While the resort itself employs 200, how many additional jobs supporting the resort did it create? I assume that’s what Trump’s 6000 was referring to.

And the large point. Not all real estate development succeed. And people don’t get paid. There is nothing sinister or malevolent about it. The ones that succeed have a large multiplier effect to the economy.

Trump understands that. That’s why I’m betting on Trump.

“Trumps Tortured History”

“Trump has sought to emphasize his ties with Scotland; in return, he’s earned loathing in Midlothian and antipathy in Ayrshire.”

“stopping by the cottage where his mother was born (for 97 seconds…)”

“Trump had an ulterior motive for thise warm words..”
“That didn’t stop Trump from whining throughout the process…”

” The release was not popular in Scotland or the United Kingdom. Trump’s son Donald Jr. gleefully blasted Salmond…”

“Trump wasted no time stabbing Salmond in the back…”

No mention in the Atlantic article, like in the Independent of the still positive from the local government about Trump’s resort and noted that the poor economy had a large part in some of the project.

“Local councillor Isobel Davidson said there was no evidence in the short term of Trump creating 6,000 jobs.
“It might happen in the long term,” she said, speaking from her office in Aberdeenshire. “There are far more rooms available [in Aberdeenshire hotels] than there were five years ago.”

She added: “As far as I know the course is not as well used as was hoped. Other local courses are considerably cheaper. A large part of that is down to the [poor] economy.” She said however that she and fellow councillors would still welcome further investment, and that if Mr Trump pulled out, he “presumably would find another buyer”.

Councillor Davidson said it would be a “real shame” if Mr Trump pulled out of the Ayrshire golf course as she said it was much more likely to hit international success.”

You can be critical and still be fair. The Atlantic piece certainly was critical and certainly not fair.

And the reason I know it was 1971 was by the end of the summer, the developers were running out of money and we weren’t getting paid. So the survey crew (five of us) left to fight the Entiat fire. Good times, except we never did get paid.

If you want to argue over the semantics of “pathological liar” versus “compulsive liar,” be my guest. Either if fine with me to describe Trump.

As for the Atlantic link, it’s not a hit piece. I have read probably every article that exists on the subject of Trump and Scotland, and also read a biography of Trump that goes into it quite deeply, and written many posts on it. I merely put the Atlantic article up there as a summary that’s easy to find. I am highly conversant with what happened there, and Trump lied—among other things.

I repeat: being a compulsive and/or pathological liar doesn’t stop him from making deals. It has helped him make certain deals, actually.

____
There are so many points to make here, let’s see if I can sort them out.
Pathalogical vs Compulsive Liar

My objection to using the term “pathalogical” is the sinister quality to the term. It has been used by the left and I suppose neverTrumpers, but is it accurate?

Pathalogical lying is when you tell a story of how you landed in a plane while it was taking fire from the enemy.

Saying you saw thousands of Arabs cheering the fall of the Towers, or the hundreds of friends you lost in the bombing, is not.
It may be calculated but it’s probably just hyperbole.
Kind of like when I started to write that most of his lies were exaggerations. That’s an exaggeration itself. So I wrote “many of his lies were exaggerations”. I might have written “some of his lies were exaggerations”, but you know I just wasn’t willing to take the time to quantify the list.
We’re all guilty of carelessness with quantifiers.
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From a Politifact article:
…. Bending the truth or being unhampered by accuracy is a strategy he has followed for years.
“People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts,” Trump wrote in his 1987 best-seller The Art of the Deal. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.”
That philosophy guided Trump in luxury real estate and reality television. This year he brought it to the world of presidential politics.
Trump has “perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool,” said Michael LaBossiere, a philosophy professor at Florida A&M University who studies theories of knowledge. “He makes a clearly false or even absurdly false claim, which draws the attention of the media. He then rides that wave until it comes time to call up another one.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/dec/21/2015-lie-year-donald-trump-campaign-misstatements/
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I object when a conservative uses the term pathological liar, since it’s not completely accurate. And I don’t think it benefits the country to elect a true pathological liar who will take the corruption of the executive branch to new levels.

As to Trump’s golf resort developments in Scotland, the Atlantic article is a hit piece and I’m surprised you would link to it. The Independent article is more accurate and balanced.

