I suppose Old Dog has a point in calling Honey Hair (that sounds kind of affectionate doesn't it? Imagine it said with dripping sarcasm) more of a liar than the big girl in that lying consists not only of telling an untruth, but of knowingly doing so. If I had a faulty tape when I measured my tree and my height of fifty feet was wrong, that does not make me a liar.
The big girl when confronted with an ugly truth, threads her way through it, rearranging things so that it does not look so ugly, so in that sense she is more of a liar because she is working hard at it, though I expect once she has rearranged things, she may well have convinced herself that what she is saying is true.
HH, on the other hand just spouts whatever happens to be on the top of his head at the time, and he probably believes whatever he is saying at the time. There are times though when he is confronted with what he says, the cheering muslims on the rooftops for instance, and must suspect that it is not true. In these cases he doubles down by saying something like he saw it, it must be true, or everybody (the swamp internet) is saying it, so it must be true. Surely he knows he is lying at this point. But maybe not. He has been surrounded by yes men all his life, maybe he is a little like the guy in Plato's cave having seen mere illusions all his life and having no knowledge of rock hard reality.
You'll note that I pick up on relatively small things in HH's utterances, the rooftop muslims, rather than the bigger issues like say the Mexican murderers and rapists, The thing is surely there are some rapists and murderers, so what is the percentage of rapists and murderers that justifies calling the whole group rapists and murderers? Well that's a matter of opinion. It's like if I said I have a tall tree in my backyard. If some guy pays a visit and says it doesn't look tall to him, well we can discuss that. But if I say it is fifty feet tall, and a guy shows up with a tape measure and it's really only forty feet tall, well then I have broken the surly bonds of truth.
What difference does it make how tall my tree is? It makes all the difference in the world. Well not my tree, specifically, but all the things in the world. There is matter and energy and space and time and the laws that govern them and that's all there is in the universe. Well there's us, but we are just matter and energy, except for the fact that we seem to think that we are alive, but that is something completely outside the scope of today's discussion, And I kind of know that if I see a tree so do you, and if you say it's not there I can lead you to it and bang your head against it and you will; have to admit that it was there. From these mundane markers of reality we build the bigger facts of our world.
Like for instance the Magna Carta was signed in, whenever it was signed. We can argue about whether this was a big moment in democracy or not, but we can all agree on when it was signed. Well not Old Dog. Old Dog sez well sure I read that somewhere, but how do I verify that. Well he can read various accounts and see that they all agree on that date, He can read accounts from the original sources. He can visit the rare book room and read the original sources themselves, he could visit where it took place, he could see the Magna Carta itself.. If there were tests on the inks we could review them. Well he can't do all that, he has all his own whizbang experiments in his mad (but gentleman) scientist's lair in his apartment. But other people can, and certainly there are some who have and the date of the Magna Carta remains undisputed. Well if you poke around long enough in the swamp internet I am sure you can find somebody who disputes it, but if you look at their site I assure you that their sources will be lacking. You know it's like you have just finished reading the article on the Magna Carta in the Encyclopedia Britannica at the Ten Cat bar and then in breezes that guy who shows up with the pool scores and a motor mouth and he says "I happen to know, that thing was signed in 1952." Who you gonna believe.
Witness wiki which we generally accept because we know all sorts of people read it and review it and if there are any glaring mistruths in it, they will be corrected.
Every morning about five the newsperson drops a Trib and a Sun-Times outside my door, but today, for reasons unknown, they also left me a New York Times, so I have some reading to do this morning and will adjourn myself now, and will continue this discourse on Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment