Twisting truth is how a brute behaves. Telling lies is cruel brutality. Lies are betrayals. They do harm and hurt. Our messages can span the whole wide world. A lie can lead to hurt we never see. A lie is like a long range lethal shot. At Cambridge Analytics twisting the truth is OK. It’s recommended. This is the company funded by the Mercer family with links to Blackwater, the Prince and De Vos families.

If you do not want people walking on your beach, Cambridge Analytics says, don’t post a DO NOT WALK sign. Post a sign that says deadly sharks are in these waters.

Twist the truth. Create fear. Deter with lies.

An avalanche of lies

Words hurt and lies are hurt multipliers. Particularly when they are aimed at persons. We have no right to judge others, Jesus suggested, unless we are extremely well-versed in whatever we are judging. The one who judges is deemed the most likely to have a problem.

So what is twisting truth? State its effects. At worst, the effect is death. It is twisting the truth to assume all Muslims are terrorists, just as it is twisting truth to assume that all lily-white Southerners are white-supremacists. But as the harrowing account that will appear in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine says, a Muslim boy fell to such a twist.

A culture of lies

Broad prejudices based on lies are dramatic and obvious instances of how truth-twisting damages. Almost every instance of hate crime begins with a lie that wrongfully separates victims from the rest of humanity.

Terror is based on the twisting of truth. It is a lie to maintain that there is a literal paradise in which murderers will be celebrated and surrounded by sensual pleasures. We have no idea if there is anything once we lose our lives, however they are lost. The most hopeful supposition is that there is continuity and that it involves some capacity to overcome past sins such as twisting the truth or profit gouging.

The president is part of the problem

Our president has been seen as an inveterate liar and this has been proved so often in the media that it is scarcely worth documenting. If we eliminate statements that were later denied and confine ourselves to one that no rational person can deny, trump maintained that he has no contact with Russia. This patently false claim may prove the reason for his removal from office, surely a disastrous end to the Trump presidential story.

The attack of the bots

Truth will out. Time has a way of revealing what is actually the case. A good example of the mass lying which is brutal that is now surfacing is the use of bots to sway the 2016 Election.

We could argue that we are literally living as we do because of twisted truth.
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