Elena Rybakina Pretends Not to Understand Question about War and Putin

WATCH HER ANSWER HERE.

In a press conference after winning her first Wimbledon Women’s Singles Final on July 9, 2022, Elena Rybakina, the Russian-born tennis player who acquired Kazakh citizenship at the age of nineteen and switched to playing for Kazakhstan in 2018 in return for financial support from the Kazakhstan Tennis Federation, pretended not to understand the second part of a journalist’s question about whether she condemned “the war and Putin’s actions.” First she said that she didn’t hear the second part of the question, and asked for it to be repeated. Then she replied that her English “was not the greatest” and that she didn’t understand the second part of the question, and she proceeded to speak only about representing Kazakhstan.

Of course, she did understand the second part of the question. Her English was more than up to the task. She had no problems understanding and answering any of the other questions she was asked. It was just that she did not want to answer that part of the question. And she also did not want to refuse to answer that part of the question.

Answering that part of the question was a lose-lose proposition. Either she would condemn the war and Putin, and thereby cause a political incident, possibly putting herself and her Russian family in danger, or she would not condemn the war and Putin, and thereby cause a PR nightmare for herself, and possibly lose her Adidas endorsement, not to mention the support of her fans. Openly refusing to answer that part of the question could also cause an incident, however, since she would be publicly refusing to take a stand on the most serious political and humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment – the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army.

So she pretended not to understand what she had been asked.

To some philosophers, Rybakina non-deceptively lied when she said that her English “was not the greatest” and that she didn’t understand the second part of the question. More specifically, she told what they call a ‘bald-faced lie‘. In the case of a ‘bald-faced lie’, both the speaker and audience are aware that the speaker is lying, and both are aware that both are aware that the speaker is lying, and so on. The speaker is not trying to deceive her audience, since deception would be impossible – the falsehood of what is being said is obvious. The speaker has some other goal. In this particular case, the goal is to avoid answering the question, but also, to convey that she is avoiding answering that question — without actually saying that she is avoiding answering the question. She may even have the goal of conveying that this question is not one that she should be asked, given the danger of answering that question. Most importantly, for Putin or any of his stooges looking on, the goal is to say nothing that they could use against her.

To those philosophers who do not accept that such non-deceptions are lies, Rybakina merely told an ‘untruth’ or a ‘falsification’, that is, a falsehood that is not intended to deceive and that, at least, normally is intended to communicate something else. The traditional servant’s response to an unwelcome guest, “The master is not at home”, which is meant to communicate “You are not welcome here”, would be an example of an ‘untruth’ or a ‘falsification.’ So would the public announcement, “He wishes to spend more time with his family,” made by a company after a CEO becomes embroiled in a scandal or is removed in a boardroom coup, which is meant to communicate that he was forced out. Saying my English “is not the greatest” (and even “I don’t understand the question”) would be a way to communicate “I am not answering that question” and/or “Do not ask me that question, because answering it would get me into a lot of trouble.”

Even at the relatively young age of twenty-three, Rybakina, who spent most of her life in Russia, certainly seems to be adept in handling journalists’ questions and avoiding saying anything that would get her into trouble with Putin. Well played.

The Atlantic retracts article by former plagiarist

Ruth Shalit Barrett

The Atlantic has retracted an article in its November 2020 issue written by Princeton University alumna and former plagiarist Ruth Shalit Barrett, citing “serious concerns about its accuracy.” The article, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents”, is about parents making their children take up elite sports like fencing and lacrosse to get them into elite colleges.

