The way to trick social media zombies into listening or taking advice from you is to go unusually slow and take lots of fake pauses; illustrate with analogies from sports and popular sitcoms whenever possible; make it seem more like gossip than your own personal reflection by claiming you just learned it from someone else; and put yourself on their level by claiming the person who told you was some brainiac, not regular folks “like us”; claim it’s a truth Obama embraces if they’re liberal, or rejects if they’re not; always pause generously and say “that’s actually a really good point” after any attempt they make, however feeble, to contribute to the subject matter; and always, always, always make them think they’re own comments contributed to the conclusion you want them to come to, even if they didn’t; keep the whole thing as short as possible with constant variation in volume, tone, and hand gestures to mimic the fluctuations of channel surfing; watch the eyes, if they begin to dart or glaze over then your next sentence should contain a curse word or sexual innuendo.
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Thursday, January 26, 2017
9 Alternative Reasons for Trump's Rise
All we hear on the subject is how angry people are at the media and Obama, but there are deeper historical, psychological, and cultural forces at work too. Nine, to be precise...
1. MEN. Americans, particularly white, heterosexual males, have been expected to feel a certain amount of guilt for the bad parts of civilization while receiving zero credit for the good. In recent decades the anger towards them and the amount of guilt expected of them has been steadily ratcheted up by the left. Trump is an announcement by his supporters that their reservoir of guilt has run dry, and that they no longer give a crap, if they ever did.
2. MASCULINITY. Trump is a primitive alpha-male. In sharp contrast to wonkish, effete establishment politicians, Trump projects the sort of primal masculine aggression and authority that resonates with American men (and many women), who for a number of historical and cultural reasons all see themselves as blue collar at heart, regardless of what they do. This helps explain the gender gap in voting between Trump & Clinton, and the instinct by Trump supporters to instantly forgive his aggressive pursuit of women and chest-thumping bombast.
3. VIRTUAL COMMUNITY. We live in the age of anonymity, where a majority of our social lives take place on the internet. This allows us to not only harden our current biases without the moderating effects of social stigma, but also acknowledge and publicize so called "extreme" opinions we may have heretofore hidden from the prying eyes of our stifling PC culture.. Movements like the alt-right have traditionally been so far outside the mainstream that the chance encounter of any two individuals with similar ideas would have been extremely unlikely, and risky. Virtual communities have allowed proponents of these ideas to find each other and build real political momentum.
4. ANTI - P.C. The fact that Trump's shockingly nonchalant, seemingly reckless rhetoric about women, illegal immigrants, off-shoring corporations, political opponents, and geopolitical rivals has had so little effect on him or his candidacy has, I think, empowered and emboldened regular folks to recognize tribalistic urges within themselves and finally give voice to race, class, and gender-based observations that aren't considered politically correct. Ironically, this is the same identity politics that mainstream conservatism has been unsuccessfully trying to obviate for decades while the left has fought tooth and nail to make "identity" the filter through which we see every issue, based on the assumption that it helps them keep "minorities" enthralled to the Democratic party.
5. TRIBALISM. Trump is instinctively tribalistic in an increasingly tribalistic time. It's not a coincidence that the vast majority of human societies for the vast majority of human history followed a simple governmental system: autocracy. It's how we're hard-wired. If the entire evolution of human social organization were condensed into a week, then it was about 10 minutes ago that we invented "civilization". Before that, we did whatever the baddest guy in the tribe said. So, for 168 hrs and 50 minutes we followed an autocratic ruler because it kept us safe and unified, 10 minutes ago this basic formula was adapted for a much larger scale in the form of civilization, and 20 seconds ago the political left began to dismantle everything we had ever built and deny the truth of everything we had ever learned through thousands of years of trial and error and replace it with absolutely nothing. Something was bound to give...and Trump is the beginning of that something.
6. WHITES. Whites are finally beginning to vote like a minority. That is to say, like anxious people circling the wagons. Perhaps this anxiety comes as a result of their decreasing share of the population, or the unrestrained criticism of whites by pundits, academics, leftist politicians, and celebrities. It might be the double standard of allowing every single demographic to congregate freely, without suspicion, except for whites and men. Trump, or perhaps more accurately, the perception of Trump, caused many whites to believe they finally had a way of expressing their feeling of disenfranchisement.
7. GLOBALIZATION. After decades of creeping globalization and the inevitable loss of national and cultural identity this causes, people are looking with more fondness upon good old fashioned nationalism. I don't think this represents any sort of philosophical change as much is it does an unveiling of working class Americans' true feelings. American exceptionalism has always offered a certain rationale for isolationism. We tolerated globalization as long as it seemed to be working in our favor, but it was never a love affair. Americans are finally becoming aware of how much American blood and treasure is spent maintaining global peace and stability, and how little respect and appreciation is given in return. America is tired of being the world's Hank Reardon.
8) ALTERNATIVE RIGHT. Most people had never heard of the alt-right before the 2016 election, but it has been one of the important forces cultivating and unifying the disparate online pro-Trump communities, quietly re-mainstreaming traditional political and social ideas that postmodern intellectuals thought long-vanquished. It attacks the left with the sort of mischievous guerilla cunning unsurprising from a group that has dwelt in fringe obscurity for so long they've come to see mere provocation (i.e. trolling) as a form of victory.
