Alan: Canadians did not wage bloody rebellion against "The Crown" and 90 years later peacefully evolved into a sovereign nation noted for its civility and civilization. Americans, on the other hand, did wage bloody rebellion and became a nation known for its incivility and (currently) a political milieu in which enless war-making and other forms of barbarism-yahooism have replaced our remaining vestiges of civilization.
How would The Founding Fathers react to "fake news?"
In the main, "The Fathers" were Enlightenment Deists whose lives and outlooks were centered on the findings of science. They were dedicated to the disciplines of intellectual rigor as the best (and often the only) way to uncover truth.
Deism And Founding Father Links
I have a conservative friend whose chain emails I've fact-checked for years. With rare exception Georgie acknowledges that my corrections are accurate and that the content of his fake news is substantatively false - or at least designed to mislead. (If you are unfamiliar with Snopes.com poke around their Political Archives at http://www.snopes.com/category/fact-politics/)
A decade after embarking my epistemological "call and response" with Georgie, he said to me -- and this is a verbatim quote -- "I like being partly right."
"The Death Of Epistemolgy"
Decontextualized, partial "truth" has become a pathonogmonic characteristic of "The Right," and increasingly the diligent propagation of shattered, shard-like "truth" is undertaken to replace "the brain at its best" with "the belly at its worst."
"You Didn't Build That." Falsehood By Decontextualization
We all need to feel competent.
And the fulfillment of this need is more important to a sense of well-being than we commonly credit.
With the metastatic popularization of "fake news" (which anyone can indulge without training, education or even "having a life"), we have come to such extremis that legions of Americans take pride in Deliberate Falsification as their raison d'être --"the thing they do best."
And so, for many, the creation and circulation of "fake news" becomes their primary claim to "competence" and thus they commit themselves (often with religious fervor) to a behavioral sink from which they cannot escape.
The easy "buzz" of viscerally-satisfying "fake news" is tantamount to an addictive "substance," a kind of "crack" that makes the synapses sizzle and pop like a luscious steak on the grill.
This deliberate delight in falsehood is epochal, "game-changing" and will either be laid to rest or the American experiment will come undone as surely as The Tower of Babel did.
Lest we forget...
In the Babel myth, humans started out speaking "one language" and, suddenly, that one language fragmented into mutually unintelligible semantic "beliefs" so that any possibility of understanding was confounded. What one person said "came across" with an entirely different - if not antithetical - meaning. (Or, it was construed as non-sense.)
I imagine The Prince of Darkness is much happier with this turn of events that The Founding Fathers would be.
"There Is A Cult Of Ignorance In The United States Nurtured By The False Notion That..." (Isaac Asimov)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/11/there-is-cult-of-ignorance-in-us.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/11/there-is-cult-of-ignorance-in-us.html
Founding Fathers Were Rational Deists, Enamored Of Science And Contemptuous Of Superstition
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-founding-fathers-were-rational.html
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