Lies and Damned Lies

[Lightning Rod]

I think this is a good analysis, X
I call what you are talking about, 'willful ingorance.' It's the refusal to inform yourself before you open your big mouth.

deceit is different, it's a first degree iie

[Lightning Rod]

clarification:

I hope nobody mistakes my discourse here as being self-righteous
I'll lie to you in a heartbeat if it's necessary
I'm human, I'll try to protect myself like anyone else
but I understand acutely the price of a lie....it's high
the only lies I really try to avoid are the ones we tell to ourselves
they really render us weak

[stilltrucking]

Doreen wrote

I like to tell my daughter the truth.... that there's no pot smoking in my house.

....

I've never been good at logic problems like that, I can honestly say, so I'm not going to even attempt an answer.

I am not interested in logic problesm either. That is why I dropped out of law school after two weeks.

Silent woman such a beautiful soul. She went for the truth and told her daughter. It would have been better if she had not. At least not till later. But maybe I am wrong. What she told her kid was if you ever want to smoke it we will do it together.



Not so much lying that children do as a magical language. Children have not closed their accounts with reality as we have done. I am just a want to be phenomenologist.

What do I know about kids.

I am honest to a fault. That is why I have a net worth of over fifty billion dollars.

Not all people avoid pain. Some enjoy it.

[Lightning Rod]

speak of bullshit questions, here is the classic logic problem about lies and the truth:

There are two kinds of people on a mysterious island. There are so-called Honestants who speak always the truth, and the others are Swindlecants who always lie.
Three fellows (A, B and C) are having a quarrel at the market. A gringo goes by and asks the A fellow: "Are you an Honestant or a Swindlecant?" The answer is incomprehensible so the gringo asks B: "What did A say?" B answers: "A said that he is a Swindlecant." And to that says the fellow C: "Do not believe B, he is lying!"

Who is a Swindlecant, B or C or both?

ok, here's the answer to the question that nobody seems to be willing to google

B is the liar
how do we know this?
because when A gave an incomprehensible answer, and then B said, 'he said he was a Swindlecant.'
Immediately we know that was a lie. Why? because either a Swindlecant or an Honestant would give the same answer to the question. They would both say they were Honestants. Therefore it is a nil answer. We don't know if A is lying or telling the truth, but that doesn't matter. The question is about B and C. Since B said that A said that he was a Swindlecant, we know that B is a Swindlecant. And because C said B was a liar, we know that C is an Honestant.


but maybe this is beyond people who can't tell the diff between a truth and a lie

[stilltrucking]

Not that interested in thinking it through, could I just run one of those new fangled brain scans on them instead. See what part of their brains lights up?

It will come down to that sooner then we think.

Assuming the world does not end in the next 15 years or so.

[stilltrucking]

Just lazy I guess or a flashback to law school

I did go to law school for two weeks. And it was that very question in our logic text book that ended my brilliant career as the next Clarence Darrow.

Someone told me that the law has nothing to do with right and wrong. It is about justice. . Ha.

Interesting topic Clay, of course you are starting with the Mark Twain quote about statisticians . Statistics for The Behavioral Sciences is the textbook that ended my twelve year career as a college sophomore.

What interests me in my childless old age is children. There is the old adage, :

have children and let them raise you

. I am going to have to raise myself,

I still think I figured out how to lie on my own. Not that my parents did not tell me lies.

To paraphrase kurt vonnegut i

Live by the lies that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html

[Doreen Peri]

A man appeared to be asleep and his wife asked him, "Are you awake? I want to to talk to you about something important."

He replied, "No, I'm sleeping."

She said, "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Your chronic lying."

He said, "Leave me alone. I'm sleeping."

She said, "No you're not! You're awake. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to talk to me."

He replied, "No, you're wrong. I talk in my sleep."

So, was he a liar?

LOL

I just made that up.

Sounds like it, huh?

