Friday, May 25, 2018

Spin in the Open Society, Or the Old Rope a Dope

A few years back, in 2009, I told George Soros that he shouldn't believe his own spin.

The truth is that I no longer saw anything very progressive about socialism, if I ever did, especially if it plays on the manipulative function of language to spin the truth.

His motto was "I may be wrong and you may be right, and with an effort we may get closer to the truth." And I don't see how socialism or progressivism - or the Open Society Institute, for that matter - promotes his idea of open society, which is all about searching for truth and correcting one's own errors, and not about spinning it.

Popper knew all too well that what we say may affect what we do, and he also knew that spin is all about lies and not about truth.

There is still the question whether you should believe your own spin.

The spin was that he had colluded with the Russians to "Hack the election" and was too thin-skinned to take the rough and tumble of hardball politics.

Progressives not only believed this spin, they did everything they could to spread it, and to spin it further.

Once again believing their own spin, spun it still further to be both proof of obstruction of justice and proof that Trump had indeed colluded with the Russians.

For why else would he fire him except to keep him from probing too deeply into his collusion with the Russians? Never for a moment did they pause to consider the possibility that Trump fired Comey for an entirely different but all too obvious reason: not because Comey was getting too close to home, but because he was studiously ignoring his government's leaks to the press - the only crimes we actually knew to have occurred and the crimes that Trump wanted Comey to investigate - and because he had already figured out that Comey himself was one of the principal leakers.

https://spectator.org/spin-in-the-open-society-or-the-old-rope-a-dope/ 

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