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How many examples of "average politicians" telling made-up stories would be required to shift your prior here? "Putin is blackmailing Trump with tapes of him being urinated on by Russian Prostitutes" and "Russia hacked election machines in 2016 to secure a Trump victory" and "The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" are three obvious examples of made-up stories promulgated by those you seem to be classifying as "average politicians", and they were not even "directionally" correct. I am pretty sure that I could add dozens more examples from the last few years with minimal effort.
It seems to me that, moving beyond questions of aesthetics, this preference grounds out on quantifiable concrete outcomes. That is, we can actually look at population-level beliefs, and we can track those population-level beliefs to the statements of political actors that formed and broadcasted the message that gave rise to them.
This is one of my favorite graphs. It's a measure of population-level beliefs about an objective, factual question of immediate and undeniable salience to the political realities of our nation. It seems to me that the shape of this graph was directly created by the "normal politician" style of discourse which you are arguing for, and the consequences were likewise quite direct: a massive increase in violent crime nation-wide. More damningly, it seems trivial to me to demonstrate how obvious "made up stories" spun off and achieved virality directly from those "normal politician"-style claims.
What I see in that graph is an obvious example of a completely compromised epistemic environment, one where the center of gravity of the consensus narrative is completely detached from objective reality. And it seems to me that such epistemic compromise is hardly an isolated occurrence, and is in fact the norm across much of the policy space, from foreign affairs to educational policy to gun politics to abortion to the status of the federal bureaucracy and so on. If one accepts that broad epistemic corruption as a given, I'm at a loss to understand why you prefer the style that produces such woeful outcomes.
So, of these examples, I do agree that two of them - the Russiagate stuff and the Hunter laptop - were essentially made-up stories promulgated by actual politicians. The hacked voting machines thing is not, as far as I recall, something any actual elected officials claimed. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) Look, I was incredibly radicalized by Russiagate. It was one of the major things, along with the mass delusions about BLM which you highlight later in your post (a well-chosen example particularly given your interlocutor), that turned me against the progressive media establishment. I fully agree that they were scandalous lies which should have led to imprisonments. And to be clear, Republicans are not spared - I imagine that the WMD lie in the lead-up to the Iraq War is one of the other examples you had on hand.
I will not pretend that aesthetics do not play a major part here. @nomenym is correct that the way Donald Trump speaks is highly reminiscent of the way stupid people speak, and I do not want my President to sound like a stupid person. This is a powerful and viscerally-felt pre-rational preference for me, and it certainly colors the way I have experienced the Trump phenomenon over the past 9 years.
The way that, say, Richard Nixon spoke is the way a leader would speak to intelligent and well-informed populace with the wherewithal to directly assess the veracity of his claims and draw the appropriate conclusions. When a politician makes specific and falsifiable claims, I can use my own judgment and do my own research; if I determine that what he or she said was misleading or incomplete, I can punish him or her accordingly with my vote, and I can gather more information myself in order to figure out whose claims to credit in the future. Whereas with a president who is a bullshitter, I have no way to confidently assess whether what he said was even intended to be taken seriously in the first place. His supporters may not believe in some of the outrageously false things his opponents do, but I still believe that they are on average less well-informed about the world and about how the government works, even if this still ends up cashing out with them having better object-level policy preferences.
In no way am I suggesting that Kamala Harris speaks to the public that way. She is scarcely more well-informed than the lowest common denominator member of the public to whom she’s speaking. And even as I’m enumerating the qualities I long for in a politician, I recognize how doe-eyed and naïve I must sound to someone who has already given up on the future of the American regime to the extent you have.
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"The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" was actually "The Hunter Biden laptop has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign". Often they are not straight up lying but saying something that is technically true but designed in a way to mislead their audience into believing something that is false. I think if you consciously do this it is not any different from lying. It's like these people running scams on Amazon where they sell you the box but not the thing inside the box but then claim its not fraud because they sent you what was in the picture.
I think that your intuition here is actually one of the biggest ethnic/cultural divideds between the median Trump voter and most of the posters here.
Trump "lies" but is he dishonest?
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