Just use a vaudeville hook. Maybe demand that the pols wear straw hats too!
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If your canidate starts to dance,
there’s a fire in their pants.
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As always XKCD already has us covered.
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Yes, what we really need is corporate America deciding what “truth” is, and whether we hear anything they disagree with. Oh, wait, we already have that. So I guess the author wants… more of that? We want Fox News just editing out Hillary Clinton’s side of things? Was this story from an account hacked by Putin?
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You can’t do that in America, facts are subjective
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I’m always amazed when someone asks if I saw the debate last night. Staring at paint dry would literally be a better use of one’s time.
I feel pity for professional journos who have to watch. And engage enough to write about it.
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It doesn’t even have to be something muted by mistake. Even if the censors mute each lie perfectly and annotate half-truths with adept precision this would never work. Even if you got the most non-partisan, reviewers who learned participants on both sides claim to respect, it would not matter.
I predict any muting at all, even for the most objectively valid outright lies, will be perfectly spun to present the idea that the liberal media is up to their old hi-jinks again. Just proving once and for all that there is no longer any neutral arbiter everyone can trust, if there ever was.
Trump supporters and those on the fence will lap this up as further evidence that The System is corrupt and needs to be torn down at any cost.
From what I can tell: yes, there is a cis-white-male grab for slipping glory dynamic at play, and there is an anti-regulatory thing going on as well (Just let me do whatever I want without interference!). But from my point of view the degree of anti-establishment (any establishment) feeling in this election is at an all time high. Certainly in my life I can’t remember it being more so.
This is why I think any systemic solutions to the Trump phenomena are doomed to failure: You want to mess with the playing field some more? Are you crazy? Anything you do along those lines just proves to others how manipulative (and corrupt) you are.
On the Republican side this manifested as the public’s outright rejection of all the standard candidates the party trotted out. What had their predictable policies done to get the country out of the current perceived mess?
On the Democrat side I think it is what embittered so many of the Sanders camp: Not the idea that Clinton was soooo… bad (not that they believe she was optimal), but the idea that from day one forces behind the scenes within the party were trying to line up the cards for her against other internal competitors. And (whether it ultimately mattered or not) the idea that individual votes could be negated by the judgement of super delegates is off putting to every voter who views themself as a good judge of presidential character.
So: Setting up an event where Trump can be lampooned, chastised or marginalized before the eyes of the general public? I think it will boil the blood of every person in doubt of Clinton, ignorant of the depth of Trump’s foibles, and craving a sense of fairness.
I don’t have a solution to this situation. I wish I did. Or at least somebody did.
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Scenario:
Trump gets on stage and starts to spout lies. Lightning from the Heavens literally strikes the him dead on the spot.
Gigantic disembodied hand briefly appears and starts graving into the wall the dead candidate’s failings.
Next day:
Pundit 1: God would never do this. Liberal, state sponsored, black budget super weapons.
Pundit 2: Of course it was God. Trump was too good for this world. The chosen will be recalled before the Beast brings about the end of days.
Pundit 3: Interestingly, if you read the writing on the wall in [context X], and [applying crazy-logic], it actually means Trump was the most righteous man on the planet.
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AND, we should be able to immediately refute a candidate’s inciting his followers to violence enough to make this qualifying statement, as American citizen voters: You cannot hold the highest office of this great, great country if you incite violence among voters, even in jest, for POTUS is too powerful an office for violent jokes. If you want to be POTUS, you have to show deference for what the office entails, lead by example, and not pop off. Word.
P.S. Thank you, Mrs. Obama. I will miss you both as leaders of our great, great country. Please remain after your duty expires. Please remain to inspire us to be better Americans. We need your continued leadership. Thank you.
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Censorship. Plain and simple.
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Yes! Brilliant! Amazing! Let us give private entities beholden to nobody but their investors unilateral censorship power which they can exercise without being accountable to anyone.
Wow.
Just… wow.
Using something like this to get rid of Trump is like trying to shoo mice from your kitchen by beating them to death with rattlesnakes. You cannot possibly think that this is a good idea.
Watching the Trump candidacy has proven to be amazingly instructive to me. Not because of Annoying Orange himself. Idiots are idiots. This is normal. No, because I saw various erstwhile defenders of democracy, open society, and all that good stuff lose their minds entirely and start advocating for some truly heinous nonsense the moment things stopped going their way even slightly (Trump is losing, of course, he can’t win).
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I just keep coming back to this post wondering why in the name of anything good anyone would think this is a good idea.
If 1984 had featured televised debates, this would surely have been incorporated as part of the story…
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How ’bout they just disemvowel them?
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We don’t need muting. Doesn’t anyone remember Pop-Up Videos? That should do it.
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Doing this - doing anything - to the integrity of the raw broadcast is a terrible idea.
But: in fairly short order an annotated version could be created, especially if jointly sponsored by enough respectable institutions to give it credibility and widespread attention.
A simple version would be a couple of traces on screen similar to the dial-based “live audience reaction meters” sometimes added to the screen in, for example, CNN’s debate broadcasts: one trace could indicate whether what’s being said is actually substantive enough to be fact-checked (obviously, a lot of what politicians say is pablum and lacks verifiable content), and a second trace would indicate how truthful it is. This could be done similar to the dial-based audience reactions, except with a panel of reasonable experts instead of randomly selecting people for a focus group. A button could be on screen to see more about exactly what factual claim is being made, and why it is and isn’t seen as being truthful.
I think this project would be worth doing, and if the “reasonable experts” are a bunch of political science/current affairs students it could even be done fairly cheaply - though between the panelists and writing up all the fact-checks we’re still talking about hundreds of person-hours of work here, and all within a couple of days for maximal salience, so by “fairly cheaply” I mean many tens of thousands of dollars, probably more like hundreds of thousands considering i know nothing of software development. Cheap for a consortium of major broadcasters, though.
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If democracy is so broken that it gives Trump the presidency, then fuck democracy.
If something is broken, you fix it, you don’t throw it away.
What would you even replace it with?
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Elmerocracy
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Maybe I’m old fashioned but I consider it my job to fact check the debates I’m watching and base my vote on that.
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A highly appropriate film to bring into this discussion! Sadly, it appears that Raymond chickened out at the Republican Convention.
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