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What Precisely Was the Big Lie?
C. S. Lewis’s character Professor Kirk was right to ask why they don’t teach logic in schools these days. Our absurd political circumstances have rarely, if ever in human history, needed logic more. Let’s do what we can to shed some logic on the talk about Trump’s talk of the 2020 election, shall we?
An enthymeme is an argument with an unstated step, usually an unstated premise.
Aristotle explains that enthymemes can be useful rhetorically. You don’t always have to spell out every step, talk like a robot, and lose your audience. Sometimes it’s ok to just say, “The defendant was seen at the pier on the night of the crime, and therefore did not commit the murder,” without explicitly telling people who already know the local geography that the pier is a long way from the crime scene.
But enthymemes have a darker side, like when you say “Alex is Polish, so he’s stupid” (Richard Purtill‘s example of a bad enthymeme).
Obama gave us a fine example of a bad enthymeme in 2008. He used to diss John McCain by saying that McCain agreed with George W. Bush 90% of the time. (Or maybe it was 95%. Or maybe he varied his estimates. Hard to remember exactly. Let’s just stick with 90%, shall we?)
Obama’s argument against McCain depended on a premise that Obama did not say out loud–the premise that says just how often Bush was actually wrong. If the premise was that Bush is wrong 100% of the time, then the premises of the argument do a good job beating up McCain, but one of the premises is plainly false: No one is wrong 100% of the time.
But if the premise is only that Bush is wrong 65% of the time, then Obama’s argument only establishes that McCain is wrong 58.5% of the time. If the premise were that Bush is wrong 55% of the time, then the argument would establish that McCain was only wrong 49.5% of the time–in other words, that he is usually right!
So Obama had to keep it quiet just how often Bush was wrong. Whatever the premise was, if we said it out loud, we’d start thinking for ourselves instead of doing what Obama wanted, which was to scurry along from a hastily drawn conclusion that McCain is wrong a lot into an enthusiastic vote for Obama. If Obama had let his other premise out into the open, then it would have been easy to see two things:
1. There’s no general agreement on how often Bush was wrong, and therefore little clarity on how powerful Obama’s argument against McCain actually is.
2. The most powerful versions of the argument would rely on an obviously false premise.
Now, back to Trump. A lot of people are using enthymemes against Trump these days. Trump tells the Big Lie, we are told, and therefore he is a big liar, a big problem, a threat to the Constitution, and so on.
What I don’t understand is: What exactly is it that Trump said that was a lie? There is an unstated premise here.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said the 2020 election was rigged? If so, then the Hemingway book shows that the premise is false–it actually was rigged.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that there was a lot of fraud? But in that case, the currently available evidence indicates that the premise is false–there was some fraud, and there was probably a lot of it.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that illegal actions flipped swing states? That’s probably a false premise too–illegal actions probably did flip swing states. Maybe the ones considered in Teigen vs. Wisconsin Elections Commission, for example, and almost certainly the million-plus Biden advantage in mail-in votes cast in violation of the state Constitution of Pennsylvania.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said the election was stolen electronically? If so, then we need to talk. We need to talk about how, without even talking about 2020 specifically, electronic fraud actually looks pretty plausible because we have vote-counting machines with internal modems and no processes in place to ensure that the modems are switched off during the vote-count. And after talking about that, we’d have to figure out what sort of evidence there is either for or against some of the machines having been hacked in 2020.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that the Senate should not have certified the Electoral College vote? If so, then the premise is wrong because Trump honestly believed it. But at least I can agree that he was mistaken about that.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said that the election was stolen when Dominion applied an algorithm and the voters “broke the algorithm” before some jerks brought in some fake ballots or whatever? Lots of details in there–likely at least partially mistaken, although still not a lie as such because he honestly believed it.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that we knew all that stuff at the time? Yeah, maybe that was a lie. I sure didn’t know it at the time; I was barely figuring out some of the early bits and pieces. I still don’t know exactly what happened in 2020.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said the election was stolen? I’ve heard it said that this is exactly the premise, but this is why we have to have big vocabulary words instead of nice things. Vocabulary words like “enthymeme.” An election could be “stolen” in any of the ways mentioned above. If that was the lie, then we still don’t know what the premise is.
What is the premise of the argument against Trump? What exactly was the Big Lie?
