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I want to talk about the AI video that Trump reposted, where he is flying a plane with 'King Trump' on the side, wearing a crown, dumping a payload of feces on a crowd of No Kings protestors in NYC.
Frankly, I keep thinking I can't be surprised anymore by the depths which Trump (or more realistically, his social media team0 will stoop too, and yet here we are...
Ultimately as a Christian, I find this sort of blatant hatred and mockery of the outgroup quite disturbing. I understand that staid, boring, conservatism has lost majorly over the last few decades. I understand that the right needs some vitalism, some dynamism, some sort of way to act in an agentic way that isn't just mindlessly opposing whatever progressives are doing at the moment, and then slowly backing off and letting progressives have what they want over the course of a few years.
However, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze. At this point, while Trump definitely is effective at rallying the base, I simply find his aesthetics to be revolting. It's hard to countenance not just the outright hatred of the outgroup, but the sheer crassness that is presented here.
Not just that, but why would he egg on this idea that he wants to be king? It makes zero strategic sense from my perspective, all it does is fan the flames. I suppose if he wants to fan the flames of the culture war, fine, but that's also not something I'm behind.
Anyway, the current coalition of the right, where Christian or even just classical conservatives are sort of holding their nose and voting for Trump, seems increasingly unstable to me. I suppose we'll see how things end up.
Who's holding their nose?
I wholeheartedly support shit posting. Until he posts himself beheading a Schumer look a like doll he's not even tit for tat IMHO. For all the talk of MAGA violating political norms, it's Trump who has been the victim of assassination attempts not his foes.
I thought the Kathy Griffin thing was gross and creepy, but I still think there ought to be higher standards of decorum expected of Presidents than of washed-up standup comediennes.
Physically making a mess in someone's face with the goal of humiliation has a long tradition in real life. Having someone post a video of something similar in thought only still seems like descalation to me.
In my view, public voices are public voices, the standards should be the same for anyone usong mass media.
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This kind of gets at what's really happening here. It's not that Trump is particularly crass or offensive by the standards of the media, it's that (usually older) people are shocked to see the boundary between media figure and elected office-holder broken. But it was always going to happen - Tony Blair and (to some extent) Clinton were perhaps the first to really get that, but they, and Obama, still played the expected role for the cameras. Trump goes off-script for the script of the mass-media presidency, but in a totally unsurprising way, the same way that reality tv is more popular than equivalent scripted tv, the same way HBO shows are more popular than the broadcast ones that can't show tits and guts and incest. Once politics truly began operating by the logic of distributed mass media (as opposed to, for instance, the movie-star presidency of Ronald Reagan), it just waited for a Trump to complete the process. McLuhan is chuckling in his grave.
It’s hard to compare broadcast-network show ratings to HBO’s because the latter likes to report both live and on-demand as a single number (and you also have to take streamers at their word to a larger extent). But, the biggest broadcast-network scripted series are pulling between three and four million live-viewers for average, mid-season episodes. One just isn’t going to read or hear much about Tracker, and every NCIS and emergency-services genre spin-off because they aren’t made for an audience that does much reading, writing or podcasting.
There’s also — in-between the aforementioned — the very popular offerings of Taylor Sheridan’s middlebrow Boomer-crack ouvre on cable. These shows can get a little grittier, but there’s still nothing approaching incest, and the nudity is capped at the occasional glance of buttocks.
”I’m the Landman! I’m here to tell people younger than 60 how the world really is! I’m tough but fair!”
Yeah this is Scott's "cultural dark matter" (though, for the specific point about grittier/sexier not being more popular, within broadcast TV we can just look at the comparative success of the incredibly successful Law & Order vs the even-longer-running Law & Order SVU). But HBO shows get elites talking, move the culture, inspire the next generation of creatives. Popularity with the audience that reads, writes, podcasts, etc. does matter more than the dark matter - particularly in politics, because they're the ones who decide if millions of voters get to see what Trump says on the escalator or if it's brushed off as a nothingburger. Trump is able to grab the negative attention of elites with conspicuous transgression, and then use that to get his brand across to dark-matter voters who respond positively to his heel performance.
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Very interesting comment. I wonder what new political being the advent of choose-your-own-experience AI-type media will summon.
"Ask the PresAIdent" app, you ask it stuff, the ai formulates a response, the response is sent to the president/his media staff for a fast and simple yes/no/maybe confirmation and the result is sent back to the user.
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