Well, bad on him, but that’s nothing to do with his Chinese Room argument, which sucks on its own merits.
I sort of agree – it would be a better world if people could see Turmp for what he is, without partisan interpretation, and make the right decision for themselves. But that asks a lot of the public, and empirically, a large chunk of the public aren’t up to the responsibility. They look at Turmp, and they do see a bitter ignoramus who is mocked by the sophisticated, except, instead of thinking “he shouldn’t be president” they think “he is like me, so I want him to be president”.
IMO, what would really drive a wedge between Turmp and his base is to make them see themselves as better than him. Which, in many respects, most of them are. Without that, MAGA hats will just see contempt for Turmp as contempt for themselves, so that the worse he does, the more they’ll support him.
And that is the heart of my discomfort with him. Everything is an issue that can compromised upon, there are no hard and fast principles. We need hard and fast principles when going against a party that absolutely has them, they are just evil and inhuman hard and fast principles.
we need to start addressing him as “unindicted rapist Donald Trump” because it took 50 women for Bill Cosby to finally be sent to prison, Trump is up to 16 now and already has confessed on tape to sexual assault so it’s just a matter of time before someone is finally brave enough to come forward, I don’t blame them for the silence of fear though
I mean say that out loud, the President of the United States is very likely a know rapist and 4 out of 10 people will still vote for him out of pure spite, it’s not that they don’t believe he’s likely a rapist, they don’t care
Yeah, people are pointing out that as he was alive - and a racist - in the '70s, so it’s surprising he doesn’t seem to know anything about this. But the thing about Trump is, if it doesn’t impact his own life, directly or indirectly, he tends not to give a shit (and is therefore totally incurious about it). And school busing couldn’t have been any more irrelevant to a rich guy whose kids went to private schools (and in whose lives he never took much interest anyways).
Even he has no idea. He was asked to weigh in on a controversy, but he completely misidentified both what the controversy was and which subject he was even asked to weigh in on (because he didn’t understand what the subject of the controversy was to begin with). He knows “school buses” are involved somehow, so he’s expelling words out of his mouth-hole that he hopes will sound like he’s decisive on the subject, while also not revealing he has absolutely no idea what’s going on, on any level. In other words, he’s not actually talking about anything - his speech simply functions as a message that he’s “presidential” and it’s time to move onto another subject.
Trump’s speech functions as a pretty good argument in support of it, though.
Someone was recently making the argument that Trump’s dementia is now so bad he wouldn’t be allowed to drive for a living.
Was busing an issue in New York City, specifically?
Apparently, yes
This seems like something he would have latched onto back then and never let go of. He should really be babbling constantly about liberals kidnapping white children and busing them to inner city crime schools even when that’s not what they asked him about
That’s not where his head was then, though. If he had political aspirations then, he had no ideology - even now, he only pretends to care about issues that he thinks he can weaponize - so there was no ideological filter he was using to decide what was important to know about at the time. It didn’t directly or indirectly affect him at the time, so he didn’t care/know about it. (And it’s not like he’s been using his time in the White House to actually learn about anything, especially anything historical.) Now he might pay attention to an issue like this, once he saw someone get mad about it on Fox News, as it’s the kind of thing that would indirectly affect him because he could use it for political gain. (And even then, he would only be aware of the issue enough to make reference to whatever they said on Fox News.)
It’s possible he knew something about it at the time, but didn’t realize that’s what the controversy was about or failed to see how he could weaponize it in the moment without Fox News telling him how to feel about it. Given that the man has shown, over and over again, that he is shockingly ignorant about just about everything outside his incredibly limited frame of reference, I suspect not, though.
He always thought black people were subhuman criminals
“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer forThe New Yorker
Sure, he’s always been a racist, but it was grotesque personal bigotry, not part of an organized ideology. He was always a racist psychopath who was awful to the people with whom he directly had dealings, but beyond that, his apathy won out and he couldn’t be bothered to care. (At least until the Central Park Five, but that was a whole ball of issues, some of which indirectly touched him - e.g. perceptions of NY city crime - or because they hit too many racist nerves for him to ignore.)
And in the '70s, he wasn’t looking for issues with which he could go after the “liberals” because he wasn’t identifying as conservative in any way, nor looking to go after anyone on ideological grounds. He was politically neutral, donating to whatever candidates seemed most popular where he was doing business. (Democrats in NY, Republicans in Florida, etc.) Politically, today, it’s clear he only adopts positions because he thinks they’ll resonate with his base. He’ll preference positions that align with his own racism, but as lazy demagoguery.
Which is to say: yes, he’s always been a hateful fucker, but he was a lazy, intellectually chaotic, hateful fucker who politically aligned himself with whoever seemed most advantageous at the time.
Incidentally, “PAT of Canarsie” was Parents and Taxpayers of Canarsie (Brooklyn), who later joined up with a pretty huge group of demonstrators from several neighborhoods, especially the Bronx and Queens. Altogether there were 15-20,000 protesters, mainly women. They were objecting to a NYC busing plan plan which was based on Princeton’s thoughtful solution, to pair neighborhoods then have students go to school a year or two in one neighborhood, then a year or two in the other.
Were these protesters mainly racist? Maybe. But for a lot of them, they would have been perfectly happy to have the students from the poor neighborhoods bus to theirs; their rhetoric at least was that they opposed sending their kids across town every day. It doesn’t seem like much of an objection today, where the 90 minutes your kid spends in transit represents a savings in child care expenses, but in 1964 these mothers probably wanted their kids to spend those minutes at home, watching the younger sibling or playing stickball in the streets.
I think the fact that their signs say “Integration–YES” in that time period (4 months before the Civil Rights Act was passed) is for sure a contrast to the anti-busing movements in some other parts of the country (such as Alabama the year before).
I remember my yellow school buses being driven by semi-crazed Vietnam vets in the 70s. They were scary.
