General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Enough with the scolding please. [View all]Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)In this instance, in the thread I linked, the malicious lie was that Susan Sarandon runs a sweatshop. No link, no statement of what supported the charge, no elaboration of details -- just the smear. It came with a side order of hypocrisy, because it was in a thread in which several DUers stridently insisted that any negative comment about someone they liked must be supported with facts. Those posters did not apply the same standard to a negative comment about someone they disliked.
You write that Sarandon's support of Stein "has resulted in a trump presidency." That's very dubious. There were celebrities supporting each of the leading candidates. Without hard supporting data, I see no reason to believe that this one celebrity endorsement was enough to flip scores of thousands of votes from Clinton to Stein.
Now we come to your bell-ringer:
This "won't happen again" is about Sarandon's future conduct. I personally haven't seen a single post purporting to be from Sarandon, or from a spokesperson for her, or from someone claiming enough knowledge about her to say whom she'll endorse in 2020. I don't read every post on DU so I'll just have to take your word for it that there have been such posts.
As for "really not that big a deal," yes, there are several of us who think that looking at actual numbers is more productive than venting spleen and who think that Sarandon didn't have much influence on the outcome. To say otherwise is not a malicious lie, however, and I of course never said it was. It's a judgment about a counterfactual hypothetical (if Sarandon had endorsed Clinton, would Clinton have become President?). Inherently, therefore, we can never know for sure. I can't prove that, even with Sarandon's endorsement, Clinton would not have become President, any more than I could prove that about Jon Voigt (although I thought his narration of Trump's video was very well done and probably helped Trump more than anything Sarandon did). Because we can't know for sure, it's not a malicious lie. It's just a pretty dim-witted political judgment.