posted May 21, 2014 01:16 AM            

As Mark Twain once put it, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shows.” Why are factoids so persuasive? We can suggest three reasons.

First, few attempts are made to verify the truth of a factoid. We often hear rumor and gossip directly from trusted friends whom we are not in a habit of questioning. We also turn to the “news”—whether on television or in the mass media—expecting, quite frankly, “the news” and are often not prepared to debunk each and every presented “fact.” Factoids often just sneak by out persuasion defenses. We rarely think to ask, “Is this factoid really true? Who gains by repeated telling of this factoid?” Even when we seek to verify a factoid, it is often difficult, since many rumors deal with “secret information,” “secret conspiracies,” and “esoteric knowledge” that is hard to critically evaluate and scrutinize.

Second, we accept factoids because they often meet one or more psychological needs. For example, many factoids are entertaining and this capture our attention. More seriously, the very best factoids help us rationalize and justify our most fundamental worries. Accepting as true a damaging factoid about a well-known person can make us feel better about ourselves by showing us that even the great “Mr. So-and-So” has his faults, too. Spreading a factoid may also enhance our self-images by showing others that we are in the “know” about secret information and by helping us address some of our most threatening fears. As a factoid is spread, it is often “modified and elaborated” to better serve our psychological needs.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, factoids function as a form of pre-persuasion; they create social reality. Factoids serve as bits and pieces that are used to construct our picture of the world. As such, factoids direct our attention and suggest how we should interpret the world.

posted May 21, 2014 12:47 PM            

But what Palin said was just as ridiculous...likening Russia to "next door neighbours" because from some parts of Alaska you can glimpse a very indistinct bare portion of the Russian coast and making out that that gave her "insight" into dealing with Russia.

posted May 21, 2014 01:08 PM            

As to your other non-point, Sarah Palin has a lot more insight into Putin and Russia than the Marxist Messiah could ever acquire. O'Bomber doesn't have the intellectual horsepower to learn much of anything and his 5+ years of infesting the White House while destroying our economy, our military and our foreign policy is proof positive that's true.

If you were attempting to start another "factoid", you utterly failed.

Sarah Palin on Russian action in Ukraine: Told you so
Jake Miller/CBS News
March 1, 2014

With Russian forces moving into Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and preparing for a possible deeper incursion into the former Soviet republic, former Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska, took to Facebook Friday to boast that she saw it coming.

"Yes, I could see this one from Alaska," quipped Palin, who was her party's 2008 vice presidential nominee, in a reference to her assertion then that Alaska's proximity to Russia afforded her unique insight into U.S.-Russian relations.

In October 2008, after Russia's invasion of neighboring Georgia emerged as a foreign policy flashpoint in the homestretch of a heated campaign, Palin told an audience in Nevada, "After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next." **Which is exactly what happened**

Her prediction was derided by Foreign Policy magazine as "strange" and "extremely far-fetched," but Palin, frequent media antagonist that she is, couldn't resist crowing about how events have played out.

"I'm usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as 'an extremely far-fetched scenario' by the 'high-brow' Foreign Policy magazine," Palin wrote Friday.....