Comment by simpaticoder
4 days ago
Well I guess we can agree to disagree because I think there's a lot about Trump to crash out about. It's difficult to understand how someone who so obviously a villain is so popular. It's disorienting and frustrating, like walking out of Star wars hearing people praise Darth Vader for how wonderful he was and how nasty Luke was to him. How The empire is a staple job Creator and the rebel alliance a bunch of filthy blooded miscreants who don't appreciate what they have...
If we are making Star Wars references. The whole lore of Sidious is how he and Plagueis manipulated various parties in the galaxy to gain power. In the story itself it explains how this can happen. The Jedi weren't really the good guys. They were an ossified monastic order that had lost its way.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both rival elites vying for power to enrich themselves and their circle via the apparatus of the Republican and Democratic parties. They are both reprehensible, for different reasons. Voting for Trump was a middle finger to both establishment parties in the US (the Republicans didn't want him running for the party). There are no good guys here. They were both shit.
The crash out was due to the fact Sam Harris couldn't wrap his head around the fact that people were fed up of public figures that are similar to himself. Quite frankly, it is embarrassing. He appeared to do very little introspection on the matter. His whole brand is him trying to rationally understand what's happening, and he did the exact opposite.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, is another left-wing intellectual that did understand the sentiment and has made an effort to understand people he deeply disagrees with. Guess whose ideas are more relevant currently? It isn't Harris; Harris is irrelevant these days.
> Voting for Trump was a middle finger to both establishment parties in the US
Bullshit. Trump is the logical outcome of republican party project. Vote for him was vote literally for that.
Republican politicians did not liked hia style, but did liked his project, supported and created project 2025, live the violence and all of that.
The corruption was making Trump cool to these people.
> There are no good guys here. They were both shit
Not nearly in the same way. Not even close. And Trump voters knew that.
> Bullshit. Trump is the logical outcome of republican party project. Vote for him was vote literally for that.
I don't understand why people like yourself come up with this stuff. There are loads of clips from 2016 where people were saying this. It's 10 years later, and I am still having conversations where we are denying the reality of what happened; it is bizarre.
> Republican politicians did not liked hia style, but did liked his project, supported and created project 2025, live the violence and all of that.
Project 2025 is a thing from the Heritage Foundation and wasn't a thing back in 2016, because it was published in 2023. You are just repeating stuff you've heard on the TV/YouTube.
The Heritage Foundation has been moving towards Paleo-conservatism since about 2021. The Paleo-cons were ejected/rejected from the Republican Party in the Buckley days.
I was talking about the 2016 campaign. Back in 2016 (not 2024), the Republican establishment didn't want him there. Pretending otherwise is asinine.
> The corruption was making Trump cool to these people.
People liked Trump because he's brash and loud and has an attractive wife who used to be a model. He has a ridiculous hairstyle. He flew in on a massive jet that has his name on the side of it.
He also trolled/manipulated the media constantly, which was pretty funny on the face of it. E.g., I remember he was going to talk about Obama's birth certificate or something like that, and he got CNN to broadcast his entire rally, and he mentioned it for like 5 seconds at the end.
I am English, I live in the UK. My mates and I would get some beers and watch the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump debates late at night to see the shit show. It was really funny. "What is old Donald going to say this time?!".
I understand that doesn't appeal to everyone, but a lot of people like this stuff. I won't lie, I kind of liked it as well at the time.
Compare that to someone like Jeb Bush or even his opponents, Hillary Clinton; there was no momentum, no hype.
Malcolm McLaren is quoted as saying, "Pro-wrestling is real, and politics is fake." You need to keep that in mind when watching any political coverage.
> Not nearly in the same way. Not even close. And Trump voters knew that.
No, they didn't. What people like is that he was talking about stuff they cared about and they believed he was speaking for them.
It is 10 years later, and people like yourself are still misstating what people were saying and have done no introspection.
Trump voters aren't evil. You really need to do introspection because you still don't seem to understand why there were major political upsets, both in the US, UK and EU.
You are doing exactly what many people were criticising Sam Harris for. I was fed up of it back in 2017, and you and Sam haven't learnt anything.
It is one of the reasons why I don't bother talking to people about stuff like this, because you can't look past the surface, and you make no attempt to understand what happened.
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