So, hyperbole. It\u2019s a legitimate technique of persuasion, and indeed of writing and speaking in general. Hyperbole and exaggeration are, I think, generally considered different from untruths, and I believe in our US truth-in-advertising laws allow for it. You can market your brand as the World\u2019s Greatest Widgetflakions without any actual comparative evidence, and no-one will sue\u2014and if they did, they would lose. You can even say that your company is having its biggest sale ever\u2014you can\u2019t say that the prices are the lowest, unless they are, but the biggest sale? Hard to measure, so it\u2019s fine. And evidently you can say that a building is the tallest building in Manhattan even if it isn\u2019t, not so much because of the \u2018harmless puffery\u2019 exemption as because nobody bothers to sue and why would they. It is what a certain well-known ex-developer and reality-tv star used to call truthful hyperbole<\/i>, meaning just hyperbole.\r\n
Anyway.\r\n
Even in politics, I try not to get worked up over the use of hyperbole. I deprecate it, but mildly\u2014when a politician says that we are as polarized as we have ever been, or that the state of the union is stronger than it has ever been, I mock that politician, but in my head, rather than writing a post about it. I mean, it\u2019s wrong, but it\u2019s the sort of wrong that I expect people to live with.\r\n
So I think people<\/a> are overreacting<\/a> somewhat<\/a> to Justice-Nominee Kavanaugh\u2019s statement that No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.<\/i> I mean yes, I see the point that we don\u2019t really want nominees (or Justices) to speak quite like politicians, and I agree with that. I agree that the statement sounds like it was written by Our Only President or one of his better writers, and I agree that on the whole I would prefer that a nominee (or Justice) makes up his own anodyne pabulum (or possibly pablum) than that he repeats political talking points. I wish he hadn\u2019t said the thing, or had found a better way to phrase it. But it\u2019s not a particularly Big Fucking Deal, in my opinion, and the notion that his willingness to sling bullshit in a press conference indicates his standard of jurisprudence is just silly.\r\n So I don\u2019t know why, exactly, it struck me as so awful that Our Only President said that the US-Russia relationship has never been worse<\/a>. I mean, obviously nobody was meant to actually compare the situation with the time the Polar Bear Expedition<\/a> actually exchanged fire with the Red Army, or with the dozen years that the US refused to formally recognize the Soviet government, or even with 1999 during the Chechen revolt and NATO\u2019s intervention in Serbia. Or, you know, the blockade of Berlin, the Suez crisis, or the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, Guatemala, Chile, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Cuba. It was not a comparative statement at all. It was hyperbole\u2014it simply meant that he felt that the relationship was bad. Or even less than that, as it wasn\u2019t bad by any particular standard, it just could be and would be improved. And I don\u2019t think anybody, including the person saying it, believed it to be literally true, or thought that anyone would interpret it as literally true and believe it. I mean, obviously people are interpreting it as literally true and disagreeing with it\u2014I\u2019m doing that!\u2014but it\u2019s obviously a deliberate misinterpretation of the intent.\r\n So why am I so cross about it? Perhaps it\u2019s because I loathe the man. Perhaps it\u2019s because this is not normal political hyperbole\u2014politicians generally tell a particular kind of untruth that is technically accurate but misleading in context, or else a prediction leavened with if<\/i> such that there is a kind of implausible possibility to it. Even Dick Cheney, who outright lied on many occasions, tended to avoid making statements that sounded utterly implausible. And the sort of rhetorical hyperbole politicians tend to engage in is the the greatest generation<\/i> or even the there\u2019ll be taco trucks on every corner<\/i> kind, not the measurable tallest building in Manhattan<\/i> kind. I honestly think it\u2019s bad for the country for politicians to tell different kinds of lies than they have been. I\u2019m don\u2019t think that politicians need to be truthful all the time, and but I think it\u2019s better if they are carefully misleading rather than lazily wrong.\r\n But I think, probably, more than anything, I am cross about Our Only President using this sort of hyperbole because it\u2019s much easier to be cross about rhetorical style than to think about what is actually going on in this country, and in the world.\r\n Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger has the most oh never mind.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19728"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19732,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19728\/revisions\/19732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}