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No, I’m looking for the atheist to explain that viewpoint in a way that takes care of rationality.
Funny you should bring this up today, @saintaugustine. I’m visiting in Seward, NE, and today I visited with a gentleman who is setting up a Lutheran Classics high school.
If he wants to hire a Baptist logic and philosophy teacher, lemme know, please!
You are willing to leave the epicurean delights of Hong Kong for the plains of Nebraska?
Willing to consider.
And don’t make me lecture on Epicureanism.
The theory that the election was stolen is many things and then nothing all at the same time. It really is the Russian Nesting Doll/Motte-and-Bailey of conspiracy theories, in the sense that when you examine any one of them and knock it down, there’s always some subsequent conspiracy or hand-waving behind or inside of it.
Who were the conspirators? Nobody knows. Nameless Democrat officials are frequently cited, but never is a specific person who engaged in a specific action that led to this outcome fingered.
How did they do this? Many increasingly hysterical theories are posited without evidence beginning with WI and PA allowing ballot drop boxes – yet nobody can show this would have had an effect on the actual outcome – and ranging all the way up to “votes were changed electronically” which is, to be frank, awfully sophisticated hacker stuff for a bunch of DMV-caliber government employees. They couldn’t do this and then keep schtum about it on their best day.
Can we produce more than a handful of illegal votes and subsequently the voters who cast them? Are there enough that they weren’t offset by Trump enthusiasts who, uh… similarly bent the rules? No. We would need lists running into the thousands in order to show this. In several states. One or two would be bad, but insufficient to the task of altering the outcome of the election.
Why can’t you people just accept that Trump simply wasn’t that popular and that he lost a contentious election after making a long series of mistakes? That is, after all, what Occam’s Razor would say without having to resort to the equivalent of Stacy Abrams and Karine Jean-Pierre level conspiracizing.
Of course there were “irregularities” in WI and PA. So. What? Does that mean that people voted who weren’t supposed to? No. It does not. Were more votes cast than voters registered? No.
Here is the Truth:
Trump sucks. That’s why He lost. He may yet cost us in the upcoming elections in the way he did in Georgia. Your anger at these facts is due to your fellow citizens passing this judgment on him.
You should move on and concentrate on winning future elections rather than attempting to relitigate ones long gone and decided.
Well, as someone who has been educated by nuns in an elementary school, educated in a boy’s Catholic high school, attending a Catholic university who had classes taught by a Lutheran Bishop, and a Jewish Rabbi I would like to think that a Baptist logic and philosophy teacher would be able to find a place in the schools I attended. You would have to accept the Crucifixes in every classroom that I saw, but I would believe that my son and daughter would benefit from what you would offer them.
Crucifixes are cool with me.
Are you looking for arguments for the meaning of life for human beings apart from and without consideration to the existence of souls or the Creator?
Seems to me that those who dismiss each piece of evidence of fraud, claiming that it’s insufficient to change the outcome, are the ones doing the hand-waving.
Also, Occam’s Razor suggests that JOE BIDEN getting more legitimate votes than ANYONE, EVER (in the history of US Presidential elections), doesn’t pass the smell test.
I’ll do it!
Yes. That would be a starting point. Then I would be seeking an explanation for rationality and how that could lead to a moral stance. In my feral cat litter I identified the alpha male and he operates with a pattern that does not include, require, or apparently yield any advantage that would accrue from rationality.
Who’s saying there were conspirators? Whose position are you addressing?
All I’ve been able to say on this matter has already been said. See above.
Yes. See above.
I did accept that it was that simple, as long as the available evidence allowed me.
No objection there. He rocks. (See the Supreme Court.) He also sucks. He sucks, and he rocks. Kinda like Hamlet. Perhaps even kinda like me, or perhaps you. Such is the tragedy of our humanity. Such is the tragedy of our times.
https://ricochet.com/1298020/should-we-move-on-from-2020/
Thank you.
Kant addresses that very thing, if I’m not much mistaken.
Well, moral law is rational, and moral law requires an authoritative moral lawgiver. There are written apologetics for this that I’m sure can be had.
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Teaching logic would contradict all the other things that are taught.
It’s only a Big Lie when Trump says it.
Precisely.
