Dishonesty is the defining characteristics of Trump and his administration, and lies are a daily occurrence. While there are far too many lies to track, I thought a thread dedicated to the worst and most notable lies would be useful. There’s a lot of material to choose from.
(I could have tapped into a rich vein of lies simply by linking to Trump’s Truth Social account — hence the OP title.)
Allan:
It’s also funny that Bill will demand evidence but then run away in terror when we ask him to look at it with us.
The longer all of this goes on, the more I believe that Bill isn’t trying to persuade us, he’s trying to persuade himself. Emotionally, he needs to convince himself that his position is rational and respectable and that his Dear Leader is being unfairly slandered.
When he writes
…I think he’s telling himself “See how open-minded I am? I’m perfectly willing to accept that Trump is a liar. It’s just that I’m also rational and won’t believe claims that can’t be supported, and no one has supported the lying claim. Well, except for one. See how open-minded I am? I acknowledged a Trump lie!”
None of us are stupid enough to believe it, but he is motivated to believe it. It would precipitate an emotional crisis if he didn’t.
Earlier in the thread, Bill commented:
The phrase “projecting patricians” tickled me. I assume Bill was trying to say “projecting partisans”, but who knows? Anyway, I decided to roll with it and think about what it means to be a “projecting patrician”.
I prompted Gemini:
She (I call her “Gem” — might as well have some yin to go along with Claude and Chip’s (ChatGPT’s) yang) was terribly confused and took a long time to answer. Her thought process was fascinating, and I’ll document it later on one of the AI threads.
To allay her confusion, I explained:
She said:
…and then proceeded to reason her way into producing the following image:
Haha. I love AI.
keiths,
Yes, I noticed ‘patrician’ with amusement, but let it lie. Funny given the context of Der Lügenführer.
I see a lot on Twitter. Since Musk took over I get a lot more RW content (also, because I comment, the algorithm knows this pushes my buttons). So I could hardly be accused of living in an echo chamber. What I perceive, from my safe distance (though not much further from Washington than Bill is) is a worrying descent into chaos.
The shooting of Renee Good is a blue dress/gold dress moment, but both sides cannot be right. The reason it has excited so much ongoing commentary is that there are aspects that seem a little bit marginal. I know where I stand, but I can grasp the other argument. But what’s interesting is the administration’s framing, before the poor girl’s neurons had even stopped firing. Leavitt: ‘deranged lunatic’. Noem, Miller: ‘domestic terrorist”. JD Vance: “She was trying to ram this guy with her car, he shot back, he defended himself”. Trump: “violently, wilfully and viciously ran over…recovering in hospital”. “We took over the investigation because Minnesota is corrupt… I won Minnesota 3 times”. (A clear lie, and why does he always have to make it about him?).
And not one fucking word of condolence. Christians all.
A sped-up video appearing to show him carried along is completely at odds with all other footage and the capacity to shoot (in self defence, haha). A blemish on the wing mirror is mistaken for a bullet hole, where #2 is wrongly presumed to have gone, from the front. A DHS video showing her prior behaviour (honking her horn FFS) cuts at exactly the moment their man could have been shown to be hit and MAYBE justified in firing, perplexingly. If it was crystal clear, against her or for their man, it would have carried on, but the intent is only to show her in a bad light.
This… THIS … is propaganda.
Allan Miller,
Saying it is not supporting it. You are a victim of Keiths bald assertions that fit your narrative. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you can find 10 lies out of 30000 I will drop the “seasoning” and move on.
Did he have an uncle that was a professor?
colewd:
Jesus, Bill. Have you heard of the Google? It’s this thing called a ‘search engine’, and it enables you to find things on the internet. I used the Google and found this:
Fact check: Trump tells fictional story about his uncle and the Unabomber
And since you like the Grok:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMi1jb3B5_f6370310-5b67-4855-a814-535294b291e9
colewd:
I’ve mentioned 35 in this thread alone. We’ve discussed lie after lie during this nine-month conversation. The evidence is at your fingertips — just read the threads.
If you want to challenge our claims, feel free, but I’m not going to keep feeding you the same information over and over in order to get you to say “yes, he lied about that”. This is a “you” problem, not a problem with the evidence, and as I said earlier, I am not a cult deprogrammer or a therapist. I can’t help you with the emotional side of this.
If you choose to remain in denial, that’s your choice. It won’t surprise us. In the meantime, we’ll continue to discuss Trump’s lies while you watch helplessly, unable to refute them.
His uncle died 11 years before the Unabomber was unmasked. I went through the evidence – him actually saying it – when I first brought it up. I’ve mentioned it several times since. And now you act like a newborn chick over it?
Why do you think I would make this up? One of us is arguing in bad faith, and it ain’t me.
Here’s Karoline Leavitt, squirming to avoid the question:
White House asked about Trump’s MIT Ted Kaczynski story
Karoline says:
…and then avoids answering the question.
