Propaganda and Debating Techniques
by A. Orange


"I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lüger's time, achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its successes."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 1, Chapter 6, "War Propaganda"


"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise"
-- Adolf Hitler


"Propaganda," Goebbels once wrote, "has absolutely nothing to do with truth."


"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell


As you read the following pages, you will be exposed to quite a variety of deceptive propaganda techniques, logical fallacies, and lies (hopefully, none of them mine). You might as well learn a little about how the art and science of propaganda works, so that you can recognize the techniques as people try to fool your mind with them.

You probably already know a lot about this, whether you realize it or not, because politicians pull many of these standard stunts on you every election year, and you have grown immune to some of them. And modern advertising uses a lot of them, too, and you just tune them out. Nevertheless, let's just do a quick over-view of propaganda techniques.

Bear in mind that "propaganda" is not inherently a dirty word -- it just usually is. Any time you are trying to convince anyone of something, you are using some kind of persuasion, debating, or propaganda technique. Just telling the whole truth about something is one simple propaganda technique, and a highly effective one. But lying often works better, at least with some audiences...

Master these propaganda techniques, and you too will be able to proselytize and promote cult religion and radical politics just like a battle-hardened old-timer.

PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES:

DEBATING TECHNIQUES:


PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES:


  • Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth.
    This can be highly effective, and very convincing, if you know your subject material well, and are a good speaker.

    ... And IF the truth is really what you want your audience to hear and believe.

    The Truth, as a matter of habit, has some disadvantages: You have to learn and remember a whole lot of facts, and keep them straight in your head. The facts might not always be what you wish them to be. And, alas, the truth is sometimes very boring...


  • Lie
    This one is simple, straight-forward, and obvious. Just lie and say whatever you want to. It has the advantages that you don't need to memorize so many facts, and you can make up new facts when the currently-existing ones don't suit your purposes. The disadvantages are that you might get caught in a lie, and that would destroy your credibility.

    "You're never going to make it in politics. You just don't know how to lie."
     Richard M. Nixon
    Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents, Cormac O'Brien, page 228.


  • Lie By Omission and Half-Truths
    This is also known as Suppressed Evidence.

    This one is more subtle. It has the advantage that you can't get caught in a lie, because everything that you say is true. You just happily fail to mention all of those bothersome little facts that do not support your point of view. Should a critic point out one of those annoying undesired facts, you can at least feign innocent ignorance, or claim that the fact is really just an unimportant, trivial detail, not worth mentioning.

    For example: In 1908, the Lutheran minister Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman got into a squabble over money with the trustee committee of their hospice for young men in Philadelphia, and in an angry huff, Buchman resigned and got on a boat for Europe. He ended up at a large religious convention in Keswick, England, where he felt that he had a spiritual transformation. He felt moved to write letters of apology to all six of the trustees with whom he had squabbled, humbly asking their forgiveness. Buchman said that none of them even bothered to answer his letters.

    That was rather unkind of them, wasn't it? No wonder Buchman had a disagreement with them, if they were really so haughty and so inconsiderate that they would not even acknowledge a man's humble apology and request for forgiveness...

    There is just one small detail that Frank Buchman left out in his telling of that story: Buchman didn't put any return address on the envelopes that he mailed back to Philadelphia.

    Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN on May 8, 2001, that nuclear energy "doesn't emit any carbon dioxide at all."
    That is lying by omission. It is true that nuclear reactors do not create carbon dioxide while burning their nuclear fuel, but the process of mining the uranium is done by machines like bulldozers that create lots of carbon dioxide and air pollution. And so does the process of refining the ore and converting it into usable nuclear fuel, and transporting it to the reactor. And then there is the problem of disposal of the nuclear waste. That's another giant hole to be dug with diesel-powered machines. If the whole fuel cycle is taken into account, then nuclear power creates several times as much CO2 as renewable energy sources. (The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Richard Heinberg, page 135.)


    Bill Wilson gave us lots of good examples of that technique. In chapter 8 of the Big Book, "To Wives", the wives of the recovering alcoholics seem to give advice to the wives of other alcoholics:

    As wives of Alcoholics Anonymous, we would like you to feel that we understand as perhaps few can. We want to analyze mistakes we have made.
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 104.

    Sometimes there were other women. How heartbreaking was this discovery; how cruel to be told that they understood our men as we did not!
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 106.

    We wives found that, like everybody else, we were afflicted with pride, self-pity, vanity and all the things which go to make up the self-centered person; and we were not above selfishness or dishonesty. As our husbands began to apply spiritual principles in their lives, we began to see the desirability of doing so too.
          At first, some of us thought we did not need this help. We thought, on the whole, we were pretty good women, capable of being nicer if our husbands stopped drinking. But it was a silly idea that we were too good to need God. Now we try to put spiritual principles to work in every department of our lives.   ... We urge you to try our program, for nothing will be so helpful to your husband as the radically changed attitude toward him which God will show you how to have. Go along with your husband if you possibly can.
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 116.

    Yes, Bill Wilson really would like you to feel that the wives understand as perhaps few can.

    The big problem with those quotes is that the To Wives chapter of the Big Book was not written by Lois Wilson or any of the other wives of the alcoholics -- Bill Wilson wrote it all. Lois wanted to write it, but Bill didn't trust his wife to say the right things, or to get the "style" the way he wanted it, he said, so he wrote the whole chapter himself, while pretending to be his own wife.

    What a huge difference that one tiny little fact makes. That chapter reads entirely differently, it becomes a sick twisted joke, when you know who the real author was.

    Bill Wilson perceptively analyzed his wife's many mistakes for her, and confessed all of Lois' sins for her (in print), and honestly admitted her many failings: her moral shortcomings and dishonesty and selfishness and her silly thinking that she was too good to need God (page 116). (She was "selfish" while she worked in Loesser's department store to support his unemployed thieving philandering drunken ass for years and years.)

    Then Bill the housewife even lectured "the other girls" not to nag their husbands about their drinking, or else those guys will get mad and go sleep with their mistresses (page 111)... Like Bill did.


          Bill Wilson gave us many more examples of that Lie By Omission technique. Here, he is talking about doing Step Five, where we confess all of our sins and moral shortcomings to someone else:

    This is perhaps difficult, especially discussing our defects with another person. We think we have done well enough in admitting these things to ourselves. There is doubt about that. In actual practice, we usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient. Many of us thought it necessary to go much further. We will be more reconciled to discussing ourselves with another person when we see good reasons why we should do so. The best reason first: If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking. Time after time newcomers have tried to keep to themselves certain facts about their lives. Trying to avoid this humbling experience, they have turned to easier methods. Almost invariably they got drunk. Having persevered with the rest of the program, they wondered why they fell. We think the reason is that they never completed their housecleaning. They took inventory all right, but hung on to some of the worst items in stock. They only thought they had lost their egoism and fear; they only thought they had humbled themselves. But they had not learned enough of humility, fearlessness and honesty, in the sense we find it necessary, until they told someone else all their life story.
     A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 6, Into Action, pages 72-73.

    Wow. That's really impressive. I guess we had better get down on our knees right now, and start confessing everything, holding nothing back!

    Right?

    Wrong.

    Notice that the rest of the logic is missing. That is, where do we see the report on the other people, who did confess everything, and then successfully abstained from drinking? There is no such report, because they all relapsed too. The early New York group that Bill Wilson was writing about had a very high relapse rate. Fully fifty percent of the original Big Book authors relapsed and returned to a life of drinking. In Akron, Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob calculated that they had only a 5% success rate in sobering up alcoholics (which is the same as the success rate of people who quit on their own). Bill Wilson couldn't keep 'em sober not for nuthin'. The cult religion routine didn't work at all.

    But Bill didn't want to talk about that, because he was a faithful Buchmanite who believed that you must confess your sins to everyone else in your group if you are to be holy. So Bill was doing everything in his power to make everyone holy, even if it didn't make them sober.

    And note how Bill also gave us illustrations of a few other propaganda techniques:

    • The Straw Man Tactic:
      "We think we have done well enough in admitting these things to ourselves."
      "They only thought they had lost their egoism and fear; they only thought they had humbled themselves. But they had not learned enough of humility, fearlessness and honesty..."
       Those people who think that they don't really need to do all of Bill Wilson's wonderful 12 Steps are really stupid egotistical dishonest cowards, aren't they?

    • Hiding Behind Others:
      The use of "We" to create the false impression that it was more than just the opinion of Bill Wilson -- that many people had done a whole lot of research on the subject, and had gained a lot of valuable experience in what really works to keep people sober: "We think... We usually find..." The truth is, when Bill wrote that paragraph in December of 1938 and January of 1939, there were only 60 or 70 sober A.A. members in the whole world, and they didn't all agree with him. Their major experience was in watching Bill Wilson's religious program fail to keep them sober, with most of the early A.A. members relapsing and leaving. Here, Bill Wilson was really just pushing his own strange Buchmanite religious beliefs, and trying to convince others that his ideas were the only things that work.

