This is the season where America jumps the shark because the plot just gets too ridiculous and convoluted to take seriously.
I don’t think anyone will get away with what Trump did again, because he’s probably going to go down as one of the most ineffective and terrible Presidents in U.S. history. The people who voted for him do expect results, and they aren’t going to get anything but more screwed. I expect within a couple years’ time they will turn on him.
I’m thinking not so much this-It seemed to me that a lot of the hubbub wasn’t about specific solutions to specific problems, but about directing rage towards an enemy to hate. Even now that the election is over the only talk I hear on right-wing radio is directed towards what the Democrats are supposedly doing and saying, and there is next to no talk about what is going to happen or how it is going to happen or what the various new appointees may bring to the new administration. They are still attacking as if the election is still ongoing, and I’m wondering if this is a deliberate misdirection.
They may turn on Trump the (baby)-man, but he’s demonstrated that it is possible to use outrageous insult as an effective campaign strategy as long as you follow through and don’t act embarassed or apologize. As far as I am aware, he only acknowledged and apologized only for his “lewd comment” on the Access Hollywood tape, and even that turned into a direct attack on his opponent. Formerly, the conventional thinking was that the candidate himself could not go too negative on his opponent lest he be seen as not having anything positive to say, and so highly negative ads and comments were separated as coming from third parties which were independent of the campaign. Trump has shown that it is possible to go full on negative and even bullying, and as long as it is done with sufficient bombast it can be successful. This is a dangerous lesson that will not be soon forgotten.
They are definitely in a “What do we do now?” type situation. Despite the claims that Trump and GOP knew they were going to sweep the election, it’s pretty clear that they were not expecting a clear win and nobody was planning a transition in advance. Now that they are completely in power and the Democrats are essentially powerless, there is no one left to blame. It’s a dangerous position because it was very easy to play the “Blame Obama” game and propose legislation that they knew would not pass a presidential veto, and then they could use that as further evidence that Obama won’t compromise (even though he’s compromised to the point of being a spineless executive just to get anything through Congress).
Now there are no more excuses for not pursuing an agenda that many of them do not fully believe in and will not resolve the basic social and economic problems of the nation that had people fearful enough to vote for Trump. There are two possibilities; they either turn on each other, or they turn on ‘liberal America’ (e.g. the protesters, dissenters, progressive causes, et cetera). Either choice is going to be ugly; the latter will be destructive to the fundamentals of liberty and democracy.
Actually, I lied. I do read your posts. But I disagree that we don’t need a Trump Twitter thread. Having one does not mean we’re not focusing on the other stuff. And it certainly does not mean we’re glorifying what he says. That’s a big :rolleyes:.
One fear is that he’s going to be “effective” – very, very effective indeed – especially with a Republican Congress.
I’m still shaking my head at this election. I remember reading posts from some liberal fools on this very board wishing for Trump in the general. Some changed parties to vote for Trump in the primaries. Well the jokes on them. Do they regret that?
I didn’t vote for Trump.
Anyways, yeah I’ll be annoyed. Some.
Stranger has had some good posts in this thread but I think he misses the real solution. It’s not the candidate that needs fixing. It’s the electorate. We live in a country where people can graduate high school and even college functionally illiterate and innumerate.
Speculative what-if: During one of the debates, Clinton turns toward Trump, stares at him in open contempt and says: “We were friends back in New York, when did you turn into such a damn fool?”
I don’t think the issue is literacy, but a lack of critical thinking. It’s mindblowing to me how little people actually seem to care about evaluating the evidence for any claim. I saw an anti-vax Facebook post recently that proudly proclaimed, ‘‘I don’t care if it’s true, I will never get my children vaccinated!’’
Wha…? How is it even possible not to care if something’s true?
Trump is going to be tweeting stream-of-consciousness horseshit on a daily basis from now until he leaves the Oval Office. None if it is going to be in any way meaningful or convince anyone that they made the wrong decision in voting for him or that he’s not fit to be president because that train left the station long ago.
Look, it’s not as if your thread on a random message board is going to make any difference to the public at large, and if you want to enjoy some recreational outrage then that’s your privilege. But understand that mocking Trump for the stupid things he says makes him look disarmingly clownish to those who already dislike him and just reinforces the belief that he’s being constantly attacked by those who follow him, undermining the actually disingeneous, dishonest, and dangerous things he says and does. And it’s hard not to make fun of him, in part because he’s already a walking cartoon character, and because he is so tempermentally thin skinned that he feels the need to respond to every single insult, which is even funnier. But now that so many (myself included) discounted his potential to tap into voter frustration and dismissed the actual danger that he posed, it’s time to stop making distracting fun of the infantile things he squirts out on social media and start highlighting all of the actually threatening things he and the people who he has surrounded himself with are doing.
