Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Something got me hot and bothered about narratives thirteen years ago, which would be just after our election of America’s First Holy President…but it’s impossible to say what it was now because YouTube has yanked the video. And my memory is not filling in the gaps.
Narratives are important. They represent the broadest gulf within supposedly responsible thinking people — how they’d like to think they think, versus how they really think. Narratives are responsible for all the polarization in our society. Wherever the discourse deteriorates, and reasoned discussion melts down into shouting matches, bordering on a fist fight, there are narratives.
A narrative can be true, false, or partially true. Narratives can represent things that are known, unknown, or are probable based on other things that are known.
Narratives are convincing because they’re so often at least partially true, and at least partially known.
However — and this is key — there is no such thing as a narrative that is fully known and fully true. Such a thing then becomes a fact, and ceases to be a narrative. Truth can assert itself, and there’s no social appeal involved in repeatedly asserting something that is so plainly true that it’s obvious to mediocre people.
This is why narratives are not to be trusted. The loudest ones are the ones that are pretending to be something they aren’t; the falsehoods, and the uncertainties, marching around cloaked in the disguise of known, sure facts, which is something a narrative can never be.
You hear them most often, and expressed with the most bumptious confidence, when the speaker literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and is trying to convince himself.
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