So far, disregarding political arguments with my family, only one worthwhile (hopefully) task has been accomplished. Whilst visiting home over spring break, I decided to call an old teacher of mine, one very passionate about my topic: the general lack of understanding and systematic abuse of logical fallacies to perpetuate disinformation, propaganda, circular arguments, and genuine lies. When I called him, I asked if I could come and visit one of his classes and give a presentation on how to combat such fallacies, as well as simply giving definitions, examples, and describing the pertinentcy and breadth of the issue at hand.

While it was a relatively short and superficial description across the board, I hope that my talking to the class, at the very least, gave insight and opened up a field to some students who had never even heard of the term before. As a liberal, I couldn’t resist on attacking the absurdity of some of President Trump’s tweets, Trump himself very frequently arguing with fallacy, a favorite of his being the ‘strawman’ argument, such examples being “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Crooked Hillary,” discrediting his opponents without even addressing their argument, creating a consistent loop of mud-slinging, instead of genuine discourse.

This topic, despite my passion and genuine interest in it, is more difficult to address than I once thought, it must come off as interesting, so I’ve learned to spin it in a pop-psychology format (we humans love to know ‘tricks’ to manipulate and tear down other humans), citing plenty of examples is also a must. Despite my own failure at keeping it apolitical, that is certainly another must, with tensions and polarization higher than any point barring the Civil War, any mention of the other political side, without at least addressing both sides, renders any conversation moot, coming off as just more ‘fake news,’ or whatever term people use to justify shutting out opposition. Coming up with further engaging topics, however, is proving to be a challenge. A behavioral shift, cognitively, is difficult to justify without personal presentation, and that just isn’t feasible given the scale of the issue; any usage of an term relating to fallacy is only meaningful if all involved parties also know the term, otherwise it’s more meaningless rhetoric and the circular arguments will continue ad infinitum.

Picture: mid-sentence candid, not particularly flattering, but you can only ask so much of a technologically-impaired teacher