Posts by Kracklite
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Bastard. Bastard. Bastardbastardbastard.
You know why I don't notice that... thing?
Because upon seeing it I immediately go into denial or suffer hysterical blindness. I think that that this is the next level of stealth and the USAF should take notice: design something to awful, so banal, so ill-proportioned, so ugly, so cynically crass, so unimaginative that the enemy, seeing only a blip on a radar screen will immediately suffer a kind of cognitive crash so that they remain utterly unaware of it.
Clapton/Cthulhu/Leto II/You-know-it-hates-being-called-that knows what sort of havoc this will play with pilots attempting landings at Welli... ngton airport. Oh the huge manatee!
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So I go away for a few hours and you guys are all quoting Nietzsche and Keynes to each other.
I'm going to use that.
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Sacha,
That’s what gets my goat.
Yep.
Loved the episode...
I thank you for justifying my procrastination.
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Still more random observations…
“If circumstances change so that a promise must be broken, does that make a lie of the original promise?”
Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Burke would agree that intention or objective takes precedence over words: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
As would Disraeli: “We have no permanent friend. We have no permanent enemies. We just have permanent interests.”
Now repeat after me: We have always been at war with Eastasia…
(I'm actually very surprised that the discussion has got this far without any mention of Orwell, who wrote copiously on the political abuse of language.)
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I’m tempted to coin (actually, I have) the typical psychopath’s riposte to Lincoln’s “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time”: “Fooling all of the people some of the time is enough – you just have to keep doing it again and again.”
The goldfish-like attention spans and Korsakov’s Syndrome that are now an intrinsic structural quality of today’s journalism actively aid and abet that. I noticed Phil Goff call for an Inquiry into Jon Stephenson’s findings and saw that it looked good on the news and in the headlines, which was his intention… but then nobody followed up – least of all him. To my utter lack of surprise.
However, as a tonic, how can we forget Richard Feynman? I am particularly fond of this gem: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
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A couple of observations, elaborated in my typically long-winded manner, because I have a lot of pressing work to do.
Liars lie because it works - they both lay out a fiction in which they place themselves as the central character, and their audience welcome their lies.
I am for example, telling myself that it is imperative that I get this off my chest, when in fact my other duties (marking essays) objectively matter more.
Incorrigible cynic that he is, Peter Watts likes to point out that brains are not truth-detecting mechanisms, they are survival mechanisms. Creating workable strategies to survive and workable cognitive maps of our physical and social surroundings have been the primary selection criteria in the evolution of the brain. We tell stories to each other that enable us to get by. Whether or not they are empirically true or not is coincidental. There is a tendency then to believe things that it is useful to believe - so we create myths, we anthropomorphosise natural phenomena and so on.
Terry Pratchett, charmingly, in Hogfather, has DEATH tell his "granddaughter", Susan, that we need lies like Santa Claus (or the Hogfather in this case) so that we can learn to integrate other lies into our lives such as justice, which have no empirical basis as "truth".
In The Science of Discworld II: The Globe he uses the taxonomical term "Pan narrans" to describe humanity: "Plenty of creatures are intelligent but only one tells stories. That's us: Pan narrans. And what about Homo sapiens? Yes, we think that would be a very good idea ..."
It reminds me of something Brian Eno said once (I can't remember where/when) that pop songs were not music so much as imaginary worlds that people try on.
That leads to Huizinga's Homo ludens - we are a creature that plays. We pretend, we act "as if" things were so, not according to how they really are.
...and the next jump in my game of intellectual hopscotch leads to Baruch ter Wal's point upstream that people will adopt beliefs as badges of their tribe and act and speak as if the most absurd myths were true until, functionally, the fact that they are not is irrelevant.
I think that there are good lies - metaphors, myths, fiction, ideals - but it its the calculated intent to manipulate the use of these for bad ends, bolstered by further lies to the self (it's all in the name of a good cause... mine) that makes an egregious lie. I do not believe that truth and falsehood are an absolute binary of virtue, but... well, a slippery slope.
As you were, and I'm back to other strategies of procrastination. I now think that it's very important that I read a particular book as it will make me a better person and that's good for everyone (Wade Davis' The Wayfarers - I really recommend it - it's fascinating). The marking can wait a wee bit longer yet. I'll get around to it and I'll do a good... adequate... job... Well, I'll get it done. Honest.
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Sacha,
Yeahbutnahbutyeahbutnah!
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Alas, the glib, illogically formatted and meaningless winner of Beige Alert's billboard competition proves that they still refuse to learn a damned thing.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Russell Brown,
I must admit that I have a strange form of selective synaesthesia or experience a version of the the McGurk Effect whenever I see the word “Solidarity” in T’ Standard: reading it, I hear the voice of George W. Bush saying, “You’re with us or against us” or some boofhead yelling, "Whaddarya?!"
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Rob Stowell,
...and the "matter" in the sink.