Ron Collins
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

You’ll have to look elsewhere for the value judgements you seem to crave.

More obfuscation. I have no such craving: I am both clear on my values, and at ease on how to use them to exercise judgment. You, I’m not so sure about. I see you making value judgments continually, the first one being the absolute falsehood that “numbers don’t lie.”

I suppose technically, the numbers themselves don’t. If your data is delivered accurately in terms of the numbers saying what their sources say they say, then sure, no lies there.

But what if every single one of the transactions the numbers are based on, is riddled with lies? I say they are. Nobody tells pollsters or analysts or police officers or judges or their own atorneys or their banker or their spouse across a pillow, the truth, the whole truth, and certainly hardly ever nothing but the truth. But you have this astonishing faith that those who gather the numbers, were told the truth to begin with, and further that they are telling the truth about the numbers they gathered.

Everybody has an agenda. Everybody plays the angles. Whether a thing is legal or not, whether a thing threatens the world economy or not, is no measure of whether a thing is right or wrong. You as a woman of faith must certainly grasp this.

(and BTW, this business of Ireland and Iceland et al, being “destroyed”? Better tell them that? And in this country folks are driving just as many Escalades and taking just as many jet-flight vacations as ever, and I haven’t seen a lot of soup lines forming of people in business suits, so easy on the hyperbole, how about?)

My contention with you, is nearly identical to my longstanding argument with Svetlana Voreskova over what she claims is her lack of faith and her belief in pure reason: that each of you is simply deceiving and misrepresenting yourselves. Your numbers don’t erase morality or ethics for you, but you wield them as if they mattered more in arriving at truth than your own core beliefs do. Which is why you constantly manage to make sense in some cold, rational way, but don’t even notice the everyday wrongdoing you are apparently willing to just sweep aside if the numbers don’t reflect them.

Just as I say to her that faith in reason is the ultimate superstition, I say to you that faith in numbers is the ultimate rationalizing apostasy.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s