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The mistake Todd makes here is that he seems to recognize the characteristically Trumpian mode of lying — repetition of crude falsities — but not the mode preferred by the progressive establishment — capturing sense-making institutions and turning them toward promoting ideologically-driven narratives. The latter predates Trump, is far more consequential, and is propagated primarily by the likes of the NYT and CNN.
It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
I'm hardly the first person to make this observation but it seems to me that Trump "lies" the way a used car salesman "lies". Sure, he'll tell you that Nissan Altima with bald tires at the back of the lot is a good deal, the best deal even, the sort of deal he wouldn't give his own mother, but if pressed he'll admit that its kind of a shitbox and knock 10 - 20% off the price. Normal people who interact with other normal people on a regular basis get this, they even expect it. After all the salesman's job is to sell things and few working class persons are going to begrudge another working class person for doing thier job.
In contrast a lot of what Trump's opponents seem to do is not "lying" directly in the sense of speaking falshoods so much as they are setting out with a specific intention to push a specific narrative and things like lying through omission, false pretenses, and spreading rumors/hearsay are just tools in the tool box.
There seems to be this belief that so long as you are never actually caught in an outright lie you are by definition a good and honest person. If someone is decieved by your intentional misrepresenting of a fact or lie of omission the culpability is not on you for trying to decieve them, its on them for not being being savvy enough to see through your deception.
I think that what we are seeing now is the downstream effects of this attitude. You see politics is by it's nature a multiple itteration game. Unless your plan is to litteraly exterminate everyone and anyone who might disagree with your policy decisions (and to be fair, a number of regimes have actually tried) you're gonna have to cut a second deal with someone at some point and when you do its only natural that they will factor how the first deal played out into thier calculus.
This is the bit that I think Todd and the wider media/managerial class have failed to recognize or othwerwise factor into thier thinking is that a lot of regular people have come to recognize that they got manipulated and are now on guard against it and rather than solving the (alleged) problem all the talk about how normal people are stupid, easy to manipulate, and need to be saved from themselves for democracy's sake is exacerbating it.
As Instapundit would say, they have chosen the form of thier destructor. For the Ghostbusters it was a marshmallow kaiju, for the beltway it was a reality tv star.
"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs. Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.
The fact that Trump doesn't care about the factual truth or falsity of the words that come out of his mouth to the point where he says "dogs" when he could easily have said "cats" and been making a defensible claim about facts that were in dispute at the time is a perfect piece of smoking gun evidence as to what is actually going on. In the Harry Frankfurt sense, Trump is rarely lying but he is constantly bullshitting.
I'm at work at the moment but effortpost to follow.
No, it is a statement intended to induce the true belief that at least some immigrants have been stealing and eating pets. More generally it is a signal that he is aware of and willing to give voice to his constituents' concerns.
As @Jiro points out below, normal people arent going to care that the pet in question was somebody's kitten instead of somebody's puppy. If people in the US are eating pets, something has gone wrong.
As i said above...
It seems to me that a question we ought to be asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is true or false, so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving anyone or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
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I assume he thought that was true, though.
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Oh, come on!
- Did you hear about the Haitians eating people's dogs in Ohio?
- Don't say that! This is a completely false statement, spread by bigots!
- Oh shit! Sorry, I didn't know.
- Yeah... everybody knows they're eating cats, not dogs.
In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.
You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?
Trump said that immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. As a result of him saying this, some of his target audience of low-information swing voters now believe that immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, and are therefore more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote at the election in November. Generating this change in belief was a major purpose of making the statement. Given background that motteposters know and the debate audience probably didn't, the fact that Trump said "dogs" and not "cats" may reveal interesting information about his thought processes that I hope to elaborate on in a later effortpost.
I am making the conjunction of the above claims, with the intention that they be taken seriously and literally. If you disagree with me about the facts, the spirit of this board is that you should identify the claim you disagree with rather than spewing insinuations.
I'll step in here and say it a little more clearly: Nobody beyond the lizardman constant thinks there's any meaningful difference between immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. Saying that "it's really cats, not dogs, so Trump is a liar" is itself lying like a lawyer because you are nitpicking a detail that nobody cares about in order to attack Trump. It doesn't matter that "dogs" is literally false if the truth makes no substantive difference.
It's like going into a restaurant and complaining "this food tastes like sewage", then getting told that you're a liar because the food doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like feces, so tasting like sewage is a literally false belief.
