Open Minds

How to listen

Before we can learn, we need to have an open mind. A mind ready to learn new things. To unlearn old things. To ask questions and evaluate answers.

If we are not willing to question what we think we know, or if we are starting from a set stance, we do not have an open mind.

Having an open mind does not mean a willingness to accept garbage, but it does require us to ask if it is garbage.

Holocaust Denial

Years ago I ran into Holocaust denial for the first time. It was shocking to me because I knew what happened to the Jews and other undesirables during WWII by the Nazis.

How could somebody deny that it happened?

So I asked a simple question: How do I know it happened?

The answer was that my elders told me so. These were my teachers and my history books.

Could they all be wrong?

This was in the early days of the Internet, so it was a little more difficult, but I found a couple of sites documenting why the Holocaust was fake and a few others that were debunking the deniers.

I compared these sites, and the first thing I noticed was citations to external, primary sources. The deniers made many claims, but there were not very many links to back those claims up. On the other hand, the debunkers’ site was full of references to primary sources.

When I did look at the primary sources, I found that my personal evaluation of that evidence matched what the debunkers were saying.

The deniers told me that all those sources were lying to me. But I could see the images. I could examine the images for altercations and to see if they were faked. I didn’t find anything in the primary sources or the debunker sites that even suggested altercations or fabrications.

This was not true of the denier’s site. Their primary sources did not support their conclusions.

The other thing that I quickly spotted was a comparison between ethical, reasonable, modern actions vs. wartime evil operations.

For example, they claimed that the trains could not transport that many people. But they based that on human treatment of the people stuffed into the cars. There was no indication of such human treatment. Those being transported to the extermination camps were stuffed into those cars with no room to move.

There are multiple accounts of people standing next to dead people who couldn’t fall to the ground. They were held up by the crush of humanity around them.

Finally, the deniers made a claim that a sample they stole proved that the levels of cyanide in the showers were not high enough to cause death in humans. Except that the sample they stole had been exposed to the elements for over 50 years. The values they used for LD50 were appropriate for insects, not humans.

After my research, I had personally determined that the Holocaust did take place and the deniers were sacks of shit for attempting to deny something so evil.

Before I could make that determination, I had to open my mind to the possibility.

Lies

People lie. You can’t escape it. As thinking humans, we are pretty good at detecting people who are lying to us. But that only works when dealing with average people.

We have all chuckled at the videos of children lying about something when they are covered in the cake frosting of their misdeed. A child will flat out deny they ate the cake while covered in frosting.

They have not learned the guile of how to lie.

This is the simplest type of lie: to simply say something not true. “Did you eat the cake?” “No, Mommy!”

Most people move past this method rather quickly.

The next place that people go is to deny knowledge or to exaggerate. “Did you eat the cake?” “What cake?” or “Just a teeny tiny piece.”

There is an entire science of lying with statistics. If you have heard something like “There as a 50% increase in murders in Small Town, year over year,” you know that something horrible is happening.

What if last year there were 2 murders and this year there are 3? That is a 50% increase. While every murder is bad, the difference between 2 and 3 murders a year is just as likely to be noise in the data.

But we can see where going from 2000 violent crimes to 3000 violent crimes in a year is bad.

Now look at a different version of this: “Over the last year there have only been 10 more murders year over year.” What they might be saying is that Small Town has gone from 2 murders per year to 12 murders per year. That might be alarming.

You have to know what to look at. Per capita? Raw numbers, percentages?

You also need to look at what the definitions are. It is impossible to compare the murder rate in the United States to the murder rate in the United Kingdom. We count different things as murder.

In the U.S., if a person is murdered, it counts as a murder. In the U.K., if a person is convicted of murdering somebody, then it is counted as murder. Until there is a conviction, the wrongful death is not classified as a murder.

There are many other ways to lie. There are two more that are worth touching on.

The first is a lie by omission. This is when a pertinent fact is left out of the fact pattern. “Today the police broke into a local man’s house, arresting him after he had an altercation with his neighbor [where he threatened to kill him while brandishing a firearm].”

The bracketed text changes the entire gist of the story. Both versions are true, but in one case it sounds like the police arrested that local man for something minor, breaking down his door to do so. When the more complete version is there, it sounds like the police are acting reasonably to protect the community.

The final method we’ll touch on is lying by telling the truth. If you can tell the absolute truth in such a way that nobody believes you, then you have succeeded in lying, if that was your intent.

Short Quote

By selectively quoting a person, you can change the meaning of what is said, or at the very least, the conotations.

Consider the following quote: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Now consider the following quote:

I did … sexual relations with that woman.

By omitting two words, “not have”, the entire meaning of the quote has changed. While we did not change any of his words, we have changed the meaning of his statement.

Or this made up newscast:

Again, the quote is correct, but the meaning is twisted.

When you read an article that has short quotes in it, it is best to assume that the meaning of the original statement is being manipulated. Find the original and listen to the statement in context.

Example

The following is a partial transcription of the attached video.