Trump’s Tertium

This is going to be in English, as you can see from the apostrope before the s in the title.

Kellyanne Conway. Photo Gage Skidmore

The expression “alternative fact” (not “alternative truth”) is said to have been coined by Ms Conway on January 20, 2017 – click the picture or here.
   The subject matter had been the crowd size watching Trump’s inauguration, documented best in a double picture comparing Obama’s and Trump’s fan turnout, for example here. 

Alternative fact triggered linguistic reminiscenses of Newspeak (Neusprech). Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four soared (The Washington Times and many others reported), though Orwell in 1949 had not literally used the term alternative truth. As Wikipedia knows, Orwell goes deeper into doublethink (Zwiedenken, Doppeldenk).
   Personally I suggest to think for your own, to find truths and lies and partial thruths. Believe only what you can accept, following your own thinking. For the rest: “don’t know”.
   Then pause before judging. 
   Truth is like a traffic light in black and white. You see it, but not its meaning. Turn on the color, and you get its content. People and even conservative media nowadays offer populistic morals much too early, subtly and disguised. So you will typically find the Russian conquest of the Crimea with the attribute “against international law”, just as retirement today will be always “well earned” here (»wohlverdienter Ruhestand«). If I’d written reconquest of the Crimea, content would have changed. Israel’s settlements in Palestine are never defined in that way, and correctly so – don’t mix facts with meanings. (Journalists shoud run once around the block before using an adjective.)
   Especially judgements long after the fact should be avoided. Today’s political correctness fosters that. So you’d never guess any more that negro was a neutral term in the fifties, the derogative name was nigger then.

Sermon of the Mount by Cosimo Rosselli (left part)
Fresco in the Sistine Chapel, northern wall

   Back to truth vs. lies, facts vs. things not happened. The tertium non datur (a third [possibility] is not given) was stated by Aristotle three hundred years before Christ. Later Matthew 5:37 quotes Jesus in the Sermon of the Mount saying: “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”

Permalink – please forward to two or more friends …
http://blogabissl.blogspot.com/2017/01/trumps-tertium.html

»Raus mit den Adjektiven« (deutsch):

  http://blogabissl.blogspot.com/2016/05/raus-mit-den-adjektiven.html

“America first” sounds like “foist” (aufdrängen) to me:   
   https://youtu.be/dIaoZqMrbCo?t=21s – Does Trump mean North or South America?
NZZ-Leitartikel zu Trump

»Komplementäre Fakten« in der NZZ  

We get used to lies.
   Übrigens gewöhnen wir uns schon längst an Lügen. Beispiele: Das Schild »Radar« an der Autobahn, und dann steht doch kein Blitzer dort. Oder diese Werbung, aktuell aus dem Focus.