Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Stanford University Professor Glasser on Facts and Truth

At Stanford Magazine, Stanford's own Professor of Communication Theodore L. Glasser asks us to consider this:
The Ethics of Election Coverage: A novel take on objectivity.

We agree fully with Glasser that many people on our planet, also many journalists, glibly pass off their biased personal opinions to the gullible masses as objective and neutral "truthy" thought-making, and that this is a common practice not just in the "election game", but also in academia.

Glasser writes inter alia that citing a person accurately, for example, may not necessarily be truthful in its finest sense (it can be out of context, it can emphasize a meaning never intended, it can be used merely to support the citing person's own twisted opinions rather than to obtain deeper insights, etc.), and we concur fully when Glasser writes, for example:

"What might be an alternative to objectivity, a better way to understand the role and responsibilities of a free and independent press?" . . .

We might describe what journalists write with the same sense of modesty Clifford Geertz uses to describe what anthropologists write: an “intrinsically incomplete” and “essentially contestable” account of the world. We might come to realize that, as Rorty insists, meaning endures in history, not in nature; there are no finally “correct” or “accurate” accounts of the world; all descriptions are interpretations in the sense that everything can be redescribed. We might [describe history] not as "a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known truth" but "as a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change."

And that is the truth!

Most Popular Posts of All Time

Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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