Alternative hypothesis: It isn't the size of the lie but direction of the lie. If you read what they wrote after "We hold these truths to be self-evident," it seems like a bigger lie at the time it was written than the Poland-airplane thing. The trick is civic trust. Anything that undermines it, is going to be dangerous and lies that don't, will be less so.

This is related to the reason I have been livid with conservatism. I think the more bloviating ones had a point about the importance of culture and social order even if I disagreed about what parts of that were the essential ones. Yet, they're blowing it all up over a small marginal tax cut and the right to treat immigrants like shit.

This deserves to be pushed back on. Hard.

Lies are usually quite rare in political life.

Say what now?

For instance, even the deplorable Trump's claim "immigrants come to America to sell drugs" is not in fact a Lie (as some immigrants in fact do just that); it is however a grotesque Exaggeration...

How many immigrants do you figure come to the US to sell drugs as opposed to say, picking fruit, cutting lawns, or washing dishes? If it's even .5% I would be surprised. I'm pretty comfortable calling a claim that .5% or less of immigrants come to the US to sell drugs justifies labeling all immigrants as drug-sellers a lie and saying that it's more of an exaggeration than a straight out lie is the worst kind of centrist weak sauce.

Most of them I know came for medical school.

3 was an exaggeration.

1.1: I think that can be folded into the Exaggeration frame, if we interpret your "direction of the lie" as the implications of the exaggeration.
For instance, acceptance of the declaration of independence* as true might lead one by implication to believe something like "quality of life is improved by rule of law"** (Reasonable Exaggeration).
By contrast, belief in a Smolensk conspiracy might lead one by implication to belief something like "all non-PiS supporting Poles are traitors" (Huge Exaggeration).
The Declaration of Independence Exaggeration implies smaller Exaggerations than the Smolensk Exaggeration, hence leading to less atrocious governance; in your terminology, the former lie points toward civic trust, where the latter points away from it.
*Which AFAIK was actually far better supported at the time than the Smolensk story. Some of the signers were active abolitionists, right? Whereas, per OP link, Smolensk conspiracies have no factual basis at all.
**For instance; IDK if it actually implies any such thing.

"all non-PiS supporting Poles are traitors"

I suppose. Anyway, I'm familiar with and annoyed by the local version of that lie.

The main author of the Declaration was a slave owner his whole life. I don't actually remember what the whole things says, but it does specifically mention that one of the wrongs inflicted by Britain is encouraging American slaves to revolt. So, you know, something of a contradiction is baked in from the start.

To UNLAWFULLY revolt! But, point taken. (In any case, you're the one who said the declaration pointed in a good direction, so it's your problem, not mine.)

It's on my list.

2: Barry, how much reason have I ever given you to believe that I'm a weak-sauce centrist?
I'll concede "straight-up 100% Lies are usually quite rare in political life" may not be true* but I don't think the OP analysis depends on it being so.
I'm perfectly happy to say that, in common usage of the terms, Trump was lying rather than exaggerating. I introduced the terminology Lie and Exaggeration (so capitalized) precisely to avoid the fruitless internecine fight that might begin in 2.
I believe that effective thinking requires precise use of language, even if that precision is unnatural or distasteful; and if we are to be precise, we have to admit that "immigrants come to America to sell drugs" is not entirely untrue.
Rather, it contains a little bit of truth. And on the voter psychology level, I think inclusion of that little bit of truth allows a politician to gain trust, and denying or ignoring that little bit of truth helps them to lose it. (Trump himself is not the best example of this, unsubtle as he is.)
For practical purposes none of this much matters; I introduced the Exaggeration concept solely because I thought the Lie concept wasn't precise enough.
*Quantitative research on that would be really interesting.

10.1 None, I wasn't accusing you of being a weak sauce centrist but I find labeling lies as exaggerations of a kind with weak sauce centrism and I don't find it tactically helpful.

11: Comity. I'm thinking it might be strategically helpful, as a way of classifying political actors: how far removed are these people from empirical reality?

11 not sure that was correct grammatically but you got the point.

If it's not the 18th century or earlier, I don't read grand Theories of capitalized Nouns.

I googled. It's the 21st century.

You can call them lies' and exaggerations' if you prefer?

The atrociousness of any given society is proportional to the size of the Exaggerations which govern the lives of its people.

And I think a corollary is the absurdity of the lies that are "tolerated" from its rulers. For instance I found Trump's pathetic and ridiculous "I said it the wrong way" excuse for his Helsinki press conference with Putin to be particularly disturbing in that regard. not that *anyone* actually believed it but it was passed over relatively quickly as just another wacky day in his administration.

Thinking of lies and truth as binary seems like an problem. Probably better to score lies vs. truth on a scale from 0 to 1. So "Immigrants come here to sell drugs" is like a 0.03, where as "Grass is green" is like a .98. (Sometimes grass is brown.)

This allows you to create equations based on truthiness, which ought to be good for something.

Highly recommend Jason Stanley's How Propaganda Works for an accessible philosophy-of-language take on the mechanisms of propaganda.

I'm not sure. I have a not very detailed memory of a Cold War incident -- the Soviet Union arrested an American reporter accusing him of spying. It was a big diplomatic crisis. Then the United States sent an imprisoned Russian accused of spying back to Russia, and the Soviets released the American reporter. President Reagan insisted there was no quid pro quo.
It was an obvious and total lie, but seemed fairly harmless.

20: That's not harmless. Assuming the reporter wasn't a spy, the US was left with one fewer Soviet spies to trade for US spies, and thus with less ability to recover its people; and indicated to all enemies that seizing random US people was a mechanism for recovering their own spies, thus endangering US nationals everywhere.

Even my grandmother, who watches Polish news for most of the day (when she isn't watching her soap opera or COPS), is disgusted by what's happening in Poland. No idea what my Trump-loving uncle thinks, as we no longer talk.

18: Exactly. The Exaggeration' Index'.

21: I think you're arguing against the trade itself, not the lie.

24: Indeed I am! But the lie appears pointless.

"The Exaggeration' Index'."

The next book by Charlie Stross?

There is a category I think of as "the etonian lie" which is obviously untrue, a polite fiction really; but one of the marks of being a player is to recognise its untruth and yet go along with it, since anyone who is fooled can't be worth bothering with. A lot of diplomatic language is on the edge of this.

27: That seems like an apt description of the lie in 20.

Also essential because that's not really what she said.

more 27: well, but you can ding outsiders for either acting as though the `lie' is true (chumps!) or acting as though the `lie' isn't true (not playing along! Shrill!). It's where "hypocrisy is the tax vice pays to virtue" falls down, I think -- e.g. when rich people get away with vices that they ascribe to the poor and then punish the poor for.

"Immigrants come to America to sell drugs" is as much a lie, not an exaggeration, as "dogs have three (and no more than three) legs" is.