Who is smarter, trump or hillary

Trump is smart in the way a huckster is smart i.e., canny and manipulative, but he's basically an idiot.

Hillary can form sentences.

Voted Hillary.

I have no way of knowing since I don't know either of them personally. But Trump is obviously more politically savvy.

Trump dumbs himself down in public. Very smart guy, whether you agree with him or not.

Don't misunderestimate him.

Is Trump that savvy or has he just caught a wave?

I don't think Trump was dumbing himself down when he was spewing birther vomit. He's a classic moron.

Is Trump that savvy or has he just caught a wave?

^yeah. figuring out that much of the GOP base is economically fragile and don't particularly care for cutting social safety net or cutting taxes for the wealthy, but are still super racist doesn't exactly = "smart".

he just has the privilege of this all being a lark when it doesn't work out in his favor.

xp his spewing of birther vomit was totally calculated and opportunistic though, right? and it paid off! doesn't necessarily make him smart, but I don't see that it's evidence he's a moron either

I'm not certain it's calculated. The same schtick was openly mocked in 2008. This year, it's found an audience, and momentum does the rest.

2012, I mean.

It was completely calculated! And it was successful enough in 2011/2012 that Obama was forced to release his fucking birth certificate. Trump may be an asshole, but he's no moron.

Trump isn't smart. I don't think he's savvy either. I'm not sure what he is. He definitely has some kind of characteristic which is helping him in this election that I don't know the word for.

i certainly don't think he's mentally deficient or anything.

I wouldn't claim he's stupid, I just don't know if I'd attribute his success to savvy political machinations as much as a spontaneous shift in the public mood.

I'm guessing that this thread is going to be almost entirely ppl debating whether or not Trump is smart (or not smart but "savvy") (or just a moron) and that everyone pretty much agrees that Hillary is smart? is that correct?

Well, yeah.

xpost The word is charisma.

I am very impressed with Trump's ability to handwave and deflect - he's such a pro.

Trump may be an asshole, but he's no moron.

― flappy bird, Friday, May 27, 2016 10:43 AM (48 seconds ago)

yeah, i dunno, flappy bird. he has about him the stink of pure moron. one can be "canny" and even sort of naively brilliant without possessing much actual think-power.

Very smart guy, whether you agree with him or not.

― flappy bird, Friday, May 27, 2016 10:31 AM (13 minutes ago)

and this reads like a direct quotation, which helps put your admiration in perspective

Clinton was offered a “stand-alone” computer near her office that would let her access the Internet without entering a password or logging into the department’s network as other employees are required to do, the official said.

The official, Lewis A. Lukens, executive director of Clinton’s executive secretariat from 2008 to 2011, said he was told the proposal was declined because Clinton was “not adept or not used to checking her emails on a desktop.” However, Lukens said, Clinton was “very comfortable” using a BlackBerry — even though she would have to leave her office to use the device due to security protocols.

xp I don't admire Trump. I just think it's naive to assume he's a moron based on the speeches and interviews he gives. But like I said, there's no way of knowing. I don't know him or Hillary. But Trump is clearly the more savvy one.

On November 3, the District of Columbia Bar Association notified Hillary that she had failed the bar exam. For the first time in her life, she had flamed out — spectacularly, given the expectations of others for her, and even more so on her own. Of 817 applicants, 551 of her peers had passed, most from law schools less prestigious than Yale. She kept this news hidden for the next thirty years. She never took the exam again, despite many opportunities. Her closest friends and associates were flabbergasted when she made the revelation in a single throwaway line in Living History.

Those who knew her best speculated that she must have felt deep shame at her failure, and that her self-confidence — always so visible a part of her exterior — was shattered by the experience (though many first-rate lawyers, even Yale Law graduates, had flunked the bar on their first try).

I think Clinton is pretending to not know how to use a computer because she doesn't want to be stuck at the office responding to emails. This is the kind of thing old people can get away with.

xxp

But Trump is clearly the more savvy one.

― flappy bird, Friday, May 27, 2016 10:57 AM (9 minutes ago)

what does "savvy" even mean to you? he's a drooling goober with a gift for getting other drooling goobers to fork over their attention (and money).

He's a brilliant huckster & manipulator. The fact that he said that John McCain wasn't a war hero "because he was captured" and his poll numbers went up. Impossible to overestimate the staggering stupidity of the American electorate. Trump has managed to become the populist revolt candidate despite being a billionaire from New York.

i think that speaks more to the stupidity of the base than it does to his intelligence

who is the smartest person alive?

