Why it matters, part 1

I regret that this may come as a shock to some, but you need to know it—the world is filled with lying liars who lie.

It is possible that once upon a time this mattered less, because people would be called on it, but now that doesn’t happen that much. People say blatantly false things, and other people repeat it and share it and validate it, and there is no reckoning for it.

Let’s look at the Donald Trump thing:

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/07/normal-0-donald-trump-is-big-fat-idiot.html

I have since been able to determine that the quote did not originate with Donald Trump, but has been floating around the internet for several years now. This makes sense because the Supreme Court decision was just the last step in a fairly long history for the Affordable Care Act.

My post went over the falsehoods in the quote, which people were not really bothering to correct. In addition, no one is bothering to correct the misquote. It is a false attribution attached to false information that is flying around the Internet, and quite popular.

(It would be reasonable to ask me if I feel guilty about the title of that blog post now, and you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it’s still true for other reasons, and it has a nice ring. I may just be a bad person.)

The lying is pretty bad, and will be getting much worse soon, as this is a campaign year.

For example, in March there was a Romney ad quoting Obama, making it sound as if he was not confident about the economy, but it was actually Obama quoting a McCain ad. Now there is a different ad where it sounds like the president is giving no credit to business owners because the quote has been so distorted and taken out of context, and there is just no shame in this. People pass around the altered quote and they get all hot and bothered over it, and maybe they wouldn’t like the original quote, but they should at least be deciding on full information.

This is not to say that the other side is innocent. Romney’s “I like to fire people” quote was referring to healthcare choice, and there have been recent references to Romney’s tax plan sending 800,000 jobs overseas, though apparently the initial study was not specific to Romney’s plan, but with similar priorities.

My bias towards the Democrat side could me let this go, because those distortions are closer to the truth than the Romney ones. Actually, “I like firing people” seems really close to being a Freudian slip. However, mainly I want more. I want better. If people disagree with me, that’s okay. I’m a big girl and my self-worth is not caught up in never facing any conflict. I want it to be for real reasons though.

Unfortunately, the lack of regard for the truth is tied in with a lack of regard for other things as well, and it’s leading down a bad road. For example, I just found this article today:

http://www.nationalmemo.com/republicans-block-funding-for-life-saving-coal-mining-regulation/?author_name=lynn-zhong

The level of discourse has sunk so low that they are actually blocking efforts to protect workers in a dangerous field. It doesn’t matter that things are getting worse. It doesn’t matter that previous measures worked without destroying the industry. There can’t be any compromise. Generally what gets me upset here is that you have people voting against their own interests, and my mind boggles at the stupidity of it all, but there is actually something even more destructive going on, and I intend to hit that tomorrow.