Word of the year: post-truth

Events occurring and how they relate/affect Anabaptist faith and culture.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Word of the year: post-truth

Post by Bootstrap »

Another quote from Frankfurter:
One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertons that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except [hogwash].
So some people think facts matter and can be found, others think there's no such thing as truth. Traditionally, Christians have been great believers that facts and truth exist, and that they matter, but we have also realized that humans know in part and are easily misled.

If you don't think facts are knowable, then you can either (1) stop trying to talk about facts, or (2) engage in all kinds of hogwash to try to impress other people without worrying too much about the facts.
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Josh
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Re: Word of the year: post-truth

Post by Josh »

One of the issues here is whether or not journalists (and institutions that employ them which are owned by, for example, the wealthiest man in Mexico) are truly the "experts" on what truth is.
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Re: Word of the year: post-truth

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Josh wrote:One of the issues here is whether or not journalists (and institutions that employ them which are owned by, for example, the wealthiest man in Mexico) are truly the "experts" on what truth is.
That only matters if you think some person is the "expert" on truth and you can trust whatever they say. If you don't know how to computer 2+2, I guess that's the best you can do. But if arithmetic is really important to you, you really need to learn how to tell if the numbers add up or not, you can't just say 2+2=5 because Josh is smart and honest and loves God and that's what he said. Josh can still make mistakes. And if I can't do math, how can I tell that Josh is good at math?

There are different kinds of truth. As Christians, the truth that matters most is not propositional truth or arithmetic, but sitting at the feet of Jesus. Instead of trying to be experts on everything humans had ever studied, we might be better off focusing on how we live as Kingdom Christians. But if we insist that we understand all these things better than everyone else, then we have to become really good experts at how people determine truth in each of these fields. For instance, you can't just claim that a given budget won't increase the deficit without really understanding the numbers. Maybe a few of us have the expertise and calling to do this. For most of us, this is probably a distraction from actually living out the Gospel.

Consider a Kingdom Christian who does not vote, but insists that we buy into the platform of a particular party or political movement, and promotes these views day-in and day-out, treating political figures and political pundits as heroes and demons. For this person, is there any particular virtue in not voting?
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temporal1
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Re: Word of the year: post-truth

Post by temporal1 »

^^2016
✏️ The OP began with the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 2016 Word of the Year: Post-Truth

2022:

✏️ OXFORD / ‘Goblin Mode’ Is Oxford’s 2022 Word of the Year
The term describes behavior that’s “unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ... 180981245/

✏️ WEF / “These are the words of the year, according to dictionaries”
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/12/ ... year-2022/
Goblin Mode
Gaslighting
Woman
Permacrisis
War

✏️ MERRIAM-WEBSTER / “ 'Gaslighting,' plus 'sentient,' 'omicron,' 'queen consort,' and other top lookups of 2022”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-a ... f-the-year
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Most or all of this drama, humiliation, wasted taxpayer money could be spared -
with even modest attempt at presenting balanced facts from the start.


”We’re all just walking each other home.”
UNKNOWN
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