Entry 1201 — The Obversopher
Yesterday I came up with another new word, “obversopher,” for “opposite of versosopher.” A propagandist is an obversopher who wants his understanding of some belief system to triumph whether true or not. An obtusopher is an obversopher who wants his understanding of some belief system to triumph in spite of its invalidity because he truly fails to realize it is invalid. A verosophers wants the truth to triumph regardless of whether it validates some belief system of his or not.
I’m confused about the book I thought I was going to write about propagandism. The above is part of my flounder to find a Unifying Principle for it.
I need a list of propagandistic techniques and of examples of obtusophical irrationality. I probably should list everything that could possibly be on either list then get them appropriately organized. Wishlexia. Varieties of distraction. Use of logical fallacies. Cherry-Picking. Insults. Decontextualization.
Nothing more today. Earlier an important external hard drive crashed and I lost two hours taking it to Staples to have it looked at. My data may be retrievable, but I won’t find out for at least another six hours. I was worried that I’d lost many good graphic images. The drive had been for back-ups, but I’d begun using it as my only storage place for a lot of stuff–because I feared a computer crash, not an external drive crash. Very stupid. But lucky, for most of the data on the drive was (as I finally remembered after not finding it anywhere on any of my computers) from another external drive of mine, and most everything else recent was on a flash drive that I use to take things from my main computer to the one I use for my blog. But now a thunderstorm is giving me trouble. It zapped a half hour of work a few minutes ago. So I want to get this posted right now.
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