By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Lawyers Are Paid To Say Anything To Get Their Clients Off
When criminals get caught their lawyers will make any stupid, ridiculous argument they can think of to get their clients off because that’s what lawyers are paid to do; they are paid to come up with any lie that might work.
Usually, the lies are of the “It wasn’t him” or “She wasn’t raped. She wanted to have sex with my client” variety, but when the evidence of guilt is incontrovertible their excuses become more outrageous.
Remember the “affluenza” defense — “My client shouldn’t be blamed for killing four people while driving drunk because he was so spoiled by his parents that he lost the ability to tell right from wrong.” …
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Unswerving Loyalty To Your Tribe Excuses All Sins
You would think that people would care more about deceit, blunders and incompetence that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives than they do about loyalty to a person, an organization or a political religion, but they don’t.
We humans are such horrible, terrible, tribal animals that no matter how massive the loss of lives and no matter how great the cost, we often refuse to reject, leastwise punish, our tribe’s malevolent leader for his transgressions.
Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and COVID-19 prove this to be utterly true. …
[NOTE: This is a materially revised version of a column I originally published on June 18, 2018]
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Not only would Trump’s supporters believe Trump’s claim that the sky was green, not blue, they would also angrily insist that anyone who said that the sky was not green was an anti-Trumper promoting an anti-American Fake News conspiracy.
While none of this ever really happened, yet, here’s how I think Trump could successfully convince his supporters that the sky was actually green, not blue.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< — |— > >>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>
My Strange Dream
I had the strangest dream. …
[NOTE: This is a very heavily revised version of a column I originally published on September 22, 2020]
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
You Are Responsible For Those Whom You Knowingly Enable
If you make a known embezzler treasurer of your company, you are responsible for their thefts.
The bishop who transfers the known pedophile priest to an unsuspecting parish in order to protect the church from the cost of the priest’s crimes is personally responsible for the suffering endured by the next child that the pedophile priest rapes.
The people who knew that Donald Trump was a lying, untrustworthy, narcissist megalomaniac, (which is everyone with even half a functioning brain) and nevertheless chose to vote for him anyway, cannot escape responsibility for the savage attacks Trump incited on January 6, 2021. …
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
[NOTE: This is a very heavily revised version of a column I originally published on January 11, 2019]
Some People’s Fanatical Allegiance To Leaders
In January of 2016 Donald Trump said, “The polls, they say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”
You could fill volumes with examples of peoples’ unquestioning, fanatical allegiance to a cult Leader beyond all reason, logic, decency, self interest or even their instinct for self preservation. …
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
The reason people who spout conspiracy theories are massively ignorant and massively stupid is that they are intellectually incapable of comprehending the two fundamental and absolutely necessary rules that let us know if something is true or false:
Just Saying Something Is So Has Never Made It So
Over more than five hundred years of legal practice the number-one rule for all Western courts has…
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
The Primary Human Motivation — The Pursuit Of Gain & Avoidance Of Loss
To effectively protect our wealth and our liberty we first need to understand what motivates people to act the way they do.
The fundamental truth of human nature is that the overwhelming majority of people act in ways that they believe will:
In other words, most of the time, most people act in the pursuit of their own self interest. …
The two basic, conflicting, philosophies of government are: Every Man For Himself and We’re All In This Together
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
There are two fundamental philosophies about what a government is supposed to do, what a government is for. Each is an outgrowth of the wealth, power and social class of their adherents.
Because the rich and powerful are already rich and powerful they don’t need anything from the government beyond
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Systems With Predictable Results Are Vital
In order to manage our lives, we need to be able to figure out the likely consequences of our actions.
Written laws define criminal acts and assign specific punishments so that we can understand in advance the probable consequences of our conduct.
We can’t live with a drug that randomly cures us today and kills us tomorrow. We can’t live with a car that starts today, doesn’t start tomorrow, runs great the next day, and bursts into flame the day after that.
This need for predictability extends beyond criminal and financial systems. The electoral process needs predictability too. …
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Conspiracy Believers Are Immune To Facts
There are people who, against all evidence, believe that the earth is flat, that Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon, and that 9/11 was really carried out by covert agents of the U.S. government.
If you show flat earthers a picture of the earth taken from the moon they will insist that it is a fake. …
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