Tactics of Truth Suppression #8

Number 8

Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough “jargon” and “minutia” to illustrate you are “one who knows”, and simply say it isn’t so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely why or citing sources.

I’ll be honest, I am having a difficult time coming up with concrete examples of this one. I actually believe that this is how Stevie always speaks, especially if you watch Question Period. Questions are never directly answered and instead they use a lot of acronyms, numbers, “facts and stats” and then they throw in some adjectives.
It gives the appearance of getting things done but in reality they aren’t. For instance, the Conservatives are spending 5 times more money on ads to promote their ’stimulus money’ than they are to promote H1N1 awareness. Keep in mind, it is our money paying for these Conservatives ads. The fact is, most of the stimulus money hasn’t been spent and to my knowledge there’s an actual clause whereby the cities/provinces must put up the same amount of money as what the Feds will give them, in order to get the money from the Feds. So this means a lot of money probably won’t be spent, and also that a lot of the money has gone to Conservative ridings. But that’s not in their commercials, nor will they say that. I’m not sure where I’m going with this one, but whenever election talk is brought up the Cons like to play “authoritative” and say that an election would harm stimulus cash, which isn’t only a lie but their own policies prevent stimulus cash from rolling out. I guess the point is, is that unless you pay attention you would believe the words spewing out of the Cons mouths on this topic and you’d actually think that they not only knew what they were speaking about, but that they were leaders too.

Ask Stevie or Jimbo a question about the economy and they don’t give you a firm answer, instead they use rhetoric and partisan speak to avoid the answer while still giving off an air of authority and intelligence.
For instance, they never elaborate on how they plan to put us back into a surplus. They (Cons) just says “we won’t raise taxes” but they don’t tell you their plan. They never give details on the isotope crisis, instead they prefer to blame previous-previous governments. They never gave accurate facts on the legality of a coalition government in Canada’s parliamentary system, instead they just said it wasn’t legal and refused to answer questions on it. They refuse to speak about our Afghanistan mission and Stephen will not go on Canadian television to speak to us.

Do all of these things invoke authority? Not to me, but I guess to some blind sheep it would. All I see is someone who is a liar, a partisan petty person who speaks down to us. To each his/her own.