The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors – deserve our disgust.
I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.
I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in — journalism.
Would that Tulsi would and could lay bare the brazen bullshit of every single swamp critter in the District of Columbia from the life-long liar Joey B. on down and not leaving out Alejandro Mayorkas, 'Director of Homeland Security' — how is that for an Orwellian title! — and Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, and do it with the style, grace, and integrity she demonstrates in this amazing video.
Leftists constantly repeat their brazen lies in the hope that eventually they will be taken for truths. So we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable need constantly to repeat truths. Not our truths, for there is no such thing as 'our' truth or 'my' truth or 'your' truth.' Truth is not subject to ownership. If you have it, you have it without possessing it.
So speak the truth and speak it often. Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. Living well is impossible without repetition. All learning, all teaching, all physical culture, all musicianship require repetition. No mastery of anything, no improvement in anything, is possible without repetition. Can you play that riff the same way every time? If not, keep practicing.
By practicing blows, whether verbal or physical, you learn how to land effective ones.
'Speaking truth to power' is a phrase leftists love when they are out of power; in power, they exercise it, and truth be damned. They imbibed mendacity with their mothers' milk.
The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh is a good example from the '80s.
Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.
Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.
An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.
Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.
U. G. can't seem to take seriously any experience. Each is just an experience. None is revelatory or finally veridical. Religious and mystical experiences are no different than sexual or drug experiences. Before any experience can put him in contact with any reality, his skepticism dissolves it.
"Just an experience! What do I need more experiences for!"
Over the weekend, Donald Trump bragged in signature style that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Lefties are calling the statement a lie. But it is no such thing. In the typical case, a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. In the typical case, one who lies knows the truth, but misrepresents it to his audience out of a desire to deceive them. But no one knows the truth-value of Trump's braggadocious conditional. It could be true, but neither Trump nor anyone else has any evidence of its truth. Although verifiable in principle, it is not practically verifiable.
When lefties call a statement a lie which is not a lie should we say that they are lying about what it is?
Was Trump exaggerating when he made his remark? That's not right either.
I think what we have here is a species of bullshit in the sense pinned down by a noted philosopher. According to Harry Frankfurt, a statement is bullshit if it is
. . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (emphasis added)
Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit. The bullshitter is one who 'doesn't give a shit' about the truth value of what he is saying. He doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.
Now if the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He cares about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows. Frankfurt again:
. . . bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis added)
When did the Age of Bullshit begin in American politics? Perhaps with the inauguration of Bill Clinton. But it really gets underway with Barack Obama. Obama is the shuck-and-jive precursor of Trump. So let's recall some of his antics.
As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth. But truth and consistency are closely related notions. Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true. Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically. He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now. Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:
. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?
When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.
The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful. Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons. Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency — these are ethical attributes, properties of persons. Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president. When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it. That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness. But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed. It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'. There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white. Everything's a 'narrative' — good POMO word, that — and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it. Hanson has Obama's number:
But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?
[. . .]
The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.
In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.
Having the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. For that court lies in the precincts of power, and here below truth is no match for power unless those who are truthful also have power. But the paths to power are often paved with lies and their necessity. Rare then is the truthful one who attains power with his truthfulness intact.
'Knowingly lied' is a pleonastic expression. One cannot lie without intending to deceive. And one cannot intend to do X without knowing that one intends to do X. So one cannot lie without lying knowingly: there is no such thing as an unknowing or unwitting lie. It follows that 'knowingly lied' is a pleonastic or redundant expression. Good writers avoid pleonasm.
Good writers also know when to break rules in the service of what they want to say.
1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican nomination, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.
Suppose a Never-Trumper calls me a liar. Have I lied? A lie is an intentional misrepresentation of a truth known by the one who lies in order to deceive the person or persons being lied to. Now (1) is either true or not true, but no one knows which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).
If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing? I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation. And the same goes for a person who denies (2).
Donald Trump famously boasted,
2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.
Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.
But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely self-serving speculation. He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true.
Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong.
The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh , now the subject of a Netflix documentary series, is a good example from the '80s.
Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.
Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.
An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.
Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.
U. G. can't seem to take seriously any experience. Each is just an experience. None is revelatory or finally veridical. Religious and mystical experiences are no different than sexual or drug experiences. Before any experience can put him in contact with any reality, his skepticism dissolves it.
"Just an experience! What do I need more experiences for!"
Why lie when the facts are easily established and indeed well known? Hillary is famous for this, but Elizabeth Warren, the 'Cherokee' Pinocchio, takes the cake. See also Elizabeth Warren Went Native.
It has been said of Bill Clinton that he'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. Hillary continues the family tradition. One of her latest untruths is that all four of her grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants when only one of them did. She lied, brazenly, about something easily checked. To prolong the arboreal metaphor, why would she perch herself far out on a limb so easily sawn off? Beats me.
You never seem to allow comments on the posts I want to comment on, so I'm forced to add another email to your overwhelming pile.
BV: Well, my pile is not that bad. This is one of the many benefits of relative obscurity. And I am happy to receive your response.
Because I generally agree with you so much, I don't write too often. I don't even write where I moderately disagree with you. And I try not to write even where we sit on opposite ends of the table, because you are a trained philosopher and I am a dilettante.
