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Transparent false equivalence. Ostensibly respectable left-leaning newspapers of record spent years milking the "Trump = Hitler" comparisons for all they were worth. Russiagate was a nonsensical conspiracy theory elevated to the status of a federal inquiry. I'll grant that a lot of people who should have known better gave the birth certificate theory more credence than it deserved, but the only people I've seen claiming that Michelle Obama has a penis are extremely online far-right weirdos. If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.
Of course it's not realistic to expect everyone who dislikes Trump never to act histrionic or retarded. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to request mainstream, ostensibly neutral institutions to dial down the hysteria a smidge.
Why not? Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.
Agreed.
I don't have to own anything. I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way, I've personally attended at least one protest against a policy he enacted, and even if I had been eligible to vote for him in 2016, 2020 or 2024 (neither being a US citizen nor residing in the US), I wouldn't have.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
Fair enough, anyone who claimed that Trump was literally a Hitler 2.0 hell bent on a new holocaust went too far. Anyone who stopped short of that, including those who merely accused him of being a 'danger to democracy' has, I think, been vindicated. There were plenty of contemporaneous articles which evaluated Trump as a menace without descending into hysteria.
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole. 'Ha! you thought he was a wannabe mass murderer, but in fact he is just a wannabe imperialist and warmonger'. Wow, great point. This is definitely where the nexus of the conversation should be.
Fair enough. Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
As someone who voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Kamala in 2024, I second what Folamh3 responded about this apparent arguments-as-soldiers worldview. But I also want to add on that, we can combine the last 2 paragraphs of that comment to see that, from a purely selfish, power-hungry perspective, this sort of thinking is counterproductive. There's no shortage of very good, very well-supported, and very non-partisan reasons why Trump is and would be a terrible POTUS. Yet much of the messaging against him was so filled with hyperbole that even in 2016, calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" or whatever was considered cliche. Things have tended to escalate since.
And this has resulted largely in the discrediting of the people and organizations that kept up this hyperbole. When someone keeps demonstrating that they want to send a message in order to accomplish a certain goal instead of wanting to describe reality accurately (which, at a minimum, requires taking a highly skeptical view of one's own biases and welcoming criticism and feedback from people who disagree with you vehemently), then other people notice and lower their credibility accordingly. I believe it was a commenter here that described it as something like "Media keeps pressing the 'attack Trump/hurt own credibility' button" or something like that, and that's what I've been seeing play out over and over again over the past decade. And it's resulted in people seeking out and even creating alternative sources of information and commentary that mainstream news outlets used to be the primary sources for. Arguably, Musk's purchase of Twitter was also an effect. And this has tended to help Trump. And not just Trump, but also people who actually are the types of genocidal fascists that his critics make him out as.
Which, IMHO, has always been the biggest danger to this whole Trump thing that's been going on the past decade. Again, as far back as 2016, I recall reading someone, maybe on SlateStarCodex, saying that they're not afraid of Trump, they're afraid of who might come after Trump. Now, I'm somewhat afraid of Trump, but not that much more than any other Republican POTUS, but I'm definitely more afraid of what could rise up from the farther, even more extreme right wing due to much of the left having so completely discredited its ability to criticize such people.
I think the only way to gain back credibility is to demonstrate that there are very powerful, very influential internal controls that engage in self-reflection and self-criticism of one's own side, in a way that attempts at getting at the truth, especially if the truth helps one's opponents and hurts one's friends. Unfortunately, I've seen a dearth of such things over the past decade, though it's not zero.
I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson.
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No argument here, but specificity matters. Rapists and murderers are both dangerous people, but if you're accusing someone of being a rapist, you need to present evidence that they actually raped someone; presenting evidence that they murdered someone is irrelevant. If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way, rather than just saying "he is an extremely dangerous man". As I said previously, Trump only benefitted by baseless accusations of genocide-mongering. A little message discipline would have served his opponents well.
I find it kind of staggering, that you apparently don't see any kind of causal link between a politician repeatedly asserting that the mainstream media is "fake news", said mainstream media producing avalanches of hysterical and overwrought predictions about the horrors that are soon to befall the world if he is elected, said predictions conspicuously failing to come to pass, and the politician getting reelected.
I hate this Manichaean arguments-as-soldiers worldview, in which if I point out that some factual claim about Donald Trump is false, the only possible explanation is that I'm doing so because I admire him and think that he's awesome. It couldn't possibly be that I just value factual accuracy for its own sake and resent being gaslit by people claiming never to have made specific claims that they did in fact make, repeatedly, for years, in public. Not everything is an opportunity for partisan mudslinging and nothing more.
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