Richard Jernigan -> RE: My Offer (Dec. 9 2016 21:06:59)
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To call Trump a compulsive liar fails to take into account an essay recently published by a philosopher. I seldom get all the way through the first paragraph of most philosophy papers, where they lay out how they will dedicate the next 40 pages to oriental hairsplitting. But this philosopher posed an important distinction. A liar, he said, repeats a specific false statement, in the hope of convincing you of something he knows to be false. A bullsh1tter, on the other hand, says whatever he thinks you might like to hear, or whatever he wishes were true, with little or no regard for the facts, or perhaps even with no knowledge of the facts at all. Trump is a bullsh1tter. A drawback to highly publicized bullsh1tting is that the bullsh1tter may get carried away by the moment and contradict himself. Trump does this regularly. People criticize him for it. But Trump is not stupid. He possesses a certain low cunning. One of his first two appointments was a professional liar, a highly successful liar on a commercial scale, Steve Bannon. There are enough people saying Bannon is not a racist, not an anti-semite, to at least cast some doubt on the subject. Yet Bannon has boasted of making Breitbart "the platform of the alt-right" : people who definitely are racist, anti-semitic and worse. A likely explanation is that Bannon merely broadcasts whatever he sees as advantageous to him at the moment, but in a calculated and consistent manner--a practiced and successful liar. Just the man Trump needs as "Chief Strategist." With Bannon at his elbow, Trump can tell the New York Times that he "has an open mind" about climate change, while in the next week appointing to head the Environmental Protection Agency one of the world's most public and litigious deniers of anthropogenic climate change. Another semantic distinction: credulity vs. stupidity. The great majority of Americans are quite competent at managing their own affairs. They aren't stupid in that respect. But many people in the USA (and elsewhere) are credulous when told a story that resonates with their motivations. When I was a boy the press controlled public discourse. As an adolescent and young man, the reins came into the hands of television. Now in the age of social media, no one is in control. If you can pay for an hour at an internet cafe, you can post fake news. If you are Vladimir Putin, you can hire hundreds of people to post fake news, and hire hackers to steal emails, and disseminate carefully selected ones, sometimes after altering them. I agree with Bill Barkel that a major contingent of Trump voters were people tired of being looked down upon by a large and influential segment of society. There were a lot of people like the man I saw interviewed on TV. The interviewer asked whether there was a danger of Trump destroying the Republican party. The man answered, "I hope he goes up to Washington and destroys the Republican Party. They've got it coming to them." The interviewer didn't ask his opinion of the Democrats. The class divide runs through nuclear families. One of my cousins is the daughter of a union man. She didn't go to college. She is married to a man who was a truck driver for years, and then for more years chauffeur to a Texas billionaire. They live decently in retirement, in apparent financial security. Not long after I moved back to Texas she and her husband were at a family gathering. I asked about her brother, a retired chemistry professor. She replied, "Oh, we don't see much of D. and them." She has a sunny disposition. She laughed, "I guess we're not good enough for them." I don't know who they voted for, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn it was Trump. RNJ
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