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I mean, at a certain point you become complicit in the lies. Like, if you catch me, bloody knife in hand, body at my feet, the body of a person I've had decades of animosity towards and threatened to kill, and I go "He fell", clearly I'm lying. Or at least you'd have significant reason to believe I'm lying. But if you turn around and repeat to everyone "WhiningCoil didn't murder anyone! The poor man just fell and anyone who says otherwise is a nazi!" I'd say you are also a liar.
The entirety of the Democrats and the media lied about Joe Biden's cognitive state for years. In private many of them knew he was thoroughly demented. When the dam finally broke and the rats fled the sinking ship, hoping if they came clean first they could salvage some of their credibility, you heard stories going back to his inauguration. The worst, and the one that condemns the most Democrats, is when he went to Capitol Hill to try to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act, he spoke with all the congressional democrats, and he was so obviously demented Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and "clarify" what he was "trying to say". That was at least two years ago.
There were all the times in public he was obviously demented that got hand waved away. The media knew it was lying then. We all have the same eyes in our head. There were the times the media claimed Joe Biden had a stutter that he's wrestled with for years, despite five decades of public speaking stutter free. They definitely knew that was a lie and repeated it.
The conspiracy to hide Joe Biden's dementia, and the willful lying, or credulous complicity, damned every Democrat and every media mouthpiece that played ball. This isn't in the same class of lying as making and breaking campaign promises, exaggerating your record, denying corruption or moral failings, crass political posturing and the like. It's unlike any act of political dishonesty I've ever even heard of. And they were all in on it, and they didn't even care that it was obvious they were lying to everyone, because we all have the same eyes and ears on our head. If they could have bullied enough people into voting blue no matter who to drag a corpse across the finish line they would have.
If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled; what they say is apparently not significantly correlated with the truth and you should ignore it", that's a solid argument and one I'd actually mostly agree with.
If you say "these people are gullible and/or stupid and/or highly-mindkilled, and we should chop them up into little pieces", well, I don't accept that argument for a variety of reasons, but ultimately that's a matter of opinion; there's logic to that position and it's been taken before.
If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours. There are definitely some liars among the Democrats, but less than you might think.
I don't think that's the singular definition of lying. Phrases like "lying to oneself" and "lying by omission" are quite common, and I don't think they're being ironic or hyperbolic. Often, lying to oneself is considered a lesser evil than knowingly saying false things with the conscious intent to make others believe them to be true, but I'd also argue that, often, the truth is so obvious and the false thing that someone believes when they "lie to themselves" is so blatantly self-serving that it's at least as much an evil.
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How many people do you think would be less than I think? Like I said, I already consider all congressional Democrats liars for this. They all met with a demented Joe Biden trying to whip votes for the Inflation Reduction Act. They lied about his mental state for 2 years. Maybe that does not indict every single congressional staffer, or literally every single person who is a registered Democrat, or every single person who voted D. But it absolutely indicts almost every single person of rank and consequence in the DNC. Now that the beans are spilled, we know they all lied for years, and they knew they were lying.
As I said, call the liars liars. But target discrimination like this is important, damnit. It's the point of that rule, and it divides discourse from rhetoric.
How have I not done that? You keep banging on about how I'm casting too wide a net. Do you think I'm wrong to consider every Democrat of rank and consequence a liar for their conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden's mental state? Do you think it's wrong, if every Democrat of rank and consequence in the DNC is a liar, to claim that the DNC is full of liars? Do you think it's somehow ambiguous who I'm talking about when I say capital D-Democrats are liars? Do you think someone is confused that I'm actually talking about their Nana who heard on the news that Trump is Hitler and voted for the first black female president instead? Here?!
I am in fact 100% sure of this, because I was personally confused. I was more thinking of "random teens on social media resharing everything from the goodthinker sources", though.
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