Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/21/sassy-trump-responds-to-shooti.html
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What the hell does that world salad even mean? I hear and understand the individual words but when he puts them together in that combination… haven’t got the faintest fucking clue.
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I guess Don King is still alive.
Trump must be the next Mike Tyson.
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I must say, the lip smacking sounds gave me a good laugh.
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So it sounds like his answer was, “some people aren’t good at their jobs”? And how many people will die when Trump fucks up?
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Wow, yeah, that was a whoooole bunch of nothing. The only bit out of that which constituted comment on the situation (and not waffling or reminding people of how the police endorsed him), was basically “Oh well, mistakes happen. The police will just make fewer and fewer mistakes in the future.” Yeah, it’s amazing how many of those mistakes all seem to happen to black people…
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Somehow hearing it in this voice makes it even clearer that Trump’s response was an incoherent babble of random words. Really, if this were any other politician the audience would be staring slack-jawed wondering what meds the guy was on. It astonishes me that the media still treat this man as if he were on the same intellectual plane as his opponents.
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Even that nothing is significant though. Four years ago, it would’ve been mandatory for any politician to defend the murderer and repeat their story as though it were fact. Failing to do this would be seen as a betrayal of the police and by extension “law and order” in general.
Trump’s failure to say anything does send a message to the cops: even the right-wing can’t have your back if you blatantly murder someone. The political exposure is too great now. The unconditional immunity you have enjoyed is starting to erode.
Now, this isn’t indicative of good character on Trump’s part. But it is indicative of a broader anti-authority social trend, which forces even the right to distance themselves from the actions of the police.
Trump’s use of language is anything but “word salad.” His words and his use of grammar are carefully chosen, and put together artfully, automatically, and quickly. – cognitive neuroscientist and linguist George Lakoff
@politeruin, a guide to understanding the Orange One’s extremely meaningful and potent speech can be found here - part 1, part 2.
Not necessarily easy reading, if you aren’t already versed in the field, but worth the time. These speeches are not meaningless, rather the meaning has been purposely occulted to be indecipherable to you. And rendering them in something other than the original voice makes that meaning even less accessible.
知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆
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Listening to Trump is just painful. This alternate voice made it slightly less so. I’m wondering, if Trump gets elected, can this person do voice translation for the entire presidency?
That said, even with an alternate voice, it is really frustrating to listen to him babble and not say anything of substance. I want to grab him and shake him and say, “JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION ALREADY!!!”
Fascinating! I’ve not read it but on the face of it i’m not sure i buy it, he’s way too stupid for that, he can’t even stay on script when repeatedly told he has to. Unless we’re talking about a sub-concious level of stupidity that has yet to be defined…
Going off script is a very important part of what he’s doing.
He makes sure he is seen to toss aside scripts or tell aides to turn off the teleprompter, which establishes in his audience that he’s speaking his mind. That very strongly distinguishes him from his establishment opponents, and to some extent protects him from the normal consequences of saying things that are factually incorrect or blatantly bigoted. He can honestly say that he’s not politically correct (which resonates with more than half the American public, who are tired of constantly having to revise their speech) and people will forgive him, because he’s off script. It’s very cunning and very calculated.
I think it’s important to remember that intelligence is not a single thing; the IQ that we measure with the Stanford-Binet test is a specific type of problem solving ability that our society values very highly, but it is only one kind of “smarts”. Some psychologists and educators insist that there are 16 specifically identifiable intelligences, although I personally think that’s either too high or too low.
This man has flimflammed the richest banks in the world, repeatedly, and could do it again without breaking a sweat. He’s not stupid, in the conventional sense of that word.
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That would normally be tRump’s response, I suspect, even now, if he wasn’t there as part of his attempt at outreach to African Americans. This meaningless waffling was his huge effort to not totally alienate the demographic he was explicitly trying to win over. Not that it was really any sort of concession - even the police admit in that case that they shot an unarmed man; tRump tried to reinforce, to some degree, the police narrative by passing it off as a weird, random aberration by an unreliable - i.e., female - officer. (Rather than addressing the question that acknowledged it as part of a pattern of behavior by police forces.)
Yeah, he’s a con-man and seemingly a very good one if you look at the proportion of the electorate he has swindled and con-men aren’t stupid by any stretch but i can’t ascribe any machiavellian* intent to his actions when i believe he is just as shocked at getting as far as he has along with the rest of us. As a con-man he is top of the league, as a politician he is as dumb as they come but where is the stupid here? His supporters are putting him there. I thought a fellow commenter put it succinctly in another thread…
*Machiavelli is misunderstood but that’s besides the point.
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(Don’t worry, I have read Machiavelli and understand the context. Well, anyway his Art of War and The Prince in translation, which are the ones he got his reputation from.)
I understand what the commenter you quoted means about lowering the bar, too, but I suspect we’ve had US presidents who did all that, and worse, before. Look at Harding, the Bushes, or Buchanan, for example.
What worries me is that the fear-mongering and race-baiting keeps accelerating and intensifying…
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