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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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What do you think the standard apologetics are?

“That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, you deserved it.”

In this particular case, I happen to think #2 is correct. This really isn’t that bad. I included it in the list as an early example of the kind of weak evidence that liberals were cataloguing.

But you had to pick it out, since you knew it didn’t apply to you. So he wasn’t trying to mock the guy. And if he was, it was exaggerated by a hostile media. And if it wasn’t, well, the leftists started it.

…therefore you should never trust anything they say about Trump, and you still can’t take any of the examples seriously.

I think this is unreasonable.

I'm not fully sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're downplaying my skepticism, as if it were caused by this one example. Like I said, it's not just one example. It's every example of something people said about Trump, from the earliest ones I can remember where everyone was calling him racist and kept telling me how he was calling all Mexicans rapists. That sure sounded bad, until I looked into it and saw that's not what he said at all, on several levels.

I do not think your skepticism is unreasonable.

I do think that you were illustrating the “standard Trump apologetics,” which consist of denying something as fake news, downplaying it, and then deciding it was actually a good thing.

I find that particular pattern frustrating. There’s nothing wrong with believing any of the steps. Combined, though, I think they’re bad practice.

Look, it happened a long time ago. I specifically don't memorize every thing Trump's ever been accused of, or why the accusations were false. I don't want to devote all my mental energy to Trump, one way or the other. All I knew was that I'd seen that journalist argument before, and I knew it didn't hold water in some way back then, and that made want to illustrate exactly why none of these accusations actually tarnish Trump's name, why people like me check out. Because so many previous accusations don't hold water, and we have epistemic learned helplessness.

I wonder if this is just a general human behaviour, and we would have seen exactly the same pattern discussing the Dreyfus Affair in 1894.

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