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Where are you getting the idea he's any worse than any other politician, or even journalist or academic?
I continue to be fascinated by that brand of distraction, that Trump becomes the only standard (anything less is acceptable by default) and also the only person in the world with agency (no one else is blamed for actions he does in reaction, and any action generated reacting to Trump gets blamed on Trump).
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Not OP but I think it's an open question as to whether the number of Trump's lies, in absolute terms, is greater or less than other politicians, but I don't really think it's too important to close it with an answer, I don't care about it per se.
However, it seems completely obvious that the lies he tells are particularly... maybe "brazen" is the right word? Like in real life people tell white lies, and usually don't get caught. Trump tells white lies, and regularly does get caught, when prior presidents and many other public figures are often careful enough that they, on the whole, seem to lay off the white lies (silence works pretty well for most administrations, in fact almost equally as well in situations where a white lie would otherwise attempt to hide an awkward truth, they both hide it in effect).
The usual defense amounts to one of three things: 1) Trump's words were hyperbole or maybe technically incorrect, but the broader truth is correct so the precise verbiage doesn't matter, 2) Trump was just relaying his understanding based on other reports/TV/hearsay, and any incorrectness is a simple lack of due diligence, which is fine because again his broader points are correct and people can be wrong sometimes, 3) Well if you look at what he said earlier or later or some other day, that clarifies things, that's what he really meant, obviously he was just riffing off that, and we should kind of average all his statements. No particular word, phrase, or claim ever has absolute meaning.
You know, honestly I was lowkey fine with this during election season, and in a number of cases I defended Trump (!) by saying that in an election it really does matter more what people hear than what you say. We all even expect it, fact-checker mania or no. However, I (and most liberals and even most centrists even despite any biases) think that when governing the words you say have special meaning. We can't and shouldn't be guessing. It's not like the Bible where reasonable people can disagree if X scripture is literal or metaphorical or symbolic or something in between! A word has meaning. Sometimes flexible, but all meanings can be stretched so far as to break. As an example, Trump said the fired BLS chief "rigged" the numbers. That means something, and it's not a Biblical interpretation situation. Factually, by any definition, Trump was wrong. She did not rig the numbers. End of story. The End. There is no wiggle room there. So which is it, 1, 2, or 3? They have some partial explanatory power. I admit that. But they do not actually change the lie.
It's the President and he has a responsibility. Sure, Presidents lie. Some have told some really, really big whoppers. But by and large, as I said above, that's usually about the big stuff. Trump's statements are frequently wrong about the small stuff.
How bad is one versus the other? Hypothetically is it better to have a habitual fibber who is honest about the big stuff, or a charming fact-wielding guy hiding a devastating betrayal? I have no firm opinion, and to be fair it's a little bit of new territory, and with a yet-unwritten and unrevealed history to match. Will we discover a Trump Iran-Contra under our noses and thus have the worst of both worlds? Does anything so far count? No one can say yet for sure.
However, I think the small lies have spread such an atmosphere of distrust that it's creating a low-trust dynamic between the public and the President that is almost unprecedented outside of wartime (when frankly the President is semi-allowed to tell white lies IMO). I think it's justified to be dismayed about that and worried about it. Because there's a significantly wide, if not deep, "interaction surface" on the utterings of Presidents to the public. They are literally the most newsworthy person in the world, so a lot gets transmitted. Trump's white lies, even if that's really all they are (not a given but let's roll with it), do immense damage to this trust. Suddenly, rather than more limited debates about whether the government is telling the truth about specific and big things, we suddenly are expected to guess whether the government is telling the truth about small things, tiny things, mundane things. We are expected to produce custom weighted-average factual conclusions based on contradictory government information releases. That's exhausting.
Conservatives aren't really bothered by this because they mostly have delegated their decision-making to Trump and his administration, since they trust that he will not betray them overall, so the small stuff is almost irrelevant. They even tend to enjoy Trump cynically playing with those assumptions to make the traditional media dance to his pleasure. But if you put yourself in anyone else's shoes, it's a pretty terrible state of affairs.
A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?
I agree with you that trying to quantify it is a futile task, but I would like someone to explicitly take into account some very obvious counter-arguments before making their conclusion. If we juxtapose Trump's lies with things like "racism is a public health emergency, therefore protests are perfectly fine", maybe it will still turn out that he is the worst in terms of damaging societal trust, but it's far from obvious to me, and I don't think people should get to just assert that, and act like everybody agrees with them.
