@QMS
and propaganda is truth. That's the measure of it in today's political world.

Quite often with music, over the years and thousands of lyrics, the "truth" will jump out at me and stick in my mind. Here's an example:

Poets, priests, and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no one's jamming their transmission

In my eyes, that is an undeniable truth.

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Ascertaining 'the truth' requires engaging the analytical mind.
Weighing-out opposing arguments with logical filters, the truth is
normally somewhere in-between. If one is living in a black and white
world, personal bias will throw the match. Accept the gray.

Good luck with the site construction and thanks for the OT.

@usefewersyllables
my friend. The truth, being subjective, is sometimes best left unsaid.

In my 30s I became fixated with physics. With no formal training I sought out every book I could find at Barnes and Noble on the subject, written in layman's terms, of course. I still have all of them. Carl Sagan's book The Cosmos, started me on that quest.

For me, at the time, it explained much of the unexplainable. Until I came to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Harumph.

Now that I think about it, there's a correlation between the Uncertainty Principle and Bill Casey's quote from above.

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

a great deal of time thinking about Truth, back in my wannabe-philosopher days.

Being of the engineering bent, I rapidly concluded that Truth, to me, was essentially physical in nature: if I could observe it, measure it, quantify it, analyze it, and recreate it in the lab if needed- that was Truth.

As soon as any other human being got involved, everything became Religion. Period, end of statement, full stop.

Consider, for example, color. I can measure, analyze, and recreate pigments through chemistry, and I can measure the wavelengths of light of specific colors. However, what I perceive as "green" is almost certainly not what anyone else perceives as "green". And truth be told, what someone else's brain is actually registering, deep down inside, is likely to be orange or mauve or puce, and they've just learned that that particular shade of whatever is what we've all agreed upon as "green", in our shared experience.

And we immediately arrive upon the sunny shores of "consensus reality".

To make a long story short, this is why we as a species suffer from susceptibility to lies and propaganda: consensus reality is a very seductive thing, and H. sap specializes in it. It is far easier to go with the societal flow than to endlessly measure and analyze everything, especially those things that cannot be measured. People who try are generally ostracized pretty quickly, and learn that That Doesn't Work outside the lab.

This is why the War on Objective Truth waged upon us by our owners is so very successful: we are hardwired from before birth to eventually accept whatever the masses around us appear to believe. And so we have political parties, wars, scores of people trampled in religious observations, con men, and on and on.

I've finally decided that my Truth is what is true to me, verified by my own means; and I've discovered that the chances of anyone actually *agreeing* with that Truth are nearly zero. So I generally keep it to myself, except in very rare cases- such as sometimes in my marriage, and sometimes commenting here...