Charlie’s Voice

We talk about “them” living in a bubble. And I do mean “us” and I do mean “them”. Both teams make the accusation.

The question then becomes, how much do other viewpoints leak into your bubble?

From where I sit, I am constantly exposed to what the other side seems to be saying. It is on every mainstream media. Often times in lockstep. I do mean lockstep. There are more than a few examples of talking heads saying the same words.

I don’t know how much of the conservative viewpoint actually reaches into the left’s bubble. I assume there is some, but I do not believe it is very much.

As an example, consider this piece of dialog from Last Man Standing

This was done as comedy. It was funny because it reflected a reality. That the left has a view of the right that is a caricature of reality.

When we deal with the caricature of a person, we are not interacting with a person; we are interacting with a clown like version of that person. It is insulting to the person in question, and it leaves you looking foolish.

EBT and SNAP

This is a good example of the strawmen being built.

“The left cares more for illegal aliens than they do about Americans!”

vs.

“The right doesn’t care that people are going to starve without EBT and SNAP!”

These are strawman arguments. Or maybe better, they are such misrepresentations that it is impossible to have an honest discussion.

If you look at me and tell me that I, personally, don’t care that people will starve, I will point you to the donations our family has made. Anticipating SNAP and EBT being cut off, we reached out to people and communities that we know, offering help.

So why would you say I don’t care? Why would you say that my family doesn’t care?

“Well, that’s different.” isn’t really an answer. The left has used a very broad brush to paint people standing over here as evil, uncaring subhumans.

We arn’t.

I believe, no, I know, that the left doesn’t care more for illegal aliens than Americans. What I believe is that they want to help everybody, regardless of the cost. Because they wish to help everybody, they are willing to do things to accomplish those ends.

How do we get here? We get here because it is easier to fight the bogeyman than to fight real evil. It is easier to fight the uncaring conservative that just wants people to starve than it is to talk to them and find out the reasons.

It is easier to write off a progressive as caring more for non-Americans.

Hand up or Hand out?

Much of this revolves around a perception of how help should be handled and what the costs are.

I would hope that both sides can agree that there are people who are cheating or gaming the system. I hope both sides can agree that there are people who need and deserve help. The question then becomes a balancing act. How much fraud are we willing to endure such that every person in need and who is deserving gets help? How many people will struggle to reduce fraud?

There are thousands of people who deserve and need supplemental food assistance. I want us to take care of those people.

What is the best way to do so? That is a discussion that we should have. My conservative beliefs suggest, strongly, that such help should come as close as possible to those in need. Their local community, be that a church or the community center, as local as possible. Then, maybe, we should be looking at town- or city-sized communities. Then state and rarely federal.

This begs the question, who decides?

Dick was my best friend. He is now in the special prison for kiddy diddlers. His wife worked hard; he didn’t work nearly as hard. There were always reasons he wasn’t getting a job. Because he was a thief and unwilling to work, his family lost their home.

We took them in. We found room in our home for them all. We were feeding them and housing them. His wife was buying food for all of us to contribute to the running of the house. He contributed nothing.

One day my wife had had enough and went off on him. Get his lazy ass off the couch and DO something. Get a job or make her life easier. He chose to leave to live with his mother.

His stepdaughters accused him shortly after, he was arrested, he was prosecuted, and he was found guilty.

We knew he wasn’t producing. He didn’t deserve our assistance. His wife was. His wife and stepdaughters lived with us for another year or more before they found their home.

We know our neighbors. Even those that don’t associate. We know them. I’m always unhappy that my grayman fails because people call me by name and greet me when I am out and about. I don’t think I have done anything to be recongized.

I’m sure if we needed help, we would get it from our local community.

Another example of local. A friend of ours lost their house to a house fire. People started showing up that evening to offer them help.

We handed them a chunk of cash with no expectations. Others in the community did the same. They had a place to stay that night. They had food and clothing the next day. Insurance kicked in a few days later. But the community were the first responders. They community took care of their own.