Allan, to colewd:
I think your earlier diagnosis was correct. Bill is a member of this species:
Jordan Klepper mocking Trump’s Kaczynski lie
Cross-posting from the “stable genius” thread, because it’s a whopper of a lie:
Here’s a video:
Donald Trump Pledges To Halve Energy & Electricity Prices In First 12 Months Of Office
It’s worth watching the video because you can see from Trump’s tone and demeanor how easily and effortlessly he lies, no matter how ridiculous the lie is. It’s as natural to him as breathing.
He said:
No hedging this time with the “18 months at the latest” qualifier. He said 12 months. which means that unless he can cut energy prices by more than 50% in the next seven days, which of course is impossible, his promise has failed spectacularly. Which is what you’d expect, because it was never possible. He was lying.
Here I think some qualifications are called for. Lowering prices isn’t something that can be done by executive fiat (though raising them can). Economies are complex beyond rational modeling even in great detail. The Fed is perhaps the most powerful tool available, and all they can do is alter the rediscount rate, which influences the number of dollars in circulation but does relatively little to change their velocity. Trump might (as other presidents have) try to alter public optimism or expectations about future prices. If successful, that does have some effect but not a lot and not immediate.
So Trump’s claim is not credible, but not exactly a lie. I’d call it puffery, like claiming brand X is the world’s best-tasting or whatever.
Flint:
That only reinforces my point. There was no chance in hell that Trump was going to be able to cut energy costs in half in 12 months, or for that matter, ever. It was impossible, and Trump knew it.
Yes, he’s economically illiterate, and yes, he’s a moron generally, but not even he is stupid enough to think he could pull that off, especially when you consider what his “plan” was: somehow induce companies to build pipelines, speed up environmental approvals, and magically get the power industry to double and triple electrical generation capacity, all within a year, quickly enough that there would still be time for the effects to propagate through the economy to prices, and with an effect sufficient to bring prices down by half. Mr Real Estate doesn’t know much, but he does know how long building projects take, and so he knew on that basis alone that what he was hyping was impossible.
If you knowingly make a false statement in order to deceive someone, you are lying. If you tell your kids that you’ll be taking them to the zoo on Wednesday, knowing full well that you won’t be taking them to the zoo on Wednesday, that’s a lie. You don’t have to wait until 12:00 AM on Thursday for that statement to become a lie. You lied to your kids when you made the promise, because you deliberately made a false statement, intending to deceive them, and that’s the very definition of a lie.
Ditto for Trump’s energy lie. Trump said:
That statement was false at the moment Trump made it, and he knew it was false. He deliberately made a false statement, intending to deceive voters into thinking it was true, so that they would vote for him. It was a lie.
Yes, I know this. I guess I expressed myself poorly. EVERY American President since (and including) Washington has made promises they didn’t fulfill for one reason or another. The President who came closest to it was Polk, and he did it by not promising much. So rather than pound your chest and accuse them all of lying, I think it would be more reasonable not to paint aspirational assurances as lies. Hell, Carter’s campaign promise was that he would never lie to the public – a promise broken repeatedly.
I personally consider Trump so incompetent that he sincerely doesn’t know that when he promises the moon he can’t deliver. He has irrational confidence in his ability, enough to lose fortunes for his backers when he kept going bankrupt but even rich people were conned – over and over. Lying works. But to win elections, politicians have to say things like “I will lower prices”, rather than something like “I will try to get things done (but may not even be able to do that much) which might someday lower prices if nothing else comes up.” Who will vote for that? Not that Trump has any clue what causes prices to change, of course.
Keith:
I don’t know where to post this, but I thought you would enjoy it. Most likely you’re familiar with it anyway, but still..
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
Flint:
Sure, but unfulfilled promises aren’t automatically lies. If someone says “I am going to do x”, believing at that moment that they can and will do x, then they aren’t lying, even if it turns out that they don’t manage to do x.
I don’t. See above.
My standard is: if a statement meets the definition of a lie, I call it a lie. If it doesn’t meet the definition of a lie, I don’t call it a lie. That seems reasonable to me. Trump’s statement meets the definition of a lie, so I call it a lie.
That promise is a lie only if it meets the definition of a lie. Did Carter know that his statement was false at the moment he made it? Was he trying to deceive the American people into thinking he would never lie, when in fact he knew that he would? If yes, then his promise was a lie. Otherwise, it wasn’t. Whether he went on to tell lies doesn’t change the lie/not lie status of the promise. What it does change is the fulfilled/not fulfilled status, which is quite different.
Often that’s true, but not always. I think Trump knew that his statement was false at the moment he made it, for reasons given in my previous comment.
Whether something needs to be said in order to win elections is separate from whether it’s a lie. Again, it’s a lie if it meets the definition of a lie. If a politician says “I will lower prices” while knowing that they will not lower prices, then they’re lying. If they say it thinking that they will in fact lower prices, then it isn’t a lie. There are shades of gray that depend on how certain the politician feels about whether they will deliver on their promise.
Flint:
Great story! Thanks for posting it. I knew about Royal McBee, but I had never read that saga.
