Reply With QuoteDamn. I vote Starker for president.
I think the last four years have shown us that you can't defeat populism with facts and logic alone. You need people with passion to stand for the ideals of a free and fair society in order to counter it. Any system built on rules alone can still be fundamentally biased and people can still perpetrate great injustices within the confines of dry emotionless policies. We have seen where the rationalism of the Soviet technocracy led, for example.Originally Posted by Kolya
And we have seen in history that an injust system cannot really be changed by simple discussion. People are creatures of habit and comfort and sometimes you do need to rouse rabble and make them uncomfortable in order to simply make them aware of a problem that is not their own or at least make them not able to easily dismiss it. Any time there has been a significant movement for change, there have been people who have swayed public opinion by appealing to their emotions. Sometimes you need a Mr Rogers to remind people that black people enjoy cooling themselves in water on a hot day just like white folks do. And sometimes you need a black pastor with a dream, etc.
Obviously, an appeal to emotion alone without any substance behind it is empty and meaningless and not good politics. But I would argue that, conversely, cold hard factual policy is blind without a sense of why it matters and how it changes people's lives.
Last edited by Starker; 20th Jan 2021 at 21:14.
Damn. I vote Starker for president.
Interestingly I would have assumed that the last 4 years should have been an opposite lesson. Because they were filled with a lot of fear and heated emotions on both sides. Which wasn't really helpful, just made everyone feel shitty and resentful.
And then there were those rabel rousers at the capitol recently. They had a lot of passion. And it was the democrats who held up the rules of democracy. Eventually and thankfully cold hard facts, namely a vote, was needed and decided this conflict. Not more passion.
Well, not passion but misguided rage.
And this is the reason why Democrats lose so much in the US, despite having policies that the majority of the US supports. Messaging matters, because people vote based on their feelings not rational calculations. They might rationalise it after, but the feelings come first. How many people turned up because they weighed Biden's policies against Lord Dampnut's and how many turned up because they were fed up and angry? Four years ago, people didn't turn up for Clinton because her cold hard facts didn't appeal to them whereas her opponent was all about emotion. If logos is all it takes, then people would've seen all through Lord Dampnut and stopped supporting him after his lies were fact checked and debunked. Logos is important, sure, and can be used to great effect, especially in the hands of a skilled orator, but good rhetoric makes use of pathos, logos, and ethos as needed.
Uh, people did not dislike Clinton because her cold hard facts didn't appeal to them. They hated her because she was working for the Russians (lol), or she allowed four Americans to be killed and/or so many people around her found themselves suspiciously dead (not to be lol'd, but come on!), or not being secure with her emails/data (triple lol), or that she is at the center of a cabal of satanic child harvesting pedophiles (eh, maybe lay off the mushrooms)...
Or just, you know, 'cause she's a shrieking bitch because just listen to her... She speaks with a higher pitch -- like in the statistical range of 200+ Hz -- when "normal people", i.e., people we can respect that command authority, speak in the statistical range of 100Hz, right? It's just the pitch of the voice they hate... which could only be explained by someone purposefully being a harpy screeching bitch because there's no other natural explanation for how that could even be possible.
These are not battles you can win because to even start playing the game you have to start with giving up on the basic rules of liberal democracy.
It doesn't really matter for the situation or this debate what you call passion when you don't like it.
And if you think that the solution to overcome irrational emotionalized Trumpites is to emotionalize the Democrats then you're just furthering a conflict that has almost torn your country apart.
I think y'all need to calm down and think soberly about how to get along.
The solution is to finish Reconstruction, the problem is that the Confederacy has infiltrated every suburban area of this country and is going to be harder to put down this time.
And we all know the bad guys get hardfucked once the muskahounds are involved.
Speaking of conspiracy mongering though, look at what a Wikileaks Deep Dive on Biden comes up with.
geocities
I didn't mean to imply it was the sole reason she lost, just that her appeals to facts didn't win over her opponent's appeals to emotion, but yes, there had been a lot of groundwork laid there already. I just didn't want to go into Whitewater and all the -gates and Benghazi and buttery males and whatnot.
If the US continues with business as usual and everyone on the opposing side of Lord Dampnut will calm down and sit home and uncancel brunch, there will be a repeat in 4 years guaranteed. The US has won a brief respite, pulled the breaks and teetered on the edge, but this is far from over. There's a lot of work to be done and it's not cold sober facts that will motivate people to do it. Because you can bet that Lord Dampnut and his enablers will not calm the fuck down and will build and organise and fire their people up. If you think this cold civil war can just be reasoned out, you haven't really paid attention to the culture wars that have been raging the past decades. Continuing with sober policy did nothing to defeat the Tea Party populism. Facts didn't dissuade the anti-tax movement who won largely by appealing to emotion and transformed a large part of the political landscape into what it is today.
