The country is polarized. And I think part of it - it is not just social media. We get our facts from different places. People self-select with so many different cable channels and so many sources. I think that is a huge problem.
Now, I know among the politically correct, you're not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.
I suggest that an education and reading and facts aren't bad things on which to ponder a few notions.
Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.
What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then.
Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts, and simple common sense.
Facts tend to take the punch out of a good hate rant and are therefore left best unsaid.
To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them.
That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.
I personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding one's subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism - from the most stylistically 'objective' to the most brazenly opinionated - has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data.
Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.
We may either proceed from principles to facts, or recede from facts to principles.
Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
Is it not in human nature sometimes, based on the facts that you now know, to reconsider?
If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.
If you're saying something that people don't want to hear or accept, a significant proportion of them will reply with hostility. Not because they know the facts, or because they have researched it themselves, but because they're so psychologically involved in believing good news that they will oppose it with a reflex.
