If you watched Trump’s appearance at the Al Smith dinner last night, you might be forgiven for concluding that he bombed, big league.
The annual charity dinner is sort of a political version of a celebrity roast, albeit one that is a little less vicious and a lot less funny. The main task of any politician speaking at the event is to demonstrate the rudiments of a sense of humor, especially when it comes to jokes directed at them.
Trump failed. Unlike Hillary, who managed to more or less get into the spirit of the thing, Trump’s only decent self-deprecating joke, if you can call it that, was at Melania’s expense, not his own. And he devoted most of his time to nasty attacks on Hillary that didn’t even vaguely resemble jokes, managing to draw actual boos from the crowd in the process.
Naturally, Trump’s most terrible fans think that he totally kicked ass.
On his blog today, white supremacist pickup artist James “Heartiste” Weidmann celebrates Trump’s alleged victory over “the infirm Queen of C*nts, Hillary Rotten Clinton” with several paragraphs worth of overcooked prose:
At the Al Smith charity dinner, Trump laid a trap for the elites and unleashed his vengeance on a gathering of effete plutocrats, smug globalist whores, lapdog media hacks, intellectually inbred urbanites, and the Wicked Bitch herself. …
He nuked the ruling class and the Clinton Machine from orbit and took a piss on their smoldering ashes.
Weidmann continues on in this vein for several more paragraphs, but I imagine you’ve got the gist of his, er, argument already.
Amazingly, Weidmann has managed to find another Trump fan whose, er, analysis of the event is even more histrionic than his own, an anonymous fellow running a blog called Face to Face. Here’s what that dude has to say on the subject:
[T]he time for yukking it up with the Establishment is over. Watch as Trump the court jester begins with his routine of juggling several glistening knives in the air, for the amusement of the white-tie audience, then calmly collects them one by one into his hands, and throws them straight into the chests of the plutocrats and the media.
The courtiers mocked him as a reality TV clown, and struck cruel blows against his little-people supporters whenever they felt like a little entertainment. So the jester decides to put on a show for the court where “Trump acts like Trump” and they’re all laughing along with the act. He convinces them it would be a riot for them to put on wax masks showing elitist caricatures, then begins a fire-breathing routine — only to spit the fire right onto their masks. As the courtiers scramble around the ballroom with their faces ablaze, the jester and his little-people companions storm out and burn down the rest of the palace.
Yipes. I think someone’s metaphoric license needs to be revoked.
If you want to watch what actually happened at the dinner when Trump got up to speak, here are some of the highlights, by which I mean lowlights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knNEwNbhq9o&feature=youtu.be
You can see the whole thing here.
OoglyBoggles:
So to these guys a universe in which we “rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness” is less realistic than a universe in which some other species rises up from primordial ooze and evolves into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness AND THEN creates a massive simulation of our universe in which we rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness.
Man if you know anything about Trump’s history with New York’s elite, this is almost poetic.
He’s wanted all his life to be accepted and admired by the exact sort of people who were booing him in that room and they’ve always seen him as an ostentatious phony and conman.
Just a few more weeks until we send this wannabee strongman crying back to his McMansion.
@OoglyBoggles
That sucks. I’m curious though, are there any non-sexist sects around? I mean like that acknowledge the crappy stuff and reject it?
@Mish
Comments like that set off my “self righteous asshole” alarm like a siren.
@Tessa
Since you cannot disprove that every time you exit a simulation you’re just going into another simulation, it’s an improvable statement therefore unaffected by the scientific method, fiction essentially and fails to pass the “so what” test. It’s holograms all the way down.
@Bakunin
As sexist as this is going to sound, just find any sect where the majority if not all of the higher ranking members are nuns. I used to be from the Vietnamese flavor of Buddhism and the temples’ members tended to be pretty nice and welcoming folk.
I’ve heard that argument before. Basically it goes, if it were possible to simulate an entire universe to a reasonable degree of accuracy, then each “real” universe probably has a large number of simulated universes within it, so the chance that our universe is one of the real ones is small. And if it’s not one of the real ones, then it may be possible to prove it by finding flaws in reality where the creator(s) oversimplified things or took shortcuts. And if it’s provable, then it may be possible to alter the simulation from the inside.
