The Liar Next Time

RMJ has been doing some excellent Advent postings, he's doing a lot better at it than I've done two years running.  I don't have the energy for series right now, though I will continue.

He pointed out something that has increasingly annoyed me as the ocean of lies has flooded the United States and the world, perhaps the most potent effect of the internet other than the STDs of porn and hate-talk.

When did it become necessary to discern the indiscernible state of mind of a pathological liar as they told lies?  When did it become a requirement that we prove that the liar knows that what they're saying is a lie before calling the lie a lie and the liar a liar?   When did it become necessary to prove that the liar did not believe the lie as they lied it? 

I think the answer is that it isn't any logical or moral necessity, it is a cowardly pose invented by the media so they would not have to point out that Republican-fascists, the politicians, the lawyers, the media figures, the academicians, the alleged journalists,etc. lie constantly, often in contradiction of things they have also said on the record.  That this disaster of Trumpism as the disaster of Bush II-Cheney (the invasion of Iraq?  Ring a bell?  I can assure you there are millions in the middle-east who remember) as those of the Reagan-Bush I years (Central America is still a hell hole due to what America did in those years, and millions there know that) were all a product of liars on TV, on hate-talk radio, on respectable radio and TV (NPR-PBS-C-Span) and, as it was more used, the internet. 

Nothing is going to get better till that cowardly pose of self-preserving, self-serving, pseudo-journalistic scrupulosity is junked as certainly as the declaration that the first person to say fascist loses the calling of "political correctness" and other such pop-cultural aids of depravity. 

The damage done to us is primarily a product of the rejection of even the most obvious and basic standards of morality, that it's wrong to lie, it's a consequential sin that is not acceptable and which should be punished in proportion to the consequences possible from the lie.  The idea that human beings in numbers for safety are automatically equipped to discern the difference between a frequently repeated lie, one shaped and formed to be an easy sell, often told for pay by a TV or movie star, is clearly wrong.  Trump's entire career as a politician is exactly based in that being an all too easy thing to peddle through the mass media,  Reagan's career certainly started with his Hollywood celebrity status.  I have no doubt that Republican billionaires are looking for the next show biz personality they can groom to install in the same way. 

The courts enabling lies through such idiotic requirements for calling liars liars and punishing the telling of lies in the mass media is to blame for a lot of this.  I don't know if those pudding headed "justices" bought into some bull-shit psychological or philosophical line on that or if they knowingly decided to enable the oligarchs through their corruption of the nation through mass media lies, as most of their history otherwise does, but democracy cannot stand in a nation in which such a dangerously large percentage of the population is so corrupted that it has fallen for the act of a totally transparent con-man crook as Donald Trump.   And that is entirely a product of the mass media, proving that the "entertainment" division is as capable of producing that as the alleged "news" division is. Even the alleged news promoted Donald Trump saying the darndest and most outrageous things, often as a diversionary "feature" to attract an audience.  He was given enormous amounts of free air time on "news" shows on TV.  

The dangers of all of this are either going to have to be effectively addressed to cleanse the airwaves, the cable channels, the internet of lies or you can kiss democracy good-bye and with it anything like equality, a decent life, a sustainable life. 

All of that program of mid-20th century modernist, libertarian "freedom" freedom from morality, freedom from responsibility, freedom from even the acknowledgement that there are things which are true and which are false, things which are real and things which are not real, things which are safe and things which are dangerous and that all of the latter items in those categories cannot be tolerated within a egalitarian democracy because they destroy the possibility of equality and democracy was always a lie, an obvious lie, a lie which, maybe from a perch in the artificial environments of tenured university life, a life in the sausage factory of mendacity, the legal racket, life on the publicly funded Olympus of the Supreme court could be pretended to be safely tolerated and even allowed.   But that was wrong, history has proven it wrong, it's our choice to learn the lesson or we will be kept behind for even harsher lessons.