Talking to Trumpers

So I tried to engage with a bunch of Trump supporters at one of the wingnut websites I occasionally frequent [sorry no link]. Kind of thought of it as a civic duty. Unfortunately all I have to report back is basically what I knew going in. These people are:

• stupid: the kind of stupid people who think they are smart, bringing to mind this classic scene.
• racist: not the virulent kind, more the whiny kind who think blacks are getting special advantages and the decks are stacked against white men
• assholes: in all manner of ways, but most striking to me was when I pointed out that Trump had a habit of stiffing the contractors who did work for him, they replied that “the work must have been substandard”. In other words, in a fight between a rich and powerful guy and a lesser power, automatically back the rich guy. This may be due to something basic in the core of the authoritarian psyche, but it is incomprehensible to me.
• convinced that there is something called “the left” that includes everybody from Hillary to Stalin, that is deliberately evil and devoted to “destroying our liberties”, and basically is in league with Satan.

This last point of course means that whatever Trump՚s flaws, he appears to be the better alternative to them. So pointing out Trump՚s near-total ignorance, his vile personality, his fraudulent background, and his absurd and destructive proposals means nothing. They claim to be conservatives but are willing to take the risk of vast destruction of our existing system of governance, simply out of hatred for someone who exemplifies the existing system.

These people are lost to sanity, and all we can do is hope that they aren՚t a very big or influential group come November.

[addendum: I don't think I did a very good job of doing what needs to be done -- that is, getting some kind of sense of what these people are really about. That is (a) hard to do on the internet as opposed to f2f and (b) probably better accomplished by people with more empathic skills than me. Here's George Saunders, who normally writes fiction about the broken people of the modern world, giving it a go.]

Report from Davos

I decided to skip Davos this year so am relying on reports like this one (via Whiskey Fire which has pointers to much more).

Two interesting factoids from this article: One, $25 trillion in market value has evaporated in the current financial crisis. That's a lot! Of course, the right interpretation is not that this much value vanished, but that that's how much fake value was hallucinated by an insane system that is now coming off of some kind of analog of a drug binge.

The other factoid is that you, dear reader, ar just as much to blame for this mess as the more obvious culprits, according to one of the economic luminaries at Davos:

One Davos regular, Washington-based Carlyle Group’s managing director David Rubenstein, said he thinks a key issue at this year’s gathering is “who is at fault.” Yet Rubenstein, who was saying at Davos two years ago that the outlook for leveraged buyouts was “very robust,” says responsibility shouldn’t be tied only to him or his industry.

“There are six billion people on the face of the earth, and probably about five billion participated in what went on,” Rubenstein said in an interview. “Everybody participated in some way or shape or form.”

BTW, if I were inclined to be a conspiracy nut, the Carlyle Group would probably be one of the major nodes in the network graph I maintained in crayon on my apartment walls. Oh wait, the internet is my wall.