Simply because you say something, does not make it so. But enough people might believe it to be so, that for all intents and purposes it is.
Last night during the post-election analysis on CNN, David Frum, whom Jerry Pournelle calls “the egregious Frum” for his erroneous ways, remarked,
You know, the Democrats claim not to be the party of the rich, but they’re raking in the bucks.
If my new employer has changed one thing about me, it’s my new focus on data. Most intelligent people can see through statements like that. Give me a candidate that can lay all of the data out on the table, admit margins of error, and make it apparent that they know what a logical fallacy is, and I cannot imagine they could ever possibly lose. This just reinforces the fact that people don’t care about the right thing, they just care about the thing that makes them “feel” best. Statements like this appeal to emotions, and that’s what wins elections. All a necessary evil, I suppose, for a working democracy, but I often wonder if data will ever have a place in human government.