(November 28, 2016 at 12:54 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: As a citizen of an outsider looking at his campaign from afar I can say that it looked racist from here in the UK. Maybe you have a different level of tolerance for bigotry over there
Sadly, we probably do. Scott Alexander put up a lengthy blog post on how the attempts to paint Trump as a racist were so overboard as to perhaps work in his favor. I'm not entirely sold on his premise, but he does show how the media narrative contrasted with what Trump was actually saying both in the past and as he campaigned.
Note that Alexander is not excusing Trump --on the contrary, he is convinced that Trump will be a disaster as President-- but pointing out that the media's desire to point out his racism led to a "boy who cried wolf" type of scenario where potential voters went tone-deaf to the message.
"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
-Stephen Jay Gould