That expresses how I have observed conservatives respond to issues.

I know that progressives also responded to that fire and helped out.

The difference, which I have personally observed, is that progressives check to see if the person has the correct social score before they assist. Conservatives respond first and worry about politics and social scores later.

I know that the person that we helped out has full-on TDS, or did.

Conclusion

Stop looking at the labels. Stop looking at the strawmen. Instead, look at what people are actually doing.

Open your mind and listen; maybe there is a reason for their opinion. Don’t write off a differing opinion as evil, most people are not evil.

My mentor was one of the fathers of the Internet. He was responsible for one of the most commonly used network test tools ever ping.

He was a subject matter expert in dozens of different areas; networking was just one of them.

After he died in a car accident, I moved into other areas, programming and learning new things. I quickly learned to ask people what terms and acronyms actually meant. The reason? Often I would know the thing they were referring to, but not that particular term.

This made me look like an ass. They would be talking about “jargon,” and I would be lost. They would explain what the jargon term meant, and I would suddenly be an expert. It wasn’t sudden; I just didn’t know what they were referring to to begin with.

The education industry is the worst for this. They change their terminology almost every year. This is very frustrating.

There is an entire set of students that cannot function in English. They don’t speak it, they can’t read or write it, and they don’t understand spoken English.

In other words, they are children of immigrants, both legal and illegal, with no English skills. This requires entire cadres of teachers to deal wtih.

The term I first heard for these students was “They had English deficiencies.” Of course they were functionally illiterate in English.

Then the term changed; they were children with “English as a Second Language”. This rapidly morphed into “ESL” students.

I teach ESL to friends in Brazil via Google Hangouts. There is no shame in not being literate in English if you live in a country where English isn’t the primary langauge.

I recently heard a teacher describe his school as being 1/3rd ESS. Huh?

Translation: ESS is the replacement for ESL. This is the education industry’s politically correct way to say “students who are functionally illiterate in English”. A third of the student population. Ouch.

Over time I’ve watched the term “pupil” morph to “student.” It still felt the same to me. The concept is one of a person learning from a teacher. A teacher is responsible for teaching pupils and students.

They changed the term again. The new term is “learners”.

This is a horrible term. Not all children are learners. Not all children are self motivated to learn. Learning is a skill we teach and we hope our children learn.

If a learner fails, the teacher is no longer the obvious responsible person.

I am so tired of trying to figure out what the term de jure is.

Words and phrases have particular meanings. These meanings are steeped in history and tradition. Over time, those definitions might change, but words have meaning.

The meaning of words morphs either naturally or intentionally. They also mean different things based on different cultures.

In England, a “fag” is a cigarette. In the United States, it is a male homosexual.

When I was a kid, we used a phrase, “I’m so angry I could jump down your throat!” Or, quoting from the Cambridge Dictionary, “I made the mildest of criticisms and he jumped down my throat.”

I was having a very frustrating conversation with my son’s principal. I some point I said, “I’m so frustrated I’m having a hard time not jumping down your throat.” At the end of the conversation, as I was leaving, she asked why I didn’t become a teacher and invited me to become one.

I left feeling good.

The next day I was told I was not allowed on school property because I had threatened to physically harm her.

She didn’t want to hear what the phrase meant. She didn’t care that she had not felt threatened at the time. Instead, after the fact she decided it was a threat.

Opening Our Minds

When we are listening, we need to understand and accept the meaning of the words as the person speaking intends them. To do otherwise is to act in poor faith.

When I am talking about criminal aliens, or illegal aliens, it means exactly what the law says it means. It means a person who is not a citizen of the country and who is here without permission of the government.

It does not mean all immigrants or migrants. It means exactly what the definition says it means.

If you hear somebody say, “We should deport illegal aliens,” it is highly unlikely they are talking about legal immigrants. Yes, there are some people who want legal immigrants gone. That is a different issue.