Another thing I'd like to see is some direct comparisons to past presidents. Even if you want to go with the "Republicans bad" framing, it is again rather counter-intuitive for me that anything Trump said could be as bad as George Bush lying the country into the war in Iraq.
I agree, and confessed to being unsure and not fully exploring it. However, two wrongs don't make a right, and that discussion doesn't detract from the main point I made, I don't think.
I kinda think that it does.
I never said that Trump lying is right, just that it's far from the worst. As to your point about how all the little lies add up to an atmosphere of mistrust, I just flatly disagree. Politicians being dishonest was seen as cost of doing business in a democracy for as a long as I have lived, and almost certainly long before that ("How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving! HAR! HAR! HAR!" is probably one of the boomerest jokes one can think of), so the idea that Trump can move the needle feels rather off.
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A while back, somebody on this site said "Democrats lie like lawyers. Trump lies like a car salesman". That's stuck with me ever since, and I think it's part of what makes the PMCs so irate.
The problem isn't that it's a lie, but that it's a lie expressed outside of the expected class-coding.
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Trump lies like your uncle telling fish stories. Understanding this dynamic creates trust by generating low-stakes opportunities to display ingroup loyalty. All the right has to do to gain this benefit is not crash out whenever Trump calls something "the greatest show" because "AKSHUALLY EXPERTS SAY IT WAS ONLY THE FOURTH GREATEST SHOW".
And even more so by presumptively taking most claims of Trump lying as themselves lies. I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking (I don't think either of them managed to word themselves accurately when they were arguing about the deficit over their comparative terms, but I think Trump was less wrong), or claims that were defensible/true but that Democrats don't like.
And this matters in a context when trust has already been completely destroyed. Remember "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?" That was a blatant, meaningful, painful lie. The self-appointed "fact-checkers" called it absolutely true, then slowly walked it back until after Obama's re-election when they admitted it was the "Lie of the Year".
Shit, "Obama has a healthcare plan" was a straight up lie! He literally just let his speechwriters write a check his policy team couldn't cash because he assumed Hilary was going to be the nominee anyway!
The cost is entirely to you. Every time a respectable outlet melts down over something that didn't happen (because they default assume that Trump MUST be lying about everything), you guys lose trust and respect and a few more people realize that NYT and WaPo and CNN are on the same level as Glenn Beck at his worst.
This whole post is just Blue Team being mad that they can't lie with impunity and nasty consequences to Red Team anymore.
The loss of trust in media is in good part self-inflicted yes. I think the conflation of facts with fact-checks, and the laundering of political opinion as fact was not good. For example, NPR lit its own listener trust on fire over the years, even if it was more a slow burn.
Still, a government official - the ultimate government official - should never be mistaken for a friendly uncle. He's currying ingroup loyalty at the explicit cost of more general trust destruction. That's exactly my point, and it's a bad trade. A lot of these utterances are magnified by broader traditional media yes, but they are actually said. While in years past someone suspicious of media spin could go back and just watch the original remarks directly to get the original truth, in recent years often listening to Trump directly leaves you less informed and more confused, with more effort to untangle the web. In short, although the perception of Trump's lies is worse than the reality, the reality of Trump's lies are also worse than prior past. Both are bad. I hate this idea that we need to choose one and only one person or organization or group to blame. And at the end of the day, no one elected the news but the President has special power and his wording matters more, so with greater power comes greater responsibility.
(IIRC that's a bit of an oversimplification of the Obamacare strategy. The original Politifact lie of the year article probably summed it up best: "Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best." Yep, seems about right. So to be more specific, everyone really knew that the legislative effort would require a lot of changes to pass Congress, so I don't really think it's fair to ding 2007 Obama for the that. 2011 Obama and 2014 Obama, things are different.)
No, it's a fine trade because the general trust was utterly non-existent among the red tribe. Again, this complaint is Lucy crying "why won't you let me lie to you forever, Charlie Brown?"
Joe Biden goes utterly senile in office and the nation is run by a shadowy cabal of unnamed, unelected staffers and the real problem is the entitled electorate having the gall to ask questions about it.
George Bush lies us into Iraq (with a critical assist from the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, aka the man who handpicked the liars for the hearings), resulting in a million dead brown people, torching trillions of dollars from the treasury, destabilizing a large chunk of the world, terroristic blowback, total loss of America's moral standing in the world, sparking resentment and contempt from our allies and leaving us dangerously weak for the future. Totally fine, respectable elder statesman. Don't you know he paints?