The Democrats don't need to win over Lord Dampnut's followers (though it's vastly preferable that they do win over at least some of the less devout ones), they need to build the widest coalition possible against them and then enact reforms to try to deal with the root of the problem: inequality, long term job insecurity, etc. They will need to win both the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens. And this can't be done by arguing about policy differences. There has to be a vision for the country everyone can work towards. Obama's policy fit on a poster. Lord Dampnut's policy fit on a trucker hat, and Biden won by not being Lord Dampnut and by promising to restore the soul of the nation.
Since you're unwilling to reason, why don't you try attacking some minor country at the other end of the world? That always used to bring you guys back together.
Well this didn't take long.
America, lol
It's less that the people in the US are unwilling to reason and more that as a rule you don't convince people based on reason and facts alone. If it was so, cars would be advertised based on their features only, not by how much sex you're going to have when you buy one.
Here's a 20ish minutes long video that goes a bit into the different aspects of rhetoric and how they function:
Here's one way QAnons can deal with their reality crumbling around them.
Project Shadowprez.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, man.
You're welcome.
She had an empty, vague platform of 'not Trump', failing to court left-wingers by rejecting even modest reform proposals (highlighted by Sanders, hence the ongoing Dolchstoßlegende-esque excuses for her loss from Clinton fans), and basically being appealing only to Democrat loyalists. She was a milquetoast, bland, status quo candidate, up against a firebrand outsider promising reform, at a time when many Americans were finding the status quo wasn't working for them.
And there were a million and one different angles of attack against her stoked by a lengthy propaganda campaign leaning on a healthy dose of sexism and bullshit conspiracy theories. And she had no rhetorical charisma whatsoever. It isn't just one thing, and I really question if the takeaway from the last four years should be that Democrats need to amp up the rhetoric too.
I think the more fundamental requirement, something establishment Democrats have struggled with, is establishing a direction and a platform that both their base and moderates can get passionate about to start with. America isn't happy with the status quo, and a campaign promising change worked for Obama in '08, took Sanders from a nobody to a front-runner, and is what Trump campaigned on in '16. Clinton could have been the most powerful orator in the world and her platform still wouldn't have resonated with working-class Americans. Biden won this time on account of Trump's sheer unpopularity, but I think 2024 is going to heavily depend on how much change Biden accomplishes in the next four years.
Assuming we make it that far without things getting uglier. Can't be too certain.
I tend to share Kolya's bias against playing to emotions, but don't have time to get into it now. I can recognize it's often a necessary part of politics. It's just playing with fire. Like I think playing to identity politics may be an issue on the Left in terms of pushing people off the rails in another decade or two, but that pales in comparison to the raging fire of white identity politics happening right now. Obviously we have to deal with the ongoing inferno now and cross any other burning bridges when we get to them.
Most all of these issues are coming back down to identity issues, what is it to be an "American" (certainly not coming from the Americas as Duckeh would have it!). It's white nationalism vs. multiculturalism (call it globalism and it may as well be Stalinism), the same old story it's always been, but there are some new catches with it. E.g., other minorities are also vying for stakes in the hierarchy; cf. Texas stayed red because masses of South Texas Latinos flipped from Dem to Rep in support of Trump, ostensibly because they're as alienated by multiculturalism & new immigrants as whites.
The point is, the US needs to have a reckoning about its identity from the ground up, what in other contexts we write up under the banner of "transitional justice" ... getting the power group to acknowledge a long history of atrocious abuses, owning it, recognizing "we're not the same people as our grandparents were", and reforging a new basis of identity and a new relationship. (This is the "forgiveness model of TJ" btw). I ought to write an article at least about it. The public discussion on this is lightyears behind where it needs to be to get to the root of the issue.
Anyway, while I'm posting, I'll just drop this here for the record, as this is still one of the issues where Trump is vulnerable.
“He’s a Lot of Fun to Be With”: Inside Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump’s Epic Bromance
We can also start taking bets on what criminal charges may finally be brought against Trump.
First of all there's the matter of even listing which ones are even in the cards.
The ones that come to mind for me are:
(1) Obstruction of justice - ordering witnesses to lie, dangling pardons for lies, etc.;
(2) Bribery - taking money for presidential decisions, the same thing Blagovitch was convicted for;
(3) Incitement to insurrection - I already mentioned that I think that's a longshot because of the "intent" problem;
(4) Financial crimes, e.g., to do with the Deutsch Bank loans & dealings with the Russian oligarchs.
(5) The rape & sexual assault claims, not least with 2+ minors, Katie Johnson & Maria P.
Feel free to add to the list!
If I demand psychiatric hospitalization for the fools who buy this am I "oppressive" or "communist" ?Here's one way QAnons can deal with their reality crumbling around them.
Project Shadowprez.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, man.
Remember, TTLG is not the only one that makes jokes. This is obviously a joke. To make fun of QAnon people. Even QAnon people will not believe this. They could. That's why we make fun of them. But they won't.
I was about to say ... This is their religion for a lot of them. It's not even about politics anymore.
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