LANGUAGE, LIE-DETECTORS AND CARLO COLLODI
1. Yes, Trump is a compulsive (and repulsive) serial liar.
2. Yes, the right-wing press is trying to minimize this.
3. Yes, it’s harder to prove that someone tried to deliberately misinform people rather than just “mistakenly asserting and believing something false to be true.”
4. Yes, Trump can be serially absolved of his serial lies by sugar-coating them as “mistakenly asserting and believing something false to be true.”
5. Fine. Ban the word “lie” in the Trump era, forget about intent, and simply, relentlessly keep building a cumulative list of the things that Trump asserts to be true that are false, from day to day, every day, coupled with the evidence in each case.
6. Let’s see how many people are ready to believe the things Trump says as this list just grows and grows and grows.
7. Natural language evolved 300,000 years ago on the default assumption that what people tell you is true; if the default assumption had been that it was false, language could never have gotten off the ground.
8. But, as a safeguard, we also evolved highly sensitive serial lie-detectors: If someone keeps lying to us, we stop believing them, whether we like it or not.
9. The deplorables believed (or pretended to believe) Trump enough to vote for him despite the evidence; the decent majority already saw through him long, long before the time of the election (but the electoral laws gave Trump a false majority anyway).
10. Let’s see how long Trump’s serial lying leaves him any credibility at all in the US and the world as the list of the things he asserts to be true that are false just grows and grows, like Pinocchio’s nose…
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