Sunday, July 03, 2011

Nevada County Tea Party, meet Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis

July 9 update: minor wording for increased clarity.
After being, as usual, struck dumb by Mark Meckler's dynamic diatribe Wednesday night on how the United Nations (Agenda 21) and sustainability folks (ICLEI) want to take away your freedoms (link, link) - how *do* you bridge a chasm like that? - I realized one helpful resource might be this passage from David T. Moore's Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis (pdf) from the National Defense Intelligence College:
(IMO it's turgid, but it gets the point across)
"Consideration is owed to the question of how biases, and possibly active denial and deception by an adversary, have influenced the selection of both questions and answers. One way of revealing [(or rather, countering) such] bias is by asking questions such as, "If the opposite outcome [or motivation] were actually true, what other evidence would I expect to see?"
So, Tea Party folk, here's the Q for you -
If it were actually the case that the social&policy movement you're railing against was motivated by a desire to maximize the well-being (and future freedoms) of the human population on this increasingly limited planet in recognition of the fact that past practices aren't sustainable in a world of much greater human population & economic development, then: how would the trappings of that effort look different from the "they just want to controllll you"-motivated effort that you perceive?

(is that clearer?)

1 comment:

frank -- Decoding SwiftHack said...

I'm not sure that coming from a national security angle will buy you much (see this), if that's what you're getting at. But you can always try...

-- frank