Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/03/how-to-talk-about-trump-using.html
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I just don’t think “substituting reasoned argument with volume, overconfidence, condescension and a third-grade vocabulary” is my thing. I will NEVER be as good at those things as Donald Trump and to be honest I don’t think I’d want to be.
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Sad!
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It seems this just accelerates our collective race to the bottom. Yay, we’re all shouting at each other!
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Just shoot me now.
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Loser Bingbong tries to use President Trump against President Trump! Sad! President Trump has the best words! #MakeShoutingAtPeopleGreatAgain
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It’s fun to mock them with their own schoolyard language, but I think I’ll continue to use grownup language when discussing these matters with other educated adults.
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I will never fall in line with Republican goal of “Keep America Stupid”. However, Heather does make a good point in that when calling your representatives it’s best to keep it simple.
"…call your reps and say the same things. “We’re worried for our lives. We’re worried about our children. Trump is unstable. He’s dangerous.” Ask them: ‘Why aren’t you standing up to him? Why aren’t you protecting us?”
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Wasn’t the entire point of Newspeak to limit freedom of thought by diminishing the speaker’s ability to form and articulate critical concepts? And she wants us to join in with that?
Doubleplusungood.
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The problem with a constant fight to the bottom is how hard it is to recover.
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I’m not sure I can get my mind to “work” like that.
I prefer to just ask people “Is America great again yet?” and then follow that up with either “OK. Please let me know when it is, thanks” or conversely “Really? It IS? How can you tell? What’s better now?”
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I’ve seen others use this style of conversation in business - not to the same extent but very close. It’s powerful - you bring up a subject, and not many details - then just use power phrases with emotional context to frame someone’s thoughts (which are working out the details on their own because you didn’t supply any) - and then close with 'everyone - most people - so many people, and the end goal (agree, disagree, are angry etc.).
If you don’t use specifics you don’t allow someone who disagrees to even form a coherent thought back - because everyone is busy trying to fill in details that you left out when you already moved on to using buzzwords and framing the argument.
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It’s not the educated adults that need to have their mind changed.
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How to talk about Trump using trumpspeak (and why you should)
I appologize, but I’d like to stay married, tRumpO’speaky no good round my house.
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By all means keep using That Man’s most resonant of names. Everyone agrees you gotta get that brand out there, reinforce the tyrant’s power, sad!
I’ve found that I don’t often like the responses to that inquiry. In my experience, anyone who thinks MAGA is already happening also thinks that “drain the swamp” means “kick out anyone with even a shred of an idea what the fuck it is they’re doing”.
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Well spoken people don’t want to use idiot-speak because we don’t want to sound stupid.
Here’s the thing… Idiot-speak works.
Ever heard of click-bait being known for its grammatical precision and good vocabulary? Nope, but Click-Bait still works. Yes it does! You know that no matter how you try to resist you end up assimilating click-bait headlines and sometimes you just have to follow the links even though you know it will disappoint.
Maybe Idiot-Speak is the click-bait of the Idiot-in-chief’s supporters.
Besides [eyebrow waggle] Did the well spoken, well reasoned, thinking people really elect this boob? Who is your audience if you’re trying to influence people and shift support away from the current administration?
If we only speak or post to social media in the manner we prefer aren’t we just talking to ourselves? Are we relegating our posts to tl;dr status?
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Imagine you’re someone who will pay attention to no more than 16KB of political speech per year. Hillary would burn through that in three minutes. That kind of politics is pure white noise to you; it might as well be happening in a secret bunker on the moon.
But Turmp can talk for an hour, on dozens of wide-ranging topics, and you’re still well under your data cap. Sure, you kinda know it’s uninformed, vengeful horseshit, but for the first time in your life you’re in the loop – you can be fully informed on everything the president thinks and says – you’re the core audience of the politics show now! What morally-competent candidate ever offered that?
So, yeah, if there were a single anti-Turmp voice speaking in his language, that might get through, but it doesn’t work like that any more, which is part of why Turmp happened. Walter Cronkite wouldn’t have allowed it.
I’m not saying Turmp’s pod people are retarded. They’re just utterly disengaged. America is, after all, and why shouldn’t it be, a machine for making people fat and comfortable and insulated from the troubles of history. It is a success story that for millions of Americans, war and poverty and hunger and oppression are nothing but TV fairy tales. They don’t really feel like this reality show has anything to do with what makes that comfort possible. If they started to feel it, they’d suddenly discover vast new reserves of attention, and that might happen if he fucks up their finances, but when it comes to bombing “terrorists”, or shitting on brown people and big-city abortion sluts, that’s just another episode of CSI. And people don’t watch CSI for nuance and bridge-building. They want to see someone get clearly labeled as a bad guy, and then swatted like a bug. It’s comforting.
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Heather Havrilesky is absolutely correct in this article, and I can’t believe Trump’s opponents haven’t figured this out yet. I’m reminded of Michael Moore’s essay before the election when he predicted a Trump win - Moore said that “if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic,” then you are headed for a sure defeat. I’m sorry to say he was right.
The only way you can discredit the man is by speaking his own language and using it against him. We don’t have to speak this way forever, only until the Mango Mussolini is no longer a threat to the planet.
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