I agree with you, but I think it’s important to present facts as facts the best we can. There’s enough terrible things out there both Trump and Musk have said and done, there’s no need to have any shred of mischaracterization.
Is there really any point in being careful with the facts? It seems like the way to win is to convince people of low interest and/or intelligence, which is all about rhetoric and narrativizing anyways. What’s the utility in truth here?
Fair point. But I would argue if the goal is to really change minds then you have to remove little things that allow people to dismiss everything else you said. Low interest/intelligence supporters have probably been shown the rest of the video at this point, so they will label you as a lier and their side as telling the truth and move on. Is it an unfair standard? Yes! There's also so many other events to use hopefully to better effect.
This is not how you change minds in 2025. They are going to dismiss everything you say to change their minds.
You aren't having a debate, its a mental street fight, and you gain respect by proving you know how they think and meeting them there.
Its why I say the dems are always wrong. I know that the only converastion is from using their own facts and then their own values.
The dems are always wrong, they do corruption badly. Trump pardoned 1600 people, and made 2 billion or something from 2 meme coins right before he was inagurated.
What do the dems have to show for it? 6 pardons?
So the Repubs are up 1594 pardons and billions in meme coins?
Did Trump do anything illegal? no! He exercised his powers. See! the dems can't even be corrupt or serve their own self interests effectively.
You might be interested in this YouTube series, where the author tries to deconstruct and explain the rhetoric patterns of--and countermeasures against--"The Alt-Right Playbook."
I innately want to believe that a comprehensive refutation grounded and logic and citations will win the day, but that doesn't seem to be how it plays out.
To charitably-interpret the parent-poster, they didn't say that.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
Even in a world of perfect transmission, people are highly irrational when faced with ideas challenging their priors. We don’t have perfect transmission, we have, and always have had, systems which elevate attention-drawing, profitable, and easily digestible ideas to the top while filtering out ideas too far from the status quo or threatening to governance. This is almost a matter of nature. How can a news platform exist if it only publishes complicated things beyond the public, what good would that even do? How can it exist if it doesn’t draw attention to its newspapers, or its website. We remove the explicit government control of media but we leave so many back-alleys for influence, and is the government even the locus of power now, or is it the moneyed interests that aren’t even barred from controlling media? And again, even if we woke up tomorrow with perfect, unbiased communication, we haven’t been raised to deal with it. We’d instantly repurpose the platform into a slop-distribution machine and sell advertisements on it and so on.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/