It’s pretty simple; he is not stupid, he is venal.
Any discussion of what he wants to do for the rest of us is wasted air. He has no interest whatsoever in “the rest of us”. One need only look at his preferred response to people who cross him. They are “disloyal”. Ponder that.
He is a mob boss who stays closer to the boundary of legality than say John Gotti (both of them shared the spotlight in 80s NYC, bringing to mind the great Shakespeare wars of the 19th Century the way they vied to be the headliner on Page Six.)
One of the ways to stay really relevant to other people is to owe them a lot of money. He was good at that.
He completely inhabit the idea that the best part of being rich is to never have to pay your bills.
The claim President Trump is stupid never washed -- he's had outsized success in at least three largely independent fields (media, real estate development/branding, and politics), and his first- and second-degree relatives have (by inference) high IQ's (e.g., federal judge, MIT professor of physics, etc.).
And to be sure, as you point out, Trump often used the tactic of letting the media's yen to "correct" him drive coverage. Thus, for example, he'd often inflate some statistic the media was ignoring so that they'd offer the correct one, etc. Very effective tactic!
What's more, his move into politics (essentially adopting the Buchanan platform, which is funny since he disparaged Buchanan) had many of the marks of brilliance.
(That said, while he may have the warrior knack of a modern King David slaying the GOP/uniparty Goliath, he lacked the administrative zest of a Solomon to follow it up -- he may be able to, say, draw attention to Spygate, or election improprieties, but hasn't the follow-through nor the personnel selection skills to rectify matters.)
Returning to the main point, my read on Trump is that he has an "executive" personality type -- highly disciplined if not OCD, high energy, high intelligence, but also with a low boredom threshold (ADD-ish). And he has always coded as "blue collar" (or at least, non-prestigious) -- even back in the 80s, he was a "stubby fingered vulgarian" per Graydon Carter. It was thus inevitable that he'd be cast as an idiot by the popular press when he ran as a Republican.
This is great. I live in Trump country, and if you're ever near Buffalo NY, come on out to Strykersville, and I'll buy you a beer and food at the Flip Side where I work, and you can meet (my?) people. In general everyone is a pretty nice person to know. The USA is a pretty dang good place to live, IMHO. People are all in some sense controlled by the media they consume. (And media's first goal is to have you come back tomorrow.) (I've stopped watching the news.)
I think I had TDS for a year of so, but then I realized that Trump was a political, tribal genius. I picked Trump over Desantis 2:1* in Scott A's 2023 perdition post But that's all based on my local knowledge. I really hate the all tribalism, but I'm not sure what to do. Have you read "The Goodness Paradox"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goodness_Paradox
It keeps reframing all my thinking. (I'm an old fart, 64y)
*all the media's interest in Desantis, is wishful thinking... at least that's my current model, we'll know more when votes are cast.
“Some in flyover country reject Darwinian evolution but many on the other side reject one of its most obvious implications — that since we are optimized for reproductive success and males and females differ in their reproductive roles, there is no reason to expect males and females to have the same distribution of behavioral or intellectual characteristics.”
I don't see how what I wrote is relevant to trans issues. Its political relevance is as an explanation other than discrimination of differing outcomes, such as the fact that math and physics professors at top universities are overwhelmingly male.
Male and female distributions are different but they overlap. Supposedly men are better at map reading types of tasks than women. But I am terrible at remembering maps — when I used to play WoW I would warn fellow members of a team that I could get lost on a tabletop. My wife, as a geologist, used to make her living doing three dimensional mapping for Shell.
The two questions for trans issues are whether it is true that some people are one sex biologically but the other psychologically and, if so, how other people should deal with them. The former isn't impossible — there are, after all, occasionally people who are one sex genetically and the other in physical appearance, due to some rare malfunction in development, as well as people who are genetically neither XX nor XY. Neither question is answered by the observation that male and female were subject to different selective pressures.
Going back to Matt's point, I think what is happening is that one side is pushing support for trans rights well past the point that most voters agree with, and the other side sees that as an opportunity to pick up votes. I wouldn't describe that as "defining itself by."
The point was demonstrated quite dramatically in Scotland recently, when the longtime leader of the dominant party resigned after it became clear that legislation she had pushed could result in a convicted male rapist claiming to be a woman and demanding that he be put in a woman's prison.
Nah, tribalism is drawing lines and it's pretty easy to draw lines that cut off minorities. I think there are legitimate discussions to be had around trans rights. But yeah with tribalism those are harder discussions to have.
You can say this is nothing like trans rights, but I hated it when Trump brought the NFL into the political/ tribal debate. (I'm a big sports fan, who found sports as my refuge from politics.)
It’s pretty simple; he is not stupid, he is venal.
Any discussion of what he wants to do for the rest of us is wasted air. He has no interest whatsoever in “the rest of us”. One need only look at his preferred response to people who cross him. They are “disloyal”. Ponder that.
