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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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Trump is intelligible in the sense that, if you're already familiar with the context he's speaking in, you can follow what he's trying to say. However, of you're not, you'll be lost.

His chatter about the Charlottesville fact check in the Biden debate made it exceptionally clear that he struggles to actually bring a point home and land it. If you knew already that Snopes had changed the status of the fact check then you could follow perfectly well what was going on but, if you were coming in cold, his point came off very weak and diffuse.

Knee-jerk I disagreed. But to test this, I opened up the Lex Fridman interview, which I haven't listened to, and copied a random clip from the transcript without looking at the context:

(00:10:39) So I’ve done a lot of debating, only as a politician. I never debated. My first debate was the Rosie O’Donnell debate, the famous Rosie O’Donnell debate, the answer. But I’ve done well with debates. I became president. Then the second time, I got millions more votes than I got the first time. I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win, you can’t not when. And I got millions of more votes on that and lost by a whisker. And look what happened to the world with all of the wars and all of the problems. And look what happened with inflation because inflation is just eating up our country, eating it up. So it’s too bad. But there are a lot of things that could happen. We have to get those wars settled. I’ll tell you, you have to get Ukraine done. That could end up in a third world war. So could the Middle East. So could the Middle East.

So, yeah, without seeing what Lex said to prompt this, I have no fucking clue what the main point or thesis of this rambling is, or what it might be responding to. This bit as bad as anything Kamala says, tbh. Looks like total free assoication. (not word salad).

here's another one just to be fair:

(00:24:09) Nothing. I know nothing about it. And they know that too. Democrats know that. And I purposely haven’t read it, because I want to say to you, I have no idea what it’s all about. It’s easier, than saying I read it and all of the things. No, I purposely haven’t read it and I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard about things that are in there that I don’t like, and there’s some things in there that everybody would like, but there are things that I don’t like at all. And I think it’s unfortunate that they put it out, but it doesn’t mean anything, because it has nothing to do with me. Project 25 has absolutely nothing to do with me.

This one is quite a bit easier, and pretty coherent.

He's easily coherent (sometimes moreso than Kamala), he just seems to have no concept of the difference between what's in his head and what might be in other people's heads. He often talks as if everyone is just as online and embedded in the right wing echo chamber as he is, referring to people and events off hand and just kind of assuming everyone understands what he's talking about. This works fine at rallies but it really doesn't with general audiences.

I think his main issue is the interview format in general. He's good at rallies because he controls the entire conversation there. He's also good at one-on-one discussion because he'll just overwhelm the person and schmooze them and it usually works very well. But when talking to one person for the benefit of an audience, neither of these work. If he schmoozes the interviewer that does nothing for the audience and if he takes control of the discussion then it looks like he's evading questions. Simply having a conversation on another person's terms, or at least as equals, seems very difficult to him. I can't stand hearing him in interviews.

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