So if I have this right: the CIA itself understands and is saying that Israel manufactures false intelligence to make Trump fear non-existent threats from Iran so that he will continue to use American resources and sacrifice service members to fight their wars for them? Huh.
CS Lewis on why “dumb blue collar people” usually do not fall for the same terrible ideas that the “educated elite class” so often does:
“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
– CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength
… Or Romans 1: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”
Sorry Mr. American worker but I guess you just have just eat ramen until you can afford to pay for your burritos.
Yes, I know that neighborhood full of resettled Afghans pays zero dollars for their burritos, but that’s irrelevant, we’re a nation of immigrants, you see.
I said "a red big truck" and an American winced.
He could not tell me why. He said, "It's just big red truck."
I asked what the rule was.
He said, "There's no rule, it just sounds wrong."
There is a rule.
Opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. In that order. Always. Every native speaker follows it perfectly and not one of them has ever seen it written down.
"A lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife."
Change any one of those and every American in the country will flinch, and none of them will be able to explain what happened.
I showed him the rule.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then he said, "I've been doing that my whole life?"
Yes.
Yes you have.