In the mid-90s, Ruth Shalit was a rising star, writing for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Observer and becoming an associate editor at The New Republic at the age of 24. She was in demand because of her conservative outlook and her enthusiasm for baiting Clinton liberals in Washington (her sister, Wendy Shalit, is a conservative writer and the author of A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (1999)). However, she was found to have plagiarized articles she wrote for The New Republic in August 1994 and June 1995, and the magazine was forced to print apologies. According to a story about the Atlantic retraction in The New York Times, Barrett denied that she had plagiarized the articles. She claimed that she had confused her typewritten notes with articles she had downloaded for research. You can judge for yourself with some further examples of plagiarism printed in Mother Jones in the same yearHowever, after a controversial story of hers about affirmative action at The Washington Post was found to have many errors, she was accused by the Post‘s executive editor of demonstrating “a shameful absence of journalistic standards.” She took a six-month leave of absence, returning to The New Republic to write “cultural criticism, book reviews and trend pieces.” In 1999 she left The New Republic and Washington for good and took a job in New York, developing campaign strategies at the advertising agency Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and very occasionally writing for publications like The Wall Street Journal. She remained a member of a rogue’s gallery of famous plagiarists, however. She later moved to LA, married, and took her husband’s last name (Barrett), and wrote as Ruth Shalit Barrett for publications like Elle and New York Magazine (which raised some eyebrows). She now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her family.

Fast forward to this November and her article in The Atlantic. The article is “laden with factual problems and misleading passages“, according to her old foe, The Washington Post. The main subject of the article, a mother identified only by her middle name, Sloane, has a completely fictitious son, and there are falsehoods about the serious fencing injuries sustained by her daughters. After she was challenged about the fictitious son, Barrett told her editors that Sloane had lied to her about having a son. But, according The Atlantic, “The next day, when we questioned her again, she admitted she was “complicit” in “compounding the deception” and that “it would not be fair to Sloane” to blame her alone for deceiving The Atlantic.” The editors concluded that “Barrett deceived The Atlantic and its readers about a section of the story that concerns a person referred to as “Sloane.”

In explaining its decision to assign an article to a former plagiarist, The Atlantic says that “more than two decades separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic” and “in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines.” They “took into consideration the argument that Barrett deserved a second chance to write feature stories such as this one.” However, they now believe that “We were wrong to make this assignment.”

The article appeared under the byline “Ruth S. Barrett”. In retracting, as opposed to removing, the article (it is still available as a pdf), the magazine has also updated the byline to “Ruth Shalit Barrett”, so as not to hide the identity of the former plagiarist, now turned fabulist. In becoming a fabulist, of course, she has followed in the footsteps of other associate editor at The New Republic, Stephen Glass.

Coda: In January 2022, just over a year after this post was published, Ruth Shalit Barrett brought a lawsuit against The Atlantic, accusing The Atlantic and Donald Peck, its top print editor at the time, of defamation. She is asking for $1 million in damages.

Boris Johnson – the most accomplished liar in public life

Boris Johnson, October 23, 2020

In the most recent issue of The Times Literary Supplement, Rory Stewart, former Tory minister, described Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister of the UK, as follows: “Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St. Augustine. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true.” (“Lord of Misrule“, review of Boris Johnson: The Gambler, by Tom Bower, TLS, November 6, 2020, 4).

Dishonesty during a pandemic?

The New York Times reported a recent study by Brock University of 451 adults, aged 20 to 82. The study found that thirty-four percent of COVID-19-positive participants said that they had denied having symptoms when asked by others, and fifty-five percent reported some level of concealment of their symptoms.

The Times article is terrible. It cites a study on lying from 1996, and randomly interviews several psychologists, one of whom thinks that people typically tell three lies within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. This only illustrates how loosely lying is defined by many psychologists.

The Washington Post did better. It published a link to the study and interviewed Angela Evans, the psychology professor at Brock who conducted the study. It also interviewed people about their behavior during the pandemic. One man in Alaska, Mark Plimpton, has flown to Northern Virginia to see his brother three times during the pandemic but has not shared photos after he got some “judgmental comments” on social media about his first trip. “These people,” Mark said, “they live with their families or they have family in the local area around them. I don’t, and the only way I can see my family is by getting on an airplane and traveling to the East Coast.” As the article notes, correctly, “He didn’t lie, per se, but he went out of his way not to advertise what he was doing.

The same can be said about Emily (she did not want her full name to be given), who is “hosting a Thanksgiving celebration for about 25 people” for the sake of her grandmother. Her grandmother has dementia, and “cut off from her church community and unfamiliar with technology” she has “felt depressed this year.” Despite Emily’s plan to “get together outdoors, wear masks when they’re preparing the meal, leave windows open in the bathroom and serve food in small groups,” she is “not comfortable telling her friends, who sometimes seem to try to one-up each other with who’s being the most cautious about the virus.”

