The Pledge Drive continues! If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below! Thanks!
If you thought Chuck Tingle’s version of the Clinton-Trump debate last night was surreal, well, take a look at what Dilbert creator and wannabe master persuader Scott Adams has to say about it.
Unlike some of Trump’s superfans, Adams is willing to admit that, yeah, Hillary kind of won the debate, at least by normal debate standards.
Clinton won on points. She had more command of the details and the cleaner answers. Trump did a lot of interrupting and he was defensive. If this were a college debate competition, Clinton would be declared the winner.
But Adams thinks this “victory on the 2D chess board” doesn’t really matter, because in his mind, apparently, Trump is playing some kind of 95th Dimensional mashup of Chess, Cribbage, and Hungry Hungry Hippos, or something. And in this game, Trump is the clear winner.
“Clinton won the debate last night,” Adams explains. “And while she was doing it, Trump won the election.”
IS YOUR MIND BLOWN YET
On the off chance that your mind is not, in fact, blown, let’s look at exactly why Adams thinks Trump is the real victor in this game of 95th Dimension Chesscribbippos.
As he sees it, Hillary needed to prove to skeptical Americans (or at least to Dr. Adams) that she’s healthy. And she failed.
Clinton looked (to my eyes) as if she was drugged, tired, sick, or generally unhealthy, even though she was mentally alert and spoke well. But her eyes were telling a different story. She had the look of someone whose doctors had engineered 90 minutes of alertness for her just for the event.
Huh. This is your takeaway from a debate in which Trump sniffled so much that people started to wonder if he wasn’t hopped up on the cocaine?
Some will say Clinton outperformed expectations because she didn’t cough, collapse, or die right on stage.
But that’s not enough for Adams, who raises the serious medical question: Is Hillary’s smile kind of weird?
Clinton’s smile seemed forced, artificial, and frankly creepy. … My neighbor Kristina hypothesized that Botox was making her smile look unnatural. Science tells us that when a person’s mouth smiles, but their eyes don’t match the smile, they look disingenuous if not creepy. Botox on your crow’s feet lines around your eyes can give that effect. But whatever the reason, something looked off to me.
CLEARLY UNQUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT
Trump, by contrast, was the perfect model of health and handsomeness! Well, not entirely.
To be fair, Trump’s physical appearance won’t win him any votes either. But his makeup looked better than I have seen it (no orange), his haircut was as good as it gets for him … .
But Trump didn’t WIN THE ELECTION LAST NIGHT just by being somewhat less orange than usual. He showed what a calm, cool, and collected customer he is.
Trump needed to solve exactly one problem: Look less scary. Trump needed to counter Clinton’s successful branding of him as having a bad temperament to the point of being dangerous to the country. Trump accomplished exactly that…by…losing the debate.
Wait, what?
Trump was defensive, and debated poorly at points, but he did not look crazy.
MASSIVE WIN
And pundits noticed that he intentionally avoided using his strongest attacks regarding Bill Clinton’s scandals.
You actually think he lost the debate … on purpose?
In other words, he showed control. He stayed in the presidential zone under pressure. And in so doing, he solved for his only remaining problem. He looked safer.
As I put it in a tweet to Adams last night (you’ll have to forgive my typo):
Yeah, Trump throwing a tantrum as the same exact moment he was attacking Hillary for having a bad "temperament" was super duper reassuring. https://t.co/RQnRLxd66C
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) September 27, 2016
Trump definitely looked presidential, not at all like a giant petulant baby who shouldn’t even be in the same city as the nuclear codes.
BLINKING SARCASM.GIF
The most memorable moments of the first debate: Clinton laughs off Trump’s temperament barb https://t.co/NW6ToTCDFS https://t.co/IR90V9KcLc
— POLITICO (@politico) September 27, 2016
Ladies and gentleman, Donald J. Trump! https://t.co/H9Uy8yzNYZ by @RiosJose559 via @c0nvey
— FLOR DO DESERTO (@FlorDeserto) September 27, 2016
https://twitter.com/peterwsinger/status/780607277938147328
https://twitter.com/CCW000/status/780897508310458368
Oh, wait, that last one isn’t Trump. Hard to tell sometimes.
And here’s the latest Pledge Drive capybara, with a friend:
Something about this comment by Roger has made me want to post again. I’m having trouble putting the reason into words, but I believe Paradoxical has essentially already stated it.
I last commented here a little over 2 years ago, but under the name “scott1139”. I started reading the blog again about a month ago, and it feels sorta like coming home. So many new people, though! 🙂
As far as general information for introductions goes, the only other thing I can think of is that I use he/him/his pronouns.
Welcome back, Prophet309! That comment bothered me, too. Why can’t Roger just give Clinton a try? We haven’t tried a woman president before.
We’ve tried a woman president two times, for 12 year total, and it worked out great! Better than the current male one, I’m gonna say.
So yup, give it a go.
FYI: having seen how oligarchs treat “their lessers” and the world around them, it tends to boil down to “fuck you, I got mine, and if the world goes to shitter, we have money and we will go to some other place to spend it for the rest of our lives and not bear the consequences of our actions”.