    • Lying by Omission (some more):
      Half of those few sober A.A. members didn't like or do Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps. They were the members who demanded that Bill's 12 religious steps be called "suggestions", not requirements, because they saw clearly that Bill's dogmatic religiosity would drive away many of the alcoholics whom the program was supposed to help. See page 59 of the Big Book -- the steps are only "suggested as a program of recovery". But here, Bill wants to fool you into thinking that all of the sober members did Step Five thoroughly, holding nothing back, and that's why they were sober.

    • Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc: "It happened after 'X', so it was caused by 'X'."
      "Time after time newcomers have tried to keep to themselves certain facts about their lives.   ...   Almost invariably they got drunk."
       Bill Wilson doesn't really give us any evidence that withholding embarrassing personal secrets makes people drink alcohol, just like he doesn't give us any evidence that confessing sins to other A.A. members makes people get sober. He just wants to fool us into thinking it. I can with equal validity argue that they all relapsed because they wore clothes to the meetings:

      Time after time, we have seen newcomers make the stupid mistake of wearing clothes to A.A. meetings. Almost all of the newcomers who relapsed wore clothes. (What sins were they trying to hide?) Almost invariably, they got drunk. And almost all of the people who wore clothes to A.A. meetings eventually dropped out.

      Conclusion: Obviously, wearing clothes to A.A. meetings causes people to drink alcohol.

    • Sly Suggestions and Fear Mongering, Creating Phobias:
      "If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking."

      Then again, we might. (I did.)
      Notice how Wilson lies to you obliquely, by hints and suggestions, to lead you to an erroneous conclusion: "...we may not overcome drinking."

      And Wilson does it again, here:
      "... they wondered why they fell. We think the reason is that they never completed their housecleaning."
       It's hard to prove that Wilson is lying when he plants a suggestion like that. He might actually think that all of that crazy stuff is really true.

      And we can again use the clothes clause:
      "We think the reason that they relapsed is because they never completed the task of taking off all of their clothes and fully exposing themselves to the whole group."

    • And who says that Step Five is a "vital" step? Well, Bill Wilson does. That's assuming facts not in evidence, assuming facts yet to be proven, the trick called petitio principii. We have absolutely no evidence, other than Bill Wilson's deceitful declarations, that Step Five is in any way necessary, or even helpful, for quitting drinking.

    • Sarcasm, Condescension, and Patronizing Attitudes:
      "Trying to avoid this humbling experience, they have turned to easier methods."
       If you won't do what Bill Wilson says, and humbly grovel before your sponsor and confess all of your sins, then you are just a weak, wimpy, unspiritual lazy bum who is guilty of seeking "an easier, softer way."
      (You couldn't possibly be seeking a saner way to recover.)
      Real men are proud to masochistically grovel on their knees and wallow in guilt.


    For another example of lying by omission, look closely at this text:

          Despite four decades of AA research, no clear picture has emerged as to which patient characteristics can predict a positive outcome with AA and, therefore, can be used as criteria for matching patients to AA.   ...
          To date, only three randomized clinical trials have examined the efficacy of AA participation, either with or without additional simultaneous treatment approaches (Ditman et al. 1967; Brandsma et al. 1980; Walsh et al. 1991). The vast majority of AA studies, however, have focused on two narrower questions: Which factors predict whether a person will join AA? And how does involvement in AA predict outcome? In an attempt to answer these two questions, Emrick and colleagues (1993) reviewed 107 previously published AA studies.
     Tonigan, J. Scott, Hiller-Sturmhofel, Susanne, Alcohol Health & Research World, 0090838X, 1994, Vol. 18, Issue 4.

    1. The authors almost accurately stated that there have only been three good randomized clinical trials of the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous treatment ever done. (Actually, they ignored the best test of all, the very large test done by Drs. Orford and Edwards in England, and also Dr. George E. Vaillant's clinical trial, which also had merit.)
    2. But the authors did not tell us what those clinical trials actually found. They did not say one word about what Doctors Ditman, Brandsma and Walsh reported.
    3. Instead, the authors did a quick tap-dance towards "the vast majority of A.A. studies" that were not properly done and are not scientifically or medically valid. Then they cited a survey done by Emrick where he examined 107 of those less-reliable "studies", essays, opinions, and propaganda articles.

    So what did those three valid clinical trails find? They found that Alcoholics Anonymous was a disaster:

    • Dr. Ditman found that participation in A.A. increased the alcoholics' rate of rearrest for public drunkeness.
    • Dr. Brandsma found that A.A. increased the rate of binge drinking. After several months of indoctrination with A.A. 12-Step dogma, the alcoholics in A.A. were doing five times as much binge drinking as a control group that got no treatment at all, and nine times as much binge drinking as another group that got Rational Behavior Therapy.
      Teaching people that they are alcoholics who are powerless over alcohol yields very bad results. It becomes a self-fulfilling prediction -- they relapse and binge drink as if they really are powerless over alcohol.
    • And Dr. Walsh found that the so-called "free" A.A. program was actually very expensive -- it messed up patients so that they required longer periods of costly hospitalization later on.

    • And the authors could have mentioned that Doctors Edwards and Orford found that A.A. was completely ineffective, and that having a doctor talk to the alcoholic for just one hour, telling him to quit drinking or else he would likely die, worked just as well as a whole year of A.A. meetings.

    • And the authors could have mentioned that Dr. George E. Vaillant, member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., found in his 8-year-long test that A.A. was completely ineffective, and just raised the death rate in alcoholics. His A.A.-based treatment program had the highest death rate of all of the treatment programs that he studied.

    But the authors mentioned none of that. They just started talking about matching patients to A.A. without ever having established whether A.A. works or helps alcoholics even a little bit, or that we even should try to match alcoholics to Alcoholics Anonymous. What is the point of sending patients to A.A. when it just makes them worse? (So that also makes it an example of Assume The Major Premise.)


  • Lie With Qualifiers
    Make sweeping statements to give the impression you want, but insert so many qualifiers that the statements are meaningless, or downright dishonest.

    You get bombarded with advertisements that say,
    "Make up to $6000 per month working from home."
     Why the upper limit? Why not a lower limit? Why don't they advertise,
    "Make at least $3000 per month working from home"?

    And Qwest says, "You get free long distance (except for a 10 cents per minute surcharge)."
    If you have to pay 10 cents per minute, then it isn't free at all.

    And A.A. gives us numerous examples:
    "It works, if you work it."
    "It works, if you make it work."
     Yes, and vanilla ice cream works, if you make it work.
    Dancing in a ballerina's tutu works, if you make it work.

    In The Promises, Bill Wilson wrote:

    If we are painstaking about this phase of our development [Step 9], we will be amazed before we are halfway through.
     The A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, page 83.

    So of course if we are not amazed, then we were not painstaking enough...

    Another example: the A.A. faithful read this statement out loud at the start of every A.A. meeting:

    RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.
         The A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, Chapter 5, "How It Works", page 58.

    How could Bill Wilson write such a line when A.A. had a horrendously high failure rate?
    Simple: the A.A. program requires people to abstain from drinking alcohol, so if they relapse and drink, then they aren't "thoroughly following our path", are they?

    With that qualifier, Bill Wilson could have written,
          "NEVER have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path".

    For another example, in the Foreword to the Second Edition of the Big Book, page XX, Bill Wilson wrote:

    Of alcoholics who came to A.A. and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with A.A. showed improvement. Other thousands came to a few A.A. meetings and at first decided they didn't want the program. But great numbers of these -- about two out of three -- began to return as time passed.

    The impression we get is that A.A. worked great, and sobered up 75% of the alcoholics pretty fast, and that all of the alcoholics benefited at least a little bit, if they just tried. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Later, Bill Wilson told the truth:

    You have no conception these days of how much failure we had. You had to cull over hundreds of these drunks to get a handful to take the bait.
     Bill Wilson, at the memorial service for Dr. Bob, Nov. 15, 1952; file available here.

    This quote gives us the impression that A.A. had about a one or two percent recruiting success rate: You have to "cull over hundreds of these drunks to get a handful to take the bait." But that "handful" is people who just "take the bait" and join Bill's club. How many of those gullible joiners actually stayed sober for a year or more? Even less, for sure. So the real long-term A.A. success rate was under one percent, even by Bill Wilson's own reckoning.

    So how do we reconcile the vastly different numbers in those two statements? Easy. We use qualifiers:

    • First off, Bill Wilson began the first quote with a major qualifier about those alcoholics "who came to A.A. and really tried". If they didn't join A.A., or they didn't "really try", then they weren't counted.

    • And who decided whether they had really tried?
      Well, Bill Wilson, of course.
       Heck, with that qualifier, Bill Wilson could make the numbers into anything he wanted them to be.

    • The last qualifier counted only "those who stayed on with A.A.", so those who relapsed and left A.A. and didn't "Keep Coming Back" didn't count either. That conveniently eliminated all of the drop-outs, deaths, and failures from the statistics. So there wasn't a single case "of those who stayed on" that didn't "show improvement" in the statistics that Bill manufactured.

