This article misses the mark terribly. "Zero sum" thinking has some explanatory power for why people line up behind a chosen leader, but it doesn't explain why they choose that leader in the first place.
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.
> they prefer comfortable falsehoods to hard truths
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.
> They choose liars because liars are supernormal stimuli for the body politic
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.
> 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.
> To me, the reason most people choose liars as leaders is because they prefer comfortable falsehoods to hard truths.
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.
It is bizarre, beyond bizarre, that these people keep focusing in on Trump's flamboyant habit of lying. His opponents lied. Everyone in politics lies. Why there is this expectation that people will stop supporting Trump because he lies is beyond a mystery. Are Huppert and Levine proposing that they vote for honest politicians? Where are they supposed to find them?
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.
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.
It seems like a very fragile system if it relies on the day to day goodness of individuals and lacks mitigation against liars but gives them the power of authority anyhow.
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.
Well, at least Nixon had some consequences. I feel like, in the past the liars at least tried to delay the exposure of the lie. And “plausible deniability” came from that environment.
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.
Read the latest indictment[1] and then find me another politician who has lied at anything approaching the scale and seriousness of Trump and his co-conspirators.
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.
Well, as mentioned, G. W. Bush was cheerleading an unwarranted invasion in Iraq and Obama oversaw a sweeping an likely unconstitutional omnisurveillence system. Both of those things are worse than asking people to do things that the Biden DoJ doesn't like. If someone could trade a 2nd Trump term for not sending the troops to Iraq that'd be a great deal for America. And depending on your authoritarian-libertarian leanings it'd be a good trade to get rid of the surveillance state too.
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.
While GWB overthrowing an authoritarian government in Iraq on a lie is really bad, it does not rise to the level of overthrowing a liberal democracy in America on a lie. Yes, both were lies, but Bush barely had to lie at all to get the Congress to go along with it and one could make the case that he believed the lie himself. Not so with Trump, as the indictment makes clear.
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.
> it does not rise to the level of overthrowing a liberal democracy in America on a lie.
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.
When you talk about inexplicable voter behavior, Trump is at the top of my list by a mile. I'd say Bush was worse in terms of outcomes, but you could at least understand how mania over terrorism lead to a lot of bad decisions. I actually think most of the Bush admin believed they were doing the right things and not lying at all. Trump is a whole different beast. He lies like he breaths. Makes up facts that aren't even relevant. Says things in direct opposition to observable reality. Denies saying things he said on camera a week earlier. His hand-modified hurricane map was both trite and shocking at the same time. I personally do not understand his appeal to anyone at all and would love for a political scientist to tell me something new.
> It is bizarre, beyond bizarre, that these people keep focusing in on Trump's flamboyant habit of lying. His opponents lied. Everyone in politics lies.
“All baseball players hit baseballs. Why are we focused on Babe Ruth just because he hit more than most?”
That is certainly a more reasonable analogy. What Trump does is outplay his opponents by using more interesting lies. They do a sort of ha-ha-I-technically-said trick where they lie but want to pretend they didn't.
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.
An entertaining liar. That... explains some things.
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.
The fact is trump did lie more than most. He lied worse than most. And he deserves to be in prison for his lies and likely will end up in some form of prison or house arrest until the next lying politician pardons him.
Trump is a liar and a horrible person. No arguments from me there. However it just seems that he lied more because of the unprecedentedly biased media coverage against him. With Trump we had fact checking about every single lie and anything that could be twisted and taken out of context was.
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.
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).
There is still a very large and fundamental difference between the kind of election promise breaking you expect from most politicians and what Trump did. He was constantly lying about everything and denying reality. That is not how all politicians behave.
The US government has a history - a long, storied and very visible history - of moving armies around killing people for stupid reasons. Partly because of special interest lobbying by the military industrial complex, partly because they are oblivious to the destruction and it is convenient to them politically. Afghanistan alone was multiple trillions of dollars. The cost in lives was higher than that.
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.
Joe Biden has said that the cancer was probably caused by the burn pits during the war. Which is plausible, though of course hard to substantiate. So attributing the death to the war is rather confusing and potentially misleading.
