Humor is divisive.
The authoritarian right has been getting laughed at for many years by the smug left, and they are now taking a stand. Finally they have a hero, and not a single conspiracy or joke is going to divert their support. The more their leader is laughed at, the more emboldened they become. If a person cares about removing the division in society, it would help by not mocking the other side.
Then there is a part of the trump supporters that are energized when they see the “snowflakes triggered”. The more we are triggered, the louder they cheer. Therefore, it is a simple matter to trigger the flakes in effort to drum up support, the flakes’ glee is a manipulation to extrude support, which makes the whole thing even less funny. Was confefe a mistake that went unnoticed? I think it is either trolley trap, or at least another mistake that provides the same desired result.
On a more personal level, I live in trump town USA. My daily life can include maga bumper stickers, trump yard signs and banners, dixie flag waving pick up trucks, fearful friends and coworkers, brazen gun rights advocates, open carry gun laws, energetic pro trump discussions in public, opposing sided families and long time friends are no longer enjoying activities together, and my city is already on the growing list of places where an immigrant has been murdered by a trump fan. These people are emboldened and righteous, I don’t see either side trying to come to the middle, and looking at history leads me to believe it is going to get worse before we finally decide enough is enough. Sometimes humor isn’t the correct reaction.
I never argued he was deliberately making typos as part of a scheme. I think the typo was accidental. Then I think the White House spun it intentionally because they knew that:
liberals would latch onto the fact that only an idiot would believe that it was intentional
conservatives would think that liberals must be idiots if they believe that anyone actually believes it is intentional
The typo is unintentional, the press conference is a trolley. And this time you’re the butt of the joke because you think Trump supporters and conservatives are actually stupid enough to believe the White House line. They don’t, and they’re laughing at you for taking it so seriously.
I think it would be better not to take the bait.
I guess because I love people who are conservatives and Trump supporters so I don’t have the liberty of assuming all my ideological opponents are simultaneously evil and too stupid to live.
He’s made a lot of mistakes, but his handling of the media is not among them. (If you actually talk to people whose opinions differ from your own you would probably realize that.) This is the perfect example: he sucks as a leader, so his administration is full of leaks. What to do? Getting people talking about an autocorrect error instead of the leakers’ revelations seems like a great tactic.
I’m not saying every tweet is a masterful ploy, I’m saying the “covfefe” thing is stupid and makes liberals who joke about it look stupid.
I think both explanations constitute reasons and are obviously not mutually exclusive in any way.[quote=“chenille, post:80, topic:101919”]
The Republicans have spent years hanging Obama in effigy and denouncing everything from his health care to nationality to choice of mustard in deeply petty ways.
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Conservatives and liberals demonstrably have very different values, and thus different ways of reacting to the world – including political events. Yeah, conservatives can do well with this approach because it is a reactionary approach. Maybe reactionary approaches are not appropriate for liberals and leftists, though?[quote=“chenille, post:80, topic:101919”]
Many people can point to specific and even legitimate grievances against liberal discourse, and we should work on them, but so long as we’re worrying about racism and privilege and non-white problems a lot aren’t going to be impressed either way.
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This is the same problem. We need ways of presenting these as problems needing to be solved that don’t make people feel aggrieved or alienated or under attack. The current liberal/left rhetoric does that, and the circular firing squad is in full effect alienating whoever doesn’t use pronouns just so. Someone on this very BBS accused me of infantilizing women by using the adjective “little”.
You can get pats on the back from the sufficiently woke, but if your goal is to increase your movement’s popularity, that’s not going to cut it.
This doesn’t apply to any celebrity tweet – context matters. I can assure you this incident and others like it make a lot of people who don’t even like Trump in the first place feel absolutely disgusted with liberal politics.
Well, first of all you’re clearly deeply embedded in a filter bubble, so yeah I would assume you mostly hear negative things about the right and positive things about the left.