Meanwhile, Trump says he has the biggest inauguration ever and he's a threat to democracy, a fascist, literally Hitler.
Sorry bro. You guys are just not serious people. Trump's lies are emphatically far from worse than the past, and they're still much less severe than the ones his enemies tell every day.
Man, that was like a whole paragraph to admit that everything I said was completely true, but still somehow pretend that you disputed it. Still better than average for a hack outfit like Politifact.
Who is "you guys"? This is the second time in as many comments that you've arbitrarily lumped me in with abstract or unnamed groups that you dislike. Knock it off, please.
I feel as though you are not reading my comments, much less engaging with them, but rather immediately composing a reply in your head as you skim. I wrote a whole ass bit about how you're (now deliberately, I assume) conflating red tribe distrust in the traditional news media ecosystem with the actual and official communications from the President and his team, and then you just go ahead and blithely do it again in the very first sentence you write.
And demonstrate the exact same thing yet again in short order. How can Obama lie in 2007 about something that doesn't even exist yet?? That everyone agreed didn't exist yet? Almost literally no candidate ever has fully formed legislation ready to go while on the campaign trail. You're right about Obama lying -- in 2013-ish, and probably he lied (or misrepresented, it's a fine line for some things) about the health care plan during the 2012 election, but that's not what you said (you were very specific about the time frame), and all I did was point that out. No big deal, it happens. We all are wrong sometimes on small stuff. You're allowed to admit it.
I guess I'm baffled that you earnestly think they aren't deeply, viciously conflated. To my eye, they have been my entire adult life.
Bush 1 had an entire cable news network dedicated to pushing his agenda. Karl Rove was hailed as a mastermind of media manipulation and manufacturing consent for his ability to conflate news media and official government policy. The illusion of independence was just another trick, a distraction so we wouldn't catch the sleight of hand.
And all of that was a pittance compared to what the overwhelming majority of American media did to itself in the orgy of religious fervor that accompanied the election of Barak Obama.
And I guess I'm also baffled as to how you think that was a response to everything I said? Biden's lies about senility, Bush's lies to start a war, and Obama's lies about policy were all coming from the official communications of the president. When a Democrat Senator claims, on the floor of the Senate, to have personally seen proof that then-candidate Romney lied on his taxes, and then latter brushed it off as an acceptable lie because it worked, does that not count as official? When a Democrat congressman claim to have personally seen evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, is that official enough?
So yes, Trump lies, as most politicians do. He's in fine company, and honestly comes across as less vicious about it than many of his peers. Let me know when he kills a million brown people for blood oil. And yes, as a distinct-but-linked matter, most of our media consistently lies about Trump's lies to pretend he's some unprecedented Prince of Lies.
You're not a new account. You didn't just fall out of a coconut tree. Why does this stuff seem novel to you?
What are you even thinking here? Obama in 2007 had speeches about why he should be president; do you really think nothing said in those can count as a lie because the exact laws and policies haven't been formally written yet? Or because it's not said with some mystical imprimatur of the Official Office of the Presidency? Would you give Trump a pass from when he claimed to have a plan to end the Ukraine War because, to quote you, "Almost literally no candidate ever has fully formed legislation ready to go while on the campaign trail"?
I suppose I might be taking for granted that you're familiar with the history here (because it's a hobby horse I've been riding so long the horse can almost vote) so I'll lay it out in more detail. The beginning here was from interviews with his speechwriters years later.
In 2007, Obama's election team landed him a speech before a large medical association. His speechwriters sat down to plan out what to say, and realized that his healthcare plan was "we don't have a healthcare plan". Not even at the level of "early campaign website fluff". So they said "Fuck it. We'll just go huge. Promise everything to everyone. More access, better care, less cost. We'll make it a great speech, really lean into the technocratic progressivism, really raise his profile, and then we'll have 8-12 years to figure something out because Hillary has this one in the bag. We're just laying groundwork for now."
Then of course they speechified so well he won the nomination and the election, in no small part because Team Obama and Team Obama's Media constantly talked up his great plan. Do you like Leslie Knope? Do you like the West Wing? It's just like that! Obama knows theory better than his theory advisors and practicals better than his practical advisors, and he has a perfect plan, all 3-ring binders and tabs and highlighters, and it's taken everything into account. THIS is technocratic progressivism, delivering Change You Can Believe In.
