Why We Choose Liars as Leaders
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To me, the reason most people choose liars as leaders is because they prefer comfortable falsehoods to hard truths. Decisions aren't driven by self interest of material benefit, but rather the ego boost of what makes them feel smart/superior/etc. This also applies to nuance that would make people think, which is why for every political topic in the US, the mainstream opinions are invariably based around some ignorant groupthink.
Looking at the US political process with the standard narrative of "people make decisions and leaders carry them out", it's surprising that anything useful comes out of it at all. I'd say the halfway-useful results have more to do with politicians actually working for entrenched business interests, with the main mechanism of elections being to make people think they asked for the results. Of course, that is a horrible dynamic if you actually desire freedom.
I think it goes farther than this. They choose liars because liars are supernormal stimuli for the body politic. If their lies are too obvious, they may be rejected, but most liars appear as better candidates than an ideologically similar candidate bound by truth.
That might be a better way of describing it, at least for some things. Things that people want to be stimulated about, as opposed to things they want to ignore.
I think you hit the nail on the head there, and probably explains the belief in gods and how religions also exploit it. A sort of psychotherapy session for the community, if you want to believe in that.
“People” don’t see the reality but you do—huh.
Your options are to vote for politicians who never say anything of substance, or vote for people who are habitual liars. I'm glad we're realistic about Trump telling lies, but please can we also focus on the lies like the claims there was no spying apparatus, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that the US economy was strong going in to all the major recessions? The difference between Trump and that is that Trump's lies didn't end up having much in the way of consequences.
That type of reality denying - which goes beyond any one politician and highlights the rot of the entire apparatus is much more concerning than Trump. That is how the majority of politicians behave.
And, hot take, Trump probably would have pushed against starting those wars if that recording they're trying to convict him with [0] is any evidence. There is a pretty good chance that is why the entrenched players are so keen to get rid of him in fact. The powers in Washington clearly have no problem with liars because a lot of them keep happily plugging away.
He's still telling people that his son Beau died in a combat tour in Iraq, when he died from cancer in a hospital in the US.
But if this is the first thing you think about when claiming Biden is as bad as Trump in lying, I think it is obvious that this is nowhere near the same level.
Biden also said 150 million Americans were killed by guns.
For context that’s almost half the US population. I can find egregious Joe Biden quotes and lies all day. He’s at least as much of a liar as Trump.
He's not, that's the thing—it's not even close. This is math, not opinions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/plagiarism-scandal-joe-biden...
He also lied about driving an 18-wheeler…
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-claim-drove-18-wheeler-tr...
Biden has been in politics for over 50 years (he’s old enough to have issued political statements against school desegregation because he didn’t want his kids to grow up in what he called a “racial jungle”), so I can find his well documented lies all day long.
Trump is definitely a liar, but it’s hard to argue that he’s worse than Biden or other politicians on this topic.
> https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-claim-drove-18-wheeler-tr...
Really? This is what you have—he said he drove a truck when he only rode in it? This is the kind of thing that you think that makes it hard to argue that Trump is worse?
Here’s another huge Biden lie…
He said that he graduated in the top half of his class in law school, but he really ranked 76th out of 85.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/that-time-joe-b...
Like I said, I can continue this thread all day until I prove to you that Biden is a pathological liar.
You're comparing it to a man who lied over 30,000 times in his 4 years of office. You could continue this all day, and the next day, and the next, and you still won't get anywhere near that.
365 * 4 + 1 day for leap year = 1461 days in office
30,000 / 1461 = 20.5 lies per day on average
That seems like the media was either excessively nitpicky about what Trump said being a lie, or that number is a tad inflated. Maybe it's some of A and some of B?
The other thing to consider is that Trump gave way more speeches than Biden has at this point in their respective presidencies.
I think to do a proper statistical analysis we would need to normalize for the fact that Biden largely hides from the press and when he does talk to them he mostly calls on friendly reporters to answer preselected questions that he already has a prepared answer for. (This is documented fact. He has been caught several times with cheat sheets that tell him what reporters to call on and in what order so that they match his note cards.) He's had much fewer opportunities to lie.
Or maybe he just lies constantly.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-arrested-south-afric...
This was during the period when he met his claimed-"best friend" Strom Thurmond.
Severe retconning going on there.
Trump implemented a new tactic of “carpet bombing” of lies. I don’t know which is worse for society, really, but it’s different. Maybe one paved the ground for the other.
