She should have just said, "He got confused and made a mistake." Or, "The elderly can sense dead people in the room. Her spirit must have been present."
It kinda looks like the current press secretary has simply been given a book of stale notes and a "good luck out there" and not much else. What I mean is, maybe there's no "they" there. It's just the press secretary trying like hell to make something decent up as she goes along.
And it's true that she's not great at it. But, to her credit, how many people really want to be Joe Biden's press secretary given his current state? It was a hard enough job a year ago. Now it's impossible.
It is hard, mind-numbing work to collect incidents like this and document them. But it is important to counter each one and keep a record so we are not overwhelmed with despair and give up.
Reminds me of what Democratic Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry said at the time about Bill Clinton: "Bill Clinton is an unusually good liar, unusually good."
You nailed it. It's one thing when you know you're being lied to. It's another when they insult your intelligence by not even bothering to make the lie remotely believable -- or, as is the case with so many of their lies about their ever-changing narrative, when they can't even bother to even attempt to make their lies today remotely consistent with the lies they told yesterday. If you're going to lie to me while you screw up the economy and drag us into World War III over some banana republic where your family has lots of crooked business deals, okay, but why do you have to add insult to injury by talking to us like we're retarded schoolchildren? To quote the Bamboozler in Chief, "C'mon, man!"
I'll just toss in one last wee comment: The economy was screwed from waaaaaay back there. It started with allowing the Federal Reserve to be instigated, which was handing over the American financial system to a PRIVATE BANK, which loans our govt money, then charges interest on it-- all done without the vote of the People. Then in the 70's, when the Gold Standard was undone, and our economy became based on nothing whatsoever... a fiat currency called "paper," run by the Big Oil oligarchs. We've been heading down the shitter ever since the creation of the Fed. This whole "pandemic" and all the shit going on right now is a desperate attempt to rake up whatever wealth (land, power, treasure, property, etc) is left, while getting rid of a lot of the People (because when Earth's Peoples find out what the world's elitist, psychopathic, genocidal oligarchy has in mind for us, they know what will happen to them-- tyranny NEVER works); and so they have been setting us at each other, telling us WE are the problem, WE are causing "climate change" (utter nonsense), WE are causing wars (just a little prodding), WE are eating too much meat (while they kill millions and millions of animals), WE are causing climate trouble with our cars (while they, for decades now, have been spraying us and the Earth with heavy metals, causing a vast slow die-off of plant life, coupled with a very, very LOW co2, which >> plants need to live <<
Well, we're in a real mess right now.
Starve this winter, freeze to death this winter, because... Ukraine? The insanity is thick. How long before the People of Earth realize they're being played, massively, hideously, maliciously, and being CULLED? How much longer? Hard to say. It may take years and years. Meanwhile...
People like us are growing in numbers, but because of the utter trashing of the First Amendment, we are having a little difficulty getting everything straight.
We don't HAVE TO get everything straight. Just enough of it to focus on finding a way to stop this insanity. I have a motto these days: Resist Not Evil: Work Around It.
If you want the answer to that listen to NPR. They will digest it and regurgitate it and it will sound so rational. Of course you’ll be running around the room tearing your hair out but your average NPR listener (60+, white, female, retired, well educated, well meaning liberal) will swallow it whole.
And if you make the mistake of mentioning it to one of those people, they will stare over your shoulder and parrot exactly what they were fed by the soft-spoken evil genies at NPR.
I USED to like them. They've gone the way of our Constitution being upheld. We have to remember, these rights are "INALIENABLE," they are Natural Law, and nobody can take them away.
They think we're ALL stupid enough to believe shit like this, because the people who run around screaming the latest line of goofiness DO believe it. Now stop it, I'm TRIGGERED.
It would have been more believable if she said “Our president knows who is dead and who is alive. Please people. Cut it out. He was asking where Jackie is in the afterlife. “
Her body language tells me that she well knows that she is lying through her teeth - always looking like she is searching for that darn piece of paper with the words that she has been told it is her duty to spew forth. I think she clearly knows that she was an intersectionality hire (woman-check; immigrant-check; LBGTQ+-check; BIPOC-check), and that as long as she toes the line, she can ride that gravy train as long as she likes. Thing is that I think she loves the gravy but has realized just how ridiculous and off the rails the Crazy Train is, which is why she simply cannot look anyone in the eye when she speaks.