You can blame the voters all you like, and frankly I think there is a substantial portion of the electorate across lines that has not educated themselves, but quite frankly the Democratic party did a disservice by selecting a candidate for party loyalty rather than wide appeal, and there remains the larger issue that the reinforcement of the notion that you have to vote either one of the two choices results in other parties being marginalized and fronted by useless candidates which further diminishes their message. That the Democrats had to strategize against Sanders to prevent him from hijacking their party (and they rightfully should, given that Sanders was just as much of a demolisher for them as Trump was to the GOP, would have been an even weaker candidate than Clinton, and has now conditionally given his approval to Trump) just shows how narrow the appeal of their selected candidate was and how much of the country they are essentially ignoring.
I agree that the lack of critical thinking is fundamental, but that builds on illiteracy and makes people read a few headlines and tweets and go from there because they don’t have the skill or interest in investigating further.
What are we doing here?? We should be NaNo-ing! :eek:
They were never ‘friends’; the Clinton’s courted Trump for campaign contributions and Clinton Foundation donations, and would be taken by Trump supporters as just evidence that the Clintons are disingenuous and that Trump is smart enough to trick them.
Because people are rationalizing animals, and will agree with claims that correspond to their belief system even if it is demonstrably untrue and counterfactual.
Yeah, I crashed and burned on the new novel this month. I’m back to revising the old one. Since I write year-round anyway it’s probably softened the blow of failure.
[QUOTE=Stranger]
Because people are rationalizing animals, and will agree with claims that correspond to their belief system even if it is demonstrably untrue and counterfactual.
[/QUOTE]
I know this. I acknowledge that, being a human animal, I must also do this. But some of us who know actually bother to try compensating for our blind spots. We actually seek out dissent and try to learn new things. I really fail to understand why that’s not a universal ideal. I was expressing something like that to my FIL and he laughed at me. He basically said most people aren’t smart enough to weigh the evidence. I don’t like the snobbish attitude that the uneducated masses are idiots, but my resistance to that trope has been increasingly challenged this year because it seems like more and more people are going out of their way not to be educated. And some of these people really ought to know better.
(I had a friend turn this around on me by pointing out I was avoiding education about the fact that most people don’t care about facts. Sigh.)
Because America is a deeply religious country, and that attitude is a necessity for taking religion seriously in the modern work.
People complain about him but Richard Dawkins had a point when he said that one of the reasons religion is inherently destructive is because the habits of thought needed to support it cause bad judgement everywhere else too. A society that admires faith is by definition a society that admires not caring if something is true. That person on Facebook *has faith *that vaccines cause autism, and she’s almost certainly been raised her whole life to think of faith as good.
For that matter, much the same way so many of Trump’s followers have faith that he’s going to do whatever they fantasize that he’s going to do. Despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever.
Here is an illustration of why the media should ignore Trump’s inane tweeting and focus on reporting actual scandals. A day after Trump settled the fraud suit against Trump University for $25M (the actual amount that students were defrauded is estimated to be upwards of $40M) the media gets distracted by his response to VP-Elect Pence getting lectured by the cast of Hamilton. To put this into context, just the value of his settlement is about two orders of magnitude greater than the $300k loan that was the centerpiece of the Clinton Whitewater scandal, and makes Nixon’s questionable use of his political fund seem about as unethical as failing to cover one’s mouth when coughing. In other words, Trump will be entering the White House with more scandal than any president in living memory and having all but admitted to participating in fraud. This is the man that is now entrusted with making policy decisions and statements that can cause markets to rise and fall on a single unmeasured speech or ill-thought action, and Trump seems constitutionally incapable of consideration in either word or deed.
If I thought Trump was actually clever I’d suspect he did it deliberately, but this is more likely just a fortuitous turn of events combined with a media that just can’t get enough of that lovable joker who is going to star in the mid-season replacement combination sitcom/reality show “Mr. Trump Goes To Washington”. “Oh, what is The Donald up to now? That wacky Donald! Isn’t he hilarious? Maybe Tim Allen can play him in the film adaptation!”
How is it even possible not to care if something’s true?