"Trump's Lies Vs Your Brain"

[Airbrush]

This story is about Trump's "sheer joy of lying" just for the sake of lying, even about trivial matters.

Trump's Lies vs. Your Brain

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658

"Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent... A whopping 70 percent of Trump’s statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true."

"Those who have followed Trump’s career say his lying isn’t just a tactic, but an ingrained habit."

"In his own autobiography, Trump used the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” a term coined by his ghostwriter referring to the flagrant truth-stretching that Trump employed, over and over, to help close sales. Trump apparently loved the wording, and went on to adopt it as his own."

"He has the megaphone of the White House press office, his popular Twitter account and a loyal new right-wing media army that will not just parrot his version of the truth but actively argue against attempts to knock it down with verifiable facts. Unless Trump dramatically transforms himself, Americans are going to start living in a new reality, one in which their leader is a manifestly unreliable source."

"Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people’s sense of themselves, which Trump’s clearly do."

"Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly... When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything. It’s called cognitive load—our limited cognitive resources are overburdened. It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true.

But Trump goes a step further. If he has a particular untruth he wants to propagate—not just an undifferentiated barrage—he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out, sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in our heads..."

"Here’s the really bad news for all of those fact-checkers and publications hoping to counter Trump’s false claims: Repetition of any kind—even to refute the statement in question—only serves to solidify it. "

"This means that when the New York Times, or any other publication, runs a headline like “Trump Claims, With No Evidence, That ‘Millions of People Voted Illegally,’” it perversely reinforces the very claim it means to debunk."

"If false information comports with preexisting beliefs—something that is often true in partisan arguments—attempts to refute it can actually backfire, planting it even more firmly in a person’s mind... And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance."

"Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs, has found that when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies."

So what can we do in the face of a flagrant liar-in-chief? Here, alas, the news is not particularly promising... It’s easy enough to correct minor false facts, the color of a label, say, if they aren’t crucial to your sense of self. Alas, nothing political fits into that bucket."

"Scarier still for those who have never supported Trump is that he just might colonize their brains, too. When we are in an environment headed by someone who lies, so often, something frightening happens: We stop reacting to the liar as a liar. His lying becomes normalized."

"The distressing reality is that our sense of truth is far more fragile than we would like to think it is—especially in the political arena, and especially when that sense of truth is twisted by a figure in power. As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain put it, “The great master fallacy of the human mind is believing too much.” False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible. "

Edited February 12, 2017 by Airbrush

[rangerx]

My brain hurts, and I'm not even American. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the rumor Sarah Palin becoming ambassador to Canada.

 

How fucked up is that? It's bad enough Americans have to deal with batshit crazy, but now they impose it on us.

[CharonY]

Has she been appointed? Well, at the very least she should have no problem with the temperature in winter.

[whocares386]

According to an article I've read recently, it says: '' Whenever Democrats are in power, the economy gets better, and then the Republicans come back to ruin it again. Even though Democrats are the ones who are blamed for increasing debt due to their social projects. ''

 

Do you guys really agree with this ? When we look at the Reagen years, G. W. Bush years can we exactly understand that ?

 

I'm talking about that article:

 

link removed

[CharonY]

Short answer is: yes it seems to be the case see this review, for example:

 

 

The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant. This paper asks why. The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future. (JEL D72, E23, E32, E65, N12, N42)

[Strange]

From an article about the author of "The Art of the Deal"

 

 

“Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

 

Although it seems that now Trump (who wouldn't even give the writer any time because he has no attention span) claims that he wrote the book.