ETA: I laughed when I read this understatement:
I googled the RPC-4000 and found this:
It’s a handheld FPGA-based replica! The guy who built it is hoping that someone has some RPC-4000 code stashed away somewhere.
I wonder if Bill would enjoy this article:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fact-check-trump-litters-detroit-economic-speech-with-numerous-false-claims-about-economy/ar-AA1U9jIK?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=69678f07dce84c07b5e50b77c46d7bd1&ei=49
You are perhaps leaning a bit too heavily on your definition of a lie. If we say someone is lying if they say something untrue that they know is untrue and say it for the purpose of deceiving the listener, then it’s a lie. OK, fine.
But contrast this with the bullshitter. The bullshitter is constructing a narrative, painting a picture of a desired reality, and saying things to support it. The key point is, the bullshitter doesn’t know or care if their supporting claims are true or false, because that’s not relevant to them. The bullshitter’s claims might actually be true, but so what?
I regard Trump as more of a bullshitter. He’s describing a reality he prefers. For that reality to be the case, certain “facts” must be true, so these are created as necessary. Sometimes they’re true in our reality, but all are true in Trump’s reality. The more his reality diverges from ours, the less likely any supporting claim is to be true – and Trump’s reality might qualify as clinical pathology.
From my reading, most of Trump’s “lies” are self-serving wild exaggerations. But Trump doesn’t really understand things like tariffs, inflation, percentages. He has no idea how many immigrants there are, but doesn’t care. If the scenario calls for them to be rapists and murderers, then they become rapists and murderers. If the narrative requires them to come from foreigh prisons, then they come from foreign prisons. This is important. He doesn’t know the facts on the ground because he has no motivation to know anything. He makes it up as he goes along (and improvises like a jazz musician, never the same thing twice, since nothing is tethered to reality).
J.D.Vance, now, is a liar.
Flint:
Can you think of any examples of statements that meet the above criteria but shouldn’t be regarded as lies? I can’t think of any. The definition seems right to me and Trump’s energy claim satisfies it: it’s false, Trump knew it was false the moment he said it, and he said it with the intention of deceiving people and procuring their votes.
I read Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit years ago. He draws a similar distinction between lies and bullshit, but I think that’s a mistake. While indifference to the truth is what distinguishes bullshit from non-bullshit, it isn’t what distinguishes bullshit from lies. That’s because lies and bullshit aren’t mutually exclusive. A lie is still a lie even if the speaker doesn’t care whether it’s true or false.
Let’s say you’re trying to persuade your friend Miranda to go to a party with you. You know she adores Francisco, so you tell her “You really should come to the party. Francisco’s going to be there.” You know perfectly well that Francisco won’t be there because he’s visiting family in Barcelona. But the fact that what you’re saying is false doesn’t matter to you. You just want Miranda to come to the party. If Francisco actually were going to be there, you’d say the same thing in order to get her to come.
You’re clearly bullshitting, because you’re indifferent to the truth or falsity of your statement. But you’re also clearly lying, because you’re knowingly saying something false in order to deceive Miranda and get her to attend. To argue that you’re not lying in this scenario seems absurd to me. It’s both a lie and bullshit.
Trump both bullshits and lies. Sometimes he lies without bullshitting. Sometimes he bullshits without lying. And sometimes he bullshits and lies at the same time. You’re suggesting that his energy claim is bullshit but not a lie, but I say it’s a lie and not bullshit.
Here’s why. It fits the definition of a lie, as I explained in my first paragraph above. It doesn’t fit the definition of bullshit, though, because Trump very much cares about its truth or falsity. His ego is involved, and it bugs him that he’s not capable of delivering on his promise. He’s a narcissist, he craves admiration, so he wants you to believe that he’s a genius who can bring the cost of energy down by 50%.
His statement has a dual purpose: to get your vote, but also to get you to admire him because he’s this awesome guy who has such power over the economy. To see this, imagine if it were the other way around. For whatever reason, suppose that Trump would gain votes by saying “I’m not capable enough to get energy costs to plunge by half over the next year.” He would struggle to do it despite the fact that it would win him votes. Contrast that with someone who was bullshitting, who would happily make that statement in order to get the votes, not caring whether what they were saying was true.
As with bullshit and lies, so with exaggerations and lies. They’re not mutually exclusive. Bill wants them to be, which is why he freely admits that Trump exaggerates. He thinks that gets Trump off the hook for lying, but it doesn’t.
The example I’ve used with Bill is this: if I tell you that I’m as rich as Elon Musk, I’m exaggerating. I have money, but I don’t have nearly as much as Musk does. But I’m also lying, because I’m knowingly making a false statement in order to deceive you. If I attest that I’m as rich as Musk in order to get a yacht loan (assuming a very stupid loan officer), I am both exaggerating and lying.
He’s clueless in most areas, and unmotivated to learn, but he does know certain things. As I said earlier:
Flint:
Oh, he’ll definitely repeat himself. Consider how many times he’s told us he won the 2020 election. The way I’d put it is that Trump repeats himself, but he’s also willing to turn on a dime and reverse himself if it’s to his advantage. Think about the “shithole countries” remark he made years ago. He denied saying it then, but now he proudly confirms that he said it because he knows that appeals to the bigots in his base.
