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Believing in impossible things: the third option between stupid or liar
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. — Lewis Carrol

Adam Carolla. From Tinseltown, via Shutterstock.
Stupid or liar. It always comes back to stupid or liar — Adam Carolla
When I was in college, some NPC lefties were arguing about George W. Bush. One said that Bush was dumb and the other said that Bush was an evil manipulator. Somehow they agreed. I am no Aristotle, but I have some logic in me. I pointed out that Bush could not be both dumb and an Othello of country rubes at the same time, just as two objects cannot exist at the same place at the same time. I felt quite satisfied with myself, and I went to sleep. I was wrong to do so. I should have stayed up and done more to understand why people didn’t care about what is logical, which would be a bit more useful than what I learned in classes the day after.
Since then my memory has been collecting instances of illogic, and I have concluded that there is something between stupid and liar. Adam Carolla has a bit he does after somebody says something that is obviously false. He asks, “So is this person stupid or a liar.” He has asked this question so many times he just goes “stupid-or-liar,” like it’s all one word now. After deep contemplation with some Pallet Jack IPAs, I have concluded that there is another option between stupid and liar.
One of my favorite stories ever told by John Podhoretz seems to frustrate the stupid or liar binary. I know that JPod isn’t all that useful for his political takes but he has his finger on the pulse of upper-class New York people. Not so much the rest of the country, but New York he knows about.
During the Democratic Presidential candidate debate in 2016, Kamala Harris accused Joe Biden of being a racist because he opposed some form of forced racial bus integration at some point. JPod recounted how in New York, both black and white parents hated forced bussing. The kids had to get up forty-five minutes early to go to a school they didn’t like, and they were too sleepy to learn anything. Everyone universally hated it according to Pod. Then something interesting happened: After Kamala Harris accused Joe Biden, some leftists thought, “Well… maybe forced busing wasn’t that bad?”
Now Kamala lying to play the race card makes perfect sense. It’s conventional falsification for political gain. It’s as common as sunshine in July. But according to JPod, the lefties who ought to know better actually reconsidered the policy that they knew from past experience had horrible consequences.
JPod’s dogmatic lefty friends are not stupid, and I don’t think that they were being dishonest. Something about political allegiance twists the plain truth. You see, people were worried that Joe Biden was a moderate squish, so it might be politically helpful to pretend that there were benefits to forced bussing. But rather than merely pretend, JPods lefty friends believed it in some way, even though the logical parts of their brains had direct experience that it was a bad policy. There was a middle ground between stupid and liar.
There are a lot of examples of this in the more degenerate versions of Islam. Ayan Hirsi Ali was saying that the Quran advocates for wife beating. The Islamist girls she was arguing with at university mentioned that the Quran said no such thing. She then took out a Quran and went to Surah 4:34 which says exactly that. Then immediately the girls defended the Quran saying that the Quran said that she could not be beaten with anything bigger than a toothbrush
Likewise, it is not uncommon for anti-semites of the Muslim variety who say that the atrocities of October 7th did not happen, were actually carried out by Jews, or that if Muslim Palestinians did carry them out, they were justified. A lawyer friend of mine thinks this means that everyone knows the Truth and just lies about it constantly.
I am always nervous to argue about lawyers as it is similar to asking an NBA player to a game of hoops. But I think my lawyer friend is a bit off there. I think the Muslim girls who argued with Ayan Hirsi Ali did not read the Quran. They read two arguments online. That the Quran prohibits wife beating and that the Quran says that only light wife beating is permitted. Whatever supported Islam and her victimhood status was right, so they didn’t need to think about this contradiction (this was a college campus, after all, so it was important that the girls got victim points by being Muslim).
As John Derbyshire has noted, humans aren’t really wired for Truth, scientific rigor or objective accuracy. As he puts it:
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust.
Good scientists operate with the idea that there is a greater Truth to how the physical world operates, and that greater Truth is independent of whatever the tribe, the King or the church says. So obviously scientists are genetic freaks. A pitiless evolution selected for human beings who believed in whatever tribal gods were useful at the time. Group cohesion is necessary for immediate survival for the last 100,000 years or so of human prehistory. The pursuit of Platonic Truth, not so much.
Think of Socrates being killed for questioning the Athenian gods or Jesus being persecuted by the Pharisees. It’s been a risky move to base one’s opinions on the truth as one can see it, rather than follow the tribe backed by religious orthodoxy.
Adam Carolla needs to understand the psychology of someone like Pontius Pilate. Christ said, “Everyone on the side of Truth stands with me.” Pontius Pilate responded, “What is truth?” (John 18:34). Power and politics determined what truth was for Pontius Pilate. He was a skilled politician, after all, and politicians are men of the world. How fitting that before Pontius implied the relativity of truth Jesus said that he and his disciples were not of the world (John 17:14).