    • So we can have the reality that less than one percent of the alcoholics were actually success stories, joining A.A., quitting drinking and staying quit for many years, while, in the Big Book, after Bill Wilson prettied up the numbers with those qualifiers, it looked like at least 50% of the alcoholics were eventually getting sobered up by A.A. (75% of the two thirds who kept coming back).

    Cute, huh? Now that's lying with qualifiers.

    (And it's also a fair example of lying with statistics.)

    "Keep Coming Back! It Works! (...If you work it...)"


  • Lie With Statistics
    Speaking of which, there is the time-honored method of lying called Statistics.

    Both Mark Twain and Desraeli said that there are three kinds of lies:

    • Little White Lies,
    • Damned Lies,
    • and Statistics.

    You can have all kinds of fun with statistics:

    • Ninety-nine percent of all of the people who ate carrots between 1800 and 1900 are dead, so carrots are obviously very hazardous to your health. If you eat carrots long enough, you will certainly die.

    • President Eisenhower expressed astonishment and alarm when he was told that fully half of all Americans had below-average intelligence.

    • Likewise, fifty percent of all Americans have below-average income, or savings, or beauty, or housing, or education. It's no wonder why the politicians don't want to associate with all of those stupid, ugly, poor people, but guess who elects the politicians? If 80% of the stupid people, and 75% of the poor people, and 65% of the ugly people voted for a politician, then 220% of the poor, stupid, ugly people voted for the politician. No wonder that bozo got elected.

    • Another good one: Statistically, men who have survived two heart attacks almost never die from lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver. There is just something about having heart attacks that protects people from death by cancer or cirrhosis. So, after you have had two heart attacks, you can smoke and drink all you want.

    • Ninety-three percent of the people who use statistics in their arguments just make them up, and the rest get the numbers wrong.

    • If you don't buy a lottery ticket, then your chances of winning are zero. If you do buy a ticket (Powerball), your chances of winning are only 0.00000002 -- 1 in 50 million. Both numbers are so close to zero that there is little point in your actually handing over your two dollars and buying a ticket -- you still aren't going to win.
      On the other hand, if you do buy a ticket, then your chances of winning are infinitely higher than if you don't.

    • Public service announcements on TV and radio declare:
      "2 out of every 5 fatal automobile accidents was due to drinking. 33% of the drivers involved in fatal accidents had been drinking. 24% of the pedestrians involved in fatal accidents had been drinking. Therefore, alcohol intoxication is a major cause of automobile accidents, and drunk driving must be dealt with harshly."

      That logic sounds impressive, but it's completely wrong. Consider the reverse logic:

      "3 out of every 5 fatal automobile accidents did not involve drinking. 67% of the drivers involved in fatal accidents had not been drinking. And 76% of the pedestrians involved in accidents had not been drinking. Therefore, sobriety is undoubtedly the major cause of fatal automobile accidents, and sober driving must be outlawed immediately, and punished harshly."

    • And we could really have fun, starting a big war with statements like, "Forty-five percent of the drivers in fatal automobile accidents were women, therefore women shouldn't be allowed to drive."
      (But if we did that, then 100% of the accidents would be caused by men. So men shouldn't be allowed to drive.)

    • Some people often cite statistics like,
      "95% of all heroin addicts smoked marijuana before they graduated to the hard stuff. Therefore, marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to heroin."

      That is also false logic. Consider this:

      "Further research has revealed that 99.8% of all heroin addicts consumed the white drug called milk for years before they graduated to the white powder called heroin. Therefore, giving children milk at school turns them into heroin addicts."

      Or:

      "99% of all heroin addicts, cocaine addicts, amphetamine addicts, and marijuana users drank alcohol before they graduated to the harder stuff. Therefore alcohol is the universal gateway drug."

      (Actually, there is a lot of evidence that alcohol really IS the universal gateway drug, but the cigar-smoking, whisky-guzzling Senators and Congressmen in Washington don't want to hear that. They never tolerate hearing something bad about their own favorite drugs; they just want to hear bad stuff about other people's favorite drugs -- preferably other people who are poor, a different color or subcultural type, and not registered to vote.)

    • Another piece of propaganda on TV now says,

      "In roadside tests of reckless drivers after auto accidents, one out of three drivers tested positive for marijuana. Marijuana: It's more harmful than we thought."

      • They fail to establish any connection between having smoked marijuana some time in the previous 30 days (which is what the drug test detects) and driving recklessly or being in an auto accident today. They could just as well have tested for coffee, and then found that "Coffee! It's more harmful than we thought."

      • And more harmful than who thought?
         The anti-drug lunatics have been swearing that marijuana produces instant insanity and addiction ever since they made that Reefer Madness movie back in the 'thirties. They have never said that marijuana was harmless. So they are also using the Sly Suggestions propaganda technique, implying that we thought it was less harmful than it really is.

      • Also note that two thirds of those reckless drivers managed to get into their accidents without any help from pot. Logically, we must conclude that NOT smoking pot causes more reckless drivers to get into auto accidents than smoking it.

      • That propaganda also did not say that the pot-smoking drivers actually caused any of the car accidents -- they were just involved in the accidents. For all we know, they might have been hit from behind by drunk drivers.

      • Which brings up, how many of the drivers involved in the accidents were drunk?
        They didn't tell us anything about that, did they? Why weren't they saying,
        "Alcohol -- it's more harmful than we thought"?
        The propagandists appear to be hiding all evidence of drunk driving (lying by omission) and just trying to blame all of the auto accidents on marijuana. But we know from other propaganda, especially that disseminated by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that alcohol is the major cause of fatal auto accidents. (But that's a different TV commercial.)

      • One of the factors that really biases such a test is the fact that traces of marijuana will linger in body fat for up to a month, while the evidence of any use of alcohol, speed, cocaine, or heroin disappears within a day or two. That can make it look like there is a lot more pot smoking going on than there really is, while it fails to detect the chronic abuse of other drugs.

      • Speaking of which, they didn't even say that they tested for those other drugs, did they? They only told us that they tested for marijuana. What else were the drivers on?

      Obviously, such propaganda is not designed to tell anyone the truth about drugs. It is just more lying politics as usual.


  • Observational Selection
    Observational selection, also known as "cherry-picking", is a tactic like counting the hits and forgetting the misses. See only what you wish to see. Overlook and ignore evidence you don't wish to see. And encourage your audience to be equally blind. Observational selection will destroy the validity of any statistical study.

    All lies and jest,
    Still a man hears what he wants to hear
    And disregards the rest.
    Ooh-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
         The Boxer, by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle.

    The classic example of this is: Something very unusual happens, and it turns out that a tabloid "psychic" predicted it. So the "psychic" must be the real thing, able to see the future, right? Wrong. It turns out that the self-proclaimed "psychic" made many hundreds of screwy, off-beat "predictions", and just by chance, one of them came true. The "psychic" just doesn't bother to tell you about all of the wrong guesses that didn't come true... Fans of Nostradamus still do this for him.

    That "psychic's" stunt can be staged in very convincing ways, like:

    • The "psychic" writes his prediction on a piece of paper.
    • The paper is put into an envelope, which is sealed by several witnesses who put their seals on the envelope, and sign it and date it, and even add code numbers to later verify that it's the envelope they sealed.
    • The envelope is kept locked in a safe or bank vault for a long time, until after The Big Event has happened.
    • Then, in a big showy ceremony, in front of hundreds of witnesses and many TV cameras, the safe is opened and the envelope is removed from the safe and opened, and there it is for all to see: unquestionable proof that the "psychic" predicted the event.
    You guessed it: the safe is also full of failed predictions, which the con artists happily ignore. (There may even be another envelope in the safe that contains a prediction that is the exact opposite of what just happened... The code numbers on the envelopes tell the con artists which prediction is in which envelope.)

    Another way to use observational selection to get desired results is to do many studies or tests, and only report the results that you like. For example, suppose you are a P.R. firm hired to make Buzz Cola look better than Fizz Cola. You could get 1000 people to do a taste test, to see which they liked better, but you don't. You do 100 "tests", each of which have only 10 people in them. In 95 of the tests, the people liked Fizz Cola better. But by random chance, in the other 5 tests, a majority of the people liked Buzz better. So you report,
    "In test after test, a majority of the people chose Buzz Cola over Fizz."
     Technically, that statement is true, even if it is deceptive as can be. You just don't bother to mention all of the other tests where the people liked Fizz better.

    I didn't mean to pick on any real cola brand names there. I wrote that paragraph many years ago, and just made up the names "Buzz" and "Fizz" to avoid using names like "Coke"® and "Pepsi"®. That was years before I ever heard of any Buzz or Fizz Cola. Years later, I was really surprised to find that somebody used both of those names for actual brands of soft drinks. Sometimes, reality mimicks satire.

    And obviously, another way to rig any test or study is to cherry-pick the people who will be in the test. If you want 'Group A' to look better than 'Group B', then put all of the promising candidates in Group A, and put all of the losers in Group B. (That is why real valid tests must be randomized. You must throw dice, or pick names out of a hat, or something like that, to choose which people go into which group.)

