I have not been past Arts & Letters Daily recently, but it continues to carry a fine range of links.

See this one at the NY Times about Truthiness and Proofiness – different forms of approaching or presenting arguments in a specious or dishonest way.

Truthiness: “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”

Proofiness by contrast uses what purport to be hard facts, namely numbers, to skew argumentsto suit a cause: “the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true – even when it’s not.”

Examples aplenty given: “Proofiness” reveals the truly corrosive effects on a society awash in numerical mendacity. This is more than a math book; it’s an eye-opening civics lesson.

But how about yet another form of dishonesty? Frothing up a fake moral panic for ideological reasons, then letting the victims of that panic rot in prison or otherwise be punished, then concluding that those who did all that were being ‘metaphorically’ truthful?

Only in feminist America:

During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans — most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me — became convinced that they’d repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy…

Meredith Maran falsely accused her father. And now has written a book describing her ‘Lie’.

It is noteworthy  how her use of words in this interview suggests that she has still not grasped the enormity of her wickedness:

In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters’ incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail — and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.

This suggests that the ‘culture’ somehow ‘flipped’ on its own. What happened was that the innocent (male) victims of her feminist rage started to fight back, and somehow the courts began to find for them despite furious feminist counter-arguments.

With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there’s a story there.

But of course. Turn one’s perfidy into a story! Write a book. Make money.

Not only for me, but for a lot of women I know who made these false accusations, it was very much a social phenomenon. Metaphorically, everything we were saying was true. But there was a confusion between a metaphor and a fact. And it was a highly relevant difference.

What? Run that past me again, please.

Metaphorically, everything we were saying was true.

Yes, the core feminist lie remained intact. Men really were violent rapists and brutalisers of their own children. It’s just that annoyingly they had not in fact done anything to reveal their evil nature, even though we feminists said they had.    

… when you look at the overall impact on the world, I’m glad it happened. Kids didn’t used to be protected the way they are now. Another thing, one hopes, is that a little girl who does tell, or little boy, is more likely to be believed than was true before all this happened.

But … but … what if they are believed and they’re making it all up?

During the election, when people were saying Obama was a Muslim, my leftie friends would say, "What’s wrong with these people? They’re such idiots. How can they believe that?" And I would be watching it and thinking, that’s me. I know how…  I can never look at crazy right-wingers the same way

Hurrah. Solidarity between crazy people on Left and Right. So comforting.

I’m fairly close to a man still in prison, and really believe he is innocent. I know how he’s suffered. I know he’s 80 years old and in ill health. He’s spent 20 years in prison, for no reason… It is a Sophie’s choice kind of thing. Would I allow an innocent man to sit in prison if it meant keeping children safe?

So would you make that choice?

I think so.

Not sure what she means here. Is she really saying that ‘to keep children safe’ she’d let an innocent man rot in prison for twenty years or more?

How do we keep children ‘safe’ from lunatics who accuse adults unjustly?

The creepily fascinating thing about this piece is that, after all the misery and unfairness, it’s still all about Meredith and her feelings, her voyage, her revelation, her desperate attempt to cling on to her ‘metaphorical truth’ – when it’s all lies.

Which is worse? Her dishonesty or her selfishness?

Maybe they’re the same thing.