Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine does not seem to host Amazon’s best sellers page. Remember the post-inauguration selection? 1984, Brave New World, and similar life-affirming light reads. And now? “Sometimes I like to Curl Up in a Ball” is the best fit I can find. Looks like America as a whole is able to change its literary demands on short notice…
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Oh, when Chuck Tingle jumps the shark you’ll know about it.
‘Pounded in the Butt by the Shark that my Book Titles Have Finally Jumped’
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It’s kind of amazing that he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s admitting that he doesn’t read at all here. “I read half a page and then get an emergency phone call”? How long does he think it takes other people to read a half page? Especially when we know he spends 6 hours watching cable news…
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My observation is that it seems to be thinking of language as a way to convey meaning vs. thinking of language as a way to accomplish goals. Talking to toddlers and young school children, I recognize that they are largely using language like it’s a mysterious control panel: I say X and thing Y happens. Two-year-olds, in my experience, often say “Yes” when they are happy and “No” when they are angry. Over time they refine that use of language to better get what they want.
But to get advanced education at some point you have to switch over from the say X to effect Y model - the goal of speaking is to agree on ideas, not to create a social effect. This is necessary for Book Learnin’ so you see it more in more educated people (I’ve said this somewhere else recently, but there’s no sequence of utterances that will make you know calculus, for example, I need to be able to explain the ideas).
Trump clearly communicates to accomplish ends. This is why I think people largely misunderstand him. When Trump says that the inauguration crowd was the biggest or the election win was the biggest, Trump’s attempting to get people to think they’re great, not actually conveying any meaning. Spicer all but confirmed this when talking about the quotation marks around “wires tapped”. Trump was attempting to generate an effect - get people on team Trump - not to tell us anything about what actually happened.
But Trump thinks everyone else is doing the same. So when the media reports that there is no evidence Trump’s phone was tapped, they hear that the media is negating the statement. Since Trump’s statement was an action directed at getting people on their team, the media’s negation of it is read as a reaction trying to get people to leave their team.
I don’t know or care if that is true. I do know that it makes sense of what Trump says and predicts how Trump will react to things.
This conveying ideas vs. creating outcomes may be a spectrum, or maybe it’s better to view it as two orthogonal axes so that a statement could do both or neither. Either way, I think this is the source of the idea of “elites”. It’s people who use language to convey ideas. That doesn’t sound like a negative trait, but I think that people who use language in this way are as quick to demean people who don’t as Trump is to filter media reports through a personal lens.
I brought this up before in a thread whether there was a study that Trump supporters could be shown pictures of the Trump and the Obama crowd. They were asked which was which, and then asked which was larger. A “surprisingly” high number of Trump supporters correctly identified which picture was of his crowd but then bizarrely insisted it was larger. So people thought this showed their ideology was overwhelming their ability to see what was in front of them.
My interpretation is that they took the second question, “Which picture has more people in it” not in the way I’d take a psychological study (I know they will ask dumb questions and they just want me to answer honestly and record whatever response they get), but in the way you’d take that question from some asshole trying to rub it in your face that their guy won. Like if your friend came over and said, “Here’s the numbers 28 and 21, which one was the score your team got in the big game,” you’d know the answer was 21. If they followed it up with, “Which number is higher?” I can’t think of any way to take the question other than them being an asshole. Insisting 21 is higher seems like a totally reasonable response - it’s a linguistic middle finger, not a way of conveying information. The think the purpose of the study is to make fun of them.
If that wasn’t the purpose of the study, it was the effect of the study. The study had people making fun of Trump supporters for being stupid, willfully blind, etc. So sometimes I feel like we shame people for having had few educational opportunities the same way that Republicans shame people for having few employment opportunities.
(This is totally different than shaming people for being racist, which I approve of)
Anyway, I hope @Nightic responds to share what they think of as “elite”. I don’t like my odds since there’s a good chance I’ll be read as a jerk looking for ammo, though.
Yeah, you’d think a president 50 days into their term could say, “Oh, wow, tucker, I haven’t read much of anything other than briefings since I started this job. I have some books I’d like to get to, but right now I just can’t find the time.” and people would be like, “Yeah, that’s fair.” Even though it would be kind of obvious bullshit it certainly wouldn’t get them any more flak than this response. It’s just another example of Trump lying about something they could have just as easily told the truth about.
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I wouldn’t expect Trump to be able to say something that coherent unless he were reading it off a teleprompter.
