FROTHING AT THE MOUTH

 It seems in this day and age that everybody is offended by everything. A starlet wears her skirt too short, and the Twitterverse explodes with angry tweets. And the angry tweets provoke other angry tweets condemning the tweeters as twits. Then she wears her skirt too long, and we get another Twitterwar. Someone makes a casual, thoughtless remark that they would never have made if their brains had been in gear, and loud calls are made to "cancel" that person. If someone thoughtlessly refers to a person as "he" when the preferred pronoun is "ze," this is a crime against humanity. 

Fortunes are lost and careers are ended at the slip of a tongue, and almost nobody is immune to censure for the slightest offense. It's somewhat like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.  

In the land of the First Amendment, you risk ruin every time you open your mouth. The PC police have a fundamentalist view of all transgressions against Wokeness. The least insensitive comment engenders cries for the harshest punishment. 

Many people with a strong survival instinct act as though their every word and action are being recorded on an enemy's cellphone video. Aesop is supposed to have said: "Wise men say nothing in dangerous times", and that quote has seldom been truer than it is today. Of course, the original version of Aesop's quote had been cancelled due to the man's obvious misogyny and has been gender-neutralized as "Wise people say nothing in dangerous times." Is there a statue of Aesop anywhere that can be torn down?

Anyone born prior to 1950 who has ever transgressed the least prohibition of the 21st century's version of morality is to be cancelled, written out of the history books as a hero and made a villain, and any statues of them must be torn down. 

That bigoted racist, Winston Churchill, who was largely responsible for saving Europe during World War II, is supposed to have said that a people who are at war with their past have no future. I agree.

BODY LANGUAGE AS A SIGN OF DECEPTION

A few months ago I channel-surfed through a trailer for The Mentalist which showed the hero telling a suspect “I know you’re lying because you [winked, looked away, gave some other body language indication of lying].” My immediate reaction was to say “Baloney!” and keep on channel surfing. I don’t remember the specific tell that the mentalist described, but I do remember thinking that there were hundreds of innocent explanations for why a witness would do that during an interrogation.

Here’s my take on body language. We are all experts at interpreting body language if we leave the interpretation at the subconscious level. Have you ever had this happen? You see someone reacting in a way that makes you mistrust him, you can’t really put your finger on what it is, but you are uncomfortable. Trust that feeling. Your subconscious interpreted the person’s body language as that of an untruthful witness based on thousands of generations of heredity. Our remote ancestors’ survival depended on reading body language, and they passed their talent on to their offspring, who passed it on to their offspring, who eventually passed it on to us. This type of interpretation happens in the more primitive parts of our brains. If we try to overthink it, we wind up in "analysis paralysis" like Aesop's centipede. When asked how he could operate so many legs in unison without getting them tangled up, the centipede admitted that he didn't know, but he'd concentrate on it and figure out how he did it. The more he thought about it, the more tangled his legs became, until he was completely immobile with his legs tied in knots.

I think we're better off leaving body language interpretation on the subconscious level. I’ve read several articles on body language which says if someone does this or that, it’s a sure sign of lying, and I’m not convinced. I agree with Phillip Houston and Michael Floyd (authors of Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception), who rightly say that no one body language quirk is a sure sign of lying, it’s simply an indicator that you might want to take a critical look at what the witness is telling you. If the witness displays enough body language tells, your subconscious is going to decide they're lying before your conscious can apply the principles you learned in body language class.

One of my favorite bogus signs of lying is the crossed-arm stance. “Whenever someone crosses their arms in front of you,” so the pundits say, “they’re getting defensive, and they’re getting defensive because they’re lying.” Once again, I say “Baloney!” Obviously the people who peddle this brand of baloney have never encountered a bodybuilder or a teenage boy. Take a look at these two bodybuilders and try to decide if they’re (a) lying, (b) acting defensive, or (c) showing off their muscles.

 

 

I struck that pose several times when I was a teenage weightlifter, usually in front of a pretty girl.

There are any number of reasons unrelated to lying why people fold their arms across their chests. Sometimes they even do it because they’re cold.