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Cont: The Trump Presidency: Part 28

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A good reason to continue to discuss Trump is to try to work out how such a person ever got elected POTUS, so that appropriate lessons can be learned.
 
Pixel42 said:
A good reason to continue to discuss Trump is to try to work out how such a person ever got elected POTUS, so that appropriate lessons can be learned.
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If our media had half the introspection needed to learn that lesson, it would not have been a problem in the first place.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
If our media had half the introspection needed to learn that lesson, it would not have been a problem in the first place.
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There's a very real problem with the assumptions here when it comes to what drives said media and what the goals are. For the corporate media and specifically the generally right-wing leadership of such, profiting off Trump and getting an administration that worked hard to benefit corporations in general and generally remove accountability sure looks like it would be a big win in their eyes. Capitalist values very frequently diverge from what are more normally considered to be good morals.
 
Delvo said:
"Dumb it down" is indeed roughly the same general idea as what I said, allowing for a substantially different emotional angle on it to try to make me look bad.

But that was 3 words out of 70. Starting at the seventh because the first three were just a general intro, there were 64 more which you have conspicuously not defended, and there's nothing left of mine to highlight & say it equates with the other 64... almost as if you chose which parts of your own claims to defend and which to leave alone based on which parts you knew had and hadn't been accurate in the first place.
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Yeah...'almost if'. Verbosity does not change your general message: dumb it down cuz voters don't like smart people. Nuff said.
 
Stacyhs said:
Yeah...'almost if'. Verbosity does not change your general message:
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Why didn't that stop you from trying it?

Stacyhs said:
dumb it down cuz voters don't like smart people. Nuff said.
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OK, so if we're just sticking with the tiny sliver of your previous post that was somewhere near the truth and acting like the rest wasn't there...

It's actually not that voters don't like smart people, but that they don't like pretentious elitists whose pretentious elite act actually comes of not as smart but as hiding something (or bumbling idiocy when they can't pull it off right). But close enough as long as your goal is to keep making sure that your (our) side keeps losing as much as possible.
 
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Delvo said:
Why didn't that stop you from trying it?
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What a zinger! It struck me to my very core. What next? I know you are but what am I? I'm rubber and you're glue?

Delvo said:
OK, so if we're just sticking with the tiny sliver of your previous post that was somewhere near the truth and acting like the rest wasn't there...

It's actually not that voters don't like smart people, but that they don't like pretentious elitists whose pretentious elite act actually comes of not as smart but as hiding something (or bumbling idiocy when they can't pull it off right). But close enough as long as your goal is to keep making sure that your (our) side keeps losing as much as possible.
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But that's not exactly what you first said, now is it?

"Intelligence & eloquence doesn't impress them; it tells them you're trying to hide something and/or make up for a lack of down-to-Earth common sense. Even worse yet is trying to sound intellectually superior and bungling it."

"Intelligence & eloquence doesn't impress them" is basically saying "they don't like smart people".

That's all I'm going to say on it because it will engender yet another rabbit hole of semantics. Take the last word; I don't have to have it.
 
The Atheist said:
:dl:

BLM arsonists are patriots, the Proud Babies are terrorists.
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That's post 3348.

The Atheist said:
I did not say BLM were arsonists, but it's 100% factual that BLM protests included arsonists.
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That's post 3359.

Make wild claims, get called on them, claim you never made them, then make the claim again, and now this.

All of them? Wow.

I'll write to Franky the Pope and ask for BLM to be beatified and nominate them for a Nobel Peace Prize.
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I showed you EvIdEnCe that white supremacists are burning **** down and blaming it on BLM, and your only response is dismissive sarcasm. As if it doesn't really matter to you who is a terrorist and who is an arsonist and who isn't. Let's see some eViDeNcE that BLM are arsonists, or stop saying it.

I do not think that you are arguing in good faith. This is one strike.
 
The Atheist said:
That's fine, I wouldn't hesitate to agree there are more far-right terrorists than far left.

My point was that there are terrorists on both sides.
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Ok, that's not even wrong. But what's the point of your point?

If we were discussing how pig farms in Iowa are destroying the water quality, and you piped in to mention argumentatively, over and over again, that people raise pigs in New Jersey too, only to admit that they don't raise nearly as many and it isn't really that much of a problem.

What's your point?
 
