{"id":5402,"date":"2017-06-24T16:38:21","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T16:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/06\/24\/votes-by-non-citizens-may-have-cost-trump-the-2016-popular-vote\/"},"modified":"2017-06-24T16:38:21","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T16:38:21","slug":"votes-by-non-citizens-may-have-cost-trump-the-2016-popular-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/06\/24\/votes-by-non-citizens-may-have-cost-trump-the-2016-popular-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Votes by Non-Citizens May Have Cost Trump the 2016 Popular Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 10 December of last year in an entry entitled 'Post-Truth'<\/a> I wrote the following:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald<\/em> of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect<\/a> him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary \u2014 most glaringly Trump\u2019s chock-full-\u00adof-\u00adlies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "<\/span><\/p>\n

A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus!  There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them.  Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice.  Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion.  Still, it could be true.  Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote. Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence.  He pretended to know something he could not know.  Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian<\/a> ethics of belief, but not a lie.  <\/span><\/p>\n

So he didn't lie.  What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit<\/em>, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience.  Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them. <\/span><\/p>\n

So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting.  He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true.  But why pick on Trump?<\/span><\/p>\n

Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama bullshits with the best of them.  A prime example was his outrageous claim<\/a> that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam. It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.)   Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement.  Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth.  (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them:  he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure.  The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true.  He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam<\/em>.  The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

So once again we have a double standard.  Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So that's what I said back in December. But now we have evidence <\/a>that Trump was right:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

We don't know the exact number of illegal votes. No one does. But the data that are available suggest that the number of illegal votes was substantial \u2014 probably in the millions, as Trump said \u2014 and likely had a significant impact on the election's outcome.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even Democrats should find this troubling; every vote cast by a noncitizen voter negates the vote of a citizen voter. It's that simple. It's time the Democratic Party started living up to its name and stop encouraging noncitizens and illegal aliens to vote in our election.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But of course the Democrats will not live up to their name, being elitists and globalists; and of course they are not troubled by the votes of non-citizens. The best proof of this is their opposition to photo ID at polling places. Their intention is transparent: to win by any means, legal or illegal.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Mexican<\/a>
<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 10 December of last year in an entry entitled 'Post-Truth' I wrote the following: For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all … Continue reading “Votes by Non-Citizens May Have Cost Trump the 2016 Popular Vote”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}