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Originally posted by MaggieL
When you study argumentation (if your major will be foreign affairs I do hope you get to take a forensics class) you'll hear about "slippery slopes".
That's how we get to flacks and pols making statements like "That statement is now inoperative." (which was how a Nixonian flack chose to say "We got caught lying about that so we don't stand behind what we said anymore") and other gems like Clinton's "It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. If the -- if he -- if "is" means "is and never has been," that is not -- that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.", apparently intending to convey that he meant to say that he wasn't actually screwing Monica *while* testifying. The "is" in question was in fact the one in the question "Is the statement you made in the past actually true?"
SpinnigFetus, even though one can pose hypotheticals in which telling a lie is preferable to telling the truth, that doesn't say anything about the ethics of lying in general, much less the practicality of it. "Lying to other people is your business, but I'll tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind." -- Col. Baslim to his adopted son in Heinlien's "Citizen of the Galaxy"
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Ok, to start with: Spin is a product of language; there is ambiguity built into the structure of it at several different levels. (This is the reason that building a NLP is so difficult) This abiguity can be manipulated so that a phrase may mean denotatively something that is completely true, while its connotative meaning may give the public a different meaning all together that would in fact be contrary to the facts. Is that lying? In spirit I would say yes, but in the strictest sense it isn't, meaning isn't static so there can never be absolute truth conveyed through linguistic means. It isn't possible. It is this design feature of language that gives the hacks thier ammo. Polotitions are dishonest by nature, spin is just a loophole that they exploit like any loophole in a legislative sense.
Ethics are an interesting can o' worms. Personally, I feel that everybody lives by some standards. These are something that each person must arrive at by themselves and aren't something that I feel that I can cast judgement on. The other side to this the ethics of our society which basically boil down to do whatever you can get away with. It is kind of sad, but again at the same time this is what western thought has been moving towards for centuries so maybe that is just the way things are supposed to be; from a social Darwinistic view if the thought process were unsustainable sooner or later it would cease to be. This is also true from the practicality stand point. We have a president who lied repeatedly about drunk driving charges before the election, got called out on it before the election, and still is our honored commander in chief today. I think television and especially digital special effects have altered our peception of things like reality and truth to such a degree that the defintions that were in place fifteen or twenty years ago are no longer applicable. Again that isn't to say that there aren't any defintions they are just different.