[stilltrucking]

Oh god Doreen

yes very good

but

Please don't let me tell you a good old boys tale sic tail?

about the guy in Craigsville Virginia who felt a terrible draft of cold air while he was sleeping next to his wife.

pretty weird story but I laughed along with the rest of the hillbillies.

maybe not laughed but shook my head and smiled.

absolutely nothing to do with Clay's thread but..

never mind

I never been married but I have been a wanna be phenomenologist for over thirty years now.
Marriage an interesting subject for observation.

sorry for the ramble clay
I can't tell you how scared sh_tless of logic I am

every time i read an opinion by one of GWB's white house lawyer. Man you can't beat that guys logic I forgot his name Yoo something..

[Lightning Rod]

I was thinking of renaming this thread

what do you think about "Pinocchio's Nose?"
it just keeps growing

[XPress]

clarification:

I hope nobody mistakes my discourse here as being self-righteous
I'll lie to you in a heartbeat if it's necessary

As they say, to err is human, so we all do it, from time to time, and there may even be times when we can justify the occassional lie, but I think the journey we set out on should be one where we seek to rise above our base urges, to improve ourselves, and to evolve, after all, we sit typing on these computers of ours, discussing these things, only because we can, because the men who came before us, sought to push barriers, and to improve themselves.

By improving ourselves, and improving the world we live in, we're creating a legacy, for our children (for those who have them) and for their children.

On another thread someone said life was pointless, or some drivel like that, but there, in that quest, is a point to life, a simple point, that we can all aspire to, and part of the journey, to that destination, part of that process, of creating that legacy, for our children, and their children, and the all the children of the world, is self-improvement.

We can stay as selfish individuals, cowards, afraid of the "pain", or we can rise as men of courage, and better ourselves, so that we can better the future, for those who follow.

Maybe I'm young, maybe I'm idealistic, but if I am, it's still nice to have a point, to have a purpose, and to know that I might just be putting a smile on someones face, in the future, by what I'm doing today.

I guess it's also the path to immortality, what greater way is there to live forever, than by living on as a positive influence, on the future?

If my names not remembered, I don't think I'd be to bothered, but if I know that generations from now people will smile, because of something I said, or did, even if I don't get credit for it, then I'd be a happy man, and I'd know I'd have achieved true immortality.

I guess it's sort of like Buddhism, you know, reincarnation, karma, and the quest for Nirvana, and I think part of that process is a journey of improvement, and evolution, and part of that journey is learning to grow from the lying child, into the honest, selfless adult, no longer afraid of the "pain", but instead standing strong, tall, and courageous, for the greater good of everyone.

(and yes, I am aware I can go on, and on, and on sometimes, and that I'd make a good entrant for the talking Olympics :p)

[Lightning Rod]

X, I wanna take another pause to apologize to you for my first impression of you.
I don't usually sink to namecalling, but I will just this time. You are thoughtful and focused and articulate and you add much to the discourse here. (plus, you usually agree with me.....haha)

[silent woman]

for what it is worth

George Jackson the Soledad brother on being born innocent and trusting

But I wasn't born this way. Perhaps this same psychiatrist would diagnose from the overreactions that I am not a very nice person. But again I refer you to the fact that I was born innocent and trusting. The instinct to survive and all that springs from it developed in me, as it is today out of necessity.

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/soledadbro.html

nurture nature round and round it goes.
I am an ignorant child about nature
about the time I finally made junior standing I decided on an anthropology major.

I truly believed that the proper study for man is mankind.

Now it has come to this.

[Arcadia]

interesting thread but I only read the first two pages!

let´s see...

. for me a lie-lie: requires a plus of conscious intention plus some kind of damage that could have been (consciously) avoided by the liar (yourself or not). When you share enough time with someone (you included) it´s easy to know most of the time when that happens.

. & kids sometimes can tell the truth telling lies ... they maybe only need good readers!!!

[stilltrucking]

The improvers of mankind and the "Holy Lie"

This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact -- that of the so-called pia fraus [holy lie] -- offered me the first approach to this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral."

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, "The 'Improvers' of Mankind," Paragraph 5

Nietzsche Quotes

[mtmynd]

... all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral. - Nietzsche

Insight! What good is all the knowledge we amuse ourselves with if not for the occasional insight that penetrates mind and fills the soul?