All that is a pretty big bunch of “ifs”, though.
To explain more, as far as I know from my own experiences, and what I know from sites is that Vietnamese Buddhism tends to treat nuns and monks as equals and generally highly value education for and from everyone. Though I have to say that for Buddhists, Vietnamese Buddhists sometimes tend to be seen as the “I’m Christian. What kind of Christian? Just Christian.” sort.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/07/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/
Short answer: probably not, because if this were the case we should see evidence of it in the natural world, and we don’t.
@PoM, good point. Hypothetically, the whole thing is fun, though. This story is a bit old but still interesting – and the comment thread is mostly worth a read, too.
It has the rather endearing title of “I don’t know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility.”
@Policy of Madness:
“’I’d notice the difference,’ said Arthur.
“’No, you wouldn’t,’ said Frankie mouse, ‘you’d be programmed not to.'”
—Douglas Adams
@Rabukurafuto
I disagree. Yes, there are certain individuals who can behave that way and completely get away with it or get away with it until they don’t. But mainly they don’t. Business relationships aren’t strictly transactional. You can rip people off for a while, but eventually it will come back on you. How many people will demand payment up front on Trump’s next business projects? How many people are turning away from Trump resorts already (a lot, business for them is way down)? There are people who call for unfettered capitalism, but that’s not really how capitalism works – it becomes anarchy or feudalism – and that’s why all capitalist societies have an iterative and long term process of building up regulation in a cycle of adding and taking away. It’s hard to get that just right and in fact we never will, but we can try.
You’re right, some libertarians will argue for this, but they are just plain wrong. It would be shit.
I know, for example, a few senior, senior bankers – they are often really nice people. Oh yes, they can be ruthless, I’m sure and they’re not afraid of making hard decisions, but you can also rest easy in their company and I’ve seen them – worked alongside them – on voluntary projects doing really not very fun, not very clean stuff (although it often felt fun because it was good company and a lot of laughs). I’m quite certain they are the same people at work, not exactly the same, but they are who they are.
I work in non-profit sectors and I’ve run across dark triad type people and while they can fool some of the people some of them time and cause a lot of pain, eventually they’re busted. Sometimes they can hide out a long time in a large organisation where they can be transferred between departments and even promoted to get rid of them, sometimes they make it to the top and last a whole career, but they often do a lot of damage to the businesses they run, because they don’t care about the business or customers. But they often get busted because they cross too many people and use others as proxy for attack. It gets around. I’ve also run across ruthless politicians, but most of them have support from a lot around them because they’re not complete shits.
@Aunt Podger
Rather than program us to not notice the difference, it would sure be easier to program us to not even ask that question.
Quantum physics tells us that the amount of information in the universe is enormous. To simulate a universe, we would need to record every particle at every moment, because there are things that happen at a particle level which we can’t just abstract.
I think you will agree that no matter how good a computer gets, we will need more than one particle of computer to simulate the movement of each particle of matter. This means that a computer capable of simulating the universe down to a quantum level must be larger and more complex than the universe itself.
If you believe in Occam’s Razor (and not everybody does) then you would conclude that the simplest possibility is that the universe is real.
Poor Eric Trump!
Eric Trump’s Possible In-N-Out Lemonade Heist Has The Internet Going Crazy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/eric-trump-lemonade-in-n-out_us_580a4b32e4b0cdea3d87218c
I feel kind of guilty about this whole thing. Not everything that looks like lemonade is lemonade. Sorry, Eric!
Not that I was involved in any way….
After seeing a few arguments like the Simultation Hypothesis, I decided to add one axiom to my personal philosophy.
Bakunin’s Axiom – Any theory or idea that is indistinguishable from solipsism is false.
@OoglyBoggles
Interesting. I’m not really interested in the religious aspects, more the philosophical attitudes, which are really intertwined with the religious stuff I guess.
The Buddhist use of four-valued logic (that’s True, False, Both, and Neither) and rejecting the Axiom of Non-Contradiction is very cool. I haven’t read anything from the Vietnamese traditions, I’ll need to look around when I get the chance.