This isn't a perfect analogy, because feces is a major constituent of sewage, and indeed is a large part of what makes sewage noxious. I don't know how one would taste the difference between sewage and feces, whereas is an obvious meaningful difference between cats and dogs - try throwing sticks for a cat to fetch. What you mean is that there is no difference in the political impact, if true, of immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. You are obviously correct about this, possible quibbles about traditional Korean or Vietnamese cuisine notwithstanding. If the immigrants were, in fact, eating cats, then you could call "they're eating the dogs" directionally correct, but that appears to be a Motte-specific usage and truthy is what most very online people would call it.
But in an environment where people care about the factual truth and falsity of statements and not just the political impact, a cat is not a dog. If you report a cat theft to the police and it turns out that the missing animal was actually a dog, you are going to get in trouble for, yes, lying. Trump could have misspoken, but saying "dog" when you mean "cat" isn't a particularly common mistake. If Trump meant to say "dog" when the social media posts he was signal-boosting said "cat" because he didn't care about the difference this says something about his communication style - namely that he is 100% concerned about the political impact of statements and 0% concerned about their factual content. If the ratio was 90-10 like it is for most politicians, he would have said "cat" because, as you point out, "they're eating the cats" is no less politically impactful than "they're eating the dogs".
There is a saying which people use to acknowledge that they are mainly concerned about the political impact of statements vs their factual content: "it has the added advantage of being true". Based on Trump's beliefs at the time, he had the opportunity to make a politically advantageous claim that had the added advantage of being true, and didn't take it. Given the discussion on this thread, there is a non-zero number of people for whom this is a positive signal - Trump is implicitly saying "I am not like those smarty-pants intellectuals who care about the factual accuracy of sufficiently truthy political claims."
I explicitly didn't call Trump a "liar". We all agree that what is going on is more complex than that. The whole point of this thread is to discuss how a man whose statements frequently evaluate as "false" when parsed using standard English grammar has a reputation as a straight talker among his supporters. I am proposing that "bullshit" is a better framework for understanding it than "liar".
That's another version of the same nitpick. If you like, make it "this food tastes like feces" and "this food tastes like rotten skunk vomit".
There is not a meaningful difference between cats and dogs in this context, even if there is a meaningful difference when you're reporting a missing one to the police.
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But the lying part is where you impart a false belief into an audience. And Lawyer lying does much the same in a much more insidious way. Telling people that people in Ohio are having their pets or geese or whatever is obviously on its face false. But the reverse, that the integration of 20K Haitians into a town of 40K is going just fine, actually is also false and based on cherry-picked good reports (for example the factory owner saying that the Haitians are hard workers, which likely elides labor issues like wages and working conditions that the natives didn’t like) or the lack of reporting of things like crime, education strain (this town likely needs a whole lot of resources because they suddenly need to educate a bunch of ESL students who speak French) traffic congestion and accidents. Sure you can say that these aren’t serious problems and if you cherry-pick just right, you can get “Fact Check: True”. but you’re spinning the situation in a dishonest way to get people to believe what you want them to believe. Trumps lies are less sophisticated, but I contend that both are lies, and it doesn’t stop being a lie just because you happen to be using manipulated facts and statistics to tell the narrative you want people to believe in.
This is why I tend to be much more skeptical of the second sort of narrative than the first. Make no mistake, both are ultimately lies and meant to deceive an audience. But for all the faults Trump’s style of lying has, it’s easy enough to detect and therefore ultimately less harmful to the body politic than the kind of lying where it’s manipulated facts and thus hard to attack and debunk. That means the damage done will be harder to undo (especially since doing so is “racist conspiracy theories,” and thus impossible to bring up in polite society.
Finely tuned deceitful narratives deliver much more information and can be nitpicked with fruitful results. Importantly there is a shame+update mechanism whenever sophisticated lies become too obvious. Whereas pure Trumpian bullshit must be simply ignored. There is no path to anything better, if we allow it to dominate public discourse.
Update? Maybe, but only in the "abandon the indefensible position!" sense. Where exactly have you seen shame?
Shame is the mechanism for the updating! What else drives it? Without shame, one can employ Trump's strategy of maintaining the indefensible position. He is shame-less, so just doubles down.
