public-opinion
“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” ― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/481391-propaganda
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ― Edward Bernays, Propaganda
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs. A novel idea or insight, usually one that seems to explain a complex process in a simple or straightforward manner, gains rapid currency in the popular discourse by its very simplicity and by its apparent insightfulness. Its rising popularity triggers a chain reaction within the social network: individuals adopt the new insight because other people within the network have adopted it, and on its face it seems plausible. The reason for this increased use and popularity of the new idea involves both the availability of the previously obscure term or idea, and the need of individuals using the term or idea to appear to be current with the stated beliefs and ideas of others, regardless of whether they in fact fully believe in the idea that they are expressing. Their need for social acceptance, and the apparent sophistication of the new insight, overwhelm their critical thinking.
– From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade
“Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
“In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1033191-memoirs-of-extraordinary-popular-delusions-and-the-madness-of-crowds
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” ― Mark Twain
“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth–anonymously and posthumously.” ― Thomas Sowell
“Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.” ― Thomas Sowell
“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.” ― Thomas Sowell
I’m sorry,I have always thought the FDR quote was asinine!…….when your behind the source of the fear,it’s easy to be flippant.
Giving unions and collectivists certain carve-outs in the law was the DEATH-KNELL to individual rights as enshrined in the Constitution……..yeah,thanks Frank……
Don’t apologize. FDR sucks DDD’s…for all Eternity.
Tommy Jeff for the win…always.
It’s a shame that he and Samuel Clemens never got to meet. What a ticket THAT would have made!
Or Jefferson and Mencken … sort of like a Mark Twain curmudgeon … but, like Twain, a keen observer of humanity.
As far as the Jefferson quote is concerned, one can safely say that anything seen in the newspapers today should be questioned, as they are mostly wrong or lies, when it comes to politics.
“The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.” – Mark Twain
emphasis added
Misattributed quote
“People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels. They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them.”
― Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion
“The public relations counsel must deal with the fact that persons who have little knowledge of a subject almost invariably form definite and positive judgments upon that subject.” ― Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1184315-crystallizing-public-opinion
“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” ― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/481391-propaganda
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ― Edward Bernays, Propaganda
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs. A novel idea or insight, usually one that seems to explain a complex process in a simple or straightforward manner, gains rapid currency in the popular discourse by its very simplicity and by its apparent insightfulness. Its rising popularity triggers a chain reaction within the social network: individuals adopt the new insight because other people within the network have adopted it, and on its face it seems plausible. The reason for this increased use and popularity of the new idea involves both the availability of the previously obscure term or idea, and the need of individuals using the term or idea to appear to be current with the stated beliefs and ideas of others, regardless of whether they in fact fully believe in the idea that they are expressing. Their need for social acceptance, and the apparent sophistication of the new insight, overwhelm their critical thinking.
– From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
“Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
“In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1033191-memoirs-of-extraordinary-popular-delusions-and-the-madness-of-crowds
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” ― Mark Twain
“There are only two ways of telling the complete truth–anonymously and posthumously.” ― Thomas Sowell
“Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.” ― Thomas Sowell
“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.” ― Thomas Sowell