Is lying a right?

Does lying deserve freedom of speech?

Trump, Farage and Johnson have made it compulsory

That's an interesting point. Is the alt.truth become mandatory?

Republicans appear to think so. And Trump, who comes up with the most outlandish lies, demands obedience from them at peril of being primaried.

Maybe truth has lost it's appeal, in favor of politics.

Lies and spin are the core foundations of lefty arguments...

Tommy Monk wrote:Lies and spin are the core foundations of lefty arguments...

Yet Trump and BJ are rightys, and they are the ones who invent/perpetuate the lies. Can you explain that?

I think the 'clean' Tories have been chased out of the right.

Lefty lies and spin...

Tommy Monk wrote:Lies and spin are the core foundations of lefty arguments...

.

Bullshit,  Tommykins...

Lies are at the core of most political arguments --  left, right, or left-right-out..

As such, the "left" are nowhere near being the worse --  by far, the majority of self-serving lies always come from the far-right, ultra-conservative 'hard' capitalists.

Lies are also at the "core" of many advertising campaigns..

While some of your own favourite 'hobby horses' on here -- climate change denial, evolution denial, WWII revisionism  --  are mostly lies from beginning to end...

Making you yourself one of the main peddlers of lies on here..

wolf wrote:Lies are at the core of most political arguments --  left, right, or left-right-out..

I have to take issue with that, as I believe this is what people say to soften their accusations.  Let's face it, there is a more relevant conclusion to be had.

Lies, in fact, are the result of 'need-to-lie'.  In other words, a liar doesn’t want others to know his/her true motives.  So the question is not an urbane, all-inclusive statement that avoids discomfort (‘everyone lies'), but one of: why do people lie?

Democrats and Lib-Labor represent the general interest.  Republicans/Tories worship wealth and privilege.  Representing wealth and privilege means you are assigned fewer supporters than the general public.

However, in a democracy the currency is not money or status; it is votes.  Republicans/Tories, representing wealth and privilege, in fact have fewer votes to support them.  After all, how persuasive is the statement: vote for me, I’ll not represent your interests!  Generally, Republicans/Tories have a need to conceal more that do Democrats/Lib-Labor.

Therefore, there is a huge ‘need-to-lie' sucking sound from the right.  The simple fact is that Republicans/Tories are representing a very small number of votes.  They must lie and spread dezinformatsiya among the voters in order to convince them to vote for them.

This deception is what we are talking about.  Hence, Republicans/Tories generally avoid hard financial issues (reality), and press social issues like evolution denial, opposing gender identity or standing for the national anthem (diversion).  Keep the public's eyes over there, so they don’t see what we are doing over here.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10279556/Now-for-Labours-lies-about-immigration.html

Original Quill wrote:

Tommy Monk wrote:Lies and spin are the core foundations of lefty arguments...

Yet Trump and BJ are rightys, and they are the ones who invent/perpetuate the lies.  Can you explain that?

I think the 'clean' Tories have been chased out of the right.

meh, sorry to burst your bubble on that one, old boy but i think you'll find that pretty much every MP/political leader has lied to the public on all sorts, at least that's how it is this side of the pond

Tony Blair lied about iraq and probably a whole load of other stuff
gordon brown, british jobs for british workers as the employment agencies were sending abroad for workers
nick clegg, abollish tuition fees, then raised them. not eu army, he said,,,,,er, right

just to name a few

they all lie, quill

+1

gelico wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

Tommy Monk wrote:Lies and spin are the core foundations of lefty arguments...

Yet Trump and BJ are rightys, and they are the ones who invent/perpetuate the lies.  Can you explain that?

I think the 'clean' Tories have been chased out of the right.

meh, sorry to burst your bubble on that one, old boy but i think you'll find that pretty much every MP/political leader has lied to the public on all sorts, at least that's how it is this side of the pond

Tony Blair lied about iraq and probably a whole load of other stuff
gordon brown, british jobs for british workers as the employment agencies were sending abroad for workers
nick clegg, abollish tuition fees, then raised them.  not eu army, he said,,,,,er, right

just to name a few

they all lie, quill

Brown was a liar and a leftie, no question there.
Blair was pretty much a Thatcherite on economics.
Clegg did promise that, but he had no real choice. Also as a Lib Dem Orange Booker, his economics were as blue as any Tory.
The EU army is not something Britain was at risk of joining (like Denmark and Malta haven't, and even then, it isn't really an 'EU army').

But yes, politicians do lie. Corybyn lies pretty much every time he shows support of remaining. The Right have made it an artform though

gelico wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

Yet Trump and BJ are rightys, and they are the ones who invent/perpetuate the lies.  Can you explain that?

I think the 'clean' Tories have been chased out of the right.

meh, sorry to burst your bubble on that one, old boy but i think you'll find that pretty much every MP/political leader has lied to the public on all sorts, at least that's how it is this side of the pond

Tony Blair lied about iraq and probably a whole load of other stuff
gordon brown, british jobs for british workers as the employment agencies were sending abroad for workers
nick clegg, abollish tuition fees, then raised them.  not eu army, he said,,,,,er, right

just to name a few

they all lie, quill

Notice that, in your effort to prove a generality, you go to a specific? Remember, you can't generalize from specifics. That's the ultimate lie that conservative offer, to cover-up their own habitual lying: it's OK, every politican does it!

This presents the case of the Fallacy of Every and All.  "When an argument contains both universal quantifiers and existential quantifiers (all, some, none, every) with different meanings when the order of the quantifiers is reversed. This is a specific form of equivocation."

See, https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/228/Fallacy-of-Every-and-All

To equivocate through generalities is to avoid the specific in question.  That's why conservatives resort to saying everyone does it!  

The better practice is to say many politicians lie, and then move on to the question of 'why do they lie'?  If you follow this reasoning, you will begin to analyze the reason why, and you will see that 'liars' more frequently correlate with Republicans/Tories.  You will soon find out that the reason Republicans/Tories lie, is because they don't represent the general interest, but the special interest of the wealthy and privileged.  They must lie to avoid detection, and go about their business of protecting the interests of the wealthy and privileged.

But, all you have to do is look at whom it favors.  All politicians lie favors the liar, or in this case the Republican/Tories.  It avoids detection.

Tony Blair was a participant in a Tory/Republican lie to start a war, yes.  But Blair's special political theory was that Britain was the lap dog of the USA, whoever ran the latter.  Thus, under Blair, Labour made a U-turn in it's purpose.  It will have to live that down.

When I was scratching a living as a newspaper journalist (OK, I know that the rest of you couldn't care a fish's tit, but it is relevant to this thread) there was always one unasked question running through my thoughts as I conducted an interview with a politician, which included everything from the chairman of a parish council to the Prime Minister: "Why is this bastard lying to me?"

Fred Moletrousers wrote:When I was scratching a living as a newspaper journalist (OK, I know that the rest of you couldn't care a fish's tit, but it is relevant to this thread) there was always one unasked question running through my thoughts as I conducted an interview with a politician, which included everything from the chairman of a parish council to the Prime Minister: "Why is this bastard lying to me?"

That is the right question. Why indeed? For Tories/Republicans it's the need to divert and deceive, as they represent special interests, not the general interest.