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RE: What Trump supporters and Christians have in common
December 13, 2016 at 4:00 pm
I deleted part of my comment, which was to say even if they are morons and idiots (which I agree there are a lot of them out there), we need to stop framing it that way, for our own good in the long run.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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RE: What Trump supporters and Christians have in common
December 13, 2016 at 4:09 pm
(December 13, 2016 at 3:19 pm)SteelCurtain Wrote: Here's the thing, though. Can we (I mean liberals/progressives) win elections when we frame everyone else as morons?
No, but that wasn't my point. There are people out there who will accept the most off-the-wall-bizarre ideas because they have access to sources that feed it to them. Media today makes it easy to stay in a bubble while feeling as if you're tapped into a lot of information sources. You don't get past that by calling them names or by slapping them on the wrists for making poor choices.
You get past it by finding a way to make a discussion of the issues compelling. This is difficult because the past 30-50 years of election cycles have shown us that going negative and attacking character is often more effective than focusing on policy. And that is at least in part because the issues can be complex and complicated and people, in general, don't want that-- they want simple problems with simple solutions because our brains evolved that way. Nonetheless, the media missed many opportunities to ask Trump how he would govern because it was easier to make fun of him since everyone thought he was going to lose big. The same media that mercilessly exposed Sarah Palin --who wasn't even the top of her ticket-- over and over thought that mocking Trump's hair and hands was sufficient. Pence should have been an easy target but the media --again, the same one that exposed Palin-- forgot he existed.
So there is a path for future elections: take the candidates seriously and ask the tough policy questions instead of scouring twitter for tidbits that can be construed as racism.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