For example, I tried to let this anti-natalism stuff pass by, but you posted again on it today with your typical caveat that you are out to seek truth wherever it may be found. I suppose I find that a bit cavalier when you are dealing with far-out ideas like anti-natalism because it seems so intuitively implausible, and not just to myself.
I think that though we both seek truth (and I am making an educated guess here so you'll forgive me the offence if I'm wrong), the reason I don't take anti-natalism seriously is because I am a Christian first and philosopher second, and you do because you are a philosopher first and a Christian (theist) second, which would explain your mantra about seeking truth wherever it is found as justification for taking this idea seriously.
BV: I will first point out that there is a anti-natalist strain in Christianity. See, for example, More on Christian Anti-Natalism and the accompanying comment thread. So it is not clear that Christianity rules out anti-natalism in such a way as to make it impossible for any Christian to take it seriously. The logically prior question, of course, is: What is Christianity? Decide that question and then you will be in a position to decide whether Christianity is anti-natalist.
I will also point out that if you set store by plausibility and reject without examination the implausible, then you ought to reject orthodox (miniscule 'o') Christianity since its central doctrine is an apparent (and many would say real) absurdity or logical contradiction. And so is the doctrine of the Trinity which Chalcedonian incarnationalism requires. See, for example, the work of the Christian philosopher, Dale Tuggy. Both of these constitutive doctrines are apparently absurd for reasons I examine in detail in the Trinity and Incarnation category. However we analyze 'implausible,' it is clear that what is apparently absurd is implausible. So if you reject without examination the implausible, then you should reject without examination Christianity. And if you don't do the latter, then you shouldn't reject anti-natalism without examination.
And then there is the fact that you simply reject Benatar's views without examining his arguments. That's what ideologues do, not philosophers. The arguments raise important questions as should be obvious from my ongoing series. So one can learn from his work even f in the end one doesn't accept his arguments.
A tougher and deeper fourth issue concerns how philosophy and a revelation-based religion such as Christianity are related. There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality. As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:
To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)
Even a philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation will feel duty-bound qua philosopher by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept. This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl. On his death bed, cared for by Catholic nuns, open to the Catholic faith which some of his star pupils had embraced, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation! That attitude is typical of a real philosopher. If you can't 'relate to it' then you don't understand the demands of the philosophical vocation. The philosopher is called to a certain sort of life, the life of autonomous understanding, as Strauss so well puts it.
It is a tough problem and the conflict is really radical as Strauss says. The sense of intellectual honesty and intellectual responsibility in a great philosopher like Husserl is burningly strong. Someone who shares this sense cannot easily accept without careful scrutiny some religion that he happens to have been brought up on. On the other hand, where does philosophy get us? Husserl bent every fiber of his being to establishing philosophy as strict science, strenge Wissenschaft, but he failed to persuade even his best and closest students. I am thinking of Edith Stein who, while recognizing Husserl as her 'master,' in the end turned to Thomas and became a Carmelite nun. And then there is Roman Ingarden, an outstanding but neglected thinker who rejected Husserl's transcendental idealism. Heidegger, the most influential of Husserl's students, was also soon on his own exploring strange and dark Black Forest paths and wood trails. (The allusion is to his Holzwege.)
You have also said elsewhere that there is nary an argument (that is not either self-evident or tautological) that is uncontested by philosophers.
BV: Right. That's the trouble with philosophy. None of its conclusions are conclusive. Nothing gets settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. Dogmatists confidently assert substantive theses, but it is mostly if not always bluster. The problems of philosophy are genuine, and many of them are humanly important; but none of them has ever been solved in a way that makes it clear that it has been solved. The strife of systems continues unabated. But that is hardly a reason simply to plump for some ideology.
The only purpose of seeking truth is to find it (and probably to let others know about it once you have). But if you sought and you have found it (or are convinced you have found it), then what good is it to entertain truths that run contrary to it (or are precluded by it)? This just seems like regress, not progress. It's like considering infanticide when you already reject abortion.
BV: True, we seek in order to find. And it is true that some convince themselves, or become convinced, that they have found the truth. Such a one was Edith Stein:
In the summer of 1921, she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserl's. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer."
Now here is the question: If one is convinced that one has the truth, and this truth is logically incompatible with some thesis T (e.g., Benatar's anti-natalism), is one rationally justified in rejecting T and in refusing to examine the arguments in support of it?
I would say No. Note first that the conviction that one has the truth is a mere subjective certainty. No matter how psychologically powerful this certainty is, it does not entail objective certainty. One can be subjectively certain and still be mistaken. Christopher Hitchens, who died on this date six years ago, was subjectively certain that there is no God. Edith Stein was convinced that there is. It follows that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty. They can't both be right; so one of the subjective certainties was merely subjective.
Given that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty, the really serious truth-seeker must remain open to the possibility that he is mistaken about that of which he is subjectively certain. If he is really serious about truth, and intellectually honest, he must ongoingly examine his doxastic commitments. He must hold them tentatively. This is not to say that he will easily relinquish them; it is to say that he will remain self-critical. This strikes me as the right attitude here below for we who are in statu viae. Doxastic rest, if it comes at all, comes later. To rest prematurely would seem to indicate a lack of seriousness about the pursuit of truth. It would seem to indicate more of a desire for comfort than a desire for truth.
