{"id":5074,"date":"2017-02-13T13:28:09","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T18:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5074"},"modified":"2017-02-13T13:28:09","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T18:28:09","slug":"seriously-but-not-literally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5074","title":{"rendered":"Seriously but not literally"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Trump vs. Truth: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xecEV4dSAXE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A while back a writer<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2016\/09\/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh\/501335\/\"> at the Atlantic introduced <\/a>the Trumpian heuristic, &#8220;take him seriously but not literally.&#8221; This was then quickly adopted by Trump surrogates as a way of responding the \u00c2\u00a0Trump&#8217;s frequent exaggerations and errors of fact (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/opinion\/op-ed\/la-oe-goldberg-trump-seriously-literally-20161206-story.html\">this Jonah Goldberg piece <\/a>covers that end of it&#8211;never thought I&#8217;d cite him approvingly, by the way).<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s try to understand this thought. We can start by going back to the original piece. Here&#8217;s the money quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The best way, he says, is to provide good education and good jobs in these areas. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153<em>Fifty-eight <\/em>percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, <strong>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Now that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interesting.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder by the way \u00c2\u00a0what the etiquette is for including self-congratulatory lines in the course of your own writing&#8211;&#8220;now that&#8217;s an interesting thought,&#8221; you might think.\u00c2\u00a0Anyway, it&#8217;s probably clear by now that Trump takes himself literally and seriously, and so do his supporters. If this weren&#8217;t the case, they wouldn&#8217;t work so hard and constructing an alternative set of facts to match Trump&#8217;s assertions (watch the video linked above).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a curious thought nonetheless, one that cuts right to the heart of dialectical argument. If I&#8217;m going to engage you, I have to have a representation of your view. Usually, the question is whether my representation of your view is accurate, or, if not accurate, charitable.<\/p>\n<p>It is true, however, that we pepper our arguments with all sorts of things not-to-be-taken literally. I&#8217;d venture to guess that if we really thought hard, we&#8217;d find that we&#8217;d think this about many of our arguments themselves. Think how often in a casual conversation you might make some kind of hasty generalization. You don&#8217;t mean the argument to be taken literally.<\/p>\n<p>But you&#8217;re not President of the United States. And there&#8217;s a difference between casual conversation and semi-formal argument. So, let&#8217;s take the Atlantic writer seriously and literally. How do we take someone seriously, but not literally? Do we simply substitute our own version of the correct factual assertion? &#8220;Sure, Trump said 50 percent unemployment, but he&#8217;s not wrong because there&#8217;s lots of unemployment.&#8221; Would that I got <a href=\"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=2624\">iron-manned<\/a> like this!<\/p>\n<p>One last question. What&#8217;s the clue that we need to interpret someone seriously but not literally? Is it when they&#8217;re very often wildly wrong?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A while back a writer at the Atlantic introduced the Trumpian heuristic, &#8220;take him seriously but not literally.&#8221; This was then quickly adopted by Trump surrogates as a way of responding the \u00c2\u00a0Trump&#8217;s frequent exaggerations and errors of fact (this Jonah Goldberg piece covers that end of it&#8211;never thought I&#8217;d cite him approvingly, by the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5074\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Seriously but not literally<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2116,1180,2115,2061],"class_list":["post-5074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-charity","tag-iron-man","tag-seriously-but-not-literally","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5074"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5075,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5074\/revisions\/5075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}