The famous question of Pilate to Jesus: what is truth? Now, we Christians answer that by saying Jesus is the Truth…and that is true and sufficient for all events. But as we are no longer a Christian civilization, perhaps we need to expand on it a bit more? For the heathen…and, maybe, a lot of those who call themselves Christian but live as practical pagans.
The basic issue of truth has been rolling around in my head a lot lately, but Team Pudding Brain setting up a Disinformation Governance Board gives the matter urgency. To absolutely no surprise to you or anyone on our side, there are already Never Trump squishes trying to explain or explain away this board – which cannot but have a nefarious purpose of suppressing dissent. The way NT writes it up, there is a need for someone to clamp down on “misinformation”, though when pressed they’ll admit that a board inside the Department of Homeland Security isn’t the best place for it. There is, naturally, no best place for it – there is no place for it, at all.
We know that when the Left says “misinformation” what they mean is anything they disagree with. It is why they say “misinformation” rather than “lies”. Keep in mind that Leftist fact checkers will take someone which is 100% true and call it “partially false”, based on what they say is the relevant context. Meanwhile, bald faced lies by the Left are held to be “mostly true” because once you think about the whole situation, that Leftist lie speaks to a larger truth. You see how it goes: anything we say is false, anything they say is true…and so even when we say factually true things, we’re spreading “misinformation” and that has to be stopped. Now by Pudding Brain’s Cheka inside DHS.
But the larger problem we have is that a lot of people don’t know what truth is any longer. We’ve been conditioned for decades to think that divorce (ie, breaking a promise) is ok and that we have to tell “little while lies” just to get on in society. It was under Bill Clinton that this was rammed home. It would have eventually been rammed home by the Left but Clinton gave it urgency because just about everything he said was false…but as it was all in the service of the greater good (ie, advancing the Left) we all had to be taught that some times lies are good.
There is a poll out there were people were asked questions like “what portion of the population is gay?” and “what portion of the population is white” and the overall results show that people haven’t a clue about their own nation. The question about gay was very revealing in that the “vote” for gay was about 20 percent when the actual gay number is 3 percent. People are walking around thinking that one in five are gay. But, who can blame them? Turn on popular culture and it is shot through with gay characters. It seems that every move and TV show has to have a significant number of gay people in it when, in reality, most Americans might personally know one or two gay people because there simply aren’t that many out there (for myself, I personally know two gay people – and one of them is only distantly known via a second party mutual friend). People think America is barely majority white when the reality is that we’re seventy percent white. People think that twenty percent are millionaires when it is less than one percent.
And this is all because the people have been lied to and they have been conditioned to accept and repeat lies.
Here I would like to point out that a lie does no have to be false. In fact, a lie can be entirely factually correct and still be a lie. Like this:
Here are your facts. Jack went to the store where he pulled out a gun and shot the clerk and stole fifty dollars. He then went home and had a beer and told his wife he loved her.
Here is your news report: Jack came home from the store and after having a beer, told his wife he loved her.
There is nothing false in the news report, but it is a completely false story all the same. It is a fact that the most effective lies adhere as close to the truth as possible in order to transmit the lie. Recently, Marjorie Taylor Greene was accosted by an MSMer who tried to ask her why she brought up the possibility of martial law to prevent Biden from becoming President. She stopped and asked the MSMer to read the actual text (all the while refusing to confirm it was even her text – my bet is that it isn’t, but she didn’t want to get drawn into an argument on that level). Once she really pressed, the MSMer (not facing the camera while he did so) read the whole text and thus we found out that it wasn’t MTG saying we needed to go to martial law, but someone saying that some people are talking like that. And some people were – but some people talking about a thing doesn’t equate to anyone advocating for a thing.
But there was the MSM, trying to slander MTG into being an insurrectionist. And the lie was merely the MSM not reporting the whole text – they just latched on to a word and then started asking everyone “why was MTG advocating martial law?”. Now, MTG ably destroyed the MSMer – calling him a liar to his face – but you can bet on it that if any of the video is shown in the MSM, it won’t be the parts where MTG calls the MSMer a liar or the MSMer having to admit that the text doesn’t verify MTG calling for martial law. Whatever gets into the MSM show will, by selective use of words and facts, work out to the MSM viewers being told that MTG favored martial law to stop Biden. And it will have the true things in it that MTG was part of a text thread where martial law was mentioned…and that will sound oh, so ominous! But it will also be a lie.