On that we definitely agree.
Flint:
I’m sure Bill will carefully read that article and discuss the evidence with us.
<busts out laughing>
Bill will never acknowledge those lies, but he will also never acknowledge that if Trump actually believed all of them, he’d be mentally incompetent and grossly unfit for office. His choice is between “Trump is too dishonest to be president” and “Trump is too cognitively impaired to be president”. He will choose neither, opting instead to run away from the challenge, as always.
This almost misses the point. It’s bullshit even if the bullshitter doesn’t know if his statement is true. It’s bullshit even if the bullshitter believes it’s true – OR if the bullshitter believes it’s false when it’s actually true. Your definition depends strongly on the bullshitter’s knowledge – you have even said that if his claim is false but he believes it’s true, it’s not a lie. Which requires us to determine what Trump knows or understands. I think that, now and then, Trump’s claims are inadvertently correct, though that doesn’t matter to him. I’m quite sure Trump sincerely believes a lot of his bullshit.
So in our fun process of splitting hairs, we have subcategories of lies: What the liar knows, what the liar believes, whether the accuracy of a claim matters to him, the degree of an exaggeration or embellishment, and so on. Your definition leaves out some subcategories, like if the person believes it’s false when it’s true, or when the person doesn’t know if it’s true or not. If you make a claim not knowing whether it’s true or false, and later on it turns out to be one or the other, do you become a retroactive liar depending? Do you become a liar if you can make something come true, though it wasn’t when you said it? Does it matter if you believe you can make it come true? What if your belief is wrong?
(Who was it who said Napoleon became such a good liar that you couldn’t even rely on the opposite of what he said?)
I’ve noticed that the courts no longer give DoJ the benefit of the doubt, figuring if the government is making fact statements, they must have it right. Now, the courts find it necessary to check out every one. Too many are false. All lawyers misrepresent by cherry-picking, but courts frown on them making stuff up.
It is surely more important to recognise how untethered he is from the truth than whether a particular statement is lie or bullshit? He does both. “How dare you call me a liar! That’s defamation! I’ll have you know I’m a bullshitter!”.
Anyhoo, unnamed official sources claim Ross suffered internal bleeding from the low-speed impact he did not obviously suffer while shooting Renee Good, given he remained upright holding both objects one of which he was able to shoot her with. Wearing a kevlar vest with various tools on it; padding. I’m not saying they’re lying, nor even bullshitting, but it seems a tad unlikely.
Allan:
Yes, of course. Regardless of how many of his falsehoods are due to dishonesty versus stupidity or delusion, the sheer number of them shows that he’s unfit to be president. But since this thread is specifically about Trump’s dishonesty, and since Flint is questioning my claim that Trump lied about bringing energy costs down, the distinction between dishonesty and delusion actually matters here. Plus I just think the lie vs bullshit issue is philosophically interesting. I’m not the only one — Frankfurt’s book caused a big stir when it was published.
keiths:
Flint:
Right, but I don’t see how I’m missing the point. What makes it bullshit is that the speaker doesn’t care whether it’s true, not that they don’t know whether it’s true. That’s important, because in that case it isn’t a lie — the speaker isn’t saying something they know to be false. It’s bullshit, but not a lie.
Correct. What makes it bullshit is that the speaker doesn’t care whether it’s true, not whether they believe that it’s true.
The bullshitter’s belief is irrelevant. What makes it bullshit is their indifference to the truth of what they’re saying.
In the case you describe, the speaker is trying to lie but failing because they’re inadvertently making a true statement. Morally, I think trying to lie is as bad as lying, but in the case you describe, the speaker hasn’t succeeded in lying.
Quite the opposite. It doesn’t depend at all on the bullshitter’s knowledge, only on their indifference to the truth.
Right. He isn’t intentionally making a known false statement in order to deceive someone. His statement doesn’t fit the definition of a lie.
Yes, and for the reasons I gave above, I’m confident that he knew his energy claim was false at the moment he made it. Am I 100.0% sure? No, and Bill has clung to that like a life preserver. But we’re never 100.0% sure that someone has lied, because that would require reading their mind at the moment they made their statement.
Bill claims that Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky, but by his own standards, he can’t know that. He can’t say that anyone, anywhere, at any time has lied (other than himself), because he isn’t telepathic. Which is of course absurd. We don’t depend on 100.0% certainty in concluding that someone has lied. How confident we are depends on how confident we are about their knowledge and intentions at the moment of utterance. I’m quite confident of both in the case of Trump’s energy claim.
Those aren’t subcategories of lies. They’re factors feeding into our determination of whether something is a lie, bullshit, or both.
I deliberately leave out those factors because belief and knowledge are irrelevant to whether something is bullshit. If the person doesn’t care whether it’s true or false, it’s bullshit regardless of what they believe or know. They’re trying to make you believe something and they don’t care whether it’s true or false, so it qualifies as bullshit.