William Lane Craig has a good article, assuming we assume he means “moral law” whenever he says “moral” and doesn’t mention moral law.
Aristotle’s ethics is about the proper function of the human being–not moral law. Proper function of the human being doesn’t need a moral lawgiver like moral law does, so arguments that carelessly say “morality” without specifying moral law tend to be bad arguments–or at least badly written.
Adolf Hitler coined the phrase “The Big Lie” to describe a propaganda technique. Lying had generally been a minor deviation from the truth, so as to be more believable. The more minor, the more believable. Hitler described the opposite, the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” A lie about something foundational, like “2 + 2 = 5”, or “sex is a spectrum”.
But the other part of “The Big Lie” is that it is a propaganda technique. Which means its existence requires a big coordinated media operation to implement it.
In this case, 1., there’s far more evidence of election fraud than there is of a clean election, and 2., the mainstream media is united *against* President Trump.
It’s not delicious, it’s…
Attributed to Hitler’s guy, Joseph Goebbels.
However, the left tends to do this to a downright weird level of specificity.
Exactly!
Any connection with the college?
Yep.
I’ve saved these:
I have watched you evolve as a thinker over the many months that you wrestled with the many factors that you needed to consider with regards to the validity of the 2020 election. (and often the factors were overwhelming.)
This current post “Big Lie” exemplifies exactly how despite, or perhaps because, you went about learning to re-wire logic in the precise way it needs to be wired in order to come to decent conclusions regarding the gelatinous mess of reality that the 2020 election was set up to be.
Pt one of two
Pt two
In many instances, the 2020 election was like a murder that was committed by a particular thug, against whom the People’s Case rests mostly on circumstantial evidence. One piece of hard hitting evidence would not permit a jury to decide that the thug was indeed guilty of this murder, nor would 2, 3 or 4 bits of additional circumstantial evidence be enough.
But when dozens and dozens of hard hitting circumstantial evidence line up to say these vote patterns are statistically impossible, and so are these, and in two dozen major election centers across the nation, something is starting to smell funny.
Add in the dozen polling places across the nation where workers who happened to be Republicans were sent home, with the county election big wigs telling them, “We are quitting for the night. Go home. Get some sleep. Come back refreshed to begin anew tomorrow.” Then those Dem officials continued the vote count & somehow or other all of them all across the nation managed to arrive at Biden magnificently toppling the victory Trump had in his grasp at the moment the election officials had sent the workers home.
In a karmic whack of fate, Rachel Maddow had her camera crew film the two or three top election officials managing the vote count during the wee Am hours after the polls closed in Fulton County GA. Maddow portrayed them as heroic and courageous voting personnel, who put aside their need for sleep to further the Cause of America’s Democracy. In reality she must now know they were vermin. But we all know she won’t ever admit it.
Funny how many of the dozen counties I referred to were in the key battleground states of AZ, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin!
Nice phrase.
Yes, in Fulton County the lies are pretty well documented. I can’t vouch for those cases under the table being full of fraudulent ballots. (National Review had some credible objections, as I recall.) But the lies are well documented. Fulton Co. has it bad.
Thanks for these. I’m still looking for the modern progressive argument to demonstrate a meaning for rationality without human souls and a Creator. Kant is too complicated.
I’m convinced by the arguments for the existence of those. I really do like the argument that stems directly from the concept of the existence of evil implying personhood since evil is constantly in use as a term by progressives.
There is no question at all that major media, both traditional and social, acted to suppress the story of the Hunter Biden laptop and its evidence of corruption…and that former intelligence officials misused their credentials to claim that the story was likely ‘Russian disinformation’. And it is clear that these actions did have a material impact on election results.
Were these things illegal? In the case of the media actions, certainly seems to me like unreported in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign. But in any case, I don’t see how one could call the election truly ‘fair’ with these things going on.
(continuing previous comment) And make no mistake, the same people will use the same tactics against any Republican candidate who they believe threatens their positions, income, and/or social status. The attack machine is already gearing up against DeSantis.
Any overt action by corporate media to deliver or suppress political campaign promotion would appear to qualify as in-kind contributions.
Sorry, I’m confused again. Do you mean rationally demonstrating the meaning of human life without using the soul or the Creator? I think that that is impossible if all life is just the product of matter + time + chance.