I think our first step here is to define a lie – and it isn’t just the statement of a falsehood. It is the attempt to deceive which differentiates a lie from the truth. And while it is possible to deceive someone with an outright falsehood, the reality is that the most effective deceptions use truth as their foundation. It is the difference between an adult pulling a toddler’s leg by asserting the Moon is made out of green cheese and the con artist trying to sucker the unwary out of their money. The adult isn’t really trying to get the kid to believe the Moon is made out of cheese…but the con artist is definitely trying to get the money. This is why Trump grandly saying that Mexico will pay for the wall (implying to the unwary – or the malicious – that Trump was saying Mexico will cut us a check for wall construction) wasn’t an attempt to deceive, but Obama saying “if you like your doctor, you can keep him”, was. Trump was trying to drive home a rhetorical point about the necessity and benefit of the wall…Obama was just bald faced lying to save his political bacon because if he had come out and told us what ObamaCare was going to do, he would have lost the 2012 election. Obama lied to fool us into keeping him in power, Trump exaggerated to make a point – there is a gigantic difference here.
“Safe, legal and rare”: remember that? This was the supposedly centrist Democrat answer to the problem of abortion in the 1990’s. It sounded so good, but it was an attempt to deceive. And it by and large worked. It sounded so right. “Hey, I don’t like abortion, but as long as it is rare, then I’m ok with it.” Democrats went with that angle because saying “federally funded abortion on demand to the moment of birth” (their actual position at the time and now) would have been politically disastrous. But it has been lies like that which have kept the Left in power because the lies, which all contain aspects of truth, are so relentlessly hammered home by the MSM and popular culture, help people make a coward’s bargain. That bargain is: I’ll pretend you’re not lying, if you’ll leave me alone.
But that bargain never works, long term. The trouble is that the liars never stop lying: they just see if you’ll swallow the next one as readily as the last. And I think the Left has gone too far – and the trans issue seems to be the dam buster here. Trying to get people to agree that men can get pregnant and that kids are old enough to decide if they should transition was just a step way too far. But even with the rising pushback here, we have a long way to go. Many other lies have been very firmly implanted into the American mind. People – large numbers of of them – believe complete drivel because it has been endlessly and slickly imparted to them in popular culture for decades.
To take an example: Columbus. Once such a hero that we named our capital city after him, he’s now nearly universally despised, and by extension every explorer, pioneer and colonist despised with him. Most people, if you query them on the subject, will at least go along with some concept of Columbus and his successors being bad. Never mind that they recently dug up 1,000 female skulls in Mexico and, after first thinking it was a mass grave of Cartel victims, discovered it was instead a 1,000 year old site of mass female human sacrifice. Had Columbus and the Conquistadores not come along, that stuff would have just kept on going.
So, too, with all of it – there is no indication that my Irish ancestors, left alone, would have set in motion a train of events which got me to sitting in my air conditioned home in the desert with a pool out back and a pantry stuffed with food that I didn’t have to sweat in the fields to obtain. Sure, there were probably some ancestors back there who were hung for stealing a sheep and I am firmly against hanging sheep thieves…but the bottom line is that absent the Limey bastards, I wouldn’t be living nearly as well as I do today. So, thank God for the colonists!
But we can’t even have that discussion these days because the lies have been so deeply implanted that most wouldn’t know what you were talking about and a determined minority would seek to socially destroy you for pointing out relevant facts which place the Current Narrative in a bad light.
We have to get back to truth – the real truth. Telling the story which places all relevant information in the public square in a timely manner so that people can react properly to events. To do this, lying – intentional deception – is going to have to be punished. The liar,when caught, can’t be allowed to give us a “my bad” and move on. There has to be pain involved. Lots of pain. So much pain that people might start to think that honesty really is the best policy.
Hey, its either that or get ready for a future where you die of easily treatable diseases as your doctor in his ignorance throws up his hands – not knowing the simple treatments because after a century of lies, it was decided that being a doctor doesn’t require knowledge of human physiology. But he’s dead certain that men can get pregnant.
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