Emily, as the author of the Post‘s article, Marisa Iati, might have made clearer to readers, is keeping a secret from her friends, not lying to them. For more on the distinction between keeping a secret and lying, see my  “Secrets vs. Lies: Is There a Moral Asymmetry?” For a summary of the Brock University study, see here.

Lying Is Not A Federal Crime

Bridget Anne Kelly, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Chris Christie, and Bill Baroni, former Port Authority Deputy Executive Director, had their convictions for wire fraud, fraud on a federally funded program or entity (the Port Authority), and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 7, 2020. It is true, the Court ruled, that both Kelly and Baroni “used deception” to “reduce from three to one the number of lanes long reserved at the George Washington Bridge’s toll plaza for Fort Lee’s morning commuters.” They claimed that the “lane realignment was for a traffic study,” when it was for “no reason other than political payback,” because Fort Lee’s major had refused to back Governor Christie’s 2013 reelection campaign. Nevertheless, as Justice Kagan wrote in the Court’s opinion, “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime. Because the scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property, Baroni and Kelly could not have violated the federal-program fraud or wire fraud laws.”

Ruskin on Lies

The February 20, 2020, issue online of The London Review of Books features a recording of the first of this year’s LRB Winter Lectures, given at the British Museum on January 31 by Colin Burrow, of Oxford University, entitled “Fiction and the Ages of Lies.” It prompted Scott Herrick, of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, to write in to the LRB and quote from John Ruskin, in Modern Painters (1860), on the essence of lying. The complete quotation is given above. What Ruskin says here about lying anticipates Mark Twain’s account of the “silent lie”, which is discussed in my essay “The Noble Art of Lying.”

Is Lying The Worst Kind Of Deception?

This is a talk that I gave at the BRAK (Brno Analytic Conference CaL2019: Cognition and Lying) conference at Masaryk University in Brno, in the Czech Republic, on November 28, 2019. I give reasons for holding that lying is worse than deceiving people with untruthful statements (which may or not may be lying), because it involves betraying trust as well as deception, and worse than misleading people with truthful assertions, because it involves being untruthful.

You can watch the video of talk on YouTube here.

True Lie

The poster for this Tom Cruise movie about DEA informant Barry Seal says that it is “Based On A True Lie.” There are lies that are true. When a liar asserts what the liar believes to be false, but the liar is mistaken, and the liar asserts what is true, then the lie is a true lie. The liar is still a liar, even if the hearer is not deceived (although the hearer may still be deceived about what the liar believes). This is not what the poster is referring to, however. Presumably, it is referring to a lie (or deception) that was actually told (or perpetrated) by the U.S. government. Interestingly, the movie’s director, Doug Liman, has described the movie as “a fun lie based on a true story.” Strictly speaking, however, a fictional movie cannot be a lie. On why works of fiction cannot be lies, see my “Novels Never Lie.”

Melania Trump Lied About Her College Degree

For years, Melania Trump’s online biography stated that she had “obtained a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia.” This was something that she had claimed at least since 2006. However, she never obtained a degree from the University of Ljubljana. The falsehood was repeated on the Republican National Convention’s program in July 2016, despite a profile of Melanie Trump by Julia Ioffe published in April 2016 in GQ which Ioffe said that “Melania decamped to Milan after her first year of college, effectively dropping out.” In response to the lie being exposed, the online biography was temporarily taken down in late July 2016, as several news outlets reported. On her Twitter account she claimed, instead, that it was taken down because “it does not reflect my current business and professional interests.”

Melania Trump’s Speech Was Plagiarized

Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention on July 18, 2016, plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention on August 25, 2008. See the plagiarized sections here. When asked about the plagiarism, Melania Trump replied “I read once over it and that’s all, because I wrote it, and with as little help as possible.” However, the speech was written by Matthew Scully and John McConnell, and then rewritten by Melania Trump, who then asked Meredith McIver, staff writer for The Trump Organization, to assist her. McIver came forward as the person who actually wrote the speech for Melanie Trump. McIver admitted to using “some of the phrasing” from Michelle Obama’s speech, after Melania Trump “read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech” over the phone.