To me, she looks like a talking dolls head. Like a vacuous Teddy Ruxpin. Pull the string and out comes a string of words, mostly in standard English. If they have any relationship to the discussion, it’s a bonus.
Her job is not to answer questions, it’s to make them go away. Seriously, there’s only one explanation for this administration, and they aren’t ready to go public with it yet.
Yeah - it makes me feel complete somehow….. LOL! Thank you. It’s by turns amusing and pitiful to see these deluded racits fools jockey for top drawer victim status. Sigh.
I think this is a really under-explored aspect of what I am currently calling, for lack of better term, COVID mania. That is, the over-the-top gaslighting of the public. Perhaps it is an aspect of the process of mass formation, as described by Mattias Desmet.
It seems to take the form of 'You might have suspected we were lying to you yesterday, but here's an even wilder claim that we will tell you with a straight face. And of course, you will believe it, because if you don't, you're some kind of MAGA conspiracy theorist.'
The phenomenon seems to be essential to the ongoing sub-scams stemming from COVID in recent years.
It's engineered mass formation, is the thing. This is all being done in a very coordinated and prepared way. The adoption of these tactics has been remarkably lockstep across supposedly independent jurisdictions, worldwide.
The really remarkable thing to me is how effective they've been with this. It's incredible how much they've gotten away with.
They've gotten away with a lot, and will get away with a lot, but there's a remarkable degree of waking up going on in the face of a coordinated and lockstep effort.
I haven't read Desmet's book, so I couldn't say. There is quite an extensive literature on "the madness of crowds", though, and I think we could point to many historical examples of organic, spontaneously arising panics and similar mass-psych events. But these phenomena certainly been carefully and systematically engineered over at least the course of the 20th century.
It's a category error to evaluate political statements using a 'truth/lie' taxonomy.
Harry Frankfurt nailed it with an essay that he wrote in 1986 and turned into a little pamphlet-sized book in 2005. "On Bullshit".
Frankfurt insists that **bullshitting** is very distinct from **lying** - in that the **bullshitter** is completely unconcerned about what the truth actually is, whereas the **liar** knows and is trying to misdirect.
This excerpt from p16 gives the gist:
>>> Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.
On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires. This freedom from the constraints to
which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying <<<
and p17:
>>> A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in
getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
It's 20 pages; some of it's a bit repetitive, but the kernel of the argument is unassailable.
And once you know that they're ALL bullshitting, literally every time they open their mouths... the weight lifts.
You need to KNOW that there's no epistemic effort being made in their head-meat: it's just trying to say things that move the ball upfield. They don't even care whether or not it will move the chains (i.e., result in the rhetorical equivalent of a first down).
So Karine Jean-Pierre is no good at that either: she's embarrassed. Trump, Clinton and Obama though: those guys could bullshit up a storm... not a flicker of conscience ever passed across their faces. Dubya couldn't **not smirk**, so routinely gave the game away.
>>>There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.<<<
Another aspect is what the bullshit artist is bullshitting about. Trump my have bullshitted about the crowd size at his inauguration but I don't care because it doesn't change my life one way or another.
Obama bullshitting the American public about health care is another thing.
Most of Trump's "lies" we're inconsequential self agrandisements told while he was cutting taxes and regulations which made my life better.
I've gotta say that I struggle with the accepted definition of 'sociopath': like most of the dreck from the checklist-dominated field of pscho[logy|iatry|metry] it's a little too 'pat'.
It seems obvious that sociopaths would get an advantage if they HAD empathy - to help them formulate and refine their strategy - but didn't give a fuck about the *consequences* of their strategy for others.
It's not that they don't 'feel': they are INTENSELY goal-motivated and experience great pleasure when their cunning plans work as intended.
In other words, it just means that they get no disutility when others experience the adverse consequences of the sociopath's actions.
That's not 'lack of empathy' unless 'empathy' is defined in a woo-woo, kum-bye-yah kind of way.
'Empathy' just means being able to understand what the other person experiences in response to a set of stimuli. Understanding what people experience, doesn't imply giving a flying rat's arse about their welfare.
Anyone who has ever been deliberately manipulative has done this 'in microcosm'. If you've ever thought "This will infuriate the wife" and changed strategy in order to achieve some objective... you've deployed 'empathy' the way a sociopath does.