No. All that matters is your intent and knowledge at the moment you make your claim.
That doesn’t make sense to me. Why would it become a lie if you made it come true? Here’s how it actually works: If I say today that I’ve won the lottery and I have in fact won the lottery, then I’m not lying. If I say today that I’ve won the lottery when I know that I haven’t won the lottery, then I’m lying. If I win the lottery tomorrow, I can truthfully say that I’ve won the lottery, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not lying today when I make the same claim. The moment of utterance is what matters.
Yes. If Trump truly believed that he was going to cut energy costs in half in under a year, then he was hopelessly deluded but not lying.
It doesn’t matter. If you think your statement is true but it’s actually false, then you haven’t lied because you didn’t deliberately make a false statement. If you think your statement is false, but it’s actually true, then you haven’t lied, even though you were trying to. You unintentionally said something that was true.
You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be, Flint. It’s really quite simple. If x fits the definition of a lie, then it’s a lie. If x fits the definition of bullshit, then it’s bullshit. All four combinations are possible: a lie but not bullshit, bullshit but not a lie, both bullshit and a lie, and neither bullshit nor a lie.
Are there statements for which you think the definitions fail? If so, what are those specific, concrete cases, and why do you think they get misclassified?
Yeah. There’s even a term of art for it. They call it the “presumption of regularity”, which is the judicial presumption that the government is acting in good faith unless proven otherwise. The Trump DOJ has destroyed that presumption.
I think we’re going in circles. You say that if the speaker believes what he says is true, then it’s not a lie even if it’s false. THEN you say that we need not be concerned with what the speaker believes. THEN you say that if the speaker is indifferent to the truth of what he says, it’s bullshit. THEN you say that bullshit is a form of lying. And you seem to imply that if the speaker doesn’t know what he’s talking about but ought to because it’s been widely reported or he’s been corrected repeatedly, THEN it’s a lie. Pretty clear, yes?
Sounds to me like, at the heart of all this is the intent to deceive. Which means we have to determine intentions. Courts face this issue constantly – method and opportunity might be clear, but motive? Whatever the fine distinctions between lying and bullshitting, the intent to deceive is common to both.
Now, lawyers are experts at the half-truth. So witnesses are instructed to tell the truth (don’t lie), the whole truth (don’t leave out important parts or imply a false context) and nothing but the truth (don’t embellish or bury the truth in bafflegab). And then the court must disentangle this. Example: let’s say I claim the sun rises in the west. Technically, I could argue that there is no place on earth that the sun does not rise, which therefore includes the west! Did I lie? Depends on both intent and context.
We’re getting dangerously close to the “presumption of irregularity – that if the Trump DoJ says it, it’s almost certainly false or misleading. The motive isn’t to get at the truth, the motive is at best to support an ideology, and at worst to protect the guilty.
Allan Miller,
Trump was probably mistaken as his uncle taught at MIT and the Unabomber went to Harvard.
Flint:
Right. If they believe that it’s true then there is no intent to deceive. Therefore it isn’t a lie, because lying requires intent.
What I said is that if the belief is wrong (which was the premise you gave), the definition still works and the answer it gives is that the statement isn’t a lie. There are two ways for the belief to be wrong: 1) if the speaker believes the statement is true, but it’s actually false, then the belief is wrong; and 2) if the speaker believes the statement is false, but it’s actually true, then the belief is wrong.
Apply the definition to both cases:
In case (1), the speaker’s belief that the statement is true means that they don’t intend to deceive. Therefore they aren’t lying, because lying requires intent.
In case (2), the speaker is making a statement they believe to be false, with the intent to deceive. However, the statement isn’t actually false, so it doesn’t count as a lie. The speaker was trying to lie but failed. The statement isn’t a lie.
In both of those cases, the definition works fine and the verdict is that the statement is not a lie.
Right. They’re trying to make you believe something, but they don’t care whether it’s actually true. That fits the definition of bullshit.
No, bullshit overlaps with lying but is not a subset of it. I was careful to point out that all four combinations are possible:
Flint:
No, absolutely not. It’s a lie if it fits the definition of a lie, period, and the definition doesn’t refer to reportage or correction.
No, intent to deceive isn’t required for a statement to be bullshit. All that’s required is that the speaker not care whether it’s true. If you intend to deceive and you don’t care whether what you’re saying is true, then you’re bullshitting. If you don’t intend to deceive and you don’t care whether what you’re saying is true, then you’re bullshitting. That’s because intent to deceive is not part of the definition of bullshitting. Indifference to the truth of what you’re saying is.
I can’t emphasize this enough. I swear, honest to God, cross my heart and hope to die:
That’s it. That’s my entire position. It’s why I keep asking whether you can think of cases where the definitions don’t work and something gets misclassified. If the definitions work and there aren’t any problematic cases, then there’s no reason to change them.
colewd:
Let me fix that for you:
He lied, Bill.