    The government uses a subtle form of observational selection and cherry-picking in reporting the national unemployment rate: They only report those people who are actively looking for work at the unemployment office. People who have despaired and given up looking for work, or who are still looking but have simply stopped asking at the unemployment office, are erased from the rolls of "the unemployed", and are not counted when the government calculates the national unemployment rate. (Likewise, someone who accepts a menial job for minimal wages out of sheer desperation -- even a part-time minimum-wage job -- is considered no longer unemployed.) The real unemployment rate is always much higher than the government reports, no matter which political party controls the government. They all misreport the facts.

    Another example of observational selection:
    Smith: "I have here 29 files that describe cases where people went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and quit drinking. So we have a demonstrated relationship between people going to meetings and quitting drinking."
     Jones: "How many cases of failure were there, where the people went to A.A. meetings but didn't quit drinking?"
     Smith: "I didn't study them. They weren't interesting, because they were just failures. I'm more interested in what works. Besides, those other people don't count because they didn't keep coming back."

    That is just like Bill Wilson only printing selected success stories in the Big Book.

    And that is just like how Alcoholics Anonymous claims a great success rate today. The people who relapse and leave are not counted -- A.A. says that they didn't "work the program" right, or they didn't "keep coming back", so they don't count. Only the people who stay in A.A. and attend many meetings (usually because they quit drinking) get counted.

    Some treatment facilities use a variation on Observational Selection -- they cherry-pick their patients, drafting into their program as many of the most promising prospective patients as they can get, in order to improve their "success rate":
          "You have someone who just quit drinking two weeks ago? You say that he quit once before, and stayed sober for three years, all on his own, without any treatment or A.A. or anything -- just going it alone? Quick! Shove him into our treatment program, so that we can 'treat' him, and teach him how to stay sober for six months. Then we can score him as one of our 'success stories'."
     (That story is 100% autobiographical -- that's my own personal experience with a "treatment program".)

    Likewise, most all treatment centers are very deceptive when they advertize their success rates -- they only reveal what percentage of the program graduates are sober shortly after the end of the program. They ignore all of the people who drop out, flunk out, and relapse and disappear, and do not include them in the reported statistics. (They rationalize that deception by saying, "Well, they didn't finish the program, so they don't count.")

    If 100 people start a program, and ten of them last until graduation, and 8 of them are still clean and sober a month later, then the treatment center advertizes an 80% success rate. That is obviously false. A mere 8% success rate is obviously closer to the truth. But then the treatment centers do not do a follow-up a year later, to see what the real long-term success rate is. That would reveal even more failures. In the final analysis, the success rate of the treatment programs is little or nothing more than the normal rate of spontaneous remission -- the success rate of people who get no treatment at all (approximately 5% per year).

    And I know of a drug treatment program that rejects, and will not even try to treat, any and all people who have been treated before and then relapsed -- even their own graduates -- because the program managers are afraid that those relapsers will relapse again and pull down the program's average "success rate". That program also discounts all of their dropouts and relapsers. When someone "goes out" and uses drugs, or gets arrested for something, the counselors simply erase that person's name from the list of patients, and they do not count him in computing their success rate. Then they claim that their program is very successful and greatly reduces the crime rate of their patients (those few remaining patients who are not currently out stealing to get a fix).

    When such a treatment center announces that it has reduced crime in its patients by a certain amount, it is lying with statistics. It is not revealing the resulting average crime rate of all of the clients who started treatment; the T.C. is only revealing the average crime rate of those few successful patients who are still sticking with the program and still abstaining from drugs and alcohol.

    Another kind of observational selection is interpreting data in a biased manner, seeing what you wish to see. That is illustrated in this story:

          A drug and alcohol treatment center that used acupuncture on its clients wanted to show that acupuncture reduced cravings for drugs and alcohol in patients who were in recovery, so that the treatment center could produce a report that justified continuing to bill health insurance companies and state agencies for more acupuncture treatments. So they conducted a survey where they questioned their patients to see how the acupuncture treatment was affecting them:
          Counselor: "How are you doing with cravings for alcohol?"
          Patient: "No problem. I don't have any."
          Counselor: "That's because of the acupuncture."
          Patient: "No, it's because I don't have any cravings for alcohol. I am craving cigarettes like mad, because I also quit smoking, but I'm not craving alcohol."
          Counselor: "That's because of the acupuncture. I'll write down that acupuncture has reduced your cravings for alcohol."
          Patient: "No, actually it hasn't. I just don't have a problem with cravings for alcohol. I didn't have any cravings the last time I quit drinking, all on my own, without any treatment or acupuncture, and I don't have any this time either. I am too busy crawling the walls for a cigarette to crave alcohol."
          The counselor wrote "acupuncture reduced cravings" anyway.

    That story is also autobiographical, and 100% true.

    Later, the city and state agencies received a report that declared that a survey of the patients found that acupuncture was very helpful for reducing their cravings for drugs and alcohol, so the city agencies and the state health plan should continue to fund acupuncture treatment of patients in recovery.

    Notice that there was also no control group. That is, there should have been another group of patients who received no acupuncture, who were also surveyed to find out how much they were bothered by cravings. Then you compare the results from the two groups to determine what effect, if any, the acupuncture actually had on cravings for drugs or alcohol.

    Unfortunately, such properly-conducted research is almost never done by substance-abuse treatment centers. Their findings are usually just as phony as their claimed success rates.

    Another good stunt is to take surveys at A.A. or N.A. meetings. Only the faithful members who Keep Coming Back will be there to answer the questions. Asking,
    "Is there anyone here for whom the Twelve Steps did not work?"
     is the same stupid thing as asking,
    "Will everyone who isn't here please raise your hand?"
     (Never mind the fact that it also immediately leads to an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation where no one wants to confess that he is the only unspiritual one for whom the Steps are not working...)

    Observational selection does not have to be deliberate. One of the ever-present dangers to a researcher is accidental or unconscious bias in making observations. In a study of the use of LSD in therapy for alcoholism, the authors also studied the methods that other studies had used. Their observations were disconcerting -- it seems that people have an unfortunate tendency to see whatever they wish to see whenever tests are not rigidly controlled. The various psychiatric treatments and medications being tested were successful in 83 percent of the uncontrolled studies, but only in 25 percent of the controlled studies. How curious. It would seem that looking too closely, and measuring too carefully, makes the medicines or treatments suddenly stop working.

    That's a good example of researcher bias. The researchers just really wanted their experiments to be sucesses, so that's what they tended to see. But when their studies were rigorously controlled, then the researchers were forced to be more objective, and the observed success rate dropped sharply. (That is also why the FDA prefers double-blind studies, where neither the patients nor the doctors know whether the patients are getting the real medicine or a placebo.)

    A variation on the theme of Observational Selection is getting biased data even when you don't wish to. In one survey, researchers sent out questionaires that essentially asked people to honestly reveal their racist attitudes. Not surprisingly, a lot of the questionaires were simply never returned, and lots more reported that the respondents just didn't have any racist attitudes at all. As you can imagine, the resulting statistics showed that racism and racist attitudes were almost non-existent.


  • The Statistics of Small Numbers
    Also beware of The Statistics of Small Numbers, which is a different kind of observational selection. It is an error caused by looking at too small of a sample. For instance, "They say that one out of every five people on Earth is Chinese. That can't be true. I know hundreds and hundreds of people, and only three of them are Chinese. So Chinese people must be pretty rare, really..."

    A variation of that is: A wildlife program on Public Television says: "One out of every four mammals is a bat."
    Well, let's see... "I know I'm not a bat, and my wife isn't a bat, and Joe isn't a bat, so Harry must be a bat."


    The statistics of small numbers problem appears in discussions of A.A. often. People will say things like, "We don't have any nasty thirteenth-stepping sexual predators in our group," and imagine that every other group in the whole country must be just the same, and that it doesn't happen anywhere else either. Unfortunately, it does.

    Likewise, "Nobody in our group has committed suicide, so those stories about A.A. suicides are ridiculous."

    How can you be sure, unless you know every member of your group very well, and keep track of all of them, and check up on them, and know what shape each drop-out, quitter, or disappearance is really in? You don't really expect them to commit suicide at the A.A. meetings, do you? And again, you have no idea what is happening in the other A.A. groups that you don't visit. They sure aren't going to email you to broadcast the news about their suicides.

    And again, "No sponsors in our group tell the newcomers to quit taking their doctor-prescribed medications, so those stories must be untrue."
    I wish they were. (And how do you know what some sponsor is telling his sponsee, if you aren't listening in?)


  • Bury The Lead
    Burying the lead (pronounced, "lede") is a newspaper term. It means that you hide the most important fact in the story down at the bottom of the article.

    For example, a recent newspaper article about the soaring price of oil tried to explain the price increases in terms of speculators buying oil futures, and political instability in foreign countries causing uncertainty in the market. Then they gradually got around to mentioning that India and China have booming economies that want ever more oil. And then finally, in the last sentence of the article, someone said, "Oil is getting harder to find."


