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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:
Well, if you ever want to move past your feelings on the subject and join us in reality, you will find that Hillary is in general a trustworthy figure, and is literally a saint when compared to Trump, who is likely the most dishonest person in US politics today.
Also, more to the topic, any “winning” that Trump did during the debate is due to him being a proficient abuser.
Dammit, I thought I fixed that borkquote. Also, I was mistaken, the adorable children that I saw pictures of are apparently the grandchildren of the present monarchs. Their actual children are all of an age where foine is an appropriate descriptor.
Some of us think Mrs. Chad Skyboomrooster might be a troll. The jury’s still out on that. She’s over on this thread, but she’s stopped commenting.
@pitshade
Actually it was a somewhat failed pun. :p
I was making a callback to the DNC when Hillary said that “a man you can bait with a tweet is not someone who should be in charge of the nuclear launch codes”, or something to that effect. I had remembered it as “a man you can goad with a tweet…”.
Goad… goat… okay, it wasn’t a great pun even if I’d had the facts straight. 😉
@Petal
I liked your pun. 🙂
For me, it’s the opposite – cars make me nervous, while airplanes are relaxing. I suppose that’s related to the fact that I have been in 3 car crashes (though none as the driver) and zero plane crashes.
@Dali
Your nemesis
@IP
There’s a Twitter account called @EverythingGoats. 10 pounds of daww in a 5 pound bag. Plenty of forced goat puns too!
The majority of Trump’s supporters are statistically, white, uneducated males….and probably their equally uneducated wives or girlfriends. I don’t say that as a dig. Just the reality that these white, uneducated males are probably not going to be with a women who has more education than he does. What I can’t tell is if there really are this many hateful people still in our country, or if they just yell the loudest. I guess we will find that out come election time.
You all make good points, but I think miss the point at the same time. If someone is coming in for a job interview, they could have the best resume in the world, but if they can’t back it up in person, or if you suspect that they are lying about it, you aren’t giving them the job.
If you don’t think you are going to get on with someone, you don’t give them the job.
Clinton has the more relevant resume, but not necessarily better. It’s a personal opinion, but I found Trump better in the interview.
Job goes to Trump.
Immigration –
Like I say – there are plenty of bad people in the country already. Not much we can do about that. Why not improve our chances that the new people coming in are good?
There are plenty of things you can do to make improve your chances of getting good people – education, professional qualifications etc. etc.
I would say the best thing we could do would be to say only female immigrants. You’d be more or less guaranteed they wouldn’t get up to mischief.
If there is a problem with immigrants from a certain culture, perhaps those requirements should be higher. I don’t know.
I mean, we all know we live in a patriarchy etc. etc. so its not beyond possibility that culture might be negative, might effect the way we behave.
@Roger
Trump would fail an interview with me. He can’t even answer a simple question without boasting about himself and lying. Clinton, on the other hand, seems competent.
See, just because we don’t agree with you doesn’t mean we’re missing the point. It just means we have different experiences and backgrounds and have come to a different conclusion than you.
Edit:
Why do you say that?
Hey would you look at that, that’s the standard misogynistic response whenever it is “competent woman” vs “incompetent man” and a dudebro is doing picking.
Second, if you really, really, really, really think that Trump presented better, I got loads of magic nose candy to sell you.
(Sugar. Nobody tell him it is actual sugar. If I can sell two pounds for $50K, I’ll make it nice.)
If you had an interview with two people, one of whom had a solid resume but a smile that vaguely annoyed you somehow, and the other rambled incoherently, kept interrupting you with insults, contradicted himself within the same sentence, and told dozens of easily verifiable lies, while berating your company and presenting as solutions measures that would force you into bankruptcy immediately, just as he’s bankrupted 6 other companies before, you would give the job to which one again?
Please refer to my last post. Even if your initial impressions of Trump during the debate lean favourable, you are now able to look at the actual facts of the situation and see there’s no reason to think that Trump is trustworthy.
@scented hard chairs
Re: poem.
I agree, not great. But it had a bit of mitre, a bit of rhyme, and a reasonable argument.
Better than most of the stuff you see these days.
(And done off the top of my head (apart from googling for words that rhymed with “course”).
@kupo
Nice! So it wasn’t a completely wasted effort. :p
@AxecalibEr (Noice.)
I’ve seen it before. I absolutely adore goats. 🙂
Not a single whiff of good logic, and oh wow, lookit that racist comment too, on top of all this sexism.
*mentally transforms into a cat out of sheer boredom, because fuck*
*bat, bat*
This mouse is very soon dead, and I’m now way beyond bored.
*leaves to dig the litterbox, hocks a hairball into the troll’s shoes on her way there*
“I would say the best thing we could do would be to say only female immigrants. You’d be more or less guaranteed they wouldn’t get up to mischief.”
So, an Emma Goldman fan?
I think those goats on YouTube that scream like humans make more coherent points than Trump.
dlouie – Who checks the fact checkers?
kupo – biggest correlation between anything and terrorism, crime, whatever bad stuff is that it tends to be men who do it.
Why take the risk – we should have far stricter requirements for men who want to immigrate than women.
Imaginary Petal – Trump isn’t insulting me. If anything, Hilary is (“Deplorables”, “racist”) etc.
Kapok sounds like a Klingon word.
Dali,
Maybe the best way to cut back the military industrial complex would be to point out to white people that the military provides a lot of employment to POC :/
@Roger,
So, you based on how they make you feel? Go with gut instinct and emotion?
Ah, Roger. Why do you bother talking about reasons for preferring Trump at all? You’re basing your preference on how he makes you feel – how he does in the ‘interview’. You said it yourself.
All of the reasons you’re giving are window-dressing. You said that you understood our points, and they were good ones, but then said they don’t matter, because he ‘did better in the interview’ – a subjective opinion based on how he makes you feel. That’s all that matters to you. The rest is the story you tell yourself to make it feel like you’re being rational.
(This, incidentally, is basically how everyone operates, so don’t feel too bad about it. Rationality’s hard.)
So, if you’re gonna base your position on feelings, there are a few consequences you should consider:
– You shouldn’t be trying to convince anyone else. They have different feelings from you, and the fact that he makes you feel better is irrelevant to them.
– You should consider why you prefer him on an emotional level. That’s good fodder for self-growth. Feel free to talk about that here, if you want. It’s good to talk about ones’ feelings openly, to expose and analyse their foundation. Great for self-development.
– You should consider that your feelings are a piss-poor basis for electing officials, and recuse yourself from voting. Voting based on emotion alone is a pretty good sign that your rational thought processes have been grabbed by some media outlet or fearmonger. That’s a terrible basis for placing a vote.
Otherwise, best of luck! Do examine why you feel this way, if you can. It’s important. Mental hygiene is the most important hygiene. Take care of yourself!
It’s no use, Robert. It’s Fact Checkers all the way down.
I see Rogark thinks that any evidence which fails to confirm his own bias must be a conspiracy. Such manly STEMlogic.