Adam Carolla is an atheist, but he is a comedian, and a comedian is about as far as you can get from a worldly politician without being a monk or the logos made flesh.* He has to speak as truthfully as he can or his comedy falls apart like a shoddily made building.
So the contest between Truth and worldly power is eternal. There will always be politicians like Pontius Pilate and there will always be citizens who ignore their own direct experiences. But the Truth, like the Gods of the Copybook Headings, will always return, and comedy will always be funnier if it adheres to the Truth.
Published in General
I knew your post would be worth reading, Henry. Thanks.
Very well put, Henry.
Humans can very much say something that is not objectively true without lying. What they know is wrong, even if it contradicts something else they know.
As usual, your insights are welcome. I wish this had more comments.
Back when competition was getting stiff in our line-of-business, an executive called a meeting and put up a list of goals that we had to achieve in the next few months. Sitting the audience was the one true genius with whom I have ever been personally acquainted, and I’m not talking about myself. I have a bit more in the way of social skills than he had. He just stood up and pointed out that two of the goals were mutually exclusive.
How did an accomplished executive come up with that list, prepare Powerpoint charts, schedule a meeting/presentation, presumably review the charts, and miss that point?
I question whether you understand stupidity. Your confusion comes from conflating stupidity and low intelligence. The brainiest person in the world can be stupid. A moron is not necessarily stupid.
A mutually exclusive thing I’ve thought about recently is all these town names with directions attached, often because they used to be part of the other town. South Pasadena for example. If you’re no longer part of Pasadena you’re not the south part of Pasadena. Then there’s West Hollywood which is its own city, though Hollywood is not.
An example more fitting to the serious ones in your post, how about all the gay AIDS activists, and gay victims of that disease, all the while believing AIDS was just as deadly for heterosexuals.
And now, years later, AIDS medicine commercials feature gay couples.
And married couples who want to have children, must nevertheless use condoms, ALWAYS.
That all-truth-all-the-time (and nothing but) was the essence of Spock. That’s what made him an interesting alien, and someone who could be counted on for information.
or short-sighted. A conservative understands the left side of the argument because it is pushed in the Education System, Corporate Media, and in some company at work (ever had to take a DEI training class – they are awful). Most on the left are not exposed to the rights argument (or limited to the worst communicator).
Which alleged atrocities?
There were early claims of significant numbers of beheaded babies. I think that those were thoroughly debunked.
There was an early claim of a baby found in an oven. I think that this one has been thoroughly debunked.
There are many claims of mass rape, with virtually no evidence. No forensic evidence, no photographic or video evidence. Here is the UN report on the issue. It does report “credible” evidence of rape and gang rape at the music festival, based on witness reports, but based on other reporting, many of the witnesses lack any credibility, in my view.
One of the strange things is that, reportedly, Hamas live streamed body cams that, according to the Times of London, “showed them ruthlessly gunning down men, women, and children, torching homes, shooting dogs and hauling off screaming and crying civilians as hostages.” (Story here.) This is the story that says, with respect to the rape allegations on October 7, “investigators say the evidence does not stand up to scrutiny.” The UN report indicates that it reviewed digital information available online “depicting a range of egregious violations” but that “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence was found.” It did find images of some naked or partially naked bodies that could be “circumstantial” evidence, but provided no details.
There is quite a bit of evidence that some of the Israelis killed on October 7 were killed by Israeli forces themselves. I don’t think that anyone has good information about how many.
Perhaps you refer to other actions as “atrocities,” such as the killing of children. From the reports that I’ve seen, about 36 Israeli children were killed in the October 7 attack. Reports indicate that roughly 15,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, a ratio of approximately 400:1.
The reason that I mention these death tolls among children is to illustrate that, if you include such events as “atrocities,” then the Israelis are vastly worse than the Palestinians, empirically speaking.
I think that this particular portion of the OP undermines its thesis, in a couple of ways:
Please never comment on anything I write from now on. This is how your nonsense works. You will find some detail that has been reported that might or might not be accurate. Then you use it to dismiss all of the actual slaughter that Hamas did.
The facts don’t really matter to you. What matters is the narrative that the Joos are bad. It’s like arguing that the Holocaust had only 5.5 million Jewish deaths rather than 6 million so we should dismiss the Holocaust as being unimportant.
I know you are a lawyer so drowning people in data to misdirect them from a larger point is a skill you’ve developed but it’s bothersome here where there is so much better content to read.