It is worse when we hear spokespeople conflating these terms intentionally. Normally they begin by claiming to know the motive of the speaker. Having decided on the motive of the speaker, they then tell you how to interpret the phrase, twisting the intended meaning of the word or phrase.

Again, I grew up in an age where proper English used male pronouns to indicate both male and female when speaking of a group. I’ve gotten used to the newfangled method of using “they” and “them” instead, but I slip from time to time.

When I slip, does this mean I’m excluding women? No. It just means I’m using proper English from my childhood.

This includes things like “postman”, “mailman”, “policeman”, “fireman”, and hundreds of other terms of the sort. It is not exclusionary, nor is it denying that there are female letter carriers. These are just the original terms.

Phopic

“Agoraphobic”, “arachnophobic”, “hydrophobic”, and “acrophobic” are all fears. Fear of open spaces, fear of spiders, fear of water, and fear of heights.

My daughter has said I’m “transphobic”. I asked her, “Have I ever exhibited fear of a trans person?”

“No.”

“Then why are you saying I’m afraid of trans people? That is what “phobic” means.”

“Yeah, that’s what ‘phobic’ means, but ‘transphobic’ doesn’t mean fear of trans people.”

The word was intentionally picked to suggest that anybody having a disagreement regarding anything trans related is actual acting out of fear of trans people.

It doesn’t matter what they say the term means; people know that “phobic” means “scared of.”

Unregistered Firearm

Uh, there is no such thing.

While TV shows talk about firearm registrations and people owning registered firearms, the reality is that there is no federal requirement to register your firearms.

An “unregistered firearm” just means a gun that nobody was forced to tell the government about. Some states require firearm registration. Some states require that the firearm that you carry on your person be registered with your permit.

These are the exceptions to the law.

A recent news story about a New Hampshire man sueing his former high school administration for breaking into his vehicle and searching it because he had told a friend he owned a firearm mentions that “He had a registered firearm”.

There is no such thing in New Hampshire. There is no way to register your firearm with the government in New Hampshire.

Mostly Peaceful Protest

Between 2003 and 2012, The March for Life in Washington, D.C. drew crowds exceeding 400,000 people. I’ve heard reports as high as 1.2 million for some of the 2020s.

Between 1987, the first march, and today, there have been zero or nearly zero violent actions by the protesters.

What reports of violence can be found seem to be from counterprotesters doing violent things to the people of the march.

Any protest that erupts into violence or mob-like actions is not peaceful. It isn’t even mostly peaceful.

I’ve strayed; some of these are more akin to lying than misusing words.

Look for the least offensive definition

When you open your mind, you should be able to read or hear the words and decide which definition to use. Don’t leap to the worst possible definition, or to an obscure definition; work to understand what is being said and communicate.

We will be working with the legal use of the term “facts” to help this discussion. This is difficult to put into words because there is so much loose thinking in the world. We use terms that sort of apply, but not completely. We treat opinions as facts and facts as opinions.

It is a complex subject.

To help, I’ll start with a simple differentiation: “need” versus “want”.

“I want a bowl of ice cream.” expresses a desire. If I don’t get the bowl of ice cream, nothing bad will happen. I might feel bad about it. I might be upset that I don’t get it. It is just a want.

“I need food.” expresses a requirement. If I go without food for an extended period of time, I will die. I will become weak and likely fall ill if I’m without food before I die from lack of food.

This shows why it is important to understand that the words have meaning, and it behooves us to use the right word to communicate the right message.

“Known or proved to be true.” Seems simple enough. But it isn’t always. We need to ask, “How do we know it to be true?” “Has it been proven to be true?”

“Joseph Biden was the 46th president of the United States.” This is a generally accepted fact. But how do you know?

To know if a thing is true, we evaluate evidence.

Evidence is a presentation of potential facts and testimony that are presented to us to prove a fact. I can provide you with a link to a YouTube video showing the swearing in of Joe Biden.

