Actually, Albert Einstein said "Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either."
(Well, more or less. See http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/15/large-truth/ for more information.)
Rand Paul seems to think that it's "pedantry" that a quote that "everyone know" came from someone famous isn't actually believe to have come from that person according to creditable scholars and archivists. It's enough that he (and, he believes, most folk) believe it's true for it to be, in fact, true.
Which is a very political way of looking at the truth, but not quite what I'd be looking for in a president.
(More detail here — http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/busted-again-here-are-6-presidential-quotes-rand-paul-totally-made-up/ — though, to be fair, most of these he didn't make up, he just used uncritically and then refused to accept that they are not considered authentic when he was corrected.)
Rand Paul says ‘it’s idiocy’ to challenge his quotes from founding fathers
“There’s a ridiculous cottage industry out there of people who think they’re smarter than everyone else.”
And before anyone goes all "Hey, Rand Paul is the greatest, he will save America, he should be president, etc. etc." — which is what the comment section at the WaPo turned into — this is not at all about Paul's politics (though I confess I am no fan of them), but about misattribution of historical quotations and refusal to change when corrected, or to accept that such corrections are actually needed or useful.
"The only criticisms have come from some guy who’s a partisan. We discount partisans. "
Umm… He's using the quotes in an effort to seek legitimacy for his partisan viewpoints. Refusal to accept responsibility for the accuracy of those quotes seems to indicate that partisanship trumps truth in his case.
Well this group turned out to be a sham. I wasn't expecting MORE political bullshit to be shoved down my throat from this group. Undoubtedly, I was wrong.
For the record, I don't like Rand at all. I'm just sick of everyone making politics of everything.
Unfollowing in… 3…2…1
It appears you forgot to change which collection you were posting to, Dave. Which is why I stopped bothering with collections myself.
I remember looking into Ron Paul the last time he ran. He's a nice old grandfatherly type now, but as a younger man he was like a rabid dog of ignorance wrapped in a burrito of intellectual superiority. I guess the apple doesnt fall too far from the tree.
+Paul Andrews and +Les Jenkins I honestly considered what collection to stick this into. Given that it could be considered political, that would make it "Serious Stuff," but my focus here was more on quotation accuracy, which is a geeky hobby near and dear to my heart, thus my decision to place it in "Geekery and Nerditude" (and include the first comment I did). If it had been about Rand Paul (or Hillary Clinton, or Ricky Gervais, or Bill Nye) getting Star Wars and Star Trek mixed up and then refusing to accept corrections about it, there would have been no question where it belonged.
It really was not meant as "political bullshit being shoved down the throat." In retrospect, anything that seems the least bit political should, it seems, be treated as "Serious Stuff." I will correct that.
In general I find the G+ collection stuff to work pretty well, with the limitation of posts being limited to a single collection. Usually that's not a problem. In this case, apparently it was.
I find the method of adding and removing collections annoying and easy to forget to do. So I stopped bothering. I don't have the number of followers you have either.
+Les Jenkins It's a heavy burden …
The process for assigning a post to a category isn't horrible, but it's not very intuitive or in-your-face obvious. Reassigning them to a different category if you mess up is a bit more awkward than it should be.
I wish I had faith that it was high on Google's list of things to improve.
Very well then. Perhaps I was a bit over the top in my response.
I'm just sick of politics leaking into every subject of my life.
I'll follow again 🙂
Thanks for the explanation!
+Paul Andrews No problem. I'll try to keep the geekery and nerditude as politics-free as possible.