  • The Big Lie
    The Big Lie is a technique that Adolf Hitler used with great success. The idea is that you just keep repeating the same lie over and over, in spite of all arguments or evidence to the contrary, until people believe it. Massive repetition is essential. (Think: "Why do they keep running the same stupid commercials on TV, over and over and over again, ad nauseum?")

    "Tell a lie enough times and it will become the truth."
     -- Heinrich Himmler

    Hitler explained his Big Lie technique in Mein Kampf,

    The greatness of the lie is always a certain factor in being believed; at the bottom of their hearts, the great masses of a people are more likely to be misled than to be consciously and deliberately bad, and in the primitive simplicity of their minds, they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie.... Some part of even the boldest lie is sure to stick.

    It's a strange fact of human psychology that giant, totally outrageous lies are sometimes more believable than small lies, just by virtue of their bodaciousness. People feel that there must be something to it, because the claims are so extreme. People can't help but feel that "Where there is so much smoke, there must be some fire."

    In using the Big Lie technique, Hitler said, essentially,

    The Jews are an inferior race. The Jews have always been the thieving greedy bankers and money-lenders, bleeding the lifeblood out of our country. Everybody knows that the Jews are the cause of all of our problems, and now that we are imposing the Final Solution, we will soon be much better off without them.

    Today, the fascist rap is,

    Drug users and dealers are inferior people. They are really low, dirty and disgusting bums who deserve to die because they are drug users and dealers, and they don't care about anything but getting high. Everybody knows that they are the major cause of all of our problems. When we impose the death sentence for more and more drug offenses, we will finally get rid of those dopers, and we will be much better off without them.

    And:

    Those poor, long-suffering rich people desperately need a tax cut. They have been treated so badly by the government for so long, it's the least we can do to make it up to them. (Heck, some of them are down to their last billion.) Giving the rich people a tax cut will stimulate the economy so much that soon the wealth will trickle down, and we will all benefit from it.
     [Just like happened under Ronald Reagan and George Bush -- Remember: "It's the economy, stupid!"]

    And Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, said, in speaking of the "Shock and Awe" bombing war that he was waging against Iraq (March 21, 2003):
          "You don't understand how compassionate our bombing is."

    I'm sure that the children whose heads were blown off by malfunctioning smart bombs really thought that it was compassionate.

    On Jan. 27, 2004, NBC Evening News reported that the death toll of civilians killed in Iraq in the Bush vs. Saddam War had reached 10,000. That is a lot more than the 2900 Americans who died on September 11, so that's a lot of pay-back. And Saddam Hussein of Iraq wasn't even the guy who attacked America; it was Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia, remember? (The guy whom the CIA armed and funded during the Russia-Afghanistan War.)

    A few months later the score was 13,000 dead, and by April 16 it was up to 14,000, because of the battle in Fallujah That's a lot of pay-back to a country that didn't attack us.

    In just the two-week period from April 1 to April 15, 90 Americans and 900 Iraqis died, mostly in Fallujah, most of them civilians (punishment for the killing of four American civilian contractors in Fallujah).

    If reminds me of the Nazi reprisals during WWII. If one German soldier was killed by The Resistance in an occupied town, the Nazis would get their revenge by randomly shooting hundreds of civilians in that town, just making sure that somebody was always punished, even if it wasn't the people who did it.

    When the German S.S. Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia by the Czech underground, the Germans simply totally annihilated a nearby town -- Lidice -- in reprisal. They immediately shot all of the men, and sent the women and children to concentration camps, where most of them eventually died. Then they burned and blasted and bull-dozed the town until nothing was left but rubble, and then the Germans erased the name of the town from the maps.

    When the war ended, the Allies assembled at the Geneva Convention and wrote up the Geneva Accords, which made such group punishment a war crime. (But then Donald Rumsfeld, G. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, announced that the Geneva Convention was obsolete and that he did not wish to be limited by it.)

    So after four Blackwater contractors were killed in Fallujah, 900 residents of Fallujah were killed in reprisals -- the vast majority of them being civilians, including plenty of women and children.

    On March 19, 2004, on the anniversary of the start of the war, it was revealed by major news networks that the U.S. forces had used cluster bombs against targets located in civilian areas of Bagdad during "Shock And Awe". Such cluster bombing of civilians is a violation of international law. It's a war crime. A U.S. military spokesmen said that the American commanding officers felt that such usage was "appropriate".

    As of December, 2004: Now the city of Fallujah has been destroyed to eliminate the resistance, with a loss of Iraqi lives so high that the American officials won't count them and release the count. They will not tell us how many civilians were killed by American firepower. The best study to date estimates that the total Iraqi death toll in the war is now over 100,000 -- with most of them being civilians, including many, many children.

    As of 4 August 2005, the score was:

    • 1825+ U.S. military people dead in Iraq.
    • 43,000+ U.S. wounded, maimed, and crippled for life.
    • 113,000+ dead Iraqis, most of them civilians, including 30,000 children.

    And still, the Bush administration constantly repeats the chant that the war is a good thing. "Freedom is on the march." That's the Big Lie technique.

    UPDATE: July 2007: Now, of course, the war has gone on for two more years, and all of the body counts are much higher. The British medical journal Lancet reported last year that their estimation of Iraqi deaths was 600,000. The American deaths were 3546 as of 22 June 2007. And the people wounded, maimed, and crippled are uncountable.

    And still, George W. Bush prattles on about "victory in Iraq", and "establishing democracy", and "creating a stable government there", and "when they stand up, we will stand down."

    That's the Big Lie technique.

    And A.A. says:

    • Alcoholics Anonymous is the best -- the only -- way to recover from alcoholism.
    • Nobody can do it alone.
    • Everybody knows that The Twelve Step programs work, and keep millions of people sober.
    • Alcoholics Anonymous is an enormously successful program.
    • "RARELY have we seen a person fail, who has thoroughly followed our path..." (The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, William Wilson, page 58.)
    • Everybody knows that A.A. is spiritual, not religious.
    • If you are having a problem with drinking too much alcohol, then you have a disease which only a spiritual experience will conquer. (The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, William Wilson, page 44.)
    • Alcoholism is an incurable, progressive disease, often caused by an inherited gene, and a disease is respectable, not a moral stigma. (The Big Book, 3rd Edition, Marty Mann, Page 227.)
    • Nobody can quit drinking until they hit bottom and are ready to surrender to the A.A. program.
    • The best thing you can do for a loved one is force him to go to A.A. meetings, for his own good.
    • In A.A., nobody has any power over anyone else. In A.A., everybody is equal (but some people are more equal than others).
    • So Keep Coming Back! It Works if you work it... You die if you don't. So work it, you're worth it!

    An official A.A. history book says,

    He said, "Duke, I think this A.A. program will appeal to you, because it's psychologically sound and religiously sane."
     Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1980, page 253.

    That statement is the exact opposite of the truth:

    And still, A.A. prints and distributes large quantities of propaganda that claims just the opposite.

    That's the Big Lie technique.

    Here, Bill Wilson quoted Dr. Harry M. Tiebout quoting Bill Wilson, as if that would add authority to Bill's faked numbers:

    "Alcoholics Anonymous claims a recovery rate of 75 percent of those who really try their methods. This figure, coupled with their mushroom growth, commands respect and demands explanation."
    [Reprinted from The American Journal of Psychiatry, January 1944, "Therapeutic Mechanism of Alcoholics Anonymous".]
         Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, page 310.

    Actually, such a figure commands contempt and derision, because it is a bare-faced lie. Alcoholics Anonymous never had a success rate anything like 75%; they didn't even get a tenth of that. Notice how Tiebout repeated Bill Wilson's grossly inflated and exaggerated claims of success as if they were true facts, and even cited them in professional journals. That is the Big Lie technique, one more time again.

    [Also notice how cleverly Tiebout covered his own ass: He started off by saying that A.A. merely claimed to have a 75% success rate -- a rate which Tiebout had to know was totally untrue, because Tiebout was Bill's psychiatrist, and Tiebout had a number of other patients in A.A., too, so he could see what was going on. But then Tiebout just accepted Bill's grossly exaggerated claims as correct, and declared that they "commanded respect and demanded explanation". If anyone called Tiebout on it later by pointing out just how inaccurate those numbers really were, Tiebout could always just pass the buck to A.A., and say that he was just using their numbers.
    And the psychiatrist Dr. Tiebout accepted those inflated numbers as valid, in spite of his own diagnosis of Bill Wilson's mental state as "immature and grandiose", and stating that Bill Wilson was trying to live out "the infantilely grandiose demands" of "His Majesty the Baby."]

    Since then, numerous A.A. shills have parrotted those false numbers without doing any research of their own. The West Baltimore Group of A.A. has a web page on the A.A. success rate that declares:

    Q - What is the success rate of Alcoholics Anonymous?
    A - Of those sincerely willing to stop drinking about 50 per cent have done so at once, 25 per cent after a few relapses and most of the remainder have improved. (N.Y. State J. Med., Vol. 44, Aug., 1944)
    ...
    Of those alcoholics who wish to get well and are emotionally capable of trying our method, 50 per cent recover immediately, 25 per cent after a few backslides. The remainder are improved if they continue active in A.A. ... (N.Y. State J. Med., Vol.50, July 1950)
     What is A.A.'s Success Rate?, http://www.voai.org/Success%20Rate.htm

    Likewise, Bill Wilson wrote that an A.A. newcomer said:

    "Then I woke up. I had to admit that A.A. showed results, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding these had been anything but scientific. It wasn't A.A. that had the closed mind, it was me."
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 27.

