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.
Meh. The universe already has a name.
@Policy of Madness: the only language I have really known well enough to program in was Forth. I don’t see it as an ideal medium for 1:1 universe-level simulations or even consciousness-capable AI. although of course as a cis female, I am not capable of understanding computers or logic, and I’m sure the TDS of the Y chromosome comes with innate ability to program at that level, and the only reason that boy babies don’t start programming at that level in (God help us) BASIC the second they get out of the womb was nine months of proximity to parts that often belong to women.
Therefore, I’m not certain whether it would be easier to program one not to notice or not to ask the question, but I think one of the fascinating aspects of a simulation would be to see if its parts started wondering whether it is a simulation, and how those parts would test that idea.
I honestly don’t think we are in a sim personally, but I think it’s an interesting and even useful question both on the 3-a.m. college-dorm epistemology level and a practical one.
@Ledasmom
@EJ : the problem is, the simulator don’t have to be bound to the exact same rule. The information theory might be a result of the hardware limitation of a simulator, for example. It’s hard to make good assumption about what is true in both the “outer” and “inner” universe and what can be true only in the “inner” one, which is likely what make the theory attractive : it’s an easy-formulated, very hard problem for most people.
I guess the variant of the hypothesis where the limit of the simulation can be seen are interesting to test out. But the people who talk the most of it aren’t actual scientists but people too rich for their own good, which lead me to think it’s more a fad than a theory.
@ aunt podger
10 LET Chromosome = XY
20 GOTO Top
They’re cheering for Boo-Urns.
Pug also means “monkey” – the dogs were thought to have faces like monkeys’.
@SFHC
Oh my Universe, that is so apt. Hadn’t thought of that line in a while. :p
Wtf? My comment disapeared when I hit post. Testing
Okay. Trying again.
Jessica Jones second season will have only woman directors and I’m very happy about this misandry!
http://io9.gizmodo.com/women-will-direct-every-episode-of-jessica-jones-season-1788101861
You’re voting for someone who makes his entire public image about how rich he is!
I’m not suggesting that we rename the universe. I’m saying that the more we learn about it, the more we realize that it meets the minimum definition of “God”: it is necessary (there is no possibility of it not existing) and it is the cause of all events that are consequential or dependent (events which cannot exist without being caused by some other thing).
The context was the mention of the ontological arguments for God, and when you look at them, God does not have any characteristics other than those. The reason is that you can’t prove the existence of a Christian conception of God without proving that there is a minimal-definition conception of God; trying to prove all-powerfulness before proving existence is skipping a step. The argument that we can prove the existence of God has stuck on the minimal-definition stage, so there’s no point at this juncture in getting into the Christian conception.
YMMV but it’s powerful, to me, to think that the universe itself meets the definition of God. We are not separate from nature; we are a part of it. And if nature = God, that means that we are a part of God. We are part of the consciousness of God, along with all other conscious non-human beings. We are a way for God to know itself.
I’m not trying to convince you or anyone that this is a useful idea. It’s a very spiritual one for me.
Yeah, what you’re suggesting is indistinguishable from renaming the universe ‘god’. The “if nature = god” stuff is pointless, since nature does not in fact equal god. Nature is nature. You might as well say your hamster is god. It’s just a word game, deliberately misusing labels so as to make communication impossible. Just why.
@ POM
The concept you’re describing is called ‘panentheism’ (as distinguished from pantheism)
It crops up in quite a few philosophies and religious beliefs.
@Alan
Not exactly. Panentheism holds that the divine also exists beyond space and time. What PoM suggests is even less meaningful than that.
Koji Tanaka and Graham Priest are two scholars off the top of my head that study paraconsistent logic, which is a logical framework that allows for contradictory statements, and Buddhist logic.
@Sporky
I definitely agree. I actually find Hillary to be funny because of her sass. I think she has a different type of humor than Obama and Bill but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one
@ IP
Yeah, but it also has that idea that ‘god’ (or whatever term you use) is also manifest in everything. So basically everything that exists, or did or can exist, all adds up to god.
A lot of the more animist beliefs incorporate it, and it’s popular in certain flavours of paganism.
Ironically the guy who came up with the term did so as part of a ‘god = nature’ discussion. (can’t remember his name but he was debating with Spinoza)
@Alan
Still not entirely correct. On panentheism, god is manifest in everything, but also in nothingness. It would be incorrect to say that all of nature, in that view, adds up to god, since god is also beyond space and time, i.e. outside of nature. If you add up all of nature, you only end up with an infinetissimally small part of the god of panentheism, since you still have the endless god outside of nature.
@ IP
Yeah, it’s an interesting topic. A lot depends on how you define nature.
Some pagans/animists hold that only things that are ‘alive’ count. Others allow for everything that’s ‘real’. Sounds a bit like Yoda’s description of the Force (but, before Lucas went all midichlorian, the Force was pretty much just neoplatonism which is itself arguably panentheism)
Yet others include everything, and that includes stuff like ‘nothingness’ but now we’re getting really zen!
@PoM
None of those are necessary for the descriptor ‘god’ to be applied. Indeed, 99.99%+ of all the gods ever worshiped have none of those traits. If you consider those to be essential to the definition of god, but not sapience (which AFAIK virtually all religious traditions ascribe to all of their gods), then you have no terminology left to describe Thor or Kwan Yin or Ogún, who are all definitely gods, but have none of the characteristics you describe.
Your dispute here is with the ontological context in which I made my original comment. If you want to change context, that’s fine, but other contexts have much less interesting conclusions. If you think this one is uninteresting, the others are even less so. There’s no wonder here that you’re uninterested.
I’m not switching context. I’m pointing out a deepity. You’re not making anything more profound or interesting by calling it by a different name. It’s an argumentum ad not understanding how language works.
Ontological arguments re: the existence of God do not assign God any qualities other than the ones I listed. If you don’t like that, then your dispute is with the context, not with what I’m saying within it.
As I said before, I’m not trying to convince you or anyone that this is a useful idea, so your argument that it isn’t useful also falls completely flat for me. I’m not trying to convince you at all … but you certainly seem to be trying to convince me. Not sure why my personal appreciation for something I’ve claimed from the start to be a lark is offending you so hard.
Wrong. Ontological arguments assume that god is the greatest imaginable being, or the being of maximal greatness.
And none of this has anything to do with the fact that you’re deliberately misusing words in an attempt to define stuff into existence.
And you can cut out the whining. I’m not offended, I’m pointing out dishonest and/or flawed reasoning.
Medal Man is John Studzinski, and he’s wearing his OBE.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Studzinski