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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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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?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump

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.

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?

Yeah, and I think it's dishonest to pretend the former is worse than the latter.

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.

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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