Defining reality away
We can’t define our way out of this. Magical thinking isn’t going to work. Judicious ignoring might work on the personal level for things like being able to sleep, but on the public level – we can neither pretend nor ignore our way out of this catastrophe. Just defining Trump as normal and equivalent to all the other candidates ever cannot possibly work because it’s a gross denial of reality.
This bit of political punditry from an Irish observer defines Trump as normal and equivalent to Clinton and Obama, with ludicrous results.
I hope that Donald Trump’s gracious acceptance speech, and his positive meeting with President Barack Obama, can begin to reverse the descent into the political gutter by both sides in the recent campaign, and can lead to what was impressed on candidate Trump by his opponents: the need for a constructive and peaceful transition of power.
During the campaign, two flawed candidates relied more on personal attacks on each other than on positively selling their own policies.
That’s just a stark denial of reality. It’s not what happened. It’s not true that “both sides” descended into the political gutter, and it’s not true that both candidates relied more on personal attacks on each other than on positively selling their own policies. It’s not true that the two were equivalent. I documented that ad nauseam over the past several weeks, so I won’t bother to do it again now. If you saw even a few minutes of a debate you know how absurd it is to say the two were equivalent.
[This problem] was cheer-led by the usual keyboard warriors who love engaging in online smear campaigns, exaggerating people’s actual flaws and engaging in guilt by extreme association.
What’s “extreme association”? Is that saying Trump is doing a bad thing by making Steve Bannon a top adviser? Well, sometimes that brand of guilt by association is indeed guilt. And if we’re rebuking smear campaigns, why not rebuke Trump’s smear campaigns? God knows he’s prolific with them. Remember his smear campaign against Alicia Machado? His taking to Twitter at 3 a.m. New York time to call her “disgusting” and cite a “sex tape” that doesn’t exist? Why is it “keyboard warriors” documenting Trump’s public insults who are the bad people here? Why is Trump no worse than Clinton while “the usual keyboard warriors” are dirty rotten scoundrels?
But the claims that Donald Trump is a fool or a fascist are as absurd as the claims that Hillary Clinton is a criminal or that Barack Obama founded ISIS. Whatever their flaws, all three of these people are intelligent, driven, successful, democratic people who are devoting significant parts of their lives to promoting what they believe to be best for their country and the wider world.
And I’m Marie of Romania.
That’s a real classic of defining reality as we’d like it to be. Cites facts not in evidence. There is not the ghost of a reason to think that Donald Trump is devoting a significant part of his life to promoting what he believes to be best for his country and the world. If that were what he’s doing, he would be doing it differently.
You can’t deal with a difficult reality if you define it out of existence before you start.
It’s called gas lighting and we are seeing it on a global scale. Stand firm, and let’s keep exposing these pieces of s#%t.
What smear campaigns? All he did was tell it like it is – women are fat, Mexicans are rapists, etc etc etc. Now if he had said something mean, ugly, and unpleasant about white males, then we might have cause for calling it a smear campaign. Don’t you have even the slightest sense of reality, Ophelia? You’ve just defined reality your own way, you keyboard warrior, you.
Oh, god, what a nasty piece of work. It’s one thing Obama coming out and telling us to work together; he feels he has to. But columnists have no such requirement. They are “thought leaders”, or think they are, and as such, should actually think about what they say before they write it. But, hey, Trump wasn’t attacking them, so they didn’t see the true pain that goes with being attacked. Some people are able to sense the horrors that he inflicted on other people, but there are way too many, often calling themselves liberals, who are in this false equivalence mode and think Clinton making a joke about Trump not paying his taxes is the equivalent to his saying you can grab women by the pussy.
Bothsidesism at its finest. It’s another country’s election, not the Good Friday Agreement.
“Defining reality away” incrementally: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153172272041/how-to-break-an-illusion
Oh god there is so much stupid in that. I had to stop reading after a few paragraphs.
At first I thought that Nugent was just a doofus with a “civility” fetish that got out of control: certain bloggers were “uncivil” and therefore bad, they refused to back down even when he “ordered” them to do so, and so then they became fair game for whatever nastiness others wanted to throw at them.
But no one who was truly obsessed with civility could defend Trump like this. Civility is only binding on people who disagree with Nugent.
Incidentally, I see that Dawkins has tweeted some negative (and completely justified) things about Trump. I wonder if this will affect his status as a Brave Hero? (I’m only slightly curious; not enough to dive into the slimier corners of the internet to find out….)
The doofus with a “civility” fetish never really worked (though I think it is partly true) because the fetish applied so disproportionately to one side and skipped so completely over the side that to many observers looked like the less civil by a wide margin. Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel sort of thing.
I was thinking earlier how grotesque it is that he thought PZ is harmful enough to be worth writing 30-odd VERY long very angry blog posts rebuking him…and he also thinks Trump is on a level with Obama. Wut.
The variable of course is his vanity & ego. Trump hasn’t insulted HIM, so he’s a good caring guy who gets a little carried away, just like Obama. PZ insulted HIM so…no word salad can be tossed enough.
Yeah, to be clear, I had abandoned the “doofus with a civility fetish” explanation long before the Trump thing. The way Nugent excused all but the worst excesses of one side made that explanation untenable. I think even the vanity and ego explanation only goes so far; at some level he must share a lot of the “anti-SJW” agenda.
*nods*
Of course the Nuginator is cool with Trump, they’re both smug narcissists who run their groups/companies/country(*shudder*) like a personal fiefdom.
And the parallels to abuse continue. Exactly the kind of thing I was told during and after my experience of an abusive relationship. I just don’t understand the psychological mechanism that produces it. Is it just laziness?
Yeah I really don’t know either. Just one big question mark.
Emily, I’ll remember your observation, because it’s a pattern I recognize, but I haven’t seen it named. I can read about a con victim doubling down to avoid facing their cognitive dissonance, but I haven’t read a theory about what Nugent did here, observing a serious problem and normalizing it when I can’t see his personal investment or payoff in normalizing it.
You suggested laziness, and sometimes I think about it in similar terms, about minimizing energy or conflict. Or maybe It’s the saying about conformity, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Maybe it’s a trait that serves the success of groups, but in this case with Nugent, is on the wrong side of facts.