None of us were paying any attention to you back in college, sorry
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Ouch.
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This political party is like a scary Milgram experiment.
FTFY
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I honestly can’t tell the difference. Trump transcends parody. That’s why nobody can tell when he’s being “sarcastic,” including himself.
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I have a friend who is a Trump supporter. She is an otherwise really nice and good person. I can’t even have a conversation with her right now because she sounds EXACTLY like these people. I don’t get it. I really, really don’t get it. It’s like a certain percentage of the population has been put under some kind of spell. Although I will say the one thing my friend believes that I can’t convince her isn’t true is that illegal immigrants from Mexico are basically the cause of all economic problems in this country. And I think that drives her support of Trump. I suspect that belief drives a lot of Trump’s support.
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None of this surprises me. When I was a kid back in the dark ages of the 1970s, I lived in small-town America. I am the exact opposite of a confrontational guy, but I insisted on wearing my hair long. The bullying was constant, although mostly verbal. My tormentors frequently entertained themselves by spinning out descriptions of proper punishments for wearing the hairstyle of the hated Hippie F****t. These punishments were not particularly imaginative, but they were grisly indeed.
Many people are trained from birth to quickly locate the OTHER in their community and hurl abuse at them. If they don’t have a handy longhair or person-of-color, they’ll turn on they guy who didn’t mow his lawn or the guy that bought a small car instead of a truck. I’m not surprised that my tormentors grew up unchanged, nor am I surprised that they raised their children in the style that their tradition demands. Shirley Jackson sure had their number.
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This clip’s fake commercials/focus group were mocking Trump with a lot more than just the shock collar thing, FWIW (guns in all women’s bathrooms, etc.)
If you haven’t seen Triumph’s Election Special 2016 coverage of the GOP primary that came out in Feb., you should. I haven’t laughed that hard in ages. Haven’t seen this new one yet, though I assume it’ll be brilliant.
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This doesn’t surprise me nearly as much as how many of the tormented become reactionary adults.
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I caught a little of his shtick during the GOP convention, and it was, as you say, damned funny.
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…who might also be referred to as an “insult comic dog.”
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If they are actors, Triumph’s crew are running a hell of a long con. For one, “Brian Gogerty of Strongsville, Ohio” is how the “heavy” guy identifies himself at the beginning of the video. He has a Facebook page that goes back years, and looks pretty much what you’d expect a Trump supporter’s page to look like (previously had Confederate flag as profile photo, posts requesting prayers, etc.)
Although it would give me immense comfort to believe they’re actors, I don’t think they are. This is how authoritarianism works.
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Decent jobs with good pay, single payer health care, and k-16 public education?
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I know several otherwise perfectly competent and nice people who firmly believe that illegal immigrants are ruining the country by “taking all of our jobs” and that Mexicans are the worst offenders. I’m not sure if they’re Trump supporters, but if so that would be the single issue they’d be voting for him on.
They are all also very greedy individuals who think that paying any kind of tax is unconstitutional.
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???
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As a few others (@LurkingGrue, @nungesser, @Gyrofrog) have said: these sort of punk’d videos almost invariably require a lot of failed attempts that are not being shown. Furthermore, anyone feeling high and mighty about how these are just authoritarian Trumpkin sheep needs to review the Asch experiments courteously linked by @AnthonyC above. Asch’s research is a watermark in social psychology which, I remind you, applies to all human beings, including you. Yeah, you.
Give me a time machine, a Bernie Sanders impersonator, and a video editing crew and I’ll bet you ever last dollar of funding that I can find a group of Bernie supporters who would support advantageous gerrymandering and unconstitutional repression of opposing political parties, factions, and lobbyist groups.
I’m not arguing equivalence here. The Trump electorate is more tolerant of violence, racism, sexism, and many other reprehensible aspects of the U.S. citizenry. But the self-selection bias here along with the results of the Asch experiments make it totally reasonable to question whether any given one of these people is significantly more susceptible to the pressure to conform than a randomly chosen U.S. citizen.
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The guy is lonely, uses. Facebook. Very. Strangely.
And I don’t think he’s an actor, either.
He probably signs up for any product reviews, getting paid for them, and thought this was just another random one.
(I was offered this kind of gig once)
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I would also add that as someone who’s been in a ton of these sort of focus groups (I grew up in Columbus, one of the top test-market cities in the country, and everyone does these for cash) and has spent many hours observing focus groups behind one-way glass as a marketer, they typically do two or three days of these, with a dozen groups, and they try many ways of phrasing questions to get the answers they want. For all I know, their positive responses came as an answer to the test leader saying “If you were someone who thought this was a great ad, what would you say about it, whether you feel that way or not?”
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My friend is not greedy. Far from it, actually. She’s just not educated, works in a factory, and is probably someone Trump would very quickly dismiss as being a total loser. She cannot see this.
They’ll be the Corporate Sponsor.
