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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Note that each of those articles were written after the fact. None of those outlets, especially not the Grauniad and Chicago Tribune, would have countenanced the possibility for Trump winning prior to November 7th 2016.

For reference here is the Culture War thread from the week of the election.

Exactly, after events happened some people were claiming that was inevitable and obvious despite claiming exactly opposite before event.

I agree with you, I'm just pointing out an obvious problem with @FiveHourMarathon's alleged evidence, and offering counter-evidence of my own. The thing about going back to the thread from the day of is that even though a lot of the more ardent Clinton supporters have since deleted their posts, you can see the shift happening in real time as Trump goes from "joke candidate who will never win" to "president-elect".

I'm not really sure what the problem is, so either it's so obvious I'm missing it or we've lost the plot here.

The whole original context of that link dump was supporting @orthoxerox comparison:

I've already written elsewhere that a lot of people are talking about the war the way they some people were talking about Trump's 2016 victory. "Of course Trump was going to win, the writing was on the wall." "Of course Ukraine was not going to fall, the writing was on the wall."

The whole point is that the newspapers (and internet blowhards) went from pre-election/prewar certainty that Clinton/Russia would win in a brutal stomping, to finger-wagging smug certainty that "everyone knew Clinton/Russia's campaign was fatally flawed and that Trump/Ukraine were guaranteed a win." With the side dish of "Trump/Ukraine supporters weren't brave smart contrarians because they were just pointing out the obvious things we all knew."

This whole "Hillary and Trump were both trash politicians" thing quickly requires that "Rubio and Cruz and Bush III and every Democrat who stayed out of the race for fear of Hillary are all Trash Politicians" and then once you start working your way down we haven't had a decent politician since like Nixon or LBJ. Clearly someone is winning all these elections, and since nobody else can, we have to assume that the winners are pretty good at something.

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