Well, I think of legal cases where neither lawyer knows exactly what happened, perhaps witnesses disagree, so both lawyers attempt to construct a picture of the fact situation that supports their side. There are generally facts (or call them assertions or stipulations or testimony or whatever) that tend to cast doubt on their position. So their summary leaves these out while emphasizing analogous details the other side left out. Both lawyers sincerely believe the gist of the known facts favors their position. Both care strongly about the outcome. Both depictions can’t be entirely correct, but quite likely neither is.
What’s important is, both lawyers can sincerely believe that the other intends to deceive. As I see it, neither lawyer is lying, neither lawyer is bullshitting, but both lawyers are making claims they think are probably true, or at least they HOPE are true. Some of their claims are surely false, but nobody can tell which. In general, I find your rigid adherence to definitions inappropriate in a complex, ambiguous world where knowledge is never complete and people are uninformed, ideological, confused, un(or mis)educated, often with motivations they don’t fully understand themselves.
But as I recall, you insist that hazy estimates have infinite precision! You seem uncomfortable with “maybe” and “sort of” and “probably” and “close enough.” For you, every statement is either true or false, a lie or not a lie, and must be crammed into rigid definitions phrased as neat little boxes. My world is filled with speculations, hypotheses, guesses, wishful thinking, predictions, models, probabilities. If the weather man says it’s going to rain tomorrow, is he lying? Telling the truth? Does tomorrow’s sunny weather make him a liar? How about he has some ulterior motive (like he doesn’t want to go on the picnic his wife prefers?)
All this aside, I think Trump is generally self-deluded. He’s practiced his idiotic claims until they have become false memories. His only real motivations are vengeance and greed. He’s not indifferent to the truth, exactly, but he very much wants his alternate reality to be true or come true or be accepted as true. And as his niece Mary has said, Donald often lies for sport, because it’s more fun, especially if it hurts someone. He’s been doing this so long it’s habit, all the moreso as his mind degenerates.
keiths,
Do you think constant repetition of your opinion is convincing to people who are not yet convinced?
Flint:
True but irrelevant to the question of whether they are lying or bullshitting. If you consult the definitions, each one refers to the person making the statement but neither of them refers to the beliefs of other people.
If a lawyer makes a statement x, whether x is a lie depends on whether it fits the definition of a lie. Ditto for bullshit.
The definition of a lie is:
From your description, it sounds like neither of the lawyers knows that whatever statement x they’re making is false. That means it doesn’t satisfy the definition of a lie. We therefore conclude that it isn’t a lie.
Are they bullshitting? Let’s consult the definition:
From your description, it sounds like both lawyers care about the truth of the statements they’re making. That means that the statements don’t satisfy the definition above. We therefore conclude that they aren’t bullshit.
If neither of the lawyers is making claims that they know are false, then none of their claims satisfy the definition of a lie. We conclude that they aren’t lies. And if both of the lawyers care whether the claims they’re making are true, then those claims don’t satisfy the definition of bullshit. We conclude that they aren’t bullshit.
I judge the appropriateness of adhering to a definition based on whether the definition works reliably. So far you haven’t suggested any cases where the definitions misclassify a statement. If a definition classifies a lie as a non-lie, or a non-lie as a lie, then adherence to that definition might be inappropriate. Ditto for the bullshit definition. If a definition works, however, and we can’t find cases where it fails, then adherence to that definition seems appropriate. What’s inappropriate about relying on definitions that have been tested and have never failed? We always have the option of re-evaluating if we come across a problematic case.
Not this again. Please ignore the phantom keiths in your head and pay attention to me. I am the real keiths, and I communicate my opinions via the comments I post here. The phantom keiths doesn’t speak for me, so if you want to know what I think, ignore him and consult my words.
Ignore the phantom keiths.
Ignore the phantom keiths. Here’s a suggestion: if you think I’ve said something that’s incorrect, copy and paste my words and then explain why you think I’m wrong. Since my words are written by me and not by the phantom keiths, this might help you to avoid going off on goose chases inspired by what the phantom keiths tells you.
Mine too.
Let’s apply the definition. Does the weatherman know that his statement is false and that it isn’t going to rain tomorrow? If not, then his statement doesn’t fit the definition and therefore doesn’t count as a lie. The same is true of the other clause: does he have an intent to deceive? If not, then his statement doesn’t fit the definition and therefore doesn’t count as a lie. In order to qualify as a lie, the statement has to satisfy both clauses: the weatherman has to know that it’s false and he must intend to deceive his audience.
If it is actually going to rain tomorrow, then “it’s going to rain tomorrow” is a true statement. He is telling the truth in that case. If it isn’t actually going to rain tomorrow, then “it’s going to rain tomorrow” is a false statement. He is not telling the truth in that case. Most likely neither he nor we know for sure whether it is going to rain tomorrow, in which case we don’t know whether he is telling the truth.
No, because the definition doesn’t refer to the future and therefore does not depend on it.
Then the definition applies, as it always does. See above. It depends on whether he knows that his statement is false and whether he intends to deceive.