    That's the Big Lie technique.


          And they have been doing that for a very long time, too. This phony "review" of the "Big Book" Alcoholics Anonymous was published in The New York Times in 1939. It was actually written by a hidden A.A. true believer -- Percy Hutchison -- who was scheming to help sell the book, not by a neutral observer or dispassionate critic, or by anybody who knew anything about treating alcoholism:

          Lest this title should arouse the risibles in any reader let me state that the general thesis of "Alcoholics Anonymous" is more soundly based psychologically than any other treatment of the subject I have ever come upon.
    ...
          "Alcoholics Anonymous" is unlike any other book ever before published. No reviewer can say how many have contributed to its pages. But the list of writers should include addicts and doctors, psychiatrists and clergymen.
    ...
          Here, then, is the key to "Alcoholics Anonymous," the great and indisputable lesson this extraordinary book would convey. The alcoholic addict ... cannot, by any effort of what he calls his "will," insure himself against taking his "first dose." We saw how the chap with his whiskey in milk missed out. There is one way for our authors, and but one way. The utter suffusion of the mind by an idea which shall exclude any idea of alcohol or of drugs.
    ...
    The thesis of the book is, if we read it aright, that this all-embracing and all-commanding idea must be religious. ... There is no suggestion advanced in the book that an addict should embrace one faith rather than another. He may fall back upon an "absolute," or "A Power which makes for righteousness" if he chooses. The point of the book is that he is unlikely to win through unless he floods his mind with the idea of a force outside himself. So doing, his individual problem resolves into thin air. In last analysis, it is the resigning word: Not my will, but Thine, be done, said in the full knowledge of the fact that the decision will be against further addiction.
    ...
    The argument, as we have said, has a deep psychological foundation.
     BOOK REVIEW, NEW YORK TIMES, June 25, 1939. ALCOHOLIC EXPERIENCE, By Percy Hutchison

    Percy Hutchison was actually prescribing religiomania and faith healing as the best cure for alcoholism. Faith healing is not "soundly based psychologically", and it does not have "a deep psychological foundation". Nevertheless, the A.A. true believers persistently claim that it does, even while they simultaneously brag that A.A. is not based on science. And they have been doing that for 68 years now.

    That's the Big Lie technique. Just never stop telling the lie, no matter how absurd and contradictory it is..

    By the way, Percy Hutchison was the poetry editor of The New York Times. What does a poetry editor know about medicine, alcoholism, or human psychology? How could Hutchison claim to know that the problem of alcoholism would just "resolve into thin air" if an alcoholic followed Bill Wilson's instructions? What was Hutchison doing reviewing a book about a new cure for alcoholism, and recommending one treatment program over another? When did he become qualified to advise the public about critical life-or-death medical conditions like alcoholism? Isn't that the job of the medical editor or the science editor or an actual doctor?

    Let me guess -- Hutchison suggested the book to the newspaper's editors, and volunteered to review it, because he really wanted people to hear about a wonderful new fellowship that had a magical new treatment program for alcoholism...

    The June 1940 financial report of "Works Publishing" says that the original New York A.A. group used the New York Times Book Review and several other media outlets to publicize and tout the newly-printed Big Book for free. Obviously, that so-called "book review" was a fraud -- a very biased piece of promotional propaganda, a commercial for the book, not a fair objective analysis of the Alcoholics Anonymous program.

    That's the Big Lie technique -- just keep saying it, over and over and over again, as often as you can, and in as many places as you can, no matter what, until people believe it.

    And here another long-time true believer parrots the lie:

    It is probable that more contemporary alcoholics have found sobriety through the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous than through all other agencies combined.
     Alcoholics Anonymous, an interpretation, by Milton A. Maxwell, Ph.D., contained in Chapter 33 of Society, Culture, and Drinking Patterns, David J. Pittman and Charles R. Snyder,editors, page 577.
     (Note that Milton A. Maxwell was a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc..)

    Actually, it isn't "probable" at all. The truth is that the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those alcoholics who successfully quit drinking for a year or more do it alone, on their own. That only leaves 20% who could possibly have recovered through Alcoholics Anonymous, and lots of those 20% did it in other ways too, like in Christian brotherhoods or monasteries, the Veterans' Administration program, the Salvation Army, the Catholic DePaul program, Rational Recovery, SMART, SOS, WFS, etc...

    Considering the immense A.A. dropout rate and high A.A. failure rate, it is "probable" that very few of the successful sober alcoholics actually recovered through Alcoholics Anonymous.

    Today, the A.A. campaign of misinformation continues even in the halls of Congress:

    As the fabulously successful twelve-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous has conclusively demonstrated, one cannot tackle a crisis until acknowledging the reality of a genuine problem.
     Statement of John C. Hulsman, Ph..D. Research Fellow for European Affairs, the Davis Institute for International Studies, The Heritage Foundation. Committee on House International Relations Europe Subcommittee June 11, 2003.

    I sincerely hope Mr. Hulsman knows more about foreign affairs than he knows about alcoholism treatment programs, or else we are liable to find ourselves trapped in a quagmire of unwinnable foreign wars...

    [P.S.: A year later: Let's see now, how did that premonition work out?
    Afghanistan? Iraq? The so-called "War on Terrorism"?
    "Fabulously successful" easy victories, or quagmires?    ]

    [P.S.: Two years later: Let's see now, how did that premonition work out?
    "Fabulously successful" easy victories, or quagmires?    ]

    [P.S.: Three years later... Four years later... Need I continue?]


  • Reversal Of Reality
    Have the nerve to completely reverse reality, and say the exact opposite of the truth.

    As evidence accumulated that the Bush administration had lied, fabricated evidence, distorted other evidence, and hidden contradictory facts about the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq in order to manufacture an excuse to go to war, Vice President Dick Cheney declared:
          "The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history."
     (TIME, Nov 21-27, 2005)

    Likewise, when CIA agent Valerie Plame's cover was blown, Bush declared: "We are going to find those leakers and take care of them."
     (Of course, George Bush and Dick Cheney and their White House Chiefs of Staff turned out to be the leakers, but that's okay, Scott McClellan said, because George had already declassified the secret information and approved of the leaks before they leaked it -- so George knew who the leakers were even as he swore that he would catch them.)


  • Make a Virtue out of a Fault
    Advertise and promote a shortcoming or a fault as a virtue.

    For example, ultra-cheap cameras are advertised as "No Focusing Required." The truth is, no focusing is possible, because the cameras have cheap plastic fixed-focus lenses. What is a serious shortcoming for a camera -- the inability to properly focus on the subject -- is sold as a convenience: "You don't have to bother with focusing."

    Alcoholics Anonymous uses this technique too. When the founder Bill Wilson is shown to have been a fraud, a liar, a felonious thief, a certified nutcase, a philandering sexual predator, and a con artist who sold cult religion as a quack cure for alcoholism, the true believers proclaim, "Isn't it wonderful? It just goes to show that Bill Wilson was human. And if he could get sober, then so can we. God wanted Bill to be less than perfect so that he could be a good example for us all."


  • Unsupported Claims
    Make any grand claims you wish, supported by no facts at all.

    The Red-baiter Senator Joseph McCarthy did it in his speeches in the 1950s like this:
    "I have in my hand a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department",
    as he waved a piece of paper that had no names on it. (He never, ever, revealed that list of names, or any other list of names of Communists, either. McCarthy just went on to make more and more outrageous claims, also supported by no evidence, until the U.S. Senate got fed up with the routine, and censured him.14)

    On June 1, 2004, while talking about the high prices of gasoline, acting President G. W. Bush declared, "Had we had drilled in Anwar [National Wildlife Refuge], back in the mid nineties, we would be producing an additional million barrels a day by now."

    He doesn't know that. They might have drilled a bunch of dry holes while destroying the wildlife refuge. They might have had technical difficulties. Things might have frozen up. Eco-terrorists or foreign terrorists might have bombed the pipeline. A lot of things could have happened. Predicting alternative futures is always guesswork.

    Besides, that is all a smoke screen -- a diversion of attention from the truth. The real bottleneck in producing more gasoline now is refineries -- there have been almost no new refineries built in the USA in the last 30 years. Even worse, the oil companies are actually shutting down refineries to force gasoline prices even higher -- so of course the supply of gasoline is tight.

    And the Republicans are notorious for killing alternative energy projects. President Carter started a lot of them, and then President Reagan shut them all down. Why don't we talk about what kind of a world we would have today if Reagan had not killed alternative energy?

