Lying Lie Detectors

Post-Truth Paradise

While a certain number of technologies have bitten the dust, such as phone recorders for a land line and fax machines (still possibly the most secure form of transfer of sensitive data), there is possibly one technology that will move from the police station to the personal home for general conversations and as companion for any video recording machine.  This new home feature is the personal / home lie detector, for every home and conversation, hooked up to the internet connection, working on cell phones, connected to the television for news reports, listening in with Siri or Alexa and checking doom scrolling.

One may ask why this is necessary and the answer is that is because of the post-truth world that we are living in.  At one time, we were “entitled to our opinions, but not our own set of facts.”  Thanks to Daniel Patrick Moynihan for these words of wisdom, but his statement about truth is no longer valid.  Facts are now cheap commodities that have no intrinsic consistent value.  Fox News in particular seems to have entered into a different realm of truths  that sound true in their own bubble, but do not necessarily stand up when the bubble pops - it can be expensive paying a voting machine company.

During Donald Trump's first term, the Washington Post famously kept count of the lies the president told. The paper's final tally was 30,573 from the time he was inaugurated the first time to when he left office in January of 2021 — an average of 21 lies or misleading statements every day he was in office. Some might conclude that with such numbers he's a habitual liar.

After Trump left office, the Post reported that what was especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims per day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later. Of course, that included the biggest lie of all: that he had somehow been cheated out of winning the 2020 election.  The Cap Times (Wisconsin)

PolitiFact's analysis of his first 100 days showed 17 false statements out of 29 assessed, compared to just 1 from Obama and 2 from Biden. In a broader analysis of 1,000 fact checks, Trump received the highest percentage (18.4%) of "Pants on Fire" ratings among all politicians tracked.  Factually.co

Many academics and observers who study the American political scene have called Trump unique or highly unusual in his lying and its effect on political discourse. "It has long been a truism that politicians lie," wrote Carole McGranahan for the American Ethnologist in 2017, but "Donald Trump is different". He is the most "accomplished and effective liar" to have ever participated in American politics; moreover, his lying has reshaped public discourse so that "the frequency, degree, and impact of lying in politics are now unprecedented".  American Ethnologist

Even Wikipedia has a page on the lying, so you know you can trust Wikipedia because it does not lie.

As a companion to the various agencies tracking The Donald as the Liar-in-Chief (and together with other sources of misinformation to be tracked), a  Falsehood Follower has been developed, similar to the Doomsday Clock. It is not a count-down but a count-up “clock” with unlimited decimal points and it also checks the rate of lying in terms of acceleration as secondary measure for the fulfillment of the post-truth world.