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Last night I talked to a pretty intelligent female friend of mine about various things, and the subject of how men commit the vast majority of violence came up. She was eager to admit that yes, men do. I pointed out that a subset of men commit the majority of all this violence, and that the men in that subset tend to target men as well as women. She was less eager to admit this, but she went along with it. I then made an analogy to the fact that blacks on average commit more violence than whites do, but it is a subset of blacks who commit the majority of all that violence. She started to question me, wondering whether my evidence such as the FBI crime statistics is trustworthy or not. She's not some naive college student, either. She is over 50 and has been living in the US all her life. But she still has a hard time realizing the to me pretty obvious fact that blacks are on average more violent than whites.
THAT is the power of leftist propaganda.
One might even say the dogma lives loudly in them.
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Unsurprisingly, the FBI has nerfed its crime data under Biden making it much harder to get useful information. So the epistemological situation is only getting worse.
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So then, to you, what would not be an ideologically-driven narrative?
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I love the saying "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers". Did someone here come up with that? If not, where did it come from?
It perfectly encapsulates the current meta.
I said two months ago
I don't recall seeing it formulated close to that before saying that but I absolutely could have, I don't think of it as any kind of personal insight, I see it as trivially derived from other insights I took elsewhere (taking Trump seriously not literally, him talking like New Yorker, being directionally if not literally correct, etc...)
Something only just occurred to me about that. If it's a crime to make an agreement with a bank about the value of your property as collateral, how is it not a crime to straight up lie about the prospects of a startup?
Laws are specific. Laws about lying in the US have to be particularly specific, because the First Amendment protects some, but not all, lies.
There are laws which broadly criminalise lying to federally regulated banks. There are laws that broadly criminalise lying about publically-traded securities. These laws don't apply to private lenders or shares in closely-held companies, where the only lies which are criminal are ones which constitute common-law fraud. (Obviously lying about your startup can reach the level of common-law fruad, as Elizabeth Holmes learned the hard way).
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Lying about “prospects” seems pretty hard to prove because they’re predictions. And founders definitely tend to be a little crazy.
So's estimating the value of an asset. Until you put the asset on the market and find out how much someone is willing to pay, you are only trying to predict what someone is going to be willing to pay for it.
There are certainly tools one can use to have a basis for estimating the value of their assets, but that is also the case for valuing a startup.
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It interesting that although we all understand the intended meaning of this expression (and it is true when given the meaning that people expect), it is not an accurate description of how lawyers and used car salesmen lie.
Creating a false belief using a carefully-curated set of technically-true statements is no more effective in an adversarial environment like a courtroom or a negotiation than creating the same false belief using false statements. The normal technique of a lawyer representing a rich-but-obviously-guilty client is to flood the zone with shit. This works best in criminal trials, where if the jury can't understand the case they are supposed to acquit based on reasonable doubt, but it also works in civil trials if the other side can't keep up. Lying by omission is explicitly prohibited in litigation (this is why discovery exists) and in some but not all negotiations.
Used car salesmen working for commercial dealerships, on the other hand, are trying to outnegotiate unsophisticated parties, which is exactly where "lying like a lawyer" is helpful. Making a technically-false statement creates legal risk and isn't necessary if you are good at your job. The people who tell blatant lies when selling used cars are private sellers, who are effectively gone once the cheque clears. Real estate agents are in the same boat - they will tell blatant lies, but they would much rather mislead you in legally safer ways.
So who does lie like Donald Trump? In my experience, the main groups are cheating spouses, toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and actual conmen. Trump, of course, belongs to at least two of these groups.
Who does "lie like a lawyer?" Well the main group is politicians not called Donald Trump. Politically biased journalists do, as do tendentious academics. Basically, exactly the people who form the "establishment" Trumpism is against. In each case it is because it is a lot easier to work a sympathetic ref if you got caught making a true-but-misleading statement than if you told an outright lie. But working the refs in that way doesn't work on normies, and doesn't work on neutral or unsympathetic refs.
Unfortunately this means that the saying reduces to "Trump lies like Trump, the liberal elite lie like liberal elites." This is tautological, but to someone who has been paying attention it is even truthier than the original. It also avoids calumnising innocent lawyers and used car salesmen by associating them with politicians and journalists.
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Do lawyers lie? They try to craft different narratives with the available facts at hand, sure, but I don’t see that as dishonest.