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Beelzebuddy said:
If our media had half the introspection needed to learn that lesson, it would not have been a problem in the first place.
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Dont blame the media. Ultimately, it comes down to the voters. A populace where some 40% is a toxic mix of the poorly educated, the world ignorant, the anti-intellectual, the celebrity worshipping, the gullible, the credulous, the conspiracy loving, the intolerant, the proudly wrong and the racist, what do you expect? The divide between the normal and the deplorable is so close to half that it's too often a nail-biter as to which way the pendulum will swing.
 
Lurch said:
Dont blame the media. Ultimately, it comes down to the voters. A populace where some 40% is a toxic mix of the poorly educated, the world ignorant, the anti-intellectual, the celebrity worshipping, the gullible, the credulous, the conspiracy loving, the intolerant, the proudly wrong and the racist, what do you expect? The divide between the normal and the deplorable is so close to half that it's too often a nail-biter as to which way the pendulum will swing.
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Deplorables have always been there. It wasn't that long ago most of the country supported segregation. But now they're informationally siloed, with monied interests making damn sure they'll never climb out of that bucket.

Let's take a hyperbolic example: say one of the GQP creatures accuses Biden of being a pedophile. Deep in Trump country, where exactly is someone supposed to hear that he isn't? Fox News is running 24/7 rage-commentary on "people are saying." Facebook already took good rubles to push that story to their eyeballs, they aren't going to undermine their demographic marketability and risk lowering engagement just because it isn't true.

You can ignore someone shoveling ******** for a while, but eventually they'll start burying people beneath it.
 
In the deepest Trump country there are available alternatives to the Right Wing Machine's propaganda apparatus. Even if Cable TV and the internet are not to hand, there's usually one or two radio or TV stations to pick off the airwaves. After all, in the middle of the wastes inhabited by the deplorables are found some left-leaning folk, too.

Essentially the entirety of the deplorables are choosing what they consume, for whatever reason. No one is strapping them down like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. That more than a third of a populace is ripe for exploitation by a cynical system whose lies are plain to see is frightening. But it becomes enraging when they buy into it all when it should be obvious to them that they're being hoodwinked into going against their own personal interests, let alone those of the nation. Which drags everyone else down.
 
digger said:
Make wild claims, get called on them, claim you never made them, then make the claim again, and now this.
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Are you really so thick you don't understand that "BLM arsonists" is a subset of "BLM"?

Certainly looks like it.

I agree some attacks were done by far-right, but if you think no BLM members committed arson you're severely deluded.
 
Regnad Kcin said:
Is this a thing?
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They have a permanent presence in maybe half a dozen cities. Otherwise, some folks may visit a community and cooperate with local volunteers to host some public meetings, a candlelight vigil, and other shared trauma processing type activities. I would even guess for most BLM personnel, it is not their day job/primary income source.
 
Regnad Kcin said:
Is this a thing?
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What part? Are there members of BLM? Yes. Are there people associated with BLM protests who committed arson (which includes burning police cars, at last check)? Yes. Were those people members of, for example, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation or one of the related organizations? After searching around for a bit, I came up with no evidence of any such person.
 
Aridas said:
What part? Are there members of BLM? Yes. Are there people associated with BLM protests who committed arson (which includes burning police cars, at last check)? Yes. Were those people members of, for example, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation or one of the related organizations? After searching around for a bit, I came up with no evidence of any such person.
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Yes, but only if being "associated with a BLM protest" includes "smoking some pot in the parking lot next to the park where the candlelight vigil is being held and then getting violent after the neighborhood residents go home." Possibly also "talking down to and dismissing people of color who politely request and/or desperately plead to stop spraypainting and breaking windows of businesses they work at and/or frequent and are not related to the actual problems they have immediate concerns about."

The BLM-antifa nexus is a very strange collision of perspectives. This is deeply muddied by the presence of generic anarchists who glom on to any movement providing social cover while wagging their finger at anyone who isn't "prepared to resist" like they are. Which goes over really well when a white kid in a hoodie is saying it to a grown black woman at a protest against systemic racism in law enforcement...
 
Delvo said:
It's actually not that voters don't like smart people, but that they don't like pretentious elitists whose pretentious elite act actually comes of not as smart but as hiding something ...
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Who was the most-recent smart, non-pretentious candidate that the voters liked?
 
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