Here is Politifact in 2008 rating the "you can keep it" rhetoric as "true", because that's what Obama said his plan would do! Literally no effort to, say, evaluate if that was a realistic or likely outcome.
Here's another from 2009, where they walked it back to "half true", but even that article sounds like it was written by someone on his campaign team.
And of course there was no plan, it was rhetoric and a vibe, which is why he ended up just cribbing Mitt Romney's notes and letting the insurance companies write a bunch of it. And so by 2013 it gets elevated to Lie of the Year, because Politifact doesn't need to protect Obama through another election and millions of people are obviously having their plans and doctors changed under them.
There's media spin, and then there are direct quotes from the President. That's my whole point. Trump's out there lying about trivial stuff, not just the big stuff, and directly rather than let a media machine handle the lifting. It may seem like a distinction without a difference to you, but it is important. (And as I noted, it's quite possible that Trump is or has lied about some big scandal that isn't yet known, we as always must wait for history to take its course before the judgements can start to come out with certainty on that front)
Candidates promise stuff they want to do. I take it in the spirit they are said. If Trump says he wants to end the Ukraine war, and has a plan to do so... does he make an effort to do so? I do happen to think he made an effort, even if it was a stupid and doomed one. So, not a lie! I do think he was exaggerating about doing so on Day 1 - that's obviously almost literally impossible for a president to do, so maybe it falls under the deception umbrella but I wouldn't call it a lie as such. More generally I don't consider the 100-day traditional promises to be binding, only that an attempt is made. That's the whole point of being a candidate, to outline where you want the country to go, and what you hope to deliver. Everyone in the process knows that it's better to overpromise and underdeliver than underpromising and overdelivering, right? Voters even expect it. In that sense, though I absolutely hate to be in the shoes defending PolitiFact, a 2008-era assessment of truth is more about whether a claim accurately reflects or summarizes the policy as portrayed by the source (so "true" is broadly correct), not about whether it is practical or not - though this limitation, as we both know, was flagrantly ignored by various fact-checking sites increasingly often as time has gone on. Of which I've always disapproved.
Once you're president, things change. In Obama's case, much of the first year of his presidency he spent talking about how he really wanted the health care bill to be bipartisan, to get some Republican support, and so on which he was very loud about. He ended up being wrong about that, but it frames his entire effort! Self-evidently a health care effort that is hoped to be bipartisan will involve compromises short of the partisan ideal. I think it's reasonable to expect that main pillars would stay the same and not be subject to compromise, but even that doesn't always tend to be the case when it comes to the nuts and bolts of legislation-making. Also, Obama didn't exactly hide that he approved, in terms of general strategy, of taking the 'best' ideas and combining them regardless of provenance (that's a classically technocratic view), though for PR reasons this is usually not smart to emphasize.
When Trump lies in a debate about immigrants eating the pets of their neighbors, yeah it's bad, but it doesn't do structural damage because he's communicating a vibe and not actually responsible for policy and enforcement. When Trump as president says the BLS commissioner is rigging data, we assume he has some kind of internal line of proof to suggest such; when it turns out he doesn't even have a scrap, it does structural damage. Again, the presidential asymmetry of information access - and control! - obligates the president to a higher degree of truthfulness. Usually, for example, more banal attempts at lower-grade deception would take the form of carefully worded non-answers by the press secretary. The press secretary is, in most cases, being narrowly truthful, but selective with such. Yet Trump's press secretaries and himself both seem to tell bald-faced lies with very little compunction. What I'm trying to get you to see is that my point is about the direct wording, it matters. What happens in the spin between a press conference and the news reporting on it can be worrisome, but it's of a different scale and degree than the press conference stuff itself.
Not to harp on the BLS example too much, but it's just such a clear-cut case, you can watch the conference I'm talking about here. Miller is saying how the last decade has seen massive overall aggregate errors, and as he's about to clarify that he doesn't mean to insinuate anything... At 1:35 Trump jumps in and states directly: "if it was an error that would be one thing, but I don't think it was an error, I think they did it purposefully". Miller, who has a more traditional respect for the truth when in positions of power, immediately does damage control and hedges "whether that - you may well be right - but even if it wasn't purposefully, it's incompetent". MILLER is doing things structurally safe - oh look, she was in charge during so many errors, she should have been better, that's why we're firing her. TRUMP is doing the structural damage. He tweeted that she rigged stuff, and he's digging in. He's in constant campaign mode with the ethics to match. He's not being an adult and not being responsible, and it's bad for everyone, even future Republican presidents.
