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Notes -
Trump's interview with Joe Rogan is out. I think it should be mandatory viewing, as someone who has read a lot about both of them but never heard either speak at length I had some interesting surprises.
I spotted a few major pieces of culture war fodder.
Joe apparently didn't want to do this because he was worried it would end up being fluff or making Trump look good.
I do think it makes Trump look good. It's the beer test, implemented, and for all to see. Many people have the instant opposite visceral opinion. As with everything about this, that's interesting.
Most here have concerns about legacy media, I think this adroitly makes the case against legacy media - as does Joe himself explicitly multiple times during the interview.
I've polled some Kamala supporters and they all think she'd have done just as well, but I highly doubt that.
Trump gets asked about election stealing...and some of his answer kinda matches some of the "best" answers we see here (complaining about procedural changes and so on).
At time of this posting it's at 18 million views in the same number of hours.
I just said the other day I was feeling lukewarm on Trump. But now I'm feeling different. I thought the podcast was awful. Couldn't make it past ten minutes. I might have to try again now that people say the first hour was rough.
It was Trump rambling at its worst. Rogan asks about winning the race in 2016, and next thing I know Trump is talking about how Lincoln was melancholy instead of depressed, cuz his kid died.
Sometimes I feel I would love Trump if it weren't for Trump.
Joe asked Trump how he felt when he entered the White House on his first day. Trump tells a story about seeing the Lincoln Room and having the reality of the presidency set in. He saw all the details of Lincoln’s real life, like the bed that was custom-made because he was too tall, and the small photo he kept of his son who tragically died. Lincoln was no longer a mythical figure but a real person, who lived in this real room, occupying the same job as himself.
I guess this is rambling but at what point is rambling just good story-telling? I mean, Homer rambled. Trump talks like a wise old East Coast relative who has lots of good stories. I also think there’s an element of Irish American conversational style he inherited from his mother’s side. Trump’s mom was born in the Outer Hebrides in a Gaelic speaking household, people forget this.
Did he? I've only read him in translation, but he's never seemed particularly rambly to me.
The list of ships is some of the most rambling verse I've ever read.
This is a little bee in my bonnet for me, but the more I read about Ancient Greece, the more I agree with my old Classics prof claiming the list of ships was in a way the most important part of the Iliad. Not to us, of course, but to the Greeks that list of ships was how each city and region could claim its connection to the political founding myth of Greek civilization. Think of it less like part of the narrative and more like Revolutionary War memorials in New England towns.
That's an interesting concept. When you say important, do you mean narratively important, culturally important, or something else?
I think what my prof was saying was "important to the average Greek listening to the Iliad." It's the bridge between the distant characters of the Iliad and the flesh and blood, the soil and city of the audience. Maybe a mild exaggeration given the different ways passages can be important, but imo a reasonable argument nonetheless.
Knowing the names of my five ancestors aboard the Mayflower, listening for their names during a Thanksgiving narrative is more exciting.
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