Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. Available in weekly or daily dosage. |
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McCain's bigamy, and answering a rhetorical question by Herb Ruhs, MD Wednesday, August 13, 2008 PERMANENT LINK Whenever you hear the sweetly euphemistic term "privatization" think takeover by private criminal elements. Non-criminal enterprises need a strong government committed to the Constitution and equitable law enforcement in order to compete with criminal enterprises. "Privatization" is merely
I guess this tends to put him in even tighter with the misogynist criminals who actually control the country than his association with the savings and loan criminals. I imagine that actually being a criminal is a more secure route to the presidency, and staying alive while being the president, than being, in gang parlance, "a civilian." I guess a person's got to do what they have to do to stay alive while playing the corrupt political game. Best to be a criminal when playing in a nest of them. McCain obtained marriage license with Cindy while still married to first wife
Heidi Papademetriou asks, "Who knows what to believe really?" Heidi has triggered my well known tendency to respond to rhetorical questions, one of my more annoying traits. Well, the answer Heidi, I think, is that at some level we all do. Confidence tricksters, which is really the focus of my piece, always seek to exploit some flaw in our character in order to induce us to believe something that is not true. For instance the advent of "infotainment" exploits our appetite for novelty, diversion and entertainment to induce us to absorb lies along with the thrills and chills we crave. Most of us who are insufficiently scarred emotionally to be totally separated from our true feelings can expect to get a message from our guts or from our noses that something is fishy when we are being conned. The goal of the confidence artist is to replace a reasonable sense of confidence with a false one. To the extent that we practice good mental hygiene, do our best to remain emotionally, morally and intellectually honest, we will be less susceptible to being tricked into believing lies. The chief problem of living in a confidence game environment occurs when people start repeating the lies that they have absorbed either explicitly, as in "We have to strike back over If we simply remain skeptical and refuse to believe where there is no evidence to support belief, and take available opportunities to confront untruths as we hear them from friends and family, we can engage the main antidote to this mental infection. The best defense against confidence games is humility. So we get taken in. So what? I always cringe when I think of how taken in I was during the attack on Serbia, for instance. It is the tendency to avoid admitting that we have been fooled that is our Achilles' heel. Pride goeth before the fall. What is important is that we have a healthy skepticism about ourselves and our striving to be good. Nobody is so good as to never get fooled into doing something or believing something that is best regretted. Fantasies of perfection, of moral superiority, of superior intellectual acuity are all chinks in our deception armor. Succumbing to cynicism is a great danger in the kind of lie-infested environment we live in. Having a basic faith in one's own goodness, and the goodness of most of the people we associate with, is not a weakness. It is a strength that allows us to be reasonable in our attempts to make sense out of a world that seems so senseless. It is a weakness to abandon hope at ever arriving at the truth amidst a blizzard of lies. "Truth will out" but it can take a long time and many of the details are often lost in the process. Honesty is the only sustainable policy. Herb Ruhs, MD I'm in no way even semi-informed on such things, and every economic observation I ever make is just peeking and peering out the seat of my pants, but I don't think giant corporations -- even drug store chains or big dairies -- should be allowed to exist. Helen & Harry
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