In terms of Obama specifics, I'd be interested in details, yeah. I googled a little bit, one top result was this clip where an Obama speechwriter almost exactly says what I just said - that in retrospect the claim wasn't examined closely enough... but it was never, he emphasizes, viewed as being untrue by the team. This is at odds with your claim. Are you confusing it with his 2009 speech to the AMA, when he was already president? Maybe my google-fu is just failing me, but I can't find corroboration of your claim, despite its specificity.
If you want to accuse Obama of a campaign lie, the better one might be his initial rejection of an individual mandate, only for it to eventually make it into the bill. Although, if my memory is correct, Obama was pretty reluctant to do so. For example here is one reference to this process - partly forced by CBO policy, and partly by being confronted by the raw economics. How much credit do we allow for mind-changing? Reasonable people may disagree there. But if Obama portrayed himself as a mind-changing president who is open to ideas from across the aisle and from many sources, it seems in character. I'm on record here as opining that we should, as voters, more heavily weight the character and judgement of candidates, and put less on particular pet policies. Policies can reflect character, but the reality is we vote for a person, not a party, at the end of the day, who we trust implicitly to handle diverse situations as they may arise.
(With all that said, I was late in high school when Obama was elected, and only paid medium attention to the Obama-Romney campaign, so while I believe I'm correct in this portrayal I may be wrong in some particulars)
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I'll just note that this perception of moral standing was more self-perceived rather than actual. The Iraq War was not particularly relevant to the moral standing of the US in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, and it was far secondary from decades-long support for Israel in the Middle East. IE, the conflict regions of the Cold War, where US amorality or real politic were most personally known and a matter of living memory. The US standing circa 2003 was 'winner,' and possibly 'benefactor,' but not 'liberator.'
By remainder, the rest of the world leaves Europe- where the strength of views of the US intervention in Iraq largely hinged on alignment with the French and German objections and failed efforts to unite the continent in diplomatic opposition- and the US, whose views of the morality of the US largely tended to hinge on who was in the White House at the time. And, of course, the extension of americanized politics that cross those bounds.
Rather than the Americans losing moral standing in the world, Iraq was far more a shift in certain Americans losing their belief they had moral standing in the world.
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This is a much better metaphor than "Trump lies like a used car salesman." Used car salesmen do not, in fact, lie "like used car salesmen" (although some private used car sellers do).
The main reason why "is Trump a liar" is a scissor is that Trump tells fish tales in contexts where nobody else does, and his supporters don't see it as a problem. The cleanest example is the Letitia James commercial fraud litigation - Trump's people said in a mortgage application (where lying is a crime) that his personal real estate portfolio was THIS BIG, private bankers who are used to working with Trump and wanted to humour him pretended to believe them, Letitia James prosecuted the Trump organisation for lying on a mortgage application, the judge treated the lies as real lies intended to deceive (because that is what the law says, and what would be going on if anyone other than Donald Trump lied in a commercial mortgage application), and Trump's supporters were outraged that their guy could be punished for telling what was obviously a fish tale.
You can tell a similar story about golf cheating, economic statistics, Sharpiegate, pet-eating Haitians, and even the results of the 2020 election.
A yuge part of Trump's political success is that his reputation for fish tales creates a right wing version of "clown nose on, clown nose off" where he can make a false statement, act on it (or get other people to act on it), and then if it turns out not to be believable claim it was a fish tale all along. This creates as least as much outrage in his political opponents as OG "clown nose on, clown nose off" by MSM pseudo-comedians does in their political opponents.
In real-world angling, if you tell the neighbours that you caught a fifteen-pounder and invite them all round to dinner to eat it you are not allowed to serve up a tiddler and laugh at them for believing fish tales.
Yeah, all the "That's just Trump, that's the way it is" comes off as a bizarre gimme request by MAGA types to carve out an expection for lying for the most powerful man on the Earth, and it's even more bizarre that they don't appear to see how anyone else could even see it as bizarre.
My objection to the claim "The lies Trump tells are dangerous in a way that should be prioritized" is that I have a long list of lies that seem obviously to be much, much more dangerous than any lie Trump has told, which have caused staggeringly vast amounts of harm and which no one other than MAGA appears willing to address. Entire wars, nation-wide, sustained violations of basic human rights, mass murder committed by government agents, serious crimes committed or enabled for political objectives are a few examples of these harms. I have waited decades to see these lies addressed in any meaningful way, only to be disappointed at every turn. These harms have, in my view, destroyed our previous political system and replaced it with rule by the irresponsible and unaccountable, which has already leaned hard into outright tyranny and is rapidly decaying into ungovernable chaos. Look at the reaction to Kirk's assassination, and imagine what it would have been like if the Butler bullet had been even a single inch to the right.
