Well now that he is the nominee I do look forward to months of this kind of spectacular stupidity.
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James CookVerified account
@BBCJamesCook
In Fresno, Donald Trump says environmentalists are to blame for California's drought and he will solve it by "opening up the water".
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"Think I'm gonna be the scapegoat for the whole damn machine? Sheeee......."
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I would tune in to a Trump vs Sanders debate. Trump isnt afraid to say what he thinks and Sanders has nothing to lose. And there is a fair bit of common ground between the two of them. I think it would be entertaining at a minimum and wonder if there would be respect even when calling each other out as clowns.
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"OOOOOOHHHHHHH those Russians" - Boney M
So, obviously anecdotal but I saw something interesting on my facebook feed yesterday. I have a buddy who lives in San Francisco, millenial, programmer, homosexual, someone who you would think is liberal through and through. He's been posting Bernie stuff almost daily for months but yesterday he was debating someone on one of his posts and straight up said he'd be voting for Trump now since he hates Clinton and the "establishment" so much. There's an interesting wrap around effect with these two candidates, and if my friend who has a well paying job is fed up with the establishment you have to wonder about other Bernie supporters who are much less well-off.
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James Cook @BBCJamesCook
Donald Trump says farmers have told him there is plenty of water in California but "we shove it out to sea" to protect a three-inch fish.
LOL, well anyone that thought Trump would moderate his rhetoric and move tot he centre after he got the nomination...I guess not. Lots of crazy coming. Merica the great!
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Trump is playing a different game than the rest of the politicians. He doesn't care if his statements are true or not only that they stick and to make them stick he uses repetition that appeals to emotions.
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I don't repeat myself. I don't repeat myself. ... I don't repeat myself." Those are the immortal words of Donald Trump. He spoke them to Marco Rubio in the Feb. 25 GOP presidential debate. And because it's The Donald, you know that he used not only the exact same words but the exact same intonation all three times. (It's at the 7:30 mark in the video below.)
almost hypnotism
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Almost anyone else on that stage would have been caught out saying something so immediately untrue. Not Slick Donald. Slick Donald is confident. Slick Donald is calm. Slick Donald knows exactly what he's doing.
And what he's doing is almost hypnotism. He's using repetition to create a stimulus-response effect and to make his simple ideas, labels, and attitudes stick. And he's making it work better by softening his audiences up for it. He knows that most people decide most of the time on feelings and then rationalize what they've decided. And you can bet that he's tested his approach on focus groups. He's a salesman, after all.
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1. Trump uses the same words and phrases incessantly and identically. These aren't just any words and phrases: They have strong emotional valuation. Win. Great. Huge. Sad. Weak. Lame. Lyin' Ted. Crooked Hillary. Goofy Elizabeth Warren. Repeat a thing often enough and it burrows into the mind and becomes a given. Even if you disagree with it, it becomes the established idea that you're trying to disagree with.
So, in other words, human beings are terrible, and Trump is effectively exploiting our weaknesses as a species. Great news. Great, unsurprising news.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Also comes Dilbert creator Scott Adams plausibly claiming that Trump literally is a “Master Wizard” using hypnosis on us. As one of “us” I considered this theory worth examining. The evidence shows that Donald Trump is, in fact, using technique indistinguishable from hypnosis.
From Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert who studies hypnosis
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“What I [see] in Trump,” says Adams, is “someone who was highly trained. A lot of the things that the media were reporting as sort of random insults and bluster and just Trump being Trump, looked to me like a lot of deep technique that I recognized from the fields of hypnosis and persuasion.”
One such technique is what Adams describes as a “linguistic kill shot,” in which Trump uses an engineered set of words that changes or ends an argument decisively. According to Adams, when Trump describes Jeb Bush as low energy, Carly Fiorina as robotic, or Ben Carson as nice, he’s imprinting a label you already feel about these people. They’re not random insults, but linguistic kill shots that you can never get out of your mind.
This isn't about swinging a watch.
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What is hypnosis? Dilbert creator Scott Adams blogged about hypnosis, in which he was thoroughly trained, a decade ago in his Dilbert Blog:
I describe the state of hypnosis as acquiring a power. The subject has all of his regular faculties operating plus he gains some more, if he has no objection to those new powers. For example, a subject under hypnosis would get a little extra power in one or more of these areas:
1. Extra relaxation
2. Extra imagination
3. Extra focus
Those extra powers don’t sound like much, but they are. …
If I asked you what most defines Donald Trump supporters, what would you say? They’re white? They’re poor? They’re uneducated?
You’d be wrong.
In fact, I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism.
That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.
definition of authoritarianism because I didn't fully understand the political use and I'm tired. Shades of facism but it's said, he did get the trains to run on time.
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authoritarianism. Political scientists use the term authoritarianism to describe a way of governing that values order and control over personal freedom. A government run by authoritarianism is usually headed by a dictator.
I think it's apt. He has the "strongman" feel of Mussolini, and also shares his incuriosity and low-minded vision.
The real danger of Trump is that for all that he has been running for office for over a year, we still have no idea what he actually wants to do if elected. His "ideas" are either so vague as to be utterly empty of any content ("I'll "open up" the water) or so mind-bogglingly stupid that no-one believes he is actually serious ("I'll build a giant, expensive, useless and probably illegal wall!")
So if he IS elected, what will he do? And let's be clear: Republicans should be the ones who are worried about this. If Trump loses, he will lose to a historically weak and unelectable candidate in Hillary Clinton, and odds are quite good that she will lose to a challenger from a revitalized and reunified GOP in 4 years--more than enough time for the GOP to exorcise this demon of Trumpism that has hijacked their party and their movement.
On the other hand, if Trump WINS, his movement will be cemented into the party's identity. They will be the party of Trumpism, which really isn't conservatism so much as it is an intellectually arid rhetoric of nationalist (and yes, racist) rage, punctuated by policy ideas that are so vapid they can be recruited into any agenda at all, including (gasp) a vast expansion of the domestic role and size of the federal government.
More and more, I think a Trump victory is the worst case scenario for the Republicans. He will flame out eventually, but his legacy will be a giant blot on the conservative movement that risks marginalizing them in US politics for a decade or more. If he loses, on the other hand, I could see the GOP sweeping back into the White House in 2020, stronger than ever.
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Its really not hard to see why he gets away with it.
Hillary is as corrupt and crooked as they come. She represents everything that is wrong with Washington and politics in general. She has lied, cheated and stole her way to where she is now. Trump is not part of that establishment, nor is he coming across as either crooked or corrupt.
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