Truth Isn’t Truth

Truth isn’t truth……

Excuse me, but it is.

I found it hard to believe that a man for whom I had so much respect after 9/11 could utter such a ridiculous phrase. Fuck you Rudy Giuliani.

Because you see, Truth is what it says…the Truth. It’s not negotiable – there aren’t any different forms of truth –it’s either the Truth, or it isn’t. It’s like News – News is neither positive nor negative; News is News – it’s merely a reflection in a mirror. News is what happens, anywhere, everywhere. News is not made up – it’s either happened or it hasn’t. And if it’s happened, it’s News. Like Truth. 

The trouble is that Giuliani just knows that half the population of America have dissolved into an age where Truth simply doesn’t matter anymore. So he just makes up an “alternative” narrative, which he stands up by backing it with “alternative” facts. Just like Trump, Erdoğan and Putin. Defenders of those compulsive liars no doubt find a great deal of comfort when protected against the massive intrusion of facts, or Truth.

Religious people often talk about the “Truth” when eulogising about what they believe – sorry, that doesn’t work. You cannot make up a Truth because that’s what you believe. You see, belief can be about true or false propositions, but a religious person will always accept them as being true. Truth is tangible –it can be proven – it exists. 

 So I truly believe that Truth, like reality, is nothing but the whole truth. Like somebody once said, it’s both sides of a coin. One side of the coin is just a perceived reality or part truth. The coin is the whole truth and is true all the time.

And of course, Giuliani knows that if Truth isn’t Truth, there would never be any proof that he ever made such a suggestion. What a gigantic twatfest that man is. And that’s the Truth…..

The relativity of truth: bring back Einstein!

I understand that Rudi Giuliani was a very good New York City mayor. He now is one of President Trump’s legal team though I don’t really understand his functions now. 

What he said in the CNN interview sounded weird, you know. But it actually wasn’t as weird as it seems. 

Let me explain it. Here’s the quotation: 

“Donald Trump says I didn’t talk about [former national security adviser Michael] Flynn with [then-FBI Director James] Comey. Comey says you did talk about it. So tell me what the truth is.”

This is exactly what I mean. Trump supporters would believe whatever he says. His haters would believe anything else. Who to believe then? I remember lots of noise about Paul Manafort and his connections to Russia. Now it is proved by the Mueller investigation that there was no Russian connection at all. Yes, he did it wrong but it he did it wrong with the Ukraine, not Russia. The Ukraine is not Russia, ok? The media accusations were loud but there was no desired outcome. Today most of the media do not want to talk about it because this accusation hasn’t become a fact. They just silently switch on to the next accusation – again, yet to be proven.

So to me it is obvious: the media picture is very different from what the reality is. This is, I think, what Giuliani wanted to emphasize. We live in a world where there are ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’ or just facts you don’t accept because you don’t like it. If you don’t like it then it simply doesn’t exist: what a perfect world… 

Donald Trump might have – I’m sure he has – his dirty secrets. But, on the other hand, the Mueller investigation seems to me a purely politically inspired affair. 

Nowadays the truth isn’t always truth: it depends on your positioning in space and time. It seems to be a very relative commodity. We need Albert Einstein to sort it out.

Non-Believers Need Not Apply

If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit.

~W.C. Fields

Last weekend, on NBC’s Meet The Press, Trump Solicitor Rudy Giuliani dumfounded host Chuck Todd with the phrase “Truth isn’t Truth”.

The quote is so odd that the BBC covered it this way: “Mr Giuliani then made his main point – that accusations of obstruction of justice against the president hinge on a conversation he had with then FBI director James Comey in February 2017, and that Mr Trump’s account of that conversation differs radically from Mr Comey’s.”

Let’s take this statement seriously and break it out. For our purposes we will forget that Mr. Trump said exactly why he fired the FBI Director in a later comment. The truth is that Mr. Giuliani is correct: it is not possible to know who is lying between Mr. Comey & Mr. Trump. In American slang, this is called a “he said, she said” and would simply be ignored by a court. Indeed, no lawyer would even try to admit such testimony. No video, no audio, and no witness: He said, she said.

So Rudy’s right, this will not stand as the truth in a court. But that’s because no court would confuse this with the truth. This is not a verifiable fact, its two different versions of the same conversation. But that isn’t my issue with the statement “Truth isn’t Truth”. 

The truth is that every major player at the White House is trying to confuse verifiable facts with opinion. Many are only too happy to accept this spiel because Trump’s truth dovetails nicely with their world views. 

Did Trump have the biggest Inauguration crowd in history? The facts say no but the alternative facts say yes. If you’re a racist, you desperately need to believe Trump because that gives your personal views confirmation. It then becomes imperative to accept alternative facts as real facts. You have a personal stake in believing Giuliani.

Now, we are finally getting at the heart of why I consider Mr. Giuliani’s statement so dangerous. We start with a perfectly legitimate statement: we cannot prove what happened in the conversation because we cannot prove who is telling the truth.

We then quickly take that perfectly legitimate statement, that real fact, and smear it all over everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth. What’s the proof? Who really knows the facts anyway; but we do know the press is fake news. Truth isn’t truth because it’s all he said, she said.

I am reminded of a game called Jenga. Basically, there’s a stack of wooden bricks and each player pulls a brick out. At some point, the entire wooden column comes crashing down because one, single wooden block was pulled out. We just don’t know which one will bring the entire scaffolding down; heaped across the table. 

Trump’s advisors are also playing a giant game of Jenga. They have the same problem; if they admit any lie has been disproved, they don’t know which lie will bring the entire steaming pile crashing down. If you’re a supporter, once you begin to question what you are being fed, when will you decide the entire thing is one giant lie?