To me it’s somewhat more dishonest. A lawyer lies by recasting the facts so that they tell the story that best serves his purpose, even when the clearest telling of the facts points in the exact opposite direction. They often do so by leaving out crucial context and details that would lead a neutral observer in the opposite direction, thus making people believe something is true that isn’t.
We’ve all been talking about the Lebanon pager explosions. Some people here have speculated on how it was done and how it might be detected or hidden. And on the political side, I would find it fair to say that the comments on this site have a lean towards conservative and neo-reaction. Now if someone who frequents this site is prosecuted, any good lawyer would have painted this site as a reactionary and even fascist site where terrorism was discussed pretty openly. Ripped from context, as lawyers tend to do, the discussion of how Israel blew up pagers juxtaposed with a bit of juicy reactionary or HBD talk paints a picture of this place as a Proud Boy type site. Left out is the crucial context. It’s against the rules to recruit for any cause, liberals post here fairly often, and the discussion of pager batteries was talking about a news story and discussed by people who work n tech.
Lying by recasting the facts is worse to me because it can cover itself with the veneer of truthfulness. You can cite a fact, and people who check will see that the actual facts cited are true. But stripped of context, the facts tell a very different story than the events they’re used to describe. A lie, on the other hand, is easy enough to sus out. You look it up, and it’s not true at all. And so it doesn’t get deep enough into the culture to affect how we see the world. But tell a sort-of-truth, and your fact-checking will help the narrative stick because it’s not obviously wrong. It’s just not an accurate and honest telling of the facts and designed to elicit a belief that isn’t accurate.
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Say there are two people. They both meet a guy who is 6’9” (2.05m) tall.
Person A says: “He’s the tallest person I’ve ever seen! Huge guy! At least 7’0” (2.13m) tall!”
Person B says: “He was probably above average height. I’ve seen taller. People before.”
Person A’s answer is a lie. The guy they saw wasn’t quite as tall as they said and it’s probable that they’ve watched a basketball game or a film and have seen a person who is taller than that before.
Person B’s answer is technically correct. They’ve probably seen basketball on TV, they’ve seen extremely tall people before. And the guy they saw was certainly taller than average.
But Person B’s answer is basically dishonest. The guy they saw was indeed extremely tall! They failed to convey that, all while being technically correct.
And Person A’s answer, while a lie, managed to be more accurate and honest assessment of the subject at hand. It was a much better answer if you wanted to know something about the subject.
Given a choice between them, I’d much rather deal with a person A, a liar who is directionally correct, than person B, a person that maybe rarely lies but also rarely conveys any useful information.
Person B’s answer is worse than useless; if taken seriously you would probably come to a conclusion further from the truth than Person A’s answer.
This is a rather simple and direct example but there’s ample situations like this on the real world. There really are a lot of Person B’s in the world, and once you see them you start seeing them everywhere.
Huh, that’s a good point. Thanks, you’ve changed my perspective on this.
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Yes, this is a good way to put it. It's in some ways even worse than that; If a person C turns up, who states that the tall guy looks REALLY tall & wants to measure him, person B has the tendency to first try to stop him, and if successful, to complain that person C makes claims "without evidence".
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Yes, lawyers lie. If you knowingly deceive your audience, you are a liar. That counts even if your words can be artfully construed to not be false.
We even created a whole new religion to deal with this hypocrisy. In the time of Jesus, the Pharisees were obsessed with following the letter of the law while neglecting its spirit. We invented the social technology to solve this problem 2000 years ago, but some people still don't get it.
The democrats also just straight up lie a lot. When Harris kept saying “Trump’s Project 2025” that isn’t “technically true but misleading.” That was straight up lying.
I’m not sure it is really fair to say Trump is unique in lying. Where he is probably unique is that when he doesn’t need to lie he exaggerates.
Yeah, they straight-up lie quite a lot actually. Worse, they repeat the same lie so many times that people start to take it for granted as baseline reality, like the “fine people” line. In the debate itself Harris only implied that Trump called neo-nazis fine people by mentioning them right before saying trump said “fine people”, which is not a lie by the barest technicality, but the message rests on ad-nauseam repetition of an actual lie.
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My favorite was the “no US soldiers in an active war-zone” lie. Just a few weeks ago some US Soldier got shot by ISIS.
There was a viral video uploaded basically the same day of the debate that ended up getting millions of views of the debate on TV when she said that, and it pans out to like seven soldiers in a forward operating base being like “Wait… then where the fuck are we right now?”
