Murtaza Hussain
@mazmhussain
Very disturbing thing I have noticed recently is that U.S. officials no longer care about being perceived as lying. After the "SignalGate" scandal several top officials went public to claim that the information they shared was not classified (immediately disproved after it was then published) or that it was somehow "planted" there by a nefarious infiltrator, for which no evidence at all was provided. The reason they are doing this is because they don't care about convincing people necessarily, they just have created their own separate right-wing media echo chamber that just need to feed narratives to run with. We are well past the era of reasoned debate or persuasion. We are still far from that point thanks to separation of powers and a strong judiciary, but this is how dictatorships operate. Over time it generates a level of cynicism in the system that makes it unsupportable.
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
My surface-level take is that unapologetic lying among the leadership leads to an erosion of the social fabric and a more mendacious society overall (in a “leading by example” way that normalizes this behavior at all levels). It’s worrying, because (in my perception) a defining and enduring trait of the American ethos has been its ability to reliably speak the truth (hence the big deal about perjury that doesn’t really translate in other cultures). However I’m listening to Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification podcast, and Izabella Kaminska (as guest) makes the contrarian point at the 32.5-minute mark that Trump lying so reliably paradoxically places a cap on how much disinformation can seep into society. It’s not that we’ll end up believing the lies or lying ourselves, it’s that we’ll stop making trust assumptions about others so readily because lying is expected. https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens/id1604218333
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