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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.
Those who maintain those things are somewhat excommunicated imo.
How did you get that impression? As far as I can tell everybody involved has cosy prestigious positions.
Also on the topic of milking lies see the recent thread on the mass graves in Canadian boarding schools and the comment about a gay hatecrime hoax that apparently reached legendary status.
All sorts of highly-regarded people love milking lies, so I don't see a good reason to single Trump out.
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