Honesty

How do I explain facts without being called defensive?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “People tell me I’m being defensive, when I’m really only explaining the literal facts that happened. How do I do that without being called defensive?”

Examine your motives.

Why do you feel a need to explain facts to people?

Has someone asked you for those details?

If they haven’t, they will interpret your input as motivated by a personal agenda, often defensiveness.

Your facts may be necessary to defend an action or correct a misinterpretation, in which case, your perspective may be critical to ensuring that the clarity and accuracy of events are maintained so as not to negatively affect someone unfairly due to a misjudgment or biased conclusion.

What also often happens is that when someone does offer clarifying information that an abuser doesn’t want to be made known, they will attempt to gaslight the messenger with accusations like they’re being defensive.

If you’re constantly explaining facts and that’s causing many people to accuse you of being defensive, then that could be a compulsion you developed from an abusive environment where you were constantly disbelieved and have overcompensated for that accusation by feeling compelled to explain facts, whether they’re relevant or not to resolving whatever dynamic you’ve been caught up in.

What people tell you is a clue either to the behaviour of yours you’re not entirely clear on or a clue to their attitudes. There is no universal answer as to which it would be, but your best bet is to be mindfully clear about your actions and why you chose them.

Other people will always say something; often, that thing they say has less to do with you than it does about them.

Your environment may be one where you feel compelled to offer explanations to defend yourself while being told that you’re being defensive. If that’s the case, then it’s most likely an abusive environment, and some abuser is deliberately gaslighting you to make you feel insecure about yourself.

Only you can know what the truth would be in this case.

Good luck.

Why is intellectual honesty so rare in politics?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora. and can also be accessed https://www.quora.com/profile/Antonio-Amaral-1/

I believe it’s less rare than cynical minds might think.

Too many people can’t see past their biases to know the difference between a politician’s words and their internal recreations of the meaning of their words.

Too many people, for example, will repeatedly utter how Joe Biden destroyed the economy while professional economists across the board praised it as one of the most successful economies in decades.

Too many people are still incapable of acknowledging the reality of the last election being one of modern history’s most secure and scrutinized elections. They will still adamantly insist that the election was stolen.

They will hang onto the words of a convicted felon who should be rotting behind bars and overlook his public money laundering schemes for overpriced watches and sincerely believe he has the best interests of the struggling class in mind.

They don’t even care how badly he bloated the debt by redistributing wealth to the plutocrats who are steadily taking over the global economy.

They would rather demonize their political opposition as “globalists” while doing the job of playing defence for the actual globalists.

None of them will stop to pause and consider the rationale of their position within any objective perspective.

Everything about their position hinges on tribal identity, and they can’t be wrong about their beliefs because it would mean the criticisms about their toxicity are truthful and correct. They desperately need mental health assistance in the same way that most people who have undergone interventions by their loved ones were deemed in desperate need of professional help.

The problem of corruption in politics is not and never has been a problem with the politicians themselves in a democratic nation where the people vote for who they entrust to manage their affairs on their behalf properly.

The evidence is beyond evident in distinguishing between politicians who at least try to truly represent their best interests and those who parasitically drain their constituents of their value while sending them deep into a pit of poverty.

I don’t even need to post a comparison between states that shows which politicians and parties best represent the needs of the people. It would be pointless to do so because their mental filters will dismiss all evidence as “fake news.”

The problem is not that politicians are dishonest but that the people who elect them cannot discern between honesty and dishonesty. That means that a significant proportion of the population is fundamentally dishonest.

If we are sincere in our desire to fix a perceived problem with dishonesty in politics, then we must be earnest in fixing our problems with being dishonest people at heart.

If we don’t don’t want dishonest politicians, we must stop being dishonest ourselves.