Home » Articles posted by James Mahon
Author Archives: James Mahon
These University Presidents Were Not Lying
Ben Sasse, a Yale graduate, who was President of the University of Florida when he wrote this article for The Atlantic (he resigned from the Presidency of this public university after seventeen months, but continues to earn his one million dollar salary as President Emeritus), is correct when he says that none of the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Boris Johnson – the most accomplished liar in public life
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Hope Hicks – The Honest Liar
Hope Hicks, the White House Communications Director, testified behind closed doors for nine hours before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, February 27, 2018, as part of their investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Hicks was accompanied by her two private lawyers, as well as three lawyers from the White House, […]
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 […]
Recent Comments