AMERICA: CHOOSE WISELY.
Signed,
a simple mundane person living in a country next to Russia, a country which is deffo gonna get it if tiny-minded, easily-provoked, orange deranged orangutang is feeling miffed and starts exchanging his feelings with nukular missiles.
Skiriki
Heck, Trump even said that during the debate. When he was boasting about using laws to stiff workers, he justified it by saying he only had a responsibility to his company.
@Tessa
Yep, but it really, really, really looks like the Dump-Trump thinks that something like nuclear missiles are there for using if someone gives him lip about the tribble on his head, and after they’ve been deployed, no worries! He can aaalllllwwwwayyys move on elsewhere with his Children of the Corn and keep living in their gilded palaces a life of luxury, completely unaffected by the world on fire.
Yeah, well.
‘In the article Bina links to Mr. Trump is quoted saying
“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” he said. “The temperament is not that different.”’
Reminds me of Ayn Rand boasting that she hadn’t changed her mind about anything since she was 9. Me, I’m always proud to change my mind about something–it means I’ve developed a new understanding, or learned a new thing, and that always pleases me. It also reminds me of people criticising Clinton for ‘flip-flopping’ or whatever–to me that means she’s listened to people, learned new things, and changed her opinion as a result, which shows she’s using her brain.
And speaking of which, and re being required to act only in your company’s financial interest, I was looking at the history of this belief (as I’m writing about early nineteenth century joint stock companies) and discovered that a) it’s not very old at all and b) it’s not true. And not only is it not true, but also this false belief has caused more damage than we realise:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2601747
Off-topic, back on-topic:
Trump’s polls have taken a dive since the debate. FiveThirtyEight has him down by almost ten points. Let’s see if this continues.
Oh, do fuck off, Roger. We’re talking about people’s actual lives and livelihoods here. We’re talking about damage that can’t be undone. We’re not painting the spare bedroom and deciding we’d have preferred a slightly lighter shade of blue.
Here’s ALSO a good reason why we can’t afford to “try” Trump:
https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2016/09/17/donald-trump-unveils-plan-to-make-abortion-illegal/
@ guest
Forgive me if I’m wrong but do you mean ‘shareholders’ rather than ‘company’s’ in you first sentence?
This is quite an interesting area and its something I’ve had to deal with quite a bit, especially when directors fall out or shareholders try to sack them. There’s tons of case law (here in England anyway) about this.
Generally directors of companies have to act in the best interests of the company, but that’s not necessarily equivalent to acting in the best interests of the shareholders. A massive dividend may make the shareholders happy, but if it means the company no longer has the cash at bank to keep trading then it can be a breach of the directors’ duty. Directors owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders but that doesn’t mean that dividends are the be all and end all. Generally, keeping the company as a viable entity is seen as the priority.
@ guest
Don’t know of this is any use to you; might be a nice little historical footnote about the conflict between shareholder dividends and keeping the company going.
https://www.chycor.co.uk/tourism/tolgus/page3.htm
I’ve mentioned before about how Cornish Cost-book Companies were the pre-cursors to what we have today. One problem they had was that they got into a tradition of blowing all the assets of the company on a big piss up at the annual general meeting; so a lot of them did go bust just because of that.
My sympathy goes to those poor cockroaches, with nothing to eat but Roger.
On the cardinality of statements, it’s undoubtedly ℵ(0), at least if we limit statements to finite length. If we assume we only have a finite number of words or other symbols to use, then we can just list all the statements of length 1, then those of length 2, etc. Even if we have ℵ(0) symbols, we can do something equivalent to the trick that shows the rationals have cardinality ℵ(0) which Scildfreja Unnýðnes diagrammed. Only if we allow statements of infinite length (and at least two words) would they be uncountable – Cantor’s diagonal argument could then be used.
The fallacy here is in the first clause! Although the reals are uncountable, we can only precisely describe a countable (i.e. cardinality ℵ(0)) subset of them – again, as long as we limit ourselves to statements of finite length. This subset contains all the rationals, indeed all the algebraic numbers (those that are roots of some polynomial equation), and infinitely many more – such as pi plus (or minus/multiplied by/to the power of…) any algebraic number – but the very fact that they can be finitely described means there can’t be an uncountable number of them.
@ Skiriki, re your link
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, for the rest of his life, U of T Lance Corporal Jordan Peterson was constantly misranked in his interactions with other people?
If the HR department began its emails to him with “Dear Archmage Peterson,” and ended them with “looking forward to your timely response! Have a nice day, Officer!”
If students prefaced their questions in the Q & A part of his lectures with “Excuse me, Holy Father,” and ended with “thank you, Madame President.”
If, when he booked his plane ticket online, the drop-down box for his title included only Mrs / Miss / Ms / Private – but the options Doctor, Professor, God-Emperor and Cardinal were visible but greyed out for him, suggesting that other people had the option of calling themselves those things, but he did not
I may be wrong, this may be a man who has never bristled or tantrummed at being called Mr rather than Professor. Either way, I’d like to see his response to a world that refuses to acknowledge his identity as a Professor.
Well, that’s what I’m saying. Trump doesn’t seem that crazy to me and I don’t think things will be that bad under him.