As you watch that video, you will be evaluating the evidence. At the end of the video, you will decide if that evidence proves the fact I am presenting.

You have to decide what evidence you will accept as proving a fact. You have to decide how trustworthy the evidence is. You have to decide how trustworthy the person presenting the evidence is.

After you have made those determinations, then you will decide if enough evidence that you trust has been presented to prove the fact.

Trusting The Presenter

For years the left labeled Fox News as fake news. They dropped that moniker when Trump started using it to describe other media sources.

The argument was that evidence that Fox News presented was not trustworthy. Since it was not trustworthy, you should not accept the evidence presented as proving a fact.

We all have opinions as to how biased and trustworthy a news source is.

I asked Grok the following using its expert mode (Think Harder):

Grok’s thinking is exposed, and this is its thought on the rules:

The resulting table is:

I’m disappointed that the Vine ranked so low in trust, but it is what it is.

This is the biggest issue in getting people to open their minds. They have already formed opinions about the bias of the sources they use and about how trustworthy those sources are.

You need to establish your opinions. You also have to be willing to look at other sources. You need to be willing to look at sources on the other side of zero.

Trusting The Evidence

We started with trusting the presenter because the presenter can twist the evidence, and you must be aware of that.

When I saw Jeffries’ statement, I assumed he had gotten it wrong. That he was lying. Why? Because I have an opinion of Jeffries that marks him as being untrustworthy.

I had heard Leavitt’s statement and heard something different. I heard her say, “The people that the Democrat party support are …”

Jeffries did not provide enough evidence for me to know that Leavitt had said what he said she said. MSNBC did. They provided video, and they provided a transcript that matched the video. I know the fact to be true, with a caveat.

I trust the evidence when I can verify the evidence presented with primary sources. That evidence includes videos, images, full context, statements by the parties, written documentation.

—Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (HarperCollins 1st ed ed. 1992) is a hard read. It describes horrific events. Is every word true? I don’t know. I don’t know the author; I can’t assign a level of trust to him. I do understand citations. The citations are excellent (I just realized that I haven’t verified that for this article; I remember the citations as being good). But his sources can be verified, even if I choose not to do so.

The Evidence Itself

Otherwise known as the sniff test. And the sniff test is pretty poor test.

Do we believe the evidence presented?

If somebody shows me they can hover in air, I’m not going to believe them. I am going to examine the entire situation before I believe.

I know how the trick is performed. You can likely guess. But the evidence that a man is just floating above his patch of flowers doesn’t pass the sniff test.

(If you look at every image of the floating statue/performer, they all have one thing in common: they all have something connecting them to the ground.)

Another example: “The amount of CO₂ output by man is dwarfed by the amount emitted by volcanoes.” According to NOAA, humans emitted roughly 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015. Volcanoes emitted around 0.3 billion metric tons.

Do you trust NOAA in this area? Then the fact is proven. Since this value is backed by references to the studies, we can look up how the studies were performed to discover if these numbers are factual. Or we can trust this source.

Conclusion

When we are evaluating evidence to discover the truth, to determine the facts, we have to have an open mind. We must be willing to look at different sources, to evaluate the presentation of the evidence, and the support given in that evidence. It isn’t enough to believe something is true; we need to know it is true.

That means we have to learn to look at evidence and decide for ourselves what the facts are. We need to be able to do that absent an authority telling us what to think or how to interpret the facts.

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.

I’ve been working with Ally on how to communicate in Charlie’s Voice.

What I believe I’ve found is that he starts with people that are willing to have a conversation. Usually, the people he is speaking with have the start of their conversation with Charlie written out. They expect to have a one punch knockout.

It seldom goes that way.

The reason is that Charlie starts investigating how to connect with them or to get them to articulate what they mean by the words they are using.

This allows him to use his wealth of general knowledge to have a conversation where they are working from talking points, emotions, and opinions and Charlie is working from a fact based world view.

I’m still working on this, and we are still looking from articles by you.