And as I noted several comments ago, there are shades of gray depending on how certain the speaker is about whether what they’re saying is true or false. If they’re 99% sure that what they’re saying is false, then I’d say they’re lying (assuming that they intend to deceive). What is the exact threshold? There is none, or at best it’s a judgment call for each individual. Not every question has a definite answer, so at some point it isn’t clear whether a statement is a lie. Note that I’m not talking about whether observers think a statement is a lie. I’m talking about whether the statement actually is a lie, and the answer to that question gets fuzzier the closer we get to a 50% probability.
The basic rule is to be smart about it. Apply the definitions, but do so in a way that takes account of the probabilities involved.
colewd:
No, because merely repeating an opinion isn’t persuasive to most people. That’s why I don’t merely restate my opinion. I also present the evidence, which is quite strong. Reasonable people are swayed by strong evidence.
Is evidence convincing to you? Well, it isn’t causing you to change your position. You’re dug in and not responding rationally. However, that doesn’t mean that the evidence isn’t persuading you. It’s possible that you’re convinced that Trump is a liar but don’t want to let on, because as a loyal cult member you aren’t supposed to admit that. In support of that hypothesis, I’ll note that you run away when we ask you to examine the evidence with us. That suggests that you know the evidence is damning and would prefer to avoid the spectacle of facing that evidence and looking foolish. You still look foolish, but perhaps it’s less humiliating to run away than to stand your ground and attempt to defend the indefensible.
I’m not telepathic, so I can’t say for sure what you believe about Trump’s dishonesty. What I can say is that the evidence points so strongly to the conclusion that Trump is a liar that it’s deeply irrational for you to deny it.
colewd,
Do you acknowledge that Trump lied about his uncle and Ted Kaczynski? If you think he didn’t lie, what explains the fact that he told a detailed story about a conversation with Uncle John that definitely never happened?
You don’t say.
keiths,
That whole segment is weird. Physics symposium…say something about physics… bring me into it…
The “so I asked him, I said ‘Uncle John… Dr John Trump… what kind of a student was he?'” bit is the weirdest. Obviously I don’t think he’s quoting verbatim, nor that he expects anyone else to think he is, but to slip the honorific in is odd. Like ‘Did I mention he was clever?’.
So, on to winning Minnesota 3 times. Did he, in fact, win Minnesota 3 times? He said this. Is he lying when he said he did? Or is it the kind of thing you get a bit hazy about as time passes? There are so many states. Hundreds.
keiths,
What do you think motivated him to lie here? In the case of Epstein motive was clear.
No idea. How can I know someone’s internal state? 😉.
But I guess I can speculate: he just opens his mouth and stuff comes out. He was at a physics-adjacent conference, that reminded him of Uncle John which would give him some reflected glory, so out comes the weave.
colewd:
The same thing that would have motivated him to tell the story if it had been true. As Allan said, it’s reflected glory. Trump constantly talks about Uncle John, and he uses the guy to puff up his own claims of brilliance. Example:
You can see the pattern. Uncle John wasn’t just brilliant; he taught Ted Kaczynski! He’s my uncle! I share those genes! I didn’t merely try out for major league baseball (which was already a lie); Willie McCovey was there too!
It’s a well-known psychological phenomenon that even has its own acronym. From Wikipedia:
I’ve answered your question, Bill. Now it’s your turn to answer mine:
Allan:
Let’s include Pennsylvania, which he also claimed to have won three times — lying to a kid on Christmas Eve.
What do you say, Bill? Lies, or do you have some other explanation?
Allan Miller,
Establishing motive is not a novel idea. In the Epstein case it is avoiding embarrassment with being associated with a known sex offender. In this case there was little to gain if what he said was true. Hie uncle being an engineering professor at MIT was the real brag and that is a fact as far as I can tell.
I think he is trying to avoid a slightly more grave predicament then “embarrassment” over “being associated with a known sex offender”. Trump is known to be a sexual predator himself and there are multiple allegations he is guilty of sexual abuse. let’s not downplay that, shall we?
colewd:
Allan:
colewd:
He’s mocking you, Bill. The emoji is a clue. You’re the one who keeps saying “you haven’t shown intent!” when the intent is obvious.
He had everything to gain by telling that story. He was basking in the reflected glory of his uncle, whom he brings up at every opportunity, and throwing in Kaczynski to make the story more interesting and draw more attention to himself. He’s a narcissist, after all. Why wouldn’t a narcissist prefer “my uncle taught the Unabomber at MIT, and I have insider information about what Kaczynski was like back then” to “my uncle taught at MIT”?
Notice how eager Trump was to tell that story. The meeting was about AI. Trump’s uncle had absolutely nothing to do with AI. Yet Trump was determined to shoehorn Uncle John into the conversation:
In a meeting about AI, he wanted to talk about his uncle, who had nothing to do with AI. He was BIRGing, so he seized on the flimsiest excuse to bring the topic up. He felt compelled to claim that his uncle was the longest-serving professor at MIT, because that sounds better than the truth. He fabricated his uncle’s academic credentials because he thought degrees in “nuclear”, “chemical”, and math sounded better than “physics and electrical engineering”. And then he threw a preposterous story about Kaczynski into the mix.
