(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.)
I wouldn’t know, but I suppose if you’re in a tournament of some sort, and you’re scheduled to face off day after day against stiff competition, it would be an experience that would affect you in various ways. On the one hand, this is what you’ve been training for, isn’t it? On the other hand, every day you’re thrown into the fire. Every minute you’re competing, it’s crunch time— one false move and you could be eliminated. But every minute you’re not competing, you’re trying to make the right choices about warming up, preparing, staying sharp but not overdoing it, etc.
So, the process makes you better, and maybe even gets you to heights you’d have never seen otherwise. This would be the good thing about competition. Then there’s the pass/fail aspect of it— the sense that a loss was a failure, and it invalidates all the improvement and achievement that came before. This is what I don’t like about sports, and about competition in general. The pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of wins are not the same thing, and contrary to the cherished beliefs of many, I’m not even sure they’re consistently related.
The Trump era, while disgusting for various reasons, feels invigorating to me. It’s like a tournament where my critical thinking, empathy, philosophy, and sense of humor are tested all day long.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to learn how to affect people through craft. I’ve worked hard on the skill of making people laugh, and I’ve also tried my hand at the much more quixotic mission of making them think.
In short, I’ve tried to entertain and I’ve tried to persuade. Both of these things take a lot of practice, as well as a lot of thought and preparation. Some people focus mostly on the more sordid techniques of persuasion, where you take advantage of the less admirable parts of human psychology to win people over. This is an effective method, and often leads to money and power, but depending on the breaks, it can also lead to you sitting in a bunker with a pistol and a small coterie of lickspittle lackeys.
Others, like me, are fascinated by the psychology of persuasion, but also distracted by truth. I find truth to be the ace that takes every trick, the shining grail that can make a fruitless search feel like a noble pursuit.
But if you’re serious about truth, and you know even a little about the way human minds work, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the game isn’t worth the candle. Incidentally, I use that phrase mostly because it sounds good. I’m not at all sure what it means.
Because truth requires more than just good intentions, being a good person, and so forth. You can’t just expose the lies of the people on the other side. That’s the easiest thing in the world. There is a round the clock army of Machiavellian weasels doing the work for you, regardless of which camp you’re in. All you have to do is memorize a few of their talking points, or if that’s too much work, just link to the article.
The tricky thing about truth is that isn’t really the truth unless it’s the whole truth. And I’ve come to believe that a half-truth is actually worse than a total lie.
If you have access to newspapers and the internet, and a little bit of brainpower, you can find out which Trump statements are out and out lies, and you can also parse the language of Trump lackeys to see whether they’ve crossed the rubicon from half truths to total lies. Trump, of course, traffics in both , and so do his most vocal defenders, but it’s always fun to play the parlor game of watching the ostensibly better angels like Gen. Kelly as they play Chicken with the truth, eventually deciding to just drive off the cliff rather than concede defeat. (Another example of the pursuit of wins being at odds with the pursuit of excellence, which I submit is probably something generals of integrity have always wrestled with since the first general crawled up on land and sprouted khakis.)
The day after the election, I was desperately trying to find something positive about our country in that moment. I still believe what I told myself that day, which is that this situation forces us to consider big questions like what kind of place is America, what kind of place should it be in the future, what will we tolerate, what do liberalism and conservatism mean and what do they stand for, etc.
In the past, for example, it was easy to pretend that racism was on the ropes in this country. Now, it’s easy to see that, in fact, I’ve just organized my life to avoid meeting racists. I live in a part of the country where racism is only inconsistently rewarded, especially in its most craven form. And one of the few perks of being only intermittently paid to work is that I rarely have to sit and listen to a racist asshole spouting a bunch of horseshit.
So, I welcome the Trump era, as an athlete might welcome the increased challenges as he or she moves up the ladder.
But— it ain’t easy.
I’m literally trying to entertain people, and help them think, while also trying to hold myself to the same standard on truth and honesty I expect from civilians and politicians.
Now, when I say half-truths are worse than total lies, here’s what I mean.
