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lying

Destroyer of worlds

January 29, 2017 by Pen Leave a Comment

We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

—Robert J. Oppenheimer, Physicist, Manhattan Project


What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty; your schools are no good; you have no jobs; 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?

— Donald Trump, In Charge of the Nuclear Arsenal of the United States of America


Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

— Old American Alternative Fact

Believe whatever you will. I will not preach to you, for I am an atheist. I have no holy books. I steal the good ideas I find and share them freely. I do not believe in a vengeful god, or many petty deities. I am content to live my life without the hope of eternal reward.

It bothers me that Donald J. Trump just gave preferential treatment to immigrants who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. Our newly appointed leader has expressed a preference for bringing into the nation called the United States more of the type of people who somehow voted for him despite his pussy grabbing penchant. That’s one of the things that bothers me about any kind of theological fundamentalism. Fundamentalism tends to cause tunnel vision. So does faith.

Those tired, poor, huddled masses who are not whatever label voted your way might choose your worldview, if only you were willing to feed them, clothe them, lend them your ear. At our core, we all yearn for a tribe.

That’s the basic problem with the Donald. His tribe needs exclusivity, and it panders to values it does not really believe. Trump no more believes in the theology of Christianity than he believes in Cthulhu. The man just says whatever he thinks you want to hear. Or what he thinks enough voters want to hear to elevate him into the your sphere of worship. That’s where he really thrives. When he feels adulated.

What’s he done in his first week under that giant dome of light should make you afraid. It doesn’t matter how you identify. Trump is no more pro Christian than he is pro Satanist. Or pro BDSM. Trump is for team Trump. Period. He’ll tell you that you are fired the moment you aren’t useful to his false narrative.

You should be scared when someone who lies without actually believing he is lying has access to nuclear codes.

“I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” — Donald J. Trump

Except that never happened. No one in Jersey City, of any theology, was cheering. This is just another of Trump’s thousands of alternative facts.

In the real world, the one that you and I share, whether we want to or not, Trump is creating a world that denies hope to those who need it most. A world that denies basic needs to those who could thrive in world where there is plenty to go around and the only reason people suffer and starve is because of issues with distribution.

I will not be quiet until the delusional madman no longer has access to power. Especially the power of thermonuclear annihilation. I hope you’ll join me in the #resistance.

God knows that the huddled masses could use our voices so they can cling to the hope he is trying to deny them.

Filed Under: Essays, Personal Tagged With: #resist, alienating, aliens, divisive, immigration, lying, trump

Alternative facts are lies

January 22, 2017 by Pen Leave a Comment

fact

noun

  1. something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
  2. something known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
  3. a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.

Lying is problematic. I speak as an accomplished liar. I learned the skill of lying early in life. Used lies to keep the machine that is a nuclear family running. I won’t go into all the details in this post because it isn’t primarily about me. This post is primarily about the idea that lying is toxic. Someone much smarter than I am has said it better than I can.

“Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.”
― Sam Harris, Lying

Donald Trump is a liar in charge of a team of hand picked liars. No matter how many times you make a false claim, it is still not true. Alternative facts do not exist. Whether or not you voted for Trump, it is problematic that his campaign was one made up of lies, and that he is (unsurprisingly) kicking off his presidency with more lies.

The Trump team’s most recent lie has been to make the false claim that his inauguration was the best attended in the history of U.S. inaugurations. Lie. It is an important lie? You might not think so. I think all lies are important because they chip away at reality. Should a president be busily engaged in creating a false reality? I think that is extremely dangerous. Estimates from people I trust more than Trump tell me that about 160,000 people attended his inauguration while about 470,000 protested it the next day in the same city. This doesn’t count all the people elsewhere in the world who are concerned about Donald Trump holding the most powerful position in the most powerful country in the world.

The Washington Post recently reported that of 52 claims made by Trump during the election cycle, only four percent could be verified as completely factual. That means 96% of the things Trump was saying when he was campaigning for the highest office in the land were either only partially true or were outright lies. Does that bother you? It certainly bothers me. In fact, it terrifies me.

Trump doesn’t live in the same reality I am in. He exists in a world of lies that continuously pour out of his mouth. In fact, he lies so much I suspect he is at the point where the lying is pathological. Either that or Trump is a sociopath with antisocial personality disorder. Those afflicted with the mental condition know they are lying but aren’t bothered by it. These are the kind of people who claim that someone they raped ‘wanted it’ because they were wearing provocative clothing. People who do this need are extremely dangerous and have a disproportionately negative effect on society and its institutions.

A president who refuses to cooperate with others and presents ‘alternative facts’ is not a president I want in power. People who do this cannot be ignored because they are busy trying to reshape reality in their own image and that ripples out into society in ways that are likely to tear it apart. I’m making a prediction that this carefully crafted false reality is only just starting to grow like a cancer in the belly of our country. If we allow it to go untreated, it remains to be seen how many people will needlessly suffer as a result. In world where there is more than enough to go around so that everyone can have food, shelter and access to medical care, Trump is the antithesis of making anything great. He’s more likely to foolishly start the third and possibly last great war our species will fight.

I’m with all those who are against our new liar in chief. Things are going to get much worse before they get better. Today, I can still openly complain about the problems with the new administration. I suspect that, if we are not ready to fight to keep things this way, voices like mine will be silenced one by one until the only voices left are the ones currently holding the power. I’m willing to fight to keep that from becoming a reality. I’m not willing to pay for any new walls, and I’m not willing to be quiet while others are forced to pay for them.

Filed Under: Essays, Personal Tagged With: alternative facts, facts, inaguration, liars, lying, trump

Othered

November 18, 2016 by Pen Leave a Comment

You’ll have to take it on faith when I tell you that I understand how a coward thinks. I used to get beat up after school. Not because I was a coward. Mostly, I think, it happened because words matter.

I had so many to choose from, and I loved that.

I love that fact still.

The coward’s way is the ability to stop listening. To filter out the voices that disagree. The ones that offer another perspective.

The ones that are smarter than I am. They are better at othering than I am.

It’s all scalable. I’m not, by any measure, the smartest one. I hope only to be among those found, by the measure of history, to be one of the ones most able to listen.

I probably won’t matter enough for history to notice, but that’s most of us. That’s the 99%. I love them, and I wouldn’t mind being relegated into their tribe.

I was only human.

It is why I unblocked every single person I’d ever blocked recently. We all have a voice, and I want to take every one I have the time for into consideration. If this is a popularity contest, and it is, then I need to figure out how a spray tan man took the highest office in the land. Then I need to figure out how to end his reign.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. And everything else that has been observed by the weak who refused to give away their power.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Refuse to filter out that with which you cannot stomach. You will grow stronger. As a coward who wishes to grow into some other state of being, I can tell you from long experience that scars are not shame. Wear them proudly.

Write down the names of your enemies. Burn them in effigy. Join your tribe with that of another and rejoice. The weak ones always win when they band together and make demands.

We can do that. If we overcome the fear.

I will not allow my weakness to be my master. Not should you. Study your enemies. Invite them into you house. Tell your tribe to keep their knives sharpened and their eyes and ears always open.

We win because we are legion and they are cowards more craven than we.

I will fight. Will you be my tribe?

I won’t other you. I won’t let them other you. I won’t take your humanity away just because we’re different. You can be my tribe, if you learn to listen.

Tear down the wall, or just refuse them the power to build it.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Donald Trump, essay, listening, lying, orange rejection, other, othered, possible futures, tribes, trump

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