    Bill Wilson did it like this:

    The alcoholic, realizing what his wife has endured, and now fully understanding how much he himself did to damage her and his children, nearly always takes up his marriage responsibilities with a willingness to repair what he can and to accept what he can't. He persistently tries all of A.A.'s Twelve Steps in his home, often with fine results. At this point he firmly but lovingly commences to behave like a partner instead of a bad boy. And above all he is finally convinced that reckless romancing is not a way of life for him.
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, Page 119.

    • Where is the evidence that some unnamed stereotypical alcoholic reformed himself in that manner?
    • Where is the evidence that he got "fine results" from working the Twelve Steps?
      (And it says that he "often" got "fine results". So did he get miserable results the rest of the time?)
    • Where is the evidence that the unnamed alcoholic stopped philandering and hurting his wife? Bill Wilson never did.


  • Imaginary Evidence

    Notice the lack of hard evidence in this article:

    Two recent studies support the potential effectiveness of this [12-Step] treatment when carried out by mental health professionals. The first studied alcohol-dependent outpatients. The group of subjects that received 12-Step treatment improved substantially. The second study focused on VA inpatients with alcohol and/or other substance use disorders. At the one-year follow up, the group of subjects that had received 12-Step treatment improved significantly in many life areas.
    ...
    A recent award-winning study conducted at SUNY-Albany lends support to this notion.
    Better Treatment for the MICA (Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted) Patient, Mark Lazarus, Coordinator, Partial Hospitalization Program, The Holliswood Hospital, NEW YORK CITYVOICES: April/May 2002

    Just try to figure out what studies the author is citing. It is impossible. (There was no bibliography.) You have no way of knowing whether the studies were valid or faked or improperly conducted, or whether the author interpreted the results correctly. While such grand statements sound good, they are actually meaningless because they are completely unverifiable, and hence, unreliable.

    Also notice the strange contradiction where 12-Step treatment programs are supposedly effective IF they are "carried out" by professionals. But an often-repeated Alcoholics Anonymous boast is that they don't use professional healers, because the non-professional A.A. sponsors are supposedly much better than professional therapists:
    Here was a book that said that I could do something that all these doctors and priests and ministers and psychiatrists that I'd been going to for years couldn't do!
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 473.


  • Use Association
    Association is just linking together two unrelated things. Often, it creates an emotional reaction in the intended audience. It can be anything like Guilt by Association, Honor by Association, or Desirability by Association, depending on what somebody or something is associated with.

    Advertisers routinely associate beautiful women in skimpy clothes with new cars, cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, clothes, and diamond jewelry. TV commercials teach us that we can get laid if we use the right toothpaste and the right under-arm deodorant. So we have been programmed to consciously or unconsciously associate sex with all kinds of strange things.

    Politicians also routinely kiss babies, hug children, and hobnob with other, more popular and powerful politicians, to look good by association. They also love to rub elbows with the the rich, the famous, and the beautiful people, like movie stars and sports heroes, for the same reason. And of course they want to be photographed with a good selection of wise men like university professors, Nobel prize winners, and high-ranking religious leaders, to look good by association.

    Politicians will also, occasionally, associate their opponents with some villainous characters, perhaps Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, or Ghengis Khan, to make their opponents look dangerous and evil. (Sometimes the comparison is unfair, and sometimes it isn't. It all depends.)

    The Scientology propaganda book "What Is Scientology" devotes 16 pages (xiv to xxix) to showing you pictures of beautiful, palatial buildings that the organization owns around the world, and the last "building" is really a large ship, the Freewinds. What do those beautiful buildings and that beautiful ship have to do with whether Scientology is a good organization, or whether it can help you with your mental problems, or with whether you should give all of your money to Scientology? Absolutely nothing. They are just trying to impress you, to make you think that Scientology is really a big, high-class outfit, not the sleazy, low, money-grubbing con that it actually is.

    A powerful association that I find in my own mind is that, ever since September 11, every time I see a photograph of an American Airlines jet, I see it crashing into a skyscraper, or blowing up as it comes out through the wall of a skyscraper. There is no skyscraper in the picture; my mind just fills it in because of those televised images that were burned into my mind on September 11. That is totally unfair to American Airlines, of course. It wasn't their fault that some terrorists chose to hijack some of their flights. Nevertheless, American Airlines has a real problem with that association that has been planted in so many people's minds.

    Similarly, before September 11, the public perception of firemen was something like "a bunch of adventurous young guys and overgrown boy scouts with too much testosterone, who are living out a childhood fantasy of being firemen and getting their kicks by driving big red trucks real fast." After September 11, the image is "a bunch of heroic guys who rush into burning towers to save people, and die when the building comes down on their heads."

    That's the power of association.

    A corollary to association is something that I like to call "reverse association" -- basking in reflected glory by honoring others (who may be totally out of your league). An easy way to accomplish that is to hand out "awards", honoring others for something or other. An interesting example of "reverse association" is: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan received the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service from Ken Lay in November, 2001, less than three weeks before Enron filed for bankruptcy. Now I'll guess that Greenspan wishes he had never accepted the award.13

    Guilt By Association is of course a negative association. It is like, "Senator Blowhard had lunch with Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. Therefore Senator Blowhard is just as corrupt as them."
     We do not really know anything about Blowhard's integrity, just from that. He is not automatically guilty just because he associated with those guys one time.
    (But if he often associated with them, and took lots of money from them, and rode around in their jet while campaigning for office, like George W. Bush did, then that is another matter.... And if his Vice President then arranged the energy regulations so that Enron could massively rob the State of California with artificially inflated electricity prices, then that is very suspicious.)


  • The Glittering Generality
    The Glittering Generality is a kind of Association technique.

    American politicians routinely wave the American flag and praise God, country, Democracy, Freedom, Mom, and apple pie, trying to create links in people's minds (associations) between themselves and those other positive images.

    So salt and pepper your speeches with zillions of flowery phrases and wonderful-sounding words and vague glittering generalities:

    • "God, country, Mom and apple pie"
    • "Patriotism, Freedom, Democracy, and the good old USA"
    • "safety and national security"
    • "those simple home truths that some of us learned at our mother's knee, and which many of us have forgotten and neglected -- honesty, purity, unselfishness and love."
    • "inspiration and liberty for all"
    • "the great creative sources in the Mind of God"
    • "the combined moral and spiritual forces of the nation"
    • "Christian values"
    • "family values"
    • "Freedom is on the march."
    • "Our wonderful patriotic troops who are fighting for Freedom in Iraq"
    • "The wonderful men and women who serve in our volunteer army"

    It is really tragic how many innocent people have been murdered in the name of Freedom, Democracy, and Christian family values... (Just recently, 30,000 children in Iraq, and before that, zillions of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Vietnamese.)

    A common variation on The Glittering Generality is invoking images of "The Golden Age". Imply that there was a better time way in the past -- "The Good Old Days" -- when everything was wonderful -- "everybody was happy, everybody was kind and decent, everybody obeyed the law, everybody believed in God, the rulers were wise and just, and children obeyed their parents".

    Sometimes this Golden Age is embodied in a popular myth, like The Days of King Arthur, where noble knights believed in Might For Right (not "Might Makes Right"), and and the brave knights spent their time rescuing fair damsels in distress. And of course, the wizards of The Olden Times, like Merlin, were much wiser and much more powerful than today's wizards, and their magic was so much better than today's magic...

    Then the speaker invokes an appeal to return to the Good Old Days -- "We must get Back to the Basics, and Back to Traditional Values".

    Adolf Hitler and the Nazis actually used those terms -- "Back to the Basics" and "Traditional Values" -- in their propaganda, while campaigning for seats in the Reichstag, and they declared that Hitler could take Germany back to "The Golden Age" if elected.


  • Exaggerate
    You don't blatantly lie; you just stretch the truth a good bit. This also has the advantage that even if you get caught at it, you can always argue that you were telling the truth, and it's all a matter of degree, and people just got the wrong impression, or took it the wrong way... Mark Twain explained that expanding a story wasn't really a lie, just a "stretcher".

    For an example of exaggeration, this is one of the faithful followers of the cult leader Frank Buchman singing his praises, trying to make him sound like a citizen of the world:

    ...he knows China like the Chinese; he is thoroughly at home in Germany, the Netherlands, India, America, Africa, and Australia.
     A. J. Russel, For Sinners Only, page 82, quoted in
    Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, page 57.

    Frank Buchman probably did feel at home in Germany, because he was a native German speaker, the son of German-speaking Swiss emigrants to Pennsylvania. But it is questionable whether he was equally at home in all of those other countries that he visited for short periods of time, unless they just happened to have five-star hotels, which was really Buchman's favorite environment. And it is absurd to say that Buchman knew China like the Chinese. Frank Buchman only spent a couple of years in China as a missionary, where his behavior was so obnoxious and offensive that the Bishop of Hankow finally ordered him to stop working in China.

    For another example of exaggeration:

    Japanese business and industry is such an incredible gargantuan efficient powerhouse that it will devour American industry, like Godzilla stomping his way through Tokyo. We'll all end up speaking Japanese and driving Hondas. The only hope of survival that we have is to adopt Japanese styles of management, so that we can become more like them. And American workers need to learn how to be more like Japanese workers, too. They need to learn to be more loyal to their companies, and they need to accept wage cuts and roll-backs in benefits to help save their employers.