Sociopaths are (generally) about σ above the cognitive median, but not much more. They're good manipulators, which means that they can put themseles in others' shoes - so actually they are GOOD at 'empathy'.
They just have almost zero 'utility-interdependence': what happens to others doesn't matter. 'Others' doesn't mean literally everyone except oneself... it should be taken to mean "people outside my circle of giving-a-fuck'.
Sociopathy is far better understood as having a narrow circle of giving a fuck.
The lies being used these days are not an attempt to appease, explain or justify anything. Or help make people like the liners. They are words to fill the air from people who don’t care of you know the truth or not and who also know that no one is going to stop them. They can say the moon made them do it and will keep on doing what the moon made them do. Whether you believe it or not. “Belief” used to be important to politicians. It no longer is.
She should have just said, "He got confused and made a mistake." Or, "The elderly can sense dead people in the room. Her spirit must have been present."
"There are 535 people in the two houses of Congress. He got confused and made a mistake."
Boom, over. The fact that they can't do that is....interesting.
You do realize he's got dementia, right?
Memory issues are a big indicator...
It kinda looks like the current press secretary has simply been given a book of stale notes and a "good luck out there" and not much else. What I mean is, maybe there's no "they" there. It's just the press secretary trying like hell to make something decent up as she goes along.
And it's true that she's not great at it. But, to her credit, how many people really want to be Joe Biden's press secretary given his current state? It was a hard enough job a year ago. Now it's impossible.
60 million Americans voted for Biden.
(82 million officially).
Our problem isn’t with Biden, or the Politicians.
Our problem is with their voters.
They already accepted what was said about Trump- your problem isn’t with Trump but his voters.
The Elites and Democrats proceeded on that basis ala riots, Covid, Vaccines, shutdowns, masks, mass electoral fraud, Troops, FBI raids and arrests.
What is needed is reciprocity.
That tens of millions put a dementia patient surrounded by 3d string sociopaths is the problem, not the dementia patient.
The rest of us need to come to grips with that, they made their choices and we’d better make ours.
Word.
To show sympathy to my best friend, who lost his mom and dad young, I always say: “Hey Jeremy, where’s your mom and dad?”
When I do this Jeremy knows his parents are on my mind. I’m such a good person.
You're a good friend.
It is hard, mind-numbing work to collect incidents like this and document them. But it is important to counter each one and keep a record so we are not overwhelmed with despair and give up.
Thanks, Chris.
Reminds me of what Democratic Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry said at the time about Bill Clinton: "Bill Clinton is an unusually good liar, unusually good."
All politicians lie but most do it like Clinton did. These people don’t even try. Why should they? We’re all just a bunch of ignorant people.
Why expend that much effort, when they've already proved repeatedly that there are no consequences.
And anyone who insists might get a little visit from the FBI.
You nailed it. It's one thing when you know you're being lied to. It's another when they insult your intelligence by not even bothering to make the lie remotely believable -- or, as is the case with so many of their lies about their ever-changing narrative, when they can't even bother to even attempt to make their lies today remotely consistent with the lies they told yesterday. If you're going to lie to me while you screw up the economy and drag us into World War III over some banana republic where your family has lots of crooked business deals, okay, but why do you have to add insult to injury by talking to us like we're retarded schoolchildren? To quote the Bamboozler in Chief, "C'mon, man!"
I'll just toss in one last wee comment: The economy was screwed from waaaaaay back there. It started with allowing the Federal Reserve to be instigated, which was handing over the American financial system to a PRIVATE BANK, which loans our govt money, then charges interest on it-- all done without the vote of the People. Then in the 70's, when the Gold Standard was undone, and our economy became based on nothing whatsoever... a fiat currency called "paper," run by the Big Oil oligarchs. We've been heading down the shitter ever since the creation of the Fed. This whole "pandemic" and all the shit going on right now is a desperate attempt to rake up whatever wealth (land, power, treasure, property, etc) is left, while getting rid of a lot of the People (because when Earth's Peoples find out what the world's elitist, psychopathic, genocidal oligarchy has in mind for us, they know what will happen to them-- tyranny NEVER works); and so they have been setting us at each other, telling us WE are the problem, WE are causing "climate change" (utter nonsense), WE are causing wars (just a little prodding), WE are eating too much meat (while they kill millions and millions of animals), WE are causing climate trouble with our cars (while they, for decades now, have been spraying us and the Earth with heavy metals, causing a vast slow die-off of plant life, coupled with a very, very LOW co2, which >> plants need to live <<
Well, we're in a real mess right now.
