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Notes -
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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