I don’t mean that they’re morally worse, although sometimes that may be the case. I mean that they do more damage, and are generally responsible for more corruption, than out-and-out lies. This is for two reasons. They are much easier for a good person to accept as truth. Often, in fact, the half-truth owes its very existence to the unpalatable nature of baldfaced lies. Thus, a person who self-identifies as a truth teller will reach for the half-truth whenever actual truth threatens to be inconvenient.
They are also harder to refute. The genius of the half-truth is that the part that seems true shields the horseshit part, and you’re made to feel that you must refute the strong part of the argument in order to get at the part that really chaps your ass.
In short, the half-truth is the John and Yoko of the rhetorical world.
Our two political parties are both built on half-truths, which is appropriate given that our country was as well. (Some would argue that’s too generous; I’m hoping those people aren’t still reading this.)
In case your blood is already boiling, allow me to back those statements up.
Half-truths of the Democratic Party include, but are not limited to the following: political correctness is always for the best, racists are always wrong about everything, liberal policies always help the people they are supposed to help, calling out racists is always the best policy, Thomas Jefferson was a great man, etc., etc.
For the GOP, a brief sampling of half-truths could include: tax cuts are good, Christianity is inherently good, business is good for everybody, the free market should be allowed to proceed unfettered, freedom isn’t free, and so on.
All of these half-truths are taken on faith by their respective parties, and while some people might pick out one or two of them and say they are total lies, I think it’s fair to say there’s some truth in all those ideas. But what of it? Some truth isn’t enough for me. What makes them half-truths is what makes them dangerous. When you use a half-truth to bolster your argument, your critical thinking isn’t operating.
My breakfast this morning was peppered with half-truths, and would have been even more peppered had I read the Post letters column at the time. I try not to read this page while eating. Even when I’m not trying to keep food down, I usually avoid it because of things like this.
A reader writes in, commenting on a recent piece about sexual harassment, that the piece was biased because the celebrity harrassers mentioned included Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, and Bill O’Reilly, but not Anthony Weiner or Bill Clinton. I’m not here to defend Weiner or Clinton, even though I’m not convinced the crimes committed (or allegedly committed) by those two are even close to being as heinous as those of the pudding-hawking social critic. If you’re ranking them against the deuce of red faced media giants, it’s a little less cut and dried maybe, but still hard to argue that we’re talking about some demonstrable absolute equivalence. Even so, I grant the basic point, which is that we all are able to calibrate our outrage when our heroes or allies are exposed as bad actors.
That being said— I refer to the guy’s basic point, and not to what he actually wrote. The words he chose tipped him into half-truth territory.
He said that the piece’s failure to mention Clinton and Weiner when listing recent celebrity harrassers was “prima facie proof of fake, preening moral outrage.”
This may, in fact, be an example of the difficult to achieve “quarter truth,” because while it isn’t really proof, prima facie or otherwise, of anything of the sort, even if the statement were literally true,
the implication carried by this species of whataboutism is one of the most effective devices in the half-truther’s utility belt, and perhaps the most insidious of all.
Whataboutism probably predates the automobile, but the “he started it!” argument used by kids fighting in the back seat is arguably the archetypal example of the phenomenon.
It’s entirely fair to accuse liberals of hypocrisy on this, as well as on a host of other things, but I tend to get snippy at the notion that such an argument has anything at all to do with the moral culpability of anyone who’s committed sexual harassment or assault. I wonder if the United States will ever see a day when male abusers of women don’t inspire a debate about which political party enables sexual harassment more vigorously. Do the dynamic duo of Clinton and Weiner really somehow cancel out even one disgusting and cruel act by any number of prominent conservatives? For that matter, does the hypocritical moral piety of liberals really seem more outrageous than the conservative version? For Christ’s sake, even if I argue that one right wing guy or another should be in jail for the rest of his life, how is that more unfair than your contention that one of our guys should be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity? I feel guilty if I say something like, “I agree with Duke Ellington, who said yadda yadda.” That’s weaselly enough, to claim that some dead genius agrees with you, but claiming that an invisible omniscient giant who lives in the sky is backing you up would appear to be even more of a reach.
Let me close by pointing out, so that you don’t have to, that I’m well aware I’m decrying whataboutism while indulging in it. To which I can only reply, “He started it.”
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