Starve this winter, freeze to death this winter, because... Ukraine? The insanity is thick. How long before the People of Earth realize they're being played, massively, hideously, maliciously, and being CULLED? How much longer? Hard to say. It may take years and years. Meanwhile...
People like us are growing in numbers, but because of the utter trashing of the First Amendment, we are having a little difficulty getting everything straight.
We don't HAVE TO get everything straight. Just enough of it to focus on finding a way to stop this insanity. I have a motto these days: Resist Not Evil: Work Around It.
If you want the answer to that listen to NPR. They will digest it and regurgitate it and it will sound so rational. Of course you’ll be running around the room tearing your hair out but your average NPR listener (60+, white, female, retired, well educated, well meaning liberal) will swallow it whole.
And if you make the mistake of mentioning it to one of those people, they will stare over your shoulder and parrot exactly what they were fed by the soft-spoken evil genies at NPR.
Cause NPR don’t lie man.
I USED to like them. They've gone the way of our Constitution being upheld. We have to remember, these rights are "INALIENABLE," they are Natural Law, and nobody can take them away.
They think we're ALL stupid enough to believe shit like this, because the people who run around screaming the latest line of goofiness DO believe it. Now stop it, I'm TRIGGERED.
It would have been more believable if she said “Our president knows who is dead and who is alive. Please people. Cut it out. He was asking where Jackie is in the afterlife. “
Intercession! HE WAS CRYING OUT TO GOD.
LOL!
Her body language tells me that she well knows that she is lying through her teeth - always looking like she is searching for that darn piece of paper with the words that she has been told it is her duty to spew forth. I think she clearly knows that she was an intersectionality hire (woman-check; immigrant-check; LBGTQ+-check; BIPOC-check), and that as long as she toes the line, she can ride that gravy train as long as she likes. Thing is that I think she loves the gravy but has realized just how ridiculous and off the rails the Crazy Train is, which is why she simply cannot look anyone in the eye when she speaks.
To me, she looks like a talking dolls head. Like a vacuous Teddy Ruxpin. Pull the string and out comes a string of words, mostly in standard English. If they have any relationship to the discussion, it’s a bonus.
Her job is not to answer questions, it’s to make them go away. Seriously, there’s only one explanation for this administration, and they aren’t ready to go public with it yet.
But she’s soft spoken and polite. And she doesn’t stare at you with dead eyes. Like her predecessor.
Spot on.
What is BIPOC?
That is Bi-racial or Person of Color. Aren’t you glad you asked?
Yeah - it makes me feel complete somehow….. LOL! Thank you. It’s by turns amusing and pitiful to see these deluded racits fools jockey for top drawer victim status. Sigh.
Huh. I thought the BI was "Black or Indigenous". Formulated to exclude Asians and subcontinental Indians.
Yes, you are right. Thanks fir the correction!
Figures. It’ll mean somethinf different next week. Sigh.
I think this is a really under-explored aspect of what I am currently calling, for lack of better term, COVID mania. That is, the over-the-top gaslighting of the public. Perhaps it is an aspect of the process of mass formation, as described by Mattias Desmet.
It seems to take the form of 'You might have suspected we were lying to you yesterday, but here's an even wilder claim that we will tell you with a straight face. And of course, you will believe it, because if you don't, you're some kind of MAGA conspiracy theorist.'
The phenomenon seems to be essential to the ongoing sub-scams stemming from COVID in recent years.
It's engineered mass formation, is the thing. This is all being done in a very coordinated and prepared way. The adoption of these tactics has been remarkably lockstep across supposedly independent jurisdictions, worldwide.
The really remarkable thing to me is how effective they've been with this. It's incredible how much they've gotten away with.
They've gotten away with a lot, and will get away with a lot, but there's a remarkable degree of waking up going on in the face of a coordinated and lockstep effort.
Oh please let that be the case, and I'm crying out to God, "Where's Sanity???"
ALL Mass Formation is an engineered thing, no?