I worked one summer surveying a resort development in the scablands of eastern Washington. It was totally useless land, outcroppings of basalt with a thin layer of caliche, sagebrush and rattlesnakes were its greatest features. What were the developers thinking? It seemed incredulous to us six college students that anyone would buy a lot on this inhospitable land.
But up went the signs– residential lots for $1995.
The plans showed a complete western town as part of the development, and the marketing was directed mostly to the Japanese who were obsessed about the “old West” and to easterners who would likely buy the property sight unseen.
Anyway, the oil embargo hit, the economy stalled and the developers filed bankruptcy. The people who had bought lots of course sued and as part of the settlements a clubhouse was built with tennis courts and a swimming pool.

What does this have to do with Trump? While you may not have wanted to invest in property on seeming wasteland, had the economy not faltered, the development probably would have succeeded. There is a sort of primitive, unsullied beauty to the area, and a great coulee meandered by, harkening to epoch ages that carved out much of the land. A horse track was even built in the base of the coulee, promoted by one of the greatest Rodeo cowboys of the time, to no avail. It now sits in decay, slowing giving way to the harsh climate it tried to exploit.
Today when you drive by the development, you’ll see a weathered sign, barely legible with it’s promise of $1995 to own a piece of Western lore, scattered RV’s permanently placed on their owner’s land and a Western themed clubhouse, it’s lights shining as a beacon at dusk to a noble or foolish attempt to make the lore of the Old West come alive or cheat people with a wasteland, depending on your point of view.
When developers like Trump take on a project, they see a vision, but that vision is subject to the vagaries of local politics, an economy that may fall at an inopportune time, and a risk that they can lose it all.

I’m betting on Trump.

Are you serious? Trump wouldn’t have been able to do the deals if he’d been lying? Ask the people of Scotland what they think about that (see this and this). Ask all the people who’ve sued him, including those who fell for the Trump U scam.

And how about trying to look up the names of the hundreds of friends he lost on 9/11?

And yes, “compulsive liar” works just as well.

And of course even pathological liars and compulsive liars sometimes tell the truth. And they also often lie strategically, to get something, what you have referred to as “classic lies.” But sometimes they just lie out of habit, and for fun (which I suppose you could argue is “getting something out of it,” too). Trump has that same mix, but any website listing his lies during the campaign is going to concentrate on the more political and strategic ones.

A “white lie” traditionally refers to a harmless lie told for socially acceptable reasons that are positive–such as,for example, saying a woman’s dress is pretty when it’s not. I don’t think you mean “white lies” with Trump, I think you mean relatively trivial lies? Is that correct? If so, it’s another indication that he lies for fun, for sport, when there’s even less strategic reason to do so.

And he isn’t just doing this during this campaign. It’s a lifelong thing for him.

What if I said he really is a compulsive liar? Doesn’t that seem more tolerable?

What if he’s just a careless liar?

If you google “pathological liar” do you know what the first result is? Hillary Clinton. Really. Google it.

I looked at the top 101 lies that Trump has told and many were exaggerations, some were white lies and some were classic lies– falsehoods attempting to deceive.

Pathological, to me, implies he is unable of not lying, which is simply not true. He wouldn’t have been able to do the deals, develop the properties he has if he couldn’t be believed.

Now it would be nice if Trump were more like Mitt Romney, more careful speaking, more clinical with facts.

Will he be able to negotiate with world leaders. Sure. I suspect if being a billionaire does one thing, it gives you confidence. It makes you comfortable on a world stage.

You’re welcome!

When the blog first started, I had a lot of leftist trolls. Some were very vocal and persistent, and threatened to destroy the blog because I was on Blogger and back then there weren’t good tools for banning on Blogger. That’s why I moved to WordPress years ago. Otherwise the blog probably would have ended a long time ago.

It wasn’t until this election cycle that most of the trolls came from the right (or ostensibly from the right—they sounded so much like the old leftist trolls that I began to wonder, and still do, about a lot of them).

The nice thing, though, is that generally these things come in waves. When you take care of a wave of them, word seems to get out that this isn’t a place that’s easy to take over, and the bulk of them go on to easier pickings. So the rate of arrival slows down after that first flush. At least, that’s what appears to me to be happening.

Actually, this sparked a thought.

I hardly ever get to breitbarf nowadays, but those people always existed there, only they were not quite as overwhelming as they became when I left, and no doubt still are – probably because the rest of us left, so any modicum of reasonable conversation has attrited.

For which we thank you, deeply and sincerely, Neo.

(I have some idea just how much work that policing can be, having done some of it at Sound Politics some years ago. There the problem was more often leftist trolls, but I expect that Trumpistas would appear there now, too.

I found myself spending more time polcing the comments than writng posts, and finally started closing the few posts I was writing.)