In response to my “This is a Piece of Advice You MUST Have” Peter writes:

You are right about not using “lie” or “liar” freely. This is good advice and everyone follows it.

Since everyone follows it, it is a good tool. Liars are used to no one having the guts to call them on it. When you have enough, you fold your arms, look them straight in the eye and tell them “Quit lying.”

They are usually flabbergasted because no one had the guts to say that before. If they fain outrage and tell you not to call them a liar you just say “Then stop lying.”

This will improve or (better?) end the conversation. Usually, you will get excellent if temporary results. If they are not sociopaths or people who like to behave like sociopaths, they may begin to say to themselves “I am a liar,” and maybe, just maybe their behavior will one day improve.

But probably not.

At least it feels good to call a spade a spade, a liar a liar.

Comment by Peter — 1/10/2006 @ 1:29 pm

MY REPLY:

“This is good advice and everyone follows it.”

This is not a putdown to me. CS Lewis said, “Prophets come among men, not to tell them new truths, but to remind them of truths they already know.”

Most of what I write should sound very familiar to you. This is a lack of ego on my part. I think I have the special skill and background — and the time — to think out EXACTLY the ideas you are hitting around on the
edges.

You have told me that. One reason you don’t comment many times is because you smell a rat in what you are hearing, and when I say it, your reaction, “That’s IT, that’s it exactly!”

As LibAnon puts it,

In our defense, Bob, I’ll say that your posts (especially since the New Year) don’t always leave much room for a response other than “Wow!” It’s like looking at the Grand Canyon or something.
Speaking for strictly for myself, I find there’s often a lot of envy mixed in as well. I find myself thinking, “I wish *I* could have written that.”
But in my more lucid moments, I realize that a gift like yours comes at a personal price, and I’m not sure it’s one I’d have been willing to pay.

Comment by LibAnon — 1/8/2006

Peter is dead on target. Remember that I was talking about people who use the word “Liar” regularly. One of the byproducts of using it regularly is that when you do use it, it had no punch. If you are known as someone who almost never calls someone a liar, it hits home as Peter says it does.

If I call someone a liar, the conversation is, for practical purposes, at an end. Remember that any conversation consists of words. If you accuse someone of lying, it is exactly like telling someone who challenges you to a fistfight, “But you are the kindsof person who would pull a shiv out of his back pocket.”

That means you are not about to engage in a fight with him that is limited to fists.

Exactly the same is true of the more important fight, the fights with words. If he is the kind of person who pulls out a lie, there is no basis for discussion.

So the FIRST rule about th words lit and liar is that you should use it seldom, and, as Peter says, you should use it when it fits.

But Peter also said it ends the conversation. That is where he did not go far enough.

The first rule of using lie and liars is that they must only be used very seldom.

But RULE TwO: is just as important: when you use the word lie or liar you must FOLLOW IT UP.

Let us return tot he example of the fist fight. What if you accused somebody of being a hunk of trash who would pull a shiv inthe middle of a fist fight and then he said, “Well, OK, let’s wrestle instead.”

It SHOULD be pretty obvious that a hunk of trash who will pull a shiv in a fist fight will also pull a shiv in a wrestling match.

So if you agree to a westling march with that same person, you were clearly lying when you said he was the sort of person who would pull a knife in a boxing match.

I will give you a classic example of someone who follows step one, not using lie or liar frequently, but made liars of themselves by NOT FOLLOWING UP on it.

National Review almost never uses the word “lie.” So when they had a cover article which said that gun control was based on Lies, it had shock value. The article documented case after case of how anti-gun forces just plain lie and know it.

So far, so good.

But the next time one of those same liberals made a statement on an issue, they took it with all the seriousness they had taken it before. So they had exposed the pulling of a shiv in the middle of a boxing match and then they went right back to giving full respect to the word of that trash when the fight turned to wrestling, ie, some other issue.

That is what respectable conservatism is based on. And National Review is the flagship of respectable conservatism.

If you truly believe someone is a hunk of trash who pulled a shiv in the middle of a boxing match, that fact will never be forgotten.

You do not just shout, “He’s a liara” if you have to engage him again, but you never forget that he IS a liar.

Whenever that hunk of trash says he is engaged in a fair fight, you will remind everybody of the instance where he said that and LIED. So if you take the words lie and liar seriously, the instance of an outright lie is not limited to one particular article when gunc ontrol is the hot issue.

Follow up is also what I call memory. I call myself a man with a memory. If you actually lied and I proved it, I will remind the audience of that one proven instance every single time we debate. If you puled a shiv in a boxing match, I will not forget it next year when we are about to wrestle.

If I do, then ***I*** am the liar.

There are TWO rules about lies and liars:

1) Don’t use the words routinely and

2) Once you use it on somebody, NEVER let them forget it.

If you violate rule 2, then YOU are the liar.