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Notes -
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.
I don't know how that works to distinguish the Trump style from the mainstream political style. Trump is the one really milking lies for what they're worth. The others stop before the full value of a deceit has been extracted (i.e. before the less information-literate parts of the audience can see through it). Why? Because they are fearful of being excommunicated by other elites whose respect they don't want to lose. They are ashamed to continue knowing a portion of their peers are onto them.
Before we answer the question of "why", can we confirm that this is in fact the case? I still see people parroting lies like "puberty blockers are reversible" or "you have to go through a long and bureaucratic process to transition", for example. I've never seen anyone being excommunicated for lies on the trans topic, so I literally have no idea what you're talking about.
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