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I wouldn’t either. He seems really unsophisticated to me. Even after all that stuff I said about speaking to accomplish ends vs. speaking to convey meaning, you can do the former and still speak very well or very poorly. I read what he actually said as an attempt to get people to think he is smart and well-read, but to well-read people it very plainly says he doesn’t read. Trump not only hasn’t had to communicate ideas in his life to get through advanced education, but he also hasn’t had to be very good at actually getting people to react how he wants them to react. That’s what happens when you are born rich in a nation that heavily rewards the mere fact of being rich - you never have to develop any competencies.
That being said, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that he does read a bunch of stuff (maybe stuff he doesn’t think would make him sound smart, he might be devouring spy books or westerns every night, for example). The content of his message is only a clue as to how he wants you to feel when you hear it, the meaning of the words doesn’t bear any relationship to the truth at all.
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[quote=“Humbabella, post:84, topic:97216, full:true”]
I brought this up before in a thread whether there was a study that Trump supporters could be shown pictures of the Trump and the Obama crowd. They were asked which was which, and then asked which was larger. A “surprisingly” high number of Trump supporters correctly identified which picture was of his crowd but then bizarrely insisted it was larger. So people thought this showed their ideology was overwhelming their ability to see what was in front of them.[/quote]
When those pictures were shown to Trump supporters I know, they insisted that the smaller (Trump) crowd pictures were taken at different times; for example hours before Trump’s speech, and it was that darn, lying media lying to us again. They cannot deal with reality.
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Oh yeah, that’s an entirely different line of reasoning to avoid the facts. But the question being asked in the study was which photo had more people in it. If they interpreted the question as words with plain meanings, they could have said, “That one, but they were taken a different times.” The point of the study was that some significant fraction of people actually insisted the pictures of Trump’s inauguration crowd had more people in it. I think rather than assuming their political affiliation caused them to hallucinate, it is more likely that they did not interpret the question as asked, but inferred intent and answered that intent.
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That might be. But @anon50609448 is right: Trump supporters were more likely to identify the picture that obviously showed fewer people as having more people.
Edited: Oh, hi.
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Tell me about it! I noticed a lot of popular buzz about this in coverage of Bush’s campaign against Gore, and it has been a recurring trope ever since. Complaints of some ill-defined “elitism” seem to be a favorite Republican rallying cry, so does this demonstrate that there isn’t anything hegemonic about their candidates and policies?
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I understand. I’m just pointing out that sometimes, no amount of logic and reasoning can have any effect. I suppose I shouldn’t let it bother me so much.
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I love that scene, he was literally shitting himself when he realised.
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Might as well, they’re only useful for sabre rattling otherwise they’re stuck in dock slowly rusting away. You can’t fight the cybers with them. I see them being used to house refugees at some point in the future - wasn’t that in snow crash or a gibson novel?
“… and remember – the losers behind me? – mix ‘em up a bit! I want at least one Asian chick! One I can hit on later! And blacks! Not too many, though! Just enough to dupe black voters into thinking I’m cool with them, but not so many that it screws me over with the REAL American voters! And one – just one – dude who looks like a wetback; gotta win Florida, ya know! I wanna see fat, skinny, young, old! Fifty bucks each? Fuck ‘em on that! Tell ‘em anything that gets ‘em in there! Just pack those fucking losers in there!”
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Too bad for him they picked an uppity one. And on top of that, they failed to realize that she’d brought with her – gasp – a book! Probably never even occurred to them that she’d ever do a thing like reading.
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And it looks like she’s yelling back at somebody behind her… for reading perhaps?
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Right. That hit the news a bit when it happened, and a fuller video is out there somewhere. An older couple behind her tried to tell her to put the book away and pay attention to the Trumpster, and as you can see, she told them where to stick it. Ha! She’s a hero to me, with her combination of effective protest and the act of reading a book!
Edit: and her choice of a particular (awesome!) book makes me think this was a deliberate act of resistance, and probably ridicule too:
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Funny–When I was a child the folks at the local library used to keep trying to steer me to the “children’s literature” section instead of the history, science and SF adult books that I preferred to read. My parents finally had to tell them to let me check out anything I wanted. That was 64 years ago, and books are still my treasured companions. I even read Cory’s books.
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It’s hilarious. I loved Breaking Bad.
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[Kenny Loggins] “High-way to the data zoooone…”
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