    That was actually a real argument heard very often during the seventies and eighties, when Japan was having a few good years and taking major chunks of the American consumer-electronics and automobile markets. But after that, the Japanese economy crashed badly, and stayed crashed, and it's still a dead dog. Nobody but nobody now says that we should copy Japanese business, industry, banking, or management styles. In fact, the current pundits proclaim that the Japanese must abandon their traditional ways, dump the good-old-boy system, abandon protectionism and open up their markets, and copy American business and banking styles if they are to ever have any hope of economic recovery.

    The error was in exaggerating the degree of Japanese success in the business world, and in exaggerating the effectiveness of Japanese management and business styles. The speakers extrapolated a world-shaking economic juggernaut from a few spectacular Japanese successes in making TVs, stereos, and cars -- successes that used unfair anti-competitive practices that were sponsored by the Japanese government -- "Japan, Incorporated". The speakers exaggerated those Japanese successes to the point of assuming that those successes were an unstoppable wave of the future that would go on forever, and conquer the whole planet. (And then they told the American workers that was why they must take pay cuts...)

    In Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson made heavy use of exaggeration, especially when discussing the success rate of the Twelve-Step program.


  • Confusion of Correlation and Causation
    This is simple and straight-forward: just because two things tend to happen together does not prove that one thing causes the other. Likewise, people also often confuse association and causation, or causation and coincidence. The rooster's crowing doesn't really make the sun rise.

    Young women going to church and getting married does not really cause them to get pregnant and have babies, even though there does seem to be a strong correlation there. The real cause of the women getting pregnant is something other than the priest or minister reciting some words...

    Some people who tout "spiritual healing" routinely cite studies that show that people who have positive, cheerful attitudes recover from illnesses and surgeries faster than people who have glum, dour attitudes. They then assume that this is proof of the efficacy of "spiritual healing".

    • They overlook the obvious fact that those cheerful attitudes may well be caused by the the patients' rapid recovery. People who are rapidly recovering are almost always much more cheerful than patients who are sick unto death and dying.

    • And they overlook the fact that those two factors may correlate -- they may happen together: Rapid recovery causes cheerful moods, which cause more rapid healing, which causes more cheerfulness, and so on... Just the act of relaxing and being cheerful increases blood flow through the body, which promotes healing and improves the functioning of the immune system. That is simple medicine, not "the power of spiritual healing".

    • They also ignore the fact that any apparent link between recovery and something else, anything else, may be pure coincidence. In any large group of sick people, some will recover and some won't. There isn't necessarily any link between "spiritual attitudes" and people recovering, but the people who wish to believe there is will concentrate their attention on just the recovering "spiritual" people, and ignore everything else. That, in turn, becomes an example of "observational selection", seeing what you want to see, and ignoring the rest.

    • And when the investigator has an agenda -- a desired outcome -- he can be also be fooled by observational bias as well -- just tending to see what he wishes to see. The measure of which patients are cheerful, and how cheerful, is a subjective measurement -- it relies entirely on the judgement of the investigator. It is all too easy to rate the recovering patients as very cheerful and the non-recovering patients as very glum when that is what the investigator wishes to see.

    Alcoholics Anonymous has plenty of examples of confusion of causation and correlation, or confusion of coincidence with causation. The most obvious ones are:

    • Assuming that attending A.A. meetings makes people quit drinking.
    • Assuming that attending A.A. meetings makes people stay sober.
    • Assuming that doing the Twelve Steps makes people quit drinking and stay sober.
    • Assuming that praying makes people quit drinking and stay sober.
    • Assuming that doing the Twelve Steps makes people more "spiritual", or more moral.
      (And of course, that last item will be loaded with observational bias. Who judges? How do you impartially judge just how much more "spiritual" somebody is after doing the Twelve Steps for three or six months? And how do you impartially distinguish between "spirituality" and superstition? How do you distinguish between real spirituality and crazy self-delusion like,
      "Quite as important was the discovery that spiritual principles would solve all my problems.")

    Just because some people sit in an A.A. meeting room and talk about God and not drinking does not prove that A.A. made them quit drinking, even if they believe it. Nor does it prove that A.A. is keeping them sober.

    Using the goofy A.A. "cause and effect" illogic, we can happily declare that A.A. is totally unnecessary because mothers are the real cause of sobriety. How can we know that? Simple. Show me an alcoholic whose mother didn't tell him to quit drinking so much. Momma tells him to quit drinking, and then he finally does, so mothers are the real cause of sobriety. A.A. is irrelevant and unneeded.

    What really happens is: A lot of people quit drinking in order to stop being sick, and a lot of them get pressured or coerced into attending some A.A. meetings, and then a few of them become obsessed with cult religions like the Moonies or Scientology or Alcoholics Anonymous, and their favorite cult convinces them that they are sober because of the cult -- that the cult saved their lives -- that involvement with the cult is keeping them sober -- so they become committed to the cult and make it their new lifestyle for a while. They confuse coincidence with causation. But, eventually, most of those people wise up and realize that it's all a pack of lies, and quit the cult. In Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, 95% of the newcomers drop out in the first year alone, and, nevertheless, a bit more than half of all alcoholics find lasting sobriety anyway.

    And it's easy to see causation where there is simply no evidence to support such an assumption. Often, just wishful thinking is enough to make people see cause-and-effect relationships:

    "And... I believe addictions are also caused by a sense of spiritual separation from God, or one's Higher Power, or union with the All-That-Is."
     Addiction: A Spiritual Crisis, Judith Wagner, Tampa Bay New Times, Winter 1991, page 18.

    And that belief was based on what facts or observations? Did the authoress actually do even just one good survey of a few hundred addicts, asking them what they believed and how separated from "Higher Power" they felt?

    A common use of this propaganda technique of confusion of causation and correlation is to do polls or surveys of A.A. members, asking them about their drinking habits, and then "discover" that they drink less than some other group of people, perhaps a group of guys at the local bar, or the winos under the bridge. Then the "researcher" declares that there is "an association between AA attendance and abstinence from alcohol/drug use", and he concludes that

    "Weekly or more frequent attendance at 12-Step programs may be effective in maintaining long-term drug and alcohol abstinence. Treatment providers should encourage and assist their clients in 12-Step participation."
     "12-Step programs help maintain abstinence", R Fiorentine, The Brown University Digest of Addiction Theory and Application, Sept 1999, v18 i9 p1

    What the "researcher" won't tell you is that if you repeat that kind of study, comparing the people found at the local Baskin Robbins ice cream parlor to the guys at the local bar, you can, in just the same way, "prove" that eating ice cream reduces alcohol consumption.

    The logical conclusion is, of course:

    "Weekly or more frequent attendance at Baskin Robbins may be effective in maintaining long-term drug and alcohol abstinence. Treatment providers should encourage and assist their clients in Baskin Robbins ice cream socials participation."

    Also note the use of the propaganda technique called "Sly Suggestions" in that quote. In the first sentence, the author Robert Fiorentine suggested that A.A. may be effective. He could only suggest the idea, because he knew full well that the data did not show any cause-and-effect relationship. But in the next sentence, the author suddenly assumed that his suggestion was true, and he stated that treatment providers should shove patients into Alcoholics Anonymous groups.

    And lastly, note how the author completely ignored the fact that the people at the A.A. meeting were a self-selected group (a biased sample). That is:
          The people who wanted to stay sober went to the A.A. meetings.
          The people who wanted to get drunk went to the bar.
     So of course the people at the A.A. meetings drank less than the people at the bar. That comes as no surprise. But that does not prove that A.A. is somehow causing the "meeting makers" to abstain from drinking. It doesn't even "suggest" it. The truth is just the opposite:

    People's desire to stay sober makes them go to A.A. meetings.

    They go because they have been mis-educated and fooled into believing that A.A. is somehow necessary or "helpful for maintaining sobriety".

    To be fair, what the author of that "study" really did was conduct interviews with the patients and ex-patients of 26 Los Angeles area "treatment programs" (almost all of which were based on "Twelve Step Facilitation" -- 'TSF'11), and compare those who were still attending A.A. meetings with those who were not. He found that those who attended the meetings drank less and took fewer drugs. That should come as no surprise, because, by and large, only those people who had not relapsed were still attending A.A. meetings. Many of the relapsers really were to be found at the local bars. People stopped going to A.A. meetings when they resumed their former alcohol or drug habits. Hence Fiorentine used a very biased sample. His claimed results were just another example of Lying With Statistics, as well as Observational Selection -- i.e.: 'Cherry-Picking'.

    And, alas, we were never told what the success rate of those 26 Los Angeles area treatment programs really was. (They almost never tell the truth about that.) Those so-called "treatment programs" usually have about a 90% failure rate, so the remaining 10% of the patients who were still moderately clean and sober (clean and sober enough to "graduate") were the people who really wanted to stay clean and sober.

    The so-called "treatment programs" are really just a system for filtering out those few alcoholics and addicts wh