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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.
"I milked this for all it was worth" is another, equally plausible, mechanism for change that requires no shame, and like I said I've seen no indication anyone was ashamed of spreading these finely tuned deceitful narratives.
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