He is a mob boss who stays closer to the boundary of legality than say John Gotti (both of them shared the spotlight in 80s NYC, bringing to mind the great Shakespeare wars of the 19th Century the way they vied to be the headliner on Page Six.)
One of the ways to stay really relevant to other people is to owe them a lot of money. He was good at that.
He completely inhabit the idea that the best part of being rich is to never have to pay your bills.
The claim President Trump is stupid never washed -- he's had outsized success in at least three largely independent fields (media, real estate development/branding, and politics), and his first- and second-degree relatives have (by inference) high IQ's (e.g., federal judge, MIT professor of physics, etc.).
And to be sure, as you point out, Trump often used the tactic of letting the media's yen to "correct" him drive coverage. Thus, for example, he'd often inflate some statistic the media was ignoring so that they'd offer the correct one, etc. Very effective tactic!
What's more, his move into politics (essentially adopting the Buchanan platform, which is funny since he disparaged Buchanan) had many of the marks of brilliance.
(That said, while he may have the warrior knack of a modern King David slaying the GOP/uniparty Goliath, he lacked the administrative zest of a Solomon to follow it up -- he may be able to, say, draw attention to Spygate, or election improprieties, but hasn't the follow-through nor the personnel selection skills to rectify matters.)
Returning to the main point, my read on Trump is that he has an "executive" personality type -- highly disciplined if not OCD, high energy, high intelligence, but also with a low boredom threshold (ADD-ish). And he has always coded as "blue collar" (or at least, non-prestigious) -- even back in the 80s, he was a "stubby fingered vulgarian" per Graydon Carter. It was thus inevitable that he'd be cast as an idiot by the popular press when he ran as a Republican.
When I click on the Karan link, it brings me back here. That is an error or I am deeply confused.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/publish/post/103386326
My error. I've fixed it. The link now goes to: https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/06/another-good-article-by-dan-kahan.html
This is great. I live in Trump country, and if you're ever near Buffalo NY, come on out to Strykersville, and I'll buy you a beer and food at the Flip Side where I work, and you can meet (my?) people. In general everyone is a pretty nice person to know. The USA is a pretty dang good place to live, IMHO. People are all in some sense controlled by the media they consume. (And media's first goal is to have you come back tomorrow.) (I've stopped watching the news.)
I think I had TDS for a year of so, but then I realized that Trump was a political, tribal genius. I picked Trump over Desantis 2:1* in Scott A's 2023 perdition post But that's all based on my local knowledge. I really hate the all tribalism, but I'm not sure what to do. Have you read "The Goodness Paradox"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goodness_Paradox
It keeps reframing all my thinking. (I'm an old fart, 64y)
*all the media's interest in Desantis, is wishful thinking... at least that's my current model, we'll know more when votes are cast.
Bolsonaro, former President of Brazil is a "developing country copycat" of Trump. It seems they will be together in a CIPAC in March!
I take your point, but one side is now defining itself by prejudice towards trans people. That's pretty hard to stomach.
You missed the last paragraph then:
“Some in flyover country reject Darwinian evolution but many on the other side reject one of its most obvious implications — that since we are optimized for reproductive success and males and females differ in their reproductive roles, there is no reason to expect males and females to have the same distribution of behavioral or intellectual characteristics.”
I don't see how what I wrote is relevant to trans issues. Its political relevance is as an explanation other than discrimination of differing outcomes, such as the fact that math and physics professors at top universities are overwhelmingly male.
Male and female distributions are different but they overlap. Supposedly men are better at map reading types of tasks than women. But I am terrible at remembering maps — when I used to play WoW I would warn fellow members of a team that I could get lost on a tabletop. My wife, as a geologist, used to make her living doing three dimensional mapping for Shell.
The two questions for trans issues are whether it is true that some people are one sex biologically but the other psychologically and, if so, how other people should deal with them. The former isn't impossible — there are, after all, occasionally people who are one sex genetically and the other in physical appearance, due to some rare malfunction in development, as well as people who are genetically neither XX nor XY. Neither question is answered by the observation that male and female were subject to different selective pressures.
Going back to Matt's point, I think what is happening is that one side is pushing support for trans rights well past the point that most voters agree with, and the other side sees that as an opportunity to pick up votes. I wouldn't describe that as "defining itself by."
The point was demonstrated quite dramatically in Scotland recently, when the longtime leader of the dominant party resigned after it became clear that legislation she had pushed could result in a convicted male rapist claiming to be a woman and demanding that he be put in a woman's prison.
Nah, tribalism is drawing lines and it's pretty easy to draw lines that cut off minorities. I think there are legitimate discussions to be had around trans rights. But yeah with tribalism those are harder discussions to have.
You can say this is nothing like trans rights, but I hated it when Trump brought the NFL into the political/ tribal debate. (I'm a big sports fan, who found sports as my refuge from politics.)