9) ANTI - B.S. Elitist intellectuals tell us capital punishment costs more than life in prison, that having more women in the boardroom magically increases profitability, that Islam is a religion of peace, that there's no such thing as human nature, that massive deficits don't matter, that black people fail because of racism, that a female regretting a sexual encounter = rape, that we can't afford to deport illegal immigrants, or build a wall, or that disliking illegal immigration makes you anti-immigrant, that the second amendment causes gun violence, that illegal immigrants give more than they take......and so on. Trump's election is a collective shout of "BS!". Of course, most of us have always known it was all BS, but there was never any viable leader with the balls to say so on an actual ballot. If Trump is full of it too, then at least it's the kind that isn't blatantly designed to systematically dismantle western civilization.
1. MEN. Americans, particularly white, heterosexual males, have been expected to feel a certain amount of guilt for the bad parts of civilization while receiving zero credit for the good. In recent decades the anger towards them and the amount of guilt expected of them has been steadily ratcheted up by the left. Trump is an announcement by his supporters that their reservoir of guilt has run dry, and that they no longer give a crap, if they ever did.
2. MASCULINITY. Trump is a primitive alpha-male. In sharp contrast to wonkish, effete establishment politicians, Trump projects the sort of primal masculine aggression and authority that resonates with American men (and many women), who for a number of historical and cultural reasons all see themselves as blue collar at heart, regardless of what they do. This helps explain the gender gap in voting between Trump & Clinton, and the instinct by Trump supporters to instantly forgive his aggressive pursuit of women and chest-thumping bombast.
3. VIRTUAL COMMUNITY. We live in the age of anonymity, where a majority of our social lives take place on the internet. This allows us to not only harden our current biases without the moderating effects of social stigma, but also acknowledge and publicize so called "extreme" opinions we may have heretofore hidden from the prying eyes of our stifling PC culture.. Movements like the alt-right have traditionally been so far outside the mainstream that the chance encounter of any two individuals with similar ideas would have been extremely unlikely, and risky. Virtual communities have allowed proponents of these ideas to find each other and build real political momentum.
4. ANTI - P.C. The fact that Trump's shockingly nonchalant, seemingly reckless rhetoric about women, illegal immigrants, off-shoring corporations, political opponents, and geopolitical rivals has had so little effect on him or his candidacy has, I think, empowered and emboldened regular folks to recognize tribalistic urges within themselves and finally give voice to race, class, and gender-based observations that aren't considered politically correct. Ironically, this is the same identity politics that mainstream conservatism has been unsuccessfully trying to obviate for decades while the left has fought tooth and nail to make "identity" the filter through which we see every issue, based on the assumption that it helps them keep "minorities" enthralled to the Democratic party.
5. TRIBALISM. Trump is instinctively tribalistic in an increasingly tribalistic time. It's not a coincidence that the vast majority of human societies for the vast majority of human history followed a simple governmental system: autocracy. It's how we're hard-wired. If the entire evolution of human social organization were condensed into a week, then it was about 10 minutes ago that we invented "civilization". Before that, we did whatever the baddest guy in the tribe said. So, for 168 hrs and 50 minutes we followed an autocratic ruler because it kept us safe and unified, 10 minutes ago this basic formula was adapted for a much larger scale in the form of civilization, and 20 seconds ago the political left began to dismantle everything we had ever built and deny the truth of everything we had ever learned through thousands of years of trial and error and replace it with absolutely nothing. Something was bound to give...and Trump is the beginning of that something.
6. WHITES. Whites are finally beginning to vote like a minority. That is to say, like anxious people circling the wagons. Perhaps this anxiety comes as a result of their decreasing share of the population, or the unrestrained criticism of whites by pundits, academics, leftist politicians, and celebrities. It might be the double standard of allowing every single demographic to congregate freely, without suspicion, except for whites and men. Trump, or perhaps more accurately, the perception of Trump, caused many whites to believe they finally had a way of expressing their feeling of disenfranchisement.
7. GLOBALIZATION. After decades of creeping globalization and the inevitable loss of national and cultural identity this causes, people are looking with more fondness upon good old fashioned nationalism. I don't think this represents any sort of philosophical change as much is it does an unveiling of working class Americans' true feelings. American exceptionalism has always offered a certain rationale for isolationism. We tolerated globalization as long as it seemed to be working in our favor, but it was never a love affair. Americans are finally becoming aware of how much American blood and treasure is spent maintaining global peace and stability, and how little respect and appreciation is given in return. America is tired of being the world's Hank Reardon.
8) ALTERNATIVE RIGHT. Most people had never heard of the alt-right before the 2016 election, but it has been one of the important forces cultivating and unifying the disparate online pro-Trump communities, quietly re-mainstreaming traditional political and social ideas that postmodern intellectuals thought long-vanquished. It attacks the left with the sort of mischievous guerilla cunning unsurprising from a group that has dwelt in fringe obscurity for so long they've come to see mere provocation (i.e. trolling) as a form of victory.
9) ANTI - B.S. Elitist intellectuals tell us capital punishment costs more than life in prison, that having more women in the boardroom magically increases profitability, that Islam is a religion of peace, that there's no such thing as human nature, that massive deficits don't matter, that black people fail because of racism, that a female regretting a sexual encounter = rape, that we can't afford to deport illegal immigrants, or build a wall, or that disliking illegal immigration makes you anti-immigrant, that the second amendment causes gun violence, that illegal immigrants give more than they take......and so on. Trump's election is a collective shout of "BS!". Of course, most of us have always known it was all BS, but there was never any viable leader with the balls to say so on an actual ballot. If Trump is full of it too, then at least it's the kind that isn't blatantly designed to systematically dismantle western civilization.
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