Lying is one thing, and it’s a bad thing, most of the time. Without trust, there’s not much basis for dialogue or friendship. You can lie to spare someone’s feelings, but outside of that, it’s hard to think of a good lie. The truly corrosive thing in human relations is incoherence. If someone insists on an incoherent version of events, no communication is really possible with that person. The only healthy course of action is to understand you’re dealing with someone who is incoherent and disengage.
You can never persuade an incoherent person to listen to nuance or to compromise based on shared reality because their need to believe what they believe is impervious to reason. They are incoherent because they have no emotional choice but to believe what they believe, 100%. Doubt would crush them, because, in any argument based on what is really going on, they have no ammunition, outside of a blind, angry insistence that they’re right.
I’ve had the misfortune to know many of these motherfuckers over the course of my long life. Some have been very good companions, everything is fine with them, as long as you’re conciliatory. You can laugh with them, enjoy a good meal, go on an adventure together, until any conflict arises. In the event of any kind of disagreement, unless you drop it immediately and pretend it never happened, you get a childish insistence that what happened never happened, they don’t remember, or understand, or that you’re a liar, or that they might have been lying when you quote them as saying they might have been lying, that they never called you a liar and certainly never said they might have been lying, etc. It can make your head spin when these creatures really get going.
I knew an old lady, 98 now (same age my mother would be if she was alive), since I was her son’s best friend in fourth grade, who often insisted on things that were incoherent. She had to believe, for example, that the nightmarish marriage her son fought in for almost thirty years was completely the fault of his insane ex-wife. It was one of those conflicts, you know, where only one person is to blame for all the ugliness and the other, the innocent party, simply made the mistake of engaging with someone who was a violently enraged lunatic. There was no reason, in the old lady’s version, for the furious wife’s rage, outside of her own troubles. Her husband had absolutely nothing to do with it, even if he was passive aggressive, habitually untruthful, a provocative weasel, etc.
In the end I did the only thing possible in the face of an insistence on an insane worldview. After hearing the same insane insistence that I must forgive even people incapable of regret, empathy or apology, I stopped taking her calls and wrote her a note which I put in the mail. Her response was a classic, a close variation on the one you will always get from someone who insists incoherence by way of the last word is simply fine and dandy and there will be no further discussion of the matter. I put the perfectly polished turd of her last word in a frame, nobody I know ever phrased it more to the point:
Incoherence, when it comes from the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, is truly fucking horrific.
This morning, Trump’s social media account once again blamed U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for not joining his war, although NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to respond to an attack. The account posted: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
This afternoon, Trump told reporters: “You know, we don’t use the strait…we don’t need it. Europe needs it, Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people, so they’ll have to get involved a little bit on that one.” He also said: “I think we’ve won, we’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.” . . .
. . . Aware that [Trump’s impulsive] war is historically unpopular, Republicans in Congress are refusing to exercise any oversight of the Pentagon and the White House. Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported today that Republicans don’t want to expose disapproval of the war and so are simply cheering Trump on in public. Rather than holding public hearings that would allow the American people to hear the administration’s justification for the war and plans for its execution, as Democrats demand, Republicans are permitting the administration to inform Congress as it wishes, behind closed doors.
“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Mineiro. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”
“They’re holding news conferences,” Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters last week, so there is no need for official hearings. source
See, as long as FOX NEWS CHANNEL is covering the ongoing story, there’s no reason for debate in Congress. Unite behind the Commander-in-Chief or make yourself liable to the punishment for treason. Debate only aids our enemy, whoever that might be, and the Commander-in-Chief is the only one who determines who is an enemy and who deserves death, so stop being disloyal and just support our troops. So-called intellectuals, and so-called pragmatists, always insist that men of action have to explain themselves. That is the fatal liberal error of history, according to devotees of the incoherence of the will.
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