When Trump makes a statement, I assume that his word on its own means nothing, and I have every confidence that we can hash out the truth. When Biden or Obama or Bush or Clinton made statements, these were treated as truth regardless of contrary evidence and in many cases those questioning them were suppressed. And in fact, these arguments have succeeded in exactly the way I expected, by dragging previously-covered misdeeds into the light via the Streisand Effect. Concern about Epstein's connections was fringe, and now it is mainstream. Concern about unrestrained immigration were fringe, now they are mainstream. Arguments about politicization of the justice department and our security agencies was fringe, now it is mainstream.
Trump's lies have not led me into a position that appears, in hindsight, to be a position I don't want to be in. That is not something I can say for his predecessors or indeed for most of his current opponents.
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Left-wing media lies like dogs on an hourly basis, and even when they're technically not lying, it's in the manner or fae or Aes Sedai, where the limited sentence fragments are "true" in a narrow technical sense while the overall structure is still designed entirely to deceive and propagandize.
Would you care to drop an essay for the class about how bizarre it is that you guys tolerate that?
Yeah, it's now to such an extreme that (unless you interpret it as intended to deceive) it's incoherent. It's not plausibly sincerely mistaken; it's not open to interpretation; it's straight-up constructed to deceive.
It's like, there's such a thing as implicature, folks--and it's part of speech. (IOW: Using implicature to deceive is lying; implicature is speech, you are speaking an untruth.)
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I wouldn't personally trust any media to any particular degree, but that's still an odd point of comparison to the most powerful man on the Earth.
Shockingly enough, even the most powerful man in the world is not as powerful as numerous very powerful men and women working together to achieve their ends. But as noted elsewhere, this is not a problem we have to puzzle out from first principles; we can simply look at actual examples. Tell me, which of Trump's lies has been as damaging as Bush lying America into Iraq?
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The Kyle Rittenhouse fact-check is a classic
Not even a "misleading", which imo is far more defensible, just a straight up, red FALSE so everyone who googled and skimmed leaves with the wrong impression.
Wow, are they serious?
"Rittenhouse ran away from protesters after prosecutors say he had already shot and killed someone."
Yeah, and he also ran away from the someone he shot and killed, while the guy was chasing him and grabbing for his weapon and Rittenhouse was shouting "Friendly! Friendly! Friendly!", only turning to fire after he heard a gunshot behind him and spun around to find the guy still close behind and charging him.
I'm getting the impression that these guys might not actually have a principled interest in preventing the misleading omission of relevant facts.
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Yup. The fundamental problem with the "Trump is an unprecedented liar" claim is that leftwingers constantly and consistantly lie about the purported lies.
Almost like they don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality, just competing power narratives, and thus no obligation to even try to be accurate.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump
I read a few reports quantifying his untruths vs Biden and Obama, and he came off much worse.
Whether there's an actually solid study comparing all politicians, journalists, academics and their lies I don't know, but it seems baldly apparent that he is up there with the best of them.
Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?
Trump lies all the time. As a result, many people never trust Trump (and yes, some trust him too much).
To quote the wisest of the Scott As, "the media very rarely lies." The problem being that too many people believe them when they do lie, so you end up with riots because people are orders of magnitude wrong about police behavior.
Joe lied about not pardoning Hunter. I suspect, in the long run, that whopper will have been more impactful than the vast majority of Trump's lies. But we'll have to wait a couple more administrations to really decide if it was a one-off massive insult to the office or a particularly dangerous precedent.
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So? Wikipedia is well known for slanted coverage of anything political, it's no surprise their edditors would autistically catalogue every misleading statent from him, and refuse to do the same for other politicians.
Yeah, and I think it's dishonest to pretend the former is worse than the latter.
This is where we part ways. Biased but true speech is interpretable and informational for smart people, even if it misleads others. Lying is simply pollution.
I disagree. Smart people are especially good at making inferences, so they get into the habit. Being selective with which facts you share and arranging them deliberately to mislead--to encourage people to infer an untruth--is actually especially likely to succeed with smart people. They're especially used to their inferences being correct.
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It's not true speech, it's a lie that uses truth to mask itself, making it more dangerous, because it's more likely to be believed.
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