So…if we actually where part of a simulated universe, the most interesting question would be if there where any shortcuts in the programming and how closely we where being watched. If “lots” and “little”, we could (if doing so would be deemed sufficiently safe) gain a lot more knowledge by forming hypotheses about the original code by assuming a creator that gets bored, tired, likes clean or geeky solutions etc. and testing them trough hacking. At which point a “intelligent creator” argument would gain a lot more traction in the scientific community since it worked. I’m quite sure somebody already has (radical social constructivism isn’t that new an idea) and it seems like it didn’t pan out that much. Still a nice allegory — in fact it’s very similar to plato’s cave but has more flatscreens — to tell new students to help them crack the ideological shackles of their upbringing.
@Bakunin
I would be interested in material about Buddhist logic if you have some.
Ditto!
I believe that’s part of the argument itself, at least some of the time – because a simulated universe must be less complex than a real one, we can find the oversimplifications to determine whether we’re in a simulation, what kind of simulation it is, and what kind of magic powers it can give a sufficiently tech-wise philosopher-king.
…you might notice from my tone I’m not entirely on board with this theory. Although, if video games have taught me anything, it’s that if we move fast enough, we might catch distant objects still loading their high-res versions… actually, if reality worked like GTA, that would explain the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – you buy a new car and then start seeing the same model everywhere, because the simulation can only fit so many cars into its memory and that has to include yours.
Eh, there’s a load of stuff about the simulation hypothesis which turns me off. Amongst other things:
– it isn’t conceptually any more convincing or clever than ontological arguments for god, which are self-evidently a load of dingo’s kidneys (because of the huge amount of assumptions that you have to make to accept the conclusion).
– it isn’t any better as an explanation for the weirdness of the universe than a giant scarab beetle was for the rising and setting of the sun (just because it is compatible with our ignorance doesn’t make it correct).
– a hypothesis about anything that’s based on something that humans have only just begun to think about is probably bullshit and more of a cultural artefact than a serious description of reality (see also: everything stoned philosophy freshmen say).
It fulfils the same kind of things that so many religions have… “my life has purpose!”, “there’s a/some all powerful being(s)!” and “maybe i coudl live forever/maybe there’s a heaven!” sort of thing. Sounds like just another emergent property of a human psyche. Even the fact that it has come to popularity through the actions of a bunch of famous rich folk isn’t exactly novel either.
Wake me when someone makes realistically testable predictions.
I assume that the cross worn by the gentleman on the left is insignia from a Catholic fraternal orgnaization, but I can’t see it distinctly enough to identify it. However, on looking up such organizations, I have discovered that there was one called the Order of the Pug. Isn’t that interesting, I thought, pug has another meaning besides the dog. Nope. Order of the Pug, as in pug the dog.
rugbyyogi:
See this research: Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry (PDF). Also summarised here. In brief, a number of bankers participated in a game in which they could earn more money by lying. Half of them were “primed” by talking about their jobs beforehand, while the other half, the control group, talked about something not work-related. The former were more likely to cheat. This “priming” effect was not found in non-bankers. Conclusion: people working in banking may not be inherently dishonest, but the industry’s culture promotes dishonesty, and this has an effect on behaviour.
@Ledasmom
I think it’s a knights of Columbus medal. My dad is one and they have a lot of regalia and such. (Funny hats, too.)
I wish the “wicked bitch” (or anybody, really) would drop a house on these alt-right clowns.
The most convincing (read: the IMHO only convincing) arguments to prove the existence of God do not require God to have any particular characteristics beyond existing and causing other existences. God does not have to be all-knowing, all-powerful, outside time, etc., in fact God doesn’t even have to be conscious or taking any action. It’s not that difficult to accept the existence of “God” when we define God to be “the universe in aggregate,” which is a valid definition and the only one that I think can really be defended.
It puts an interesting slant on something Carl Sagan once said: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
One house from the sky, coming down. (Literally.)
You know, I’ve got to give it to them for “Hillary Rotten Clinton” it was actually kinda clever, at least better than the others I’d heard. But maybe it’s too clever for people that want to use it.
That video of Trump getting booed though. He can’t even acknowledge that they are booing him. He’s gotta deflect and ask, “are they booing me or Hillary?” It’s very obvious they’re booing you Trump!