House of Eratosthenes

Master Debaters

How’s this for obvious: Your reaction to the debate says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does about the debate…
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The best thing about debates, in my opinion, is how they’re by liberals, for liberals, so you can conduct some psychological research on the fly…
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Just as in generic extruded fantasy product novels, the humble dorky awkward farmboy is always the Savior of the Universe, so the Gamma / Liberal is the real hero of whatever situation he’s in, because he has some secret untapped power. The difference between GEFP and real life, of course, is that in real life the liberal believes he has found and activated his secret untapped power: Words!

Observe liberals for any length of time — particularly on the internet — and you can’t help but conclude that they really think they’re winning by being snarky and dismissive. They act as if coming up with a really great comeback 20 minutes after getting stuffed into a locker by the quarterback is the same thing as — no, better than! — beating him up in the parking lot.
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Part of this was W. specifically — they’d cling to their precious “he’s the dumbest idiot evar!” narrative even if he trounced Einstein in a calculus contest — but a lot of it is their own insecurities. Which leads them to vastly overrate the importance of specifics, details, and especially “debate” performances.

Figuring out these liberals is just like fighting the Hydra: Resolve a single unanswered question by lopping off a head, two more questions/heads grow back on the stump, and immediately. Hillary is supposedly the better choice, even though her policies are wretched and the results of her meddling, wherever she’s been allowed to meddle, are even worse — because of The Power Of Words. Good ol’ style-over-substance, from the nineties when her husband was boss. She’s the better leader because she’s got the spiffy comeback.

How come it is, then, that she needs help from the “fact checkers”?

“Fact checking” doesn’t pretend to be straight news exactly, but something more authoritative. The conceit of the “fact checker” is that he has some sort of heightened level of objectivity qualifying him to render verdicts in matters of public controversy.

Lately the “fact checkers” have been waging a campaign to portray Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war, contrary to his assertions that he was an opponent. In Monday’s debate, Hillary Clinton pleaded for their help: “I hope the fact checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard. Donald supported the invasion of Iraq.” Moderator Lester Holt obliged, basing a question to Trump on the premise that the matter was settled: “You supported the war in Iraq before the invasion.”

So, it isn’t clear to me that Hillary is winning any sort of war-of-words here; certainly, not that she’s capable of doing so on her own. Nor is it clear to me that the “fact checkers” are actually checking facts. This looks to me more like opinion-checking. As in, I am to think of Donald Trump as a supporter of the invasion of Iraq. Hmmm. Guess I’m outside of the intended audience, once again, since I can recall with clarity what happened. Seems like last Tuesday or thereabouts. I wonder, is this what it’s like to grow old?

But, sometimes fact checkers act like real fact-checkers. It happens occasionally. The WSJ article linked above, brings the example of Donald Trump blatantly misrepresenting one of his prior statements, noted by FactCheck.org. “I didn’t say lie. I said he may have lied. I don’t know.” That was balderdash:

You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none. And they knew there were none.

Which reflects well, and much more uniquely than it should, on FactCheck. WSJ hits the nail on the head when it remarks: “It was a rare example of a ‘fact check’ that simply checked a fact.”

Regarding who won, Severian concludes in his write-up,

We’ll see. If poll numbers drift Hillary-ward in the next week, she won. But I bet they continue their Trumpward momentum with hardly a pause.

Well…that has yet to be seen. Starting to look like Hillary did win. Guess the “fact checkers” managed to help her!

Where Trump goes from here: He can continue to play it nice like in this first debate — the phrase “Crooked Hillary” didn’t make even a single appearance. Trump, instead, tended to make each squabble about him, which is most easily noted in Hillary’s ambush move involving that plus-sized Playboy model. Trump took the bait. This has a decidedly negative impact over the short term…results I would describe as “mixed” over the longer term.

He could go scorched-earth, like Larry Elder seems to me to be recommending, when you boil his advice down to its bare essentials. There is at least justice in that, since it is generally true that whenever Hillary points a finger, three more curl around and point back at her.

In his position, I think I’d shrug. There is justice in that too. “Miss Universe says you called her ‘Miss Piggy’ after she gained sixty pounds and it made her feel bad.” ++Raspy sigh++ Hillary, is that really the best you can do? Really? Can we get back to businesses, tax policy, jobs, and what are we doing to defeat ISIS?

The President of the United States doesn’t get to decide for the rest of us whether we should think fat porkers are sexy. Article II of the U.S. Constitution does not list that authority.

Link available upon request, but this is the exact quote with a liberal I was discussing things with:

So…you’re response to the wage gap is to…try to make money off of it? Cute. And, with that, the little good-will I had to continue this exchange has been exhausted.

They can’t even grasp the fact that “try and make money off of it” is how 99% (possibly underestimating that) of the things we like in this country got built and developed.
- Nate Winchester | 09/29/2016 @ 12:59
Thanks for the linkage!

IMHO, Trump should do precisely nothing, about “Miss Piggy” or anything else. His only goal in the debates is to not look like a lunatic. He shouldn’t have let her bait him — and his prep team should’ve prepared him for that obvious ploy — but all in, it’s at worst a wash. The public didn’t see anything out of Granny Fallsalot that they haven’t seen a million times before; meanwhile, those who were seeing Trump for the first time saw a standard-issue politician… in other words, a safe sane boring choice. Which is all he needs. Providing he can hold back from actually pissing on her shoes on stage at a debate, he’s fine.
- Severian | 09/29/2016 @ 14:50
Hope you’re right.
- mkfreeberg | 09/29/2016 @ 17:34
No “fact checkers” need be consulted….
“Check out that fat piggys sex tape.
Check the news around that murder. ”
The DoJ, and the FBI said……
NO! “They” did NOT.
- CaptDMO | 09/30/2016 @ 16:15

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“It Was a Rare Example of a ‘Fact Check’ That Simply Checked a Fact”Thursday, September 29th, 2016

“It Was a Rare Example of a ‘Fact Check’ That Simply Checked a Fact”
Thursday, September 29th, 2016