Please lie to me - well, sometimes

No, not you, and not you either. Do it only if you are messing with my health or with the well-being of the country I happen to live in at that time.

There are days when the blogster hears something and thinks please, let that be a lie.

The reaction applies in a very narrow sense: if and only if the statement in question would otherwise be utterly dumb, supremely vicious, or stupendously denigrating.

The easiest public examples are legion in politics and other areas of public life. The head of state or secretary looking straight into the camera and explaining why the nation is doomed unless  <bullshit> is a favorite.

But the friend who borrowed 50 bucks a year ago and has since found work again with enough to spare to pay back a few dollars a month is just as important. If you need advice on how to deal with someone who has been saying I'll pay you back next month for a year, search the web.

Please let that be a lie is a defense mechanism, albeit a crude one, probably not universal but likely more common than you'd think.

In the case of elected officials, it serves a dual purpose:
1. Nobody wants a country to be led by someone as dumb as a fence post. Yes, engineers are working on "smart fence posts", but don't worry, we will not raise our demands to match the latest smart fence post. We'll stick with the old fashioned long piece of wood imagery.

2. It covers the whole spectrum of humanity: from the elitist disconcerting notion that a lot of citizens might be neither as smart nor as nice as you'd hope all the way to missed education and really bad or censored information.

In the case of a friend, the whole issue becomes very personal, and we all have to come to terms with our perception, the impact of a statement and so forth. As we said, there is plenty of advice out there.

One more thing:
Try to make it entertaining, that Darth Vader look and feel is soooo early 20th century, and we are in the 21st. What? You are so paranoid that you think even your calendar is lying to you?
And, please, do speak your true world views every now and then in the presence of someone with a decent quality smart phone.