It's one thing to lie, and try desperately to cover up the lie and not get caught. It's much worse to lie so blatantly and frequently that people give up even trying to expose and refute all your lies. It's worse because it's more corrosive to the moral fiber (and even sanity) of the population. It is not healthy to continually bathe in lies. You can lose track of reality.
It’s about the lying. For too long we have accepted that everyone lies in politics but when someone comes and carpet bombs the nation with lies and seems pleased with himself rather than ashamed, it’s time to put an end to the practice.
Politicians must be held accountable to some standard or else we cannot still pretend to have a democracy.
Like that setup wouldn’t pass the rigor of a devops 5 whys analysis - you wouldn’t say oh this one employee is just bad put a better one in their place, instead of actual systemic change. Instead you’d make sure individuals don’t have the power to mess up.
“All baseball players hit baseballs. Why are we focused on Babe Ruth just because he hit more than most?”
There’s an old joke about it even:
“How do you know when a politician is lying?
When their lips are moving.”
There are so many legitimate things to attack Trump on but it’s ridiculous to claim that he lies more than other politicians.
The fact checkers stopped when Biden was elected, but that isn’t because Biden stopped lying. He’s a known serial plagiarist and liar with over 50 years in political office and he has been lying the entire time.
They don't do that with other politicians. We don't have data on them.
So we, rage-consumers of media that we are, all think Trump is the biggest, fattest liar of them all.
There is no identical dataset for other presidents (generally because they haven't lied enough at this level to warrant a dedicated database), but luckily, you can see that Trump's lie count goes up at a fairly steady rate week-to-week/month-to-month (i.e. there's no stretch of time where he stopped lying), so a little project for you would be:
- Go back to any other modern day president from the past 50 or so years, whoever you'd like to compare
- Pick 1 week or 1 month randomly, and pull up all their public statements or press coverage
- Then count the # of lies for that week or month, and extrapolate a comparison
I think you'll quickly find that it does not compare to Trump's overall average rate of 21 documented public facing lies per day (obviously we are not able to count private conversations).
John Kerry is denying flying in a private jet because his wife was the one who owned it, not him and besides they sold it at some point [0]. Trump would just claim there is no jet, that he only travels by bicycle, that everyone knows he has the best jets and that the questioners were low energy. Then the fact checkers say Kerry was telling the truth. Cue the eye rolls from Trump voters - at least Trump is not trying to insult everyone's intelligence. He just up and lies in straightforward and entertaining fashion. Assuming the sentences parse enough to work out what he technically said. But at least there isn't some stupid game where we all have to pretend he was being honest.
[0] https://fortune.com/2023/07/13/john-kerry-stupid-lie-private...
But I think it's more than just being interesting/entertaining. I think Trump also tells lies that a large number of people want to believe.
But this may be changing. Trump's lies aren't nearly as entertaining anymore. "I won in 2020" is like, "Really? You're still on that? Get some new material." "All these court cases are just incompetent people, jealousy, conspiracy, and election interference!" Yeah, right. You're saying the same thing over and over (as the court cases keep coming). It's been getting repetitive. There's nothing new there any more.
At this point, in light of all of this evidence comprehensively laid out in relatively plain English, supporting or minimize what Trump has done (and attempted to do) is an admission of extreme ignorance, or malice.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/8a7503af-fde7-4061-...
At this point the Democratic establishment has a history of frivolous use of law to attack Trump. That indictment basically admits in point 3 that it is on shaky ground. The Democrats had their chance to hit Trump with the Russiagate investigation and came up with nothing. Then they started impeaching him to try and stop Biden's Ukraine dealings from coming to light. In light of that it seems unlikely that these lawsuits will prove serious allegations, even if they manage to get a lucky judge/jury combo and score a conviction.
It is naked politics.
If you read the Mueller Report it's also clear the the "Russiagate" wasn't a hoax and this argument that the "Democrats had their chance to hit Trump" as if the fact that the impeachments clearly failed on a partisan basis and Barr misrepresented the findings in the Mueller Report, which were damning and would have been worth an indictment if not for the fact of Trump being the sitting President at the time.
If you hate the American system and think the current liberal democracy deserves to be destroyed (for whatever reason) then you can just say so without pretending that Trump isn't a uniquely malignant liar beyond precedent.