If my judgement is bad, hopefully most people won’t agree with me.
Re: genderless pronouns – seems like the easiest solution would be to classify “he” as a genderless pronoun.
Why not reclassify she as genderless? There are more women than men, so it would require fewer people to adjust to the change.
Roger is right – I mean, if Roger doesn’t stick his dong in an activated blender, how can we ever know it’s a bad idea? If it turns out to be awful, well then he can simply not put his dong in a blender next time and the problem is solved.
I mean, that’s what I’m saying, Roger putting his dong in a blender doesn’t seem that crazy to me, and i don’t think things will go that badly for him.
If my judgement is bad hopefully Roger, the one standing to lose out, will disagree with me.
/S in case that wasn’t obvious. Please do not actually blend your dong for science – you may not have noticed but in science we have a thing called extrapolation. I’d look into it if I were you.
*squints at Roger* nope, I don’t have enough withering sarcasm left to deal with that last comment
@ roger
Well I won’t bite and say ‘but he is crazy’. I will however state my belief that not only is he unfit for for office, he’s a postitive danger. Other people here can address better than I what a nightmare he’ll be for certain groups of people. There’s also however the threat to world security.
It’s not just that he has no foreign policy experience whatsoever, it’s that he’s a reckless idiot with no impulse control. His outbursts during the campaign may be ‘entertaining’ but in nuclear armed world you need someone with at least a modicum of diplomatic skill. I would also prefer someone who has at least a vague idea of how NATO operates.
The big worry though is his hair trigger temper. If the world is to end in a ball of fire I’d rather that not come about because North Korea fakes a Tweet from Russia or China being rude about his haircut.
One of the places I buy clothes online lists me as Wing Commander.
Thanks Alan–that may be worth a footnote….
@ Dr Dead Animals
In all fairness going with ‘he’ would be 33% cheaper in ink costs.
We already tried that and it was bullshit. What kind of scientist are you, proposing that we try out something that has already been done and found wanting in the past? Are you for some reason unable to do a literature review before you shit out proposals?
Trump seems quite sane to me as well, but that doesn’t make him a good idea. You have some crap ideas about what the word “crazy” means as well, and should probably look into that before you use it again.
In short, your knowledge of this stuff is bad and you should feel bad.
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YJFJwl6SamU/maxresdefault.jpg
No. It’s also not the point here.
This is about Trump and why people don’t trust him to be a good president. If you think he would be, you’re not going to convince anyone here, so what are you trying to achieve? If you don’t think he would be, what’s this about anyway? That some website might not fit every epistemological standard imaginable? Or even many? So what? It’s a website. You really need it to be 100% beyond reproach to make up your mind on a guy running for president of your country?
You have no 100% proof for anything. So either you’re consistent and become completely inactive and paralyzed in the rest of your life or you do as Scildfreja suggested in the beginning and make do with what level of certainty we have. Measured against that, the arguments of people who are worried about Trump are perfectly fine.
However this turned into some kind of “science vs. philosophy” argument is beyond me.
Apparently Trump decided to spend most of 5:00 AM EST whining about how terrible Alicia Mercado is.
Very presidential.
For any lurkers (Roger will be impervious to facts):
The problem with “he” as the “genderless” pronoun is that “he” is not actually genderless. What you do when you try to make a gendered word genderless is that you simply gender the default. English went through hundreds of years of trying to make this work, and men liked it fine. They were classed as the default, as being fundamentally human. Women didn’t do so well, because they were classed as an aberration from human.
The easiest example of why this is a problem is to compare the meaning of the two phrases:
“He is a bad man.”
“She is a bad woman.”
The first means “he is a bad human being.” The second means “she is bad at being a woman.” Normatively, why should these two phrases have different meanings? Not “why does woman mean something other than human” but “why should woman mean something other than human.” You have to answer the questions of what is served by making men human and women something else, and what is lost by not doing this, and weigh those consequences before you can say that this is a desirable outcome.
“Gentlemen” as a greeting to a mixed group tells the women in the group that they are not welcome there.
“Mankind” tells women that they are not part of the human family.
“Countrymen” tells women that they are not citizens.
And they tell men these same things, reinforcing the belief that women are inferior beings and that it is okay to reduce them in status to that of literal property and then mistreat them. Normatively, why is this the outcome we ought to encourage? Since it is the exact same amount of work to do things differently, you have to say it is actively desirable for this to occur, that we should actively work toward that end. Because that’s what we’re doing when we say that male is human and female is something else.
People who are not men or women are already sharply othered. What is served by othering them even more? What is lost by not doing this? You have to answer those questions before you can say that your convenience in not having to think about this stuff is the most important consideration here.
My native language does not have he-she divide — there’s only one 3rd singular pronoun for sapient beings (and Sweden is asking if we can let them borrow ours, by all means) and another for non-sapient ones (roughly corresponding to ‘it’ in English).
Mere words cannot explain how much English’s (and other similarly gendered languages, let alone those with actual factual serious gendering happening) chafes me. Policy of Madness touched it up there, but fucking hell, English language, please get yourself sorted faster.