But I think you’re missing out on the sense in which I’m describing the behavior as “cruel”. I’m likening the liberal twitterati to the popular kids in school – the ones in the know, the ones who dress “right”. The ones who single out anyone who deviates from their arcane, constantly changing fashion rules and mock them.
Which isn’t to claim that the target doesn’t deserve mocking. But they don’t deserve mocking for not being one of the popular kids. If they deserve mocking, I think it should be for some good reason.
Just not a fair or accurate interpretation of what I said, and I wish you had asked before writing 10 paragraphs based on a misunderstanding.
The problem is, you might think that joking about “covfefe” makes you appear less humorless, but to someone who doesn’t already agree with you – i.e. the exact people you need to appeal to if you want to grow your movement – it actually makes you appear more humorless. Because the joke is going over your head.
You think Sean Spicer going up and saying the tweet was intentional was super serious and you’re the one making the jokes. No, Spicer’s press conference was a trolley and you took it seriously, so you are the butt of the joke.
Your post was that Trump was probably relieved at the distraction from Russia – and maybe he felt that way, though the worry about falling for distractions is what I disagree with most, because as far as I can tell people who laugh at one were still paying the most attention to the other. But you can’t look at this thread, and tell me that nobody thought making jokes was foolishly playing into his hands and a disaster for optics. I mean, as far as I can tell that’s your point, isn’t it?
Assuming that is your point, then I believe I do understand what you and vonbobo above are saying. And while there’s some validity to it, I think such objections to jokes like this focuses too much on trying to win over people who already agree with Trump, at the expense of being friendly with one another and appearing honest. Conservatives also win elections when exasperated liberals stay home. But I already made a real effort to give you my best explanation of my position, and if all that gets is reiteration and flack for being too verbose, I doubt another try is worth it.
So, yeah. Some useful reminders for me here, I guess.
Yes, you can talk about both the silly and the serious, but this will necessarily dilute the seriousness of your critiques over all.
Conservatives also win when scared liberals vote for conservative Democrats.
You did a fine job of stating your position, but I still disagree with it. Meanwhile, you seem unconvinced by my arguments. I think that’s fair, right?
The righties who comment every day on Mallard Fillmore still think that “57! 57! 57!” is an incisive political point. By all means, let us self-censor our laugh reflex in order not to make them feel bad, or even ambiguous, about their own prejudices.
This POTUS has the media repeating baby talk as a discourse instead of discussing policy.
Of course they won’t let it go. Why would they let their cloak of stupidity go ?
There are 24 hours in a day. If they can get a percentage of it to be about baby-talk that is bandwidth lost that day to fucking baby-talk instead of NEWS.
I just sat down with a Russian/English dictionary to try and figure if “covfefe” might correspond with anything but it’s hard to know what to substitute for what-- is “c” supposed to “s” or “k”?, is “v” supposed to be “B” (Cyrillic “v”) or “л” (“L” in Cyrillic)?
Not that I seriously thought Trump was doing that, but it was an interesting idea to check out.
Well, I’ve known the phonetics of the Cyrillic alphabet since I was a kid (thanks to my grandfather’s subscription to “Karpatska Rus”), but it was ultimately a fool’s errand since nothing in the dictionary came close to any combo I could find (I don’t think V and F appear next to each other in Russian too often, maybe never-- how often do they appear next to each other in English?) Seriously, “кофе” is still the closest, but “coffee” makes no sense in the context of Trump’s tweet either.
Ha ha ha ha ha
Yo, I’ll tell you what he wants, what he really, really wants
So tell me what he wants, what he really, really wants
I’ll tell you what he wants, what he really, really wants
So tell me what he wants, what he really, really wants
He wanna, (ha) he wanna, (ha) he wanna, (ha) he wanna, (ha)
He wanna really, really, really wanna covfefe ah
If you want his future, forget the past
If you wanna get with him, better pay up fast
Now don’t go wasting his precious time
Get your act together you could be just fined