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 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.
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?
> 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.
> 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 difference with Trump was summed up well in 2016 by conservative columnist and Cato Institute Fellow P.J. O'Rourke when he was a guest panelist on an episode of NPR's "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me".
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.
This is a political piece thinly veiled as psychology article. I know most people upvote this kind of stories just based on the title and use that as a conversation starter. But we are helping to rank cheap propaganda and I think that is a shame.
Is it? I read the article specifically because of this comment, and I don't see what you claim. I do see recent American political history used as an example (Trump, extensively), but it also uses a cheating sports team, as well as briefly Clinton too.
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.
I do not support Trump, I am not even from the US. My standards for the president of the no 1 military and economic world power are a lot higher than Trump. Do you see though how instead of talking about the psychology of choosing leaders we are talking about Trump? This is what I do not like.
Sucks to be you. You can also drive a conversation elsewhere. You are apart of the conversation too. You aren't a victim. You can chose how to interact with humans.
Run of the mill victim-blaming and psycholigizing. Most so-called leaders are not picked by the everyman but by powerful people, like lesser leaders or people who need frontwomen/frontmen. Then some times (like the US presidential elections) the everyman gets to pick among a few (like two) of them after having been filtered down mostly by those more powerful people.
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.
We don't choose anything. I voted once over 20 years ago.
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.
Not voting is also a choice, however it means you leave the results over to a vocal minority; remember that there were only 537 votes difference in Florida between Bush and Gore in 2000; that's a tiny margin, which could easily have gone the other way (and with it pretty much everything that happened after 9/11) if only the people that were like "I'm not voting because the system is broken" had actually gone and voted.
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.
I wish every ballot had for every office or position, the option to choose no confidence in any of the ballot choices. Then we could not only see who got the most votes we could see how many people have no confidence in any of the options or candidates. And hopefully if too large of a portion chose no confidence then we get a redo in a month with different candidates. Or something like that.
Add along with that ranked choice voting of some sort. Of course, they'll never allow this as then they couldn't have third party candidates to siphon off votes off of the opposing party's nominee.
You may want to research your State election law for major/minor party. That is how the two party system in USA is perpetuated. Of course the Ds and Rs, and TV, will not tell you about it.
> I wish every ballot had for every office or position, the option to choose no confidence in any of the ballot choices.
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.
What you say is correct. However, how many non-voters don't bother because their voice is lost. If they have the chance to be heard (that they have no confindence in the choices) maybe more will turn out to vote?
The vocal minority are those that have bought the power.
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 were only 537 votes difference in Florida between Bush and Gore in 2000
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.
That’s democracy you don’t get what you want because you are not the only citizen, you vote for your interests so that they are represented when discussing. Seems childish “I don’t get what I want so I don’t play at all” no?
There are some people who oppose corporate welfare for example to say one of the point you made
> I don’t get what I want so I don’t play at all” no
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.
Not me. It's usually vote for the person on the ballot or not at all. Either way, the person wins and could not care less what my stance is. In the rare instances there is a choice, the ordained person usually wins. In the even rarer case the non-ordained person wins, they flip and carry on the status quo they claimed to be fighting.
Well, but look at this from this angle: now those individuals and families have more or less peaceful power-transfer game to play (which also brings some marginal improvements in life quality to you and me in the process) instead of, you know, civil wars and political assassinations.
Well, what about the ancient Greek version of "democracy" where magistrates were appointed by a uniform random choice? That would also improve diversity of the public officials, you know? As opposed to that Roman "republic" thing that had magistrates elected by majority voting.
It starts to make sense really. The thing is that humanity needs to figure out what's the system that optimizes freedom and well being for most at the same time that keep psychopaths and evil players at bay (under 2% and out of power or controlling positions). Scalable to multi-culture 7 billion individuals.
Slander is spoken defamation, and defamation is by definition untrue statements.
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.
You can refute a statement or proposition (which might be an allegation of wrongdoing). You can mount a defense without refuting any allegation; for example, it's usually a defense to any allegation to say that "It wasn't me", without claiming that the event didn't happen.
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.
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.