481
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
481 points (95.5% liked)
politics
19072 readers
1902 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Stupid people really do think of the stupidest solutions to problems that don't exist.
The hard thing is hearing it over and over and over again. How many times has this shit already been tried? What was the result? Oh, you don't know? Does that not strike you as phenomenally negligent of a policy maker, to not be aware of the likely results of your fucking actions? Go die, you orange piece of shit. Or win, and take this fucking irreparable democracy with you.
Bold of you to assume he doesn't know damn well how totalitarian this is.
Honestly, I'm 50/50. He is a controlling rich asshole and knows things like police don't actually affect him, but he's also a bumbling moron. It's kind of hard to tell with him sometimes.
He's not smart in the book sense but he does know how to play the game. For example, if you listened to the audio of his call to Zelensky which lead to his first impeachment investigation, pay attention and you might notice he avoided being explicit with his quid pro quo and spent the whole conversation beating around the bush and using weasel words to try and get what he could out of him without implicating himself. Even if the Senate trial wasn't openly a farce, he still would've been found innocent because for something like this you have to be able to prove intent and that's extremely difficult unless you blunder your way into an explicit admission of intent to commit a quid pro quo somewhere along the line, which he didn't do in the audio of the phone call. I'm not saying it's wrong to be suspicious because that call was obviously shady as hell, but it was never going to meet the burden of proof.
His propaganda and overall rhetorical strategy are similarly manipulative. It's very common to mistake his lies for being stupid and obvious and assuming that's just the end of it when in fact it's actually a very specific rhetorical strategy called firehosing. The idea behind firehosing is to flood the entire system with too many political narratives, misdirections, pivots, red herrings, strawmen, contradictions, and controversial statements to keep up with so that everything is up in the air and the less regard for truth and consistency you have, the more effectively you can pull it off because the goal is to overcome reason with aggression while simultaneously drowning out opposing narratives and/or fact checking with sheer volume and repetition. It's kind of like gish galloping but on a much more broad and ambitious scale, or if you're as much of a gaming nerd as I am it's the 'zerg rush' of political rhetoric. This explains why his falsehoods are so effective despite being so obvious - ironic as it looks on the surface he would actually be far less effective if he vetted his own bullshit and tried to make sure everything he said were at least semi-close to being believable.
Tl;dr, he's a moron at some things. Manipulating millions of people and accumulating power at their expense (and ours as well even if we see through it) is, unfortunately, not one of them.