I haven't read Desmet's book, so I couldn't say. There is quite an extensive literature on "the madness of crowds", though, and I think we could point to many historical examples of organic, spontaneously arising panics and similar mass-psych events. But these phenomena certainly been carefully and systematically engineered over at least the course of the 20th century.
Agreed, and well said.
It's a category error to evaluate political statements using a 'truth/lie' taxonomy.
Harry Frankfurt nailed it with an essay that he wrote in 1986 and turned into a little pamphlet-sized book in 2005. "On Bullshit".
Frankfurt insists that **bullshitting** is very distinct from **lying** - in that the **bullshitter** is completely unconcerned about what the truth actually is, whereas the **liar** knows and is trying to misdirect.
This excerpt from p16 gives the gist:
>>> Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.
On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires. This freedom from the constraints to
which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying <<<
and p17:
>>> A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in
getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
<<<
http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
It's 20 pages; some of it's a bit repetitive, but the kernel of the argument is unassailable.
And once you know that they're ALL bullshitting, literally every time they open their mouths... the weight lifts.
You need to KNOW that there's no epistemic effort being made in their head-meat: it's just trying to say things that move the ball upfield. They don't even care whether or not it will move the chains (i.e., result in the rhetorical equivalent of a first down).
So Karine Jean-Pierre is no good at that either: she's embarrassed. Trump, Clinton and Obama though: those guys could bullshit up a storm... not a flicker of conscience ever passed across their faces. Dubya couldn't **not smirk**, so routinely gave the game away.
>>>There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.<<<
Another aspect is what the bullshit artist is bullshitting about. Trump my have bullshitted about the crowd size at his inauguration but I don't care because it doesn't change my life one way or another.
Obama bullshitting the American public about health care is another thing.
Most of Trump's "lies" we're inconsequential self agrandisements told while he was cutting taxes and regulations which made my life better.
Next time there's a book burning, let's go...
I've gotta say that I struggle with the accepted definition of 'sociopath': like most of the dreck from the checklist-dominated field of pscho[logy|iatry|metry] it's a little too 'pat'.
It seems obvious that sociopaths would get an advantage if they HAD empathy - to help them formulate and refine their strategy - but didn't give a fuck about the *consequences* of their strategy for others.
It's not that they don't 'feel': they are INTENSELY goal-motivated and experience great pleasure when their cunning plans work as intended.
In other words, it just means that they get no disutility when others experience the adverse consequences of the sociopath's actions.
That's not 'lack of empathy' unless 'empathy' is defined in a woo-woo, kum-bye-yah kind of way.
'Empathy' just means being able to understand what the other person experiences in response to a set of stimuli. Understanding what people experience, doesn't imply giving a flying rat's arse about their welfare.
Anyone who has ever been deliberately manipulative has done this 'in microcosm'. If you've ever thought "This will infuriate the wife" and changed strategy in order to achieve some objective... you've deployed 'empathy' the way a sociopath does.
Sociopaths are (generally) about σ above the cognitive median, but not much more. They're good manipulators, which means that they can put themseles in others' shoes - so actually they are GOOD at 'empathy'.
They just have almost zero 'utility-interdependence': what happens to others doesn't matter. 'Others' doesn't mean literally everyone except oneself... it should be taken to mean "people outside my circle of giving-a-fuck'.
Sociopathy is far better understood as having a narrow circle of giving a fuck.
Well said, and I agree.
The lies being used these days are not an attempt to appease, explain or justify anything. Or help make people like the liners. They are words to fill the air from people who don’t care of you know the truth or not and who also know that no one is going to stop them. They can say the moon made them do it and will keep on doing what the moon made them do. Whether you believe it or not. “Belief” used to be important to politicians. It no longer is.
They know they are lying and they know we know they are lying. It's the brave new world.
My favourite Solzhenitsyn quote.
We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying
Because they don’t care
They don’t care because they don’t think they have to
And they don't think we will EVER catch on, we are talking cows...
(Moo, muvverfukker, I'm stickin' this horn up yo backside)
And they have a complicit media that far from calling them out will actually try to help them get away with it.
And the rest of the clip where a reporter said, “well, John Lennon is often top of mind to me, but I don’t call out for him.” That was the best part.
I have long held that lying shows contempt towards those you are lying to.