Each of those things brought a payoff to Trump. He had every motive to lie.
And he couldn’t resist lying about that, either, by overstating his uncle’s tenure and fabricating his degrees. Trump is a pathological liar.
Disagree? Then explain to us why you think Trump believes a detailed, false story about his uncle, involving a conversation that couldn’t have happened, and also believes a bogus story about trying out for major league baseball with Willie McCovey, when he clearly wasn’t good enough to be invited to a tryout and when Willie McCovey couldn’t have been there even if he had been.
Is your position that Trump isn’t dishonest? That he just has a memory deficit so severe that he imagines major life events that never happened and conversations that could not possibly have taken place?
It’s ridiculous. Trump is a liar, and those stories are just two examples.
You know, it doesn’t really matter all that much if Trump is a liar, a bullshitter, if he is forgetful or if he is borderline senile, or all of that together.
All that matters is that we can’t believe a word he says, as has been amply demonstrated a great many times.
That in itself ought to be a matter of grave concern to all of us.
faded_Glory:
He’s all of the above, and stupid to boot, with a severe mental disorder. Those traits are all dangerous and I could have just started a “Trump sucks” thread, but I do think there are important differences between the traits in terms of the kind of danger they present.
Take Greenland. If Trump were just stupid, someone could educate him on why invading Greenland would be a terrible move for the US and the world. They could explain to him the consequences of attacking a NATO partner. They could walk him through the existing defense treaty between Denmark and the US, which has been in place for 75 years and gives the US the power to do pretty much anything it wants militarily in Greenland. They could explain to him that if he is truly concerned about national security, he would gain nothing by invading — that it would in fact make the US less secure by destroying or severely weakening NATO and emboldening Russia and China while gaining the US nothing in return.
That’s if it were just stupidity. I don’t think it is. Trump’s designs on Greenland appear to be motivated by 1) his insecurity, 2) his lust for power, 3) his general lack of human decency and empathy, and 4) his dismal performance domestically and the resulting catastrophic poll numbers and electoral defeats.
He’s insecure, and like most bullies he tries to allay that insecurity via aggression. He can feel better about himself if he plays the strongman. He loves to be in control and hates sharing power with anyone. That’s why he’s billing himself as “the acting president of Venezuela”. His malignant narcissism means that he lacks empathy and doesn’t care about hurting the people of Greenland (or anyone else, for that matter). He’s terrified about the release of the Epstein files and is slow-walking it as a result. Last I heard, the DOJ had only released 0.6% of the files, despite the fact that the deadline was 100% by mid-December. He is also terrified about what will happen in the 2026 midterms and his likely loss of power, plus the danger of being impeached a third time if the Democrats gain control. He’s desperate for anything he can portray as a success, and in the short term, military success is almost guaranteed given the US’s military might.
Those traits are far worse than stupidity and ignorance, which are at least potentially remediable. No one is going to change the rest. He’s a vile man, and he’s been a vile man all his life. Personality disorders aren’t curable, so we’re stuck with him as is. Persuasion isn’t feasible, so resistance is our only viable option.
I’m heartened by the fact that some NATO countries are sending troops to Greenland and that some Republicans in Congress are finally growing a spine (or at least a couple of vertebrae) and are opposing any military action by the US. The public is also overwhelmingly against it, with only 8% support. That’s as close to unanimous as you ever get in politics. Not that Trump has ever cared about honoring the will of the American people, unless it’s to his personal advantage, but if we can make it disadvantageous for him to invade then he might refrain for his own sake.
Uh, that’s not all that matters. It also matters that we can’t believe a word DHS says, or that DoJ says, or the HHR says. It matters that, credible or not, Trump is attempting to occupy blue states and cities through violence and intimidation, with armed untrained masked thugs. It matters that he wants to conquer Canada, Venezuela, Panama, Columbia, and Greenland. It matters that very few Congressional Republicans dare say a word that he might construe as criticism. It matters that at his orders the military ignores the UCMJ when it’s inconvenient. It matters that public confidence in election results, no matter what they are, has been seriously eroded. It matters that his only motivations and priorities are vengeance and greed. It matters that he has assumed the powers granted to Congress for himself, and Congress does nothing. It matters that there are outbreaks of measles, polio, and other diseases thought gone forever. It matters that his hand-picked Supreme Court justices are more loyal to Trump than to the rule of law. Just for starters.
So let’s just ignore the lie part and concentrate on the bit that’s true.
keiths,
A friend of mine joined the Danish military in order to join the elite force that maintains a presence on Greenland. It’s largely symbolic, since a significant force could overwhelm them. There is a tough selection process, similar to that undergone by various Special Forces globally. 23 month tours of duty, patrolling the frozen wastes on a Skidoo. I asked if he ever encountered anyone, he said no. So no Chinese,, Russians – not even Americans, who maintain a token base there (and could have as many as they wanted, but chose to reduce). He did meet Ted Kaczynski one day, but that was about it.