Thursday 9 November 2017

Quote of the Day: Why to call Donald J. Trump a liar is to give him too much credit


“A liar retains some respect for the truth: he tries to conceal his lies, weave a web of deception and make it difficult for his victims to discover the facts. Trump does none of this... Trump makes no distinction between truth and falsity, between statements backed by evidence and statements unsupported by any evidence. This is why you can’t catch him in a lie. He doesn’t care ...
"Rand puts it like this: to an anti-intellectual mentality words are not instruments of knowledge but tools of manipulation...”

~ Onkhar Ghate, from his article 'The Anti-Intellectuality of Donald Trump: Why Ayn Rand Would Have Despised a President Trump'
[Hat tip Stuart Hayashi]
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4 comments:

MarkT said...

I'm no Trump cheerleader, but this overstates the case against him. For Onkar Ghate, philosopher at the ARI, I can see how projection of his own thinking and communication method would lead him to make that conclusion. But we all have different communication styles, and varying degrees to which we do (or can) carefully consider our words and check for consistency before speaking. If I regarded everyone who's not always consistent, or sometimes lets their rhetoric get ahead of reality as "worse than a liar", I'd have to regard the majority of people I deal with on a daily basis as "worse than a liar".

Richard McGrath said...

Perhaps lying is irrelevant. Overall, I believe Trump has not acquitted himself too badly. He's far from perfect, but he's recently cut taxes to the middle class which has to be a good thing. As I understand it he's encouraging oil drilling and fracking for gas. A second tick there. He wants to deregulate, and is being thwarted every step of the way by hostile RINOs in the Senate. The economy is picking up as the money pumped into it by Obama, much of it lying idle until now, starts being invested. Inflation could be an issue in the next year or two. Early days yet for President Don.

Trump is not perfect but he is great said...

Perigo just did a great fisking of the cited anti-Trump article:

http://www.solopassion.com/node/10575

Peter Cresswell said...

Are you sure you know what a fisking looks like?