China’s central government is often criticized in the West for filtering the Internet and controlling what is published in China’s state-owned media.
The West should also be criticized for the exact opposite, which is allowing too much freedom to lie, which often leads to hate, bad politics and worse economic policy.
In fact, we seldom hear any criticism in the media of the lies and misinformation that appears in the West where abusing freedom of expression to mislead the public has become the art of repeating something that is not a fact until it is considered the truth.
Recently, I wrote “A Short History of the National Debt” and posted it at Speak Without Interruption, Authors Den and Scribd and plan to add it to Gather.
Before I researched the history of the National Debt, I asked myself how President Obama ran up the National Debt to $14.3 trillion dollars, because that amount was about all I was hearing from the Western media, the Tea Party and the GOP. I never heard an explanation of where that National Debt came from. What I was hearing made Obama seem responsible for the entire amount.
After doing some digging, I learned a few facts. I hesitate using the word “truth” to define anything, since the “truth” seems to be whatever anyone wants to believe, so I will stick to a few facts and let each reader decide what his or her truth is.
Continued on July 13, 2011 in Free to Lie – Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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We’ve already seen an intellectual ghettolizing of the internet medium, where information true and false contained and accepted into niche communities online (teapartiers, creationists, birther, 9/11 truther, and conspiracy theorists of various sorts). Maybe what we are seeing is a similar blurring of the line between fact and fiction spread to the wider society.
Xiaohu Liu
Internet communities with the largest followers spread opinions that the members of each community believe is true (no facts or evidence needed). Then we have hundreds or thousands of these communities and endless truths all different sort of like the different truths believed by the devout members of thousands of global religions.
What’s next? Endless wars until only one community and one truth is left or humanity is gone.