THOSE WHO LOVE AND MAKE A LIE
In another forum, we have a liberal participant who regularly shovels up liberal nonsense and deceit and thereby insults the intelligence of his readers. Another participant - I’ll call him Ed - made the following comment in response to one of this fellow’s posts:
"Net, net, you lost credibility with me when I realized you basically relied on faulty data without any application or just observance of common sense..."
Here follows my added comment:
Your fundamental mistake, Ed, is to assume this individual, with whom we have long and consistent experience, has any concern or respect for objective truth. As we have long seen, he does not. His sole purpose in everything he puts out is to reinforce and rationalize himself in his own intellectual, moral and spiritual corruption. For him - the quintessential liberal - the truth - the way things really are and really work - is never the objective and most often is a threat. All that matters to him is the defense of his corrupt, preconceived notions and self-serving opinions. This fellow’s methodology is so glaringly obvious in this regard that I find it hard to imagine there are any among the erudite participants in this forum that can't see it, and I further continue to marvel that any thoughtful person, having observed his consistent performance - stereotypical of liberals - wastes any time at all taking him seriously.
My oft-repeated little aphorism applies perfectly to him:
The credibility of WHAT you see argued is directly a function of HOW it is argued.
Find the truth in the methodology of argument. The truth can be argued for in an honest, open manner that does not insult the intelligence of those it seeks to persuade. Deceit cannot be so argued.
Again, Oberg's methodology is so consistent, so predictable, and so alien to the open, honest pursuit of objective truth that, in my view, he is and long has been totally discredited as a source of anything useful - with the possible exception of his providing examples of how a corrupt liberal mind works.
Ed goes on to ask:
"In the current environment, how can anyone take anything at face value?"
The answer to that, I think, is that nothing can be taken at face value... A great many of the problems that are tearing our society apart can be attributed, sadly, to a mindless willingness on the part of many to take things at face value, things as they are deceitfully represented by unscrupulous manipulators.
Trump, for example, is declared a Nazi by his enemies -
- and mindless millions - ignorant people who know nothing about history, Nazism or Trump - embrace the pejorative without a second thought. If somebody printed up a poster and carried it around, or photoshopped a photo, it must be true. Amazingly, many people among us are so lacking in intellectual, moral and spiritual substance that they get no further than that…
As I argued in my Substack piece, "The Left's Deceitful War of Words", all a thoughtful, fair-minded person need do when confronted with such calumny - this kind of vicious ad hominem attack - is offer a straight-forward challenge. In this case, how about this?
What is a Nazi?
How exactly is Trump a Nazi?
What has he done that justifies such a characterization?
Specifics, please.
Invariably, in the face of such a challenge, the deceit quickly falls apart. These obtuse people typically can’t get beyond the slander, and their appeal is to people as deficient in intellectual, moral and spiritual substance as they themselves…
Sadly, we do live in an age of almost universal corruption and deceit. The question then becomes, given that distasteful reality, how does one manage to swim and not sink in such a sea of deceit?
Seems to me there are only two ways forward... One can make the effort to become knowledgeable regarding the critical issues of the day, and thereby empower oneself to discriminate between truth and lies. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson argued that a people becoming so informed was essential to their remaining free:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & never will be.”
Jefferson's approach is obviously the more excellent way. The more enlightened and informed the citizenry, the more likely they are to survive as a free people.
On the other hand, we live in an age of information overload and information corruption, a time when, for most people, it is virtually impossible to gain command of all the pertinent facts - dependable facts - regarding the critical issues of the day sufficient to enable a fully informed understanding and wise decisions.
A way around this dilemma is to employ my aforesaid aphorism. As I have argued, there is a recognizable methodology of honest argument that is focused on getting at objective truth, and there is an equally recognizable methodology that is employed - that must be employed - in selling a lie. Those who deal in lies will invariably resort to what they consider time-tested methodology, and they will viciously resist the application of truth-oriented methodology, which they know will blow their lies out of the water.
Once one gets the hang of what they are up to, it is easy to recognize liars’ methodology when it is employed - the deliberate hiding or distortion of information, refusing to allow or respond to criticisms, villainizing those who disagree with them, vicious ad hominem attacks upon critics and attempts to silence or destroy them - to name just a few.
These liars’ tactics obviously assume the stupidity and ignorance of their audience. Those who seek the truth and argue for the truth never employ such methods because they don't need to - "The truth", as Joseph Smith observed, "cuts its own way" - and they never have need to appeal to the ignorance or baser instincts of their hearers.
Pursuers of truth are not afraid of but seek after new and better information that might challenge their earlier understanding. They don't go in fear of criticism - indeed they welcome it as a critical part of the process of getting at the truth - and have no need to personally attack their opponents - except perhaps to make note of their corrupt methods of argument. The truth itself, once revealed, discredits those who fight against it. That is why liars will fight to the last ditch to keep their doings in the dark.
As I have argued before, if, in the extreme case, one was virtually ignorant of the specific facts and details of an important issue at hand but understood the radically different methodologies employed by liars and deceivers as opposed to honest people seeking the truth, one could blow away the smoke and come near to the truth in virtually every instance.
Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, reality vs. fantasy, order vs. chaos, law vs. lawlessness, liberty vs. tyranny, patriotism vs. treason, light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, happiness vs. misery, God vs. the Godless…
No more complicated than that…
But… if you can be fooled, you will be…
These are the times that try men’s souls…
Torquemada