Let's Casually Talk About: Trump

The truth is my blog is not going to turn into a place where I post the best of the best content that have been fact checked and carefully written. It's a weird balance: When is a Facebook comment long enough and fleshed out enough to be a blog post? That's something I still have not figured out yet. But no worries!

Trump

Remember the title of this blog post as I continue. The last election has left me kind of drained. When Trump jumped onto the election scene it looked like a joke, but the joke kept going on until I realized it wasn't a joke, this entire show was serious. So I guess I'll just put this here for reference: I have serious qualms about the left, especially the politically correct, victim mentality left. But compared to the Trumpian right, I would come running back to the left. What I am saying is, I am not a cheerleader for any party.

Trump exhibits many traits which I have been criticizing about others for quite a while. There's the incredible narcissism. There's the likely sexism (or at least, trivialization of sexism for no good reason). Then finally and most importantly for me, his total disregard for facts and honesty.

I have been criticizing the common mistakes people make when discussing controversial issues on social media sites like Facebook. Twitter is a thing, but it's a pretty hilarious platform to be having a debate on. I wanted to understand how conversations unravel into the nonconstructive mess that they often end up being but often came up short. But I see people share political memes like they are supposed to prove something. The notion that a person could compress a nuanced and well-researched point of view on a topic into a single picture is itself laughable. Imagine having to write an essay on the economy in the US and simply printing out a meme from Facebook instead. That kind of bullshit won't fly. Yet when good evidence and good arguments and a honest attempt at conversation matters (IE, in the real world instead of the classroom), that is exactly the type of behavior that is socially acceptable. I think it's very important to point out how strange that is.

While I do heavily criticize people I find to be egregious offenders, I typically don't do so in front of them. This isn't "talking behind their back", it's just a difference in approach. Insulting someone head one is often not constructive. I try to keep that in mind when I engage in a debate with someone.

There are facts in the world, and they matter. The idea of a 'post-fact society' is not funny, it's horrifying. Even if we disagree, our disagreements should be based on facts, not fake news.

As Sam Harris perceptively notes, Donald Trump is a person that would look more crazy if he was less crazy. Each individual scandal related to him from threatening to jail a political opponent to belittling the other Republican candidate could individually bring down a candidate. Yet add them all up, you end up with a man who is seemingly invulnerable to criticism because that's just who he is, and we've all accepted it by now. When Donald called Marcobot 'Little Marco' for example, that's a sign that our political discourse has gone off the rails. How the country should be run turned into a spectacle, and the Republicans chose to nominate a serial bully.

Donald Trump gave off the veneer of being frank and 'telling it like it is'. In fact all he did was pander to what people actually wanted to hear, a tactic that was especially effective given the very politically correct left. But honest people who tell it like it is admit when they are wrong. That's something you won't see from Trump.

We should be careful about what we claim, and the more power and influence we have, the more careful we have to be about our sources. A president does not get to say 'I heard so and so did so and so'. Facebook users should feel the burden of showing a statistic without explaining how the statistic was derived.

Supply and Demand

Somebody tried to make the argument that the Kardashians are just appealing to their audience, Mcdonalds is just appealing to their fat customers, and Trump is just acting the way he does to get what he wants. What's the problem here, these guys are the top of their game because they appeal to their audience!

The problem is that ethics is a thing. We cannot simply celebrate and look up to success for success' sake alone. Some talents improve the world, some do the opposite, and some success is just up to luck.

Either Trump acts like a douchebag because that's who he really is (which is sad), or he carefully crafts everything he says and does to get what he wants (which makes him a psychopath). I'm more inclined to take the former and run with that.

When Trump breaks the conventions we have for how a presidential candidate or president should act, he is showing that there is a path to the most important seat on the planet being dishonest and disrespectful. It's not a stretch to say that this will cause more people to try his method, and shape how people respond to this type of behavior. It's not an amoral supply and demand problem. In this case the supply affects the demand.

If I was given the opportunity to make large sums of money by attacking the freedom of the press for example, I hope I would have the moral courage to decline.

I can turn off the TV when the Kardashians get overbearing, but I can't shut down the White House. And as for Mcdonalds, obesity is a real problem in America and I hope for everybody's sake that everybody get healthier.