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Can't you just say that Trump lies, the democrats deceive, if that's what you mean?
Would fit well with general rightwing memeplex of casting the democrats as the great deceiver(s). It would also be an opportunity to own the fact that Trump lies. Truth or lies isn't the primary issue, it's deception that's the issue (in politics, in news, in science, etc).
The position that you can be a habitual liar without deceiving seems like a difficult needle to thread!
There is a case to be made that few if any people treat anything Trump says as being on simulacrum level 1. This may be the typical mind fallacy, but if Trump makes noises which sound like a factual statement of the world (i.e. level 1, 'Haitians are eating our pets'), I just don't parse it that way. Likely it is not even level 2 ('I want you to believe that they are eating pets (irrespective if it is true) so that you will vote for me') because that would assume that a significant fraction of listeners will mistake it for a level 1 statement. It is either level 3 ('I am anti-immigrant. Nobody is as anti-immigrant as me!') or level 4 ('I make sounds which I think will help me get elected').
If I am running through the streets saying "The sky is green, plants are orange, Elvis is alive, I am Elvis, 4 is prime, ...", then I an telling a lot of lies, but I will not deceive anyone, because most people will conclude 'based on past statements, that person is so unreliable a source of information that I should not update on their claims'.
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It all comes down to the expectations of both parties.
If there's a street promoter outside of a club trying to convince me to pay a cover fee and go inside he might tell me things like it's the best club, that they have the biggest crowd inside of any bar in the city, everyone's having a great time, probably ever. Yuge night! Maybe they even say that they've heard rumors that there's a movie star who was planning on coming tonight. If I go inside and find it to be not all that, was I decieved? I wouldn't say so, because I was talking to a club promoter; I know what they're like, they know I know what they're like, the expectation was that they would exaggerate everything to try to get me to go inside.
There is a distinction though if they say something like "after you pay the cover fee your first two drinks are free" and it turns out not to be true. Because I don't expect them to be allowed by the bar (to say nothing of the law) to say something like that if it isn't true.
Also, I would consider myself decieved if I (before marriage of course) got in touch with a girl on a dating app and she insisted on meeting me at a club, and I found out after getting there that she was a promoter using the app to bring in clients to the club, even if she never said anything technically untrue. This is the kind of lying I associate in politics with the activists that masquerade as unbiased subject experts.
God. I hate that. I can't function in the presence of promoters like that. I think it's fairly obvious that many people can't. If the advertiser is succeeding at getting people to go inside who otherwise wouldn't, and those people end up disappointed, then he's committing attention fraud against those people. Maybe that's fine and marginal for most people. But williams syndrome-adj ADHDs like moi don't have the spoons or filters to cope with this.
We've taken to pointing at the screen and yelling "Consume product!" every time an advertisement comes on TV in my household to counteract the damage it does to our brains. It's awful. The other scenario is no better to be clear. I have to distance myself from both of those things to function.
I'm the same as you and on dealing with bullshitting estate agents simply have to leave their presence and essentially dismiss them completely from my life.
I notice that I am also allergic to lying club-promoter type politicians and much prefer to be around lawyerly narrative constructors, which makes sense of my political preferences I guess.
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I know this isn’t the main point of your comment, but I’d like to make a practical suggestion. If you find ads that damaging, just mute the TV during commercial breaks. I always do it on the few occasions I watch TV, and I merely find the ads obnoxious, not damaging to my ability to function.
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You don't have to do that. You can say that truth isn't a good safeguard against deception, with the biggest deceivers being the ones telling you the "truth".
Lying isn't good but at the end of the day deception is worse. Its kind of like how betrayal is worse than opposition. You don't even have to play defense at all.
Your average democrat might lie less often than Donald Trump but they are much, much more dishonest in my opinion. It’s not even close.
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I suppose you can claim that technically it's not a lie (knowingly putting forward a false statement), but the whole rub is that a lot of people (myself included) see "crafting narratives" as dishonest.
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The best part about it is that everybody here seems to agree with it, and we're just fighting over which type of lying is better/worse.
Yes, and it also gets at a preference that is more primal than political. Would you prefer to hang out with a lawyer who selects their words carefully or a sales guy who's always bullshitting?
Seems closely related to the old finding from the okcupid blog (here's gwern quoting it, can't find archives of the original right now) that the question "Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?" is a good predictor of liberal vs. conservative US politics, with "simple" being the conservative answer.
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