In America or not in America, governments are either resistant enough to military or political coups or not, when they occur. There's nothing special about the paper in the US Constitution that changes human behavior.
I happen to think the lives wasted in Iraq FAR outweigh the reminder that Trump provided, reinforcing the waning belief that the US Government structures are still worth supporting.
Shocking everyone on the show, in the live audience, and listening on radio he announced he was endorsing Clinton, saying:
> I have a little announcement to make ... I'm voting for Hillary. I am endorsing Hillary. I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place. She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.
Noting Trump as a habitual liar is not contentious, and so it's not propaganda at all. For those who support Trump, as reading between the lines you might (? this is an interpretation of your claim it is 'cheap propaganda' and 'thinly veiled as psychology') it would be disingenuous to claim he doesn't and didn't lie (I note you did not say this, btw); the thing is that _he's supported even though he does lie._ And that's exactly the phenomenon this article is about.
The duopoly of the US[1] has been moving to the right for decades. Which might not be obvious since the Republicans are so good at being extremists that one can be fooled into thinking that the Democrats are a left-wing party, even though they’re a business-aligned, right-wing party with some nice-on-social-issues tendencies.
I guess the decades of having to choose between not-that-different candidates might push some people towards a “left field” candidate. And in 2016 the more reactionary petite bourgeoisie managed to boost Donald Trump into snatching a victory (somewhat barely). But there was also the other left field candidate Bernie Sanders, who was not a notorious liar but was still popular. But tellingly the Establishment would rather let a terrible right-wing buffoon win rather than a social democrat, so Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump was a given since the Democratic Primaries started.
[1] Disclaimer: not an American.
But even if you do play the voting game it probably averages out that half time you're not getting who you vote for and the the other half of the time you're not getting what you voted for.
You have a few individuals and families that have a complete strangle hold via assets they're never taxed on and can borrow huge amounts of cash against. "We" simply can not compete on an even playing field.
Voting is a house always wins game.
So Truth isn't really a defense against a slander allegation; it's a refutation of that allegation. If the spoken words are true, they can't be defamatory, so they can't be slander.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation#:~:text=Truth%20i....
In the UK, it's usually a defense to say that the act was justified, even if it happened and you did it. I think it's usually a defense to claim that you had no choice.
I suppose my persnickety comment was to the effect that if the claim is true, then there was no slander; you aren't innocent or guilty, because the alleged act simply didn't happen.
I mean the system IS broken, but choosing not to participate doesn't help. If you do want to protest, vote blank. If you don't vote, you're participating in the idea that democracy doesn't work and should be replaced with a different system.
Democracy isn't perfect, but it's the least worst. The US-flavored democracy is broken but needs the right people to get voted in to change it.
If you factor in eligible non-voters, then "neither Democrat nor Republican" wins almost every election in the US. For example, Biden got 51.3% of the vote with 66.6% turnout, which is only 34% of eligible voters. Now ask yourself how many of those 34% were truly enthusiastic about Biden, and how many were just voting against Trump.
I think you're missing the point, which is that neither candidate was truly representative of the public interest. Just like neither Biden nor Trump is truly representative of the public interest. People hold their nose and vote for the lesser evil, but that's not what people want.
The OP said "it probably averages out that half time you're not getting who you vote for and the the other half of the time you're not getting what you voted for". In other words, even if your candidate wins, you lose.
I choose not to take part.
I'll do what I have to to not get terrorised by these people but otherwise I'm done. My family and I will explore our lives with the rest of humanity but no more am I taking serious the dictates of these power structures.
Amd democracy is not necessarily the best that is, like everything else, nothing more than propaganda.
There are some people who oppose corporate welfare for example to say one of the point you made
It’s not “I don’t get what I want so I don’t play” it’s “The outcome doesn’t change if I play or don’t, so I’ll just live my life and do something else”.
I can tell you exactly which party is going to win local elections near me, and in many cases which candidate because I know the demographics and general zeitgeist of the area. If I’m part of that zeitgeist, it doesn’t matter if I vote or note because I get the outcome I want either way. If I’m not, then it also doesn’t matter because no action by me is going to magically change anything. In national election, I have no interest in picking between thing 1 and thing 2, they’ll both fuck me over anyway, perhaps in different way.
Maybe if you live in a highly contested swing state or area it’s worth it to vote.
Black folks who now don't have to sit in the back of the bus and gay folks who are now allowed to be married would likely disagree with you.