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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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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.

  1. Joe apparently didn't want to do this because he was worried it would end up being fluff or making Trump look good.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. I've polled some Kamala supporters and they all think she'd have done just as well, but I highly doubt that.

  5. 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 watched all of it, and the interview was highly inconsistent with the narratives that either Trump is Hitler or Trump is senile. The interview made Trump seem joyful. Funny to think back to the TV show NewsRadio (yes, I'm old) and consider that the actor playing the station mechanic played a key role in an US presidential election by interviewing Donald Trump.

I don't watch too much of the election stuff, but when I see clips of Trump doing the speeches or interviews, I always notice this - he's loving what he's doing. He likes to speak to the audience, he has a good time doing it, and it can be seen. He can shoot breeze for 3 hours and he's enjoying it. Politicians are professional bloviators, but I haven't seen many of them that have the same quality. It looks effortless when he's doing it. I don't think Harris has this quality.

Harris was apparently pretty good at confidently saying nothing substantial back in the day, according to what Harmeet Dhillon said during her TC interview. Wasn't known for stumbling over her tongue..

Dhillon met her in San Francisco, Kamala was self assured and cool meeting people. Something happened to her since then.

she probably does very well among her typical crowd, the struggle looks like trying to avoid saying things that would trigger the wider public.