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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I am often puzzled by the comments here talking about how "Trump is not a very smart guy" or how his politics are "difficult to understand" or simply nonexistent because from what I can see he is easily one of the smartest/canniest political operators currently active with some of the most scrutable politics of any elected head of state in recent memory. But then I read a line like...

Given that its easier to create than to destroy...

...some of those earlier comments start to make sense more. I would posit that the reason you (and others here) seem to find Trump (and his supporters) so difficult to understand, is that Trump is operating on a wildly different set of assumptions than you are.

That was a typo lol. I mean, "easier to destroy than to create." Actually that plays into why I believe trump is stupid-- it's really easy to see how the bulk of his success is just the short-term gains from looting complex systems he lacks the intelligence to create. I won't dispute calling him "canny" because he really does have an exceptionally refined sort of animal cunning where he understands what people want on an emotional level... but I would define intelligence as either the general intelligence score or the capacity for abstract thought, and trump's mode of speech alone disproves him possessing those.

They elsewhere clarified that that was a typo, I believe.