He said it himself, "I'm not stupid, just the opposite". That has convinced me.

Palin. Xpost

I mentioned elsewhere Trump reminds me of a professional wrestler: the megalomania (it's gonna be the BEST wall), the threats (and we're gonna make Mexico pay for it), the mocking (Lyin' Ted, Little Marco) all seem straight out of the WWE playbook. Because he seems to be such an invented character, it's hard to tell how much is fake and how much real.

But as Οὖτις said, canny and manipulative huckster, while still being an idiot, seems pretty apt.

https://www.squishlist.com/startribune/digitalsales/9708/download/1122713/

That was supposed to be a picture of Bobby The Brain Heenan.

Trump has managed to Chauncey Gardner the fuck out of a bunch of people who are primed to fall for that shit. That doesn't make him smart. Because he seriously isn't.

flappy bird's definition of "smart" apparently = capacity to exploit stupidity of others.

the problem with that is stupid people exploit each other all the time

lol Trump literally just said "there is no drought" in California

See? He relies on empirical data.

flappy bird's definition of "smart" apparently = capacity to exploit stupidity of others.

the problem with that is stupid people exploit each other all the time

― Οὖτις, Friday, May 27, 2016 4:05 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i interpreted the question as who's smarter in the context of this election

that's funny, cuz the op places the question explicitly outside of the context of the election

not sure you're fit to judge the smartness of others tbh

who is the smartest person alive?

this seems like impossible to answer bc of the number of brilliant ppl doing v complicated work that few if any of us are capable of evaluating on their merits. like some CW answer might be stephen hawking but my guess is that there are even brighter, younger ppl in the field who haven't earned his reputation or are doing work so theoretical that it doesn't reach popular discourses. maybe more interesting question is who is the smartest current head of state. merkel + putin both seem extraordinarily capable to me.

obv the answer to thread question is obama

stalin apparently had a reputation among other communist leaders for being kinda dim (and not just trotsky, lenin thought so too), and he was a serial plagiarist. otoh he obv had a genius for certain things and iirc he has published some works of theoretical value to marxism. i'm sure a lot of the mockery was bc of prejudice against his background and bc intellectuals are snobby and think they're better than everyone else.

Stalin was not an academic or an intellectual (does anyone ever argue this?), but he was an unusually - maybe preternaturally - gifted at political maneuvering. he was a very strategically minded gangster. Putin's similar, although I don't think quite as sharp.

I dislike "genius" but Stalin was a master strategist, given to paralyzing depression on quite rare occasions (e.g. the shock of the Germa invasion).

*German

that's funny, cuz the op places the question explicitly outside of the context of the election

not sure you're fit to judge the smartness of others tbh

― Οὖτις, Friday, May 27, 2016 4:34 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"not who will win" =/= outside of the context of the election. campaign savvy is what i meant. Trump is the better campaigner and media manipulator. impossible to know who is smarter in a general sense because i've never met them, and there's no insight to be gained from their public statements/interviews/speeches. you can judge them on experience, and Hillary obviously wins bc Trump has zero.

merkel apparently a phd in physical chemistry so i'm going to guess she's as intelligent as she seems

I thought Stalin was a reasonable poet though? Not that you need brains for that <---- did I just say that?

Stalin was a fierce autodidact who often read about 500 pages a day, the Kotkin biog reveals him as a hell of a lot more clever than some credited him. Maybe being a shortarse with a Georgian accent made him seem not so dynamic.

yeah the accounts of him failing to accept and react appropriately to (much less predict) Hitler's betrayal are revealing, a rare stumble. For all of Stalin's success at scheming it doesn't seem to have brought him much happiness. He seems like he was an odd, emotionally vacant automoton programmed to consolidate power and nothing else. he seems like a cipher in a lot of ways.

xp

this obv goes to this academic v. "street-smart" / savvy / everyday intelligence question. 2 seem entirely disconnected - i knew of this v brilliant talmud rabbi when i was in yeshiva who supposedly needed to be walked back and forth from his house to the yeshiva every day or he would get lost nb this house was two blocks away. i mean that seems v extreme and maybe indicative actually of some severe learning disabilities that maybe didn't impact his high level of cognitive processing of complex legal texts. of course stalin was extraordinarily brilliant even if he wasn't quite as much an 'intellectual' - he quickly grasped new information and context shifts before far more academic members of the communist party. some of this is maybe instinctual but an instinctual intelligence is no less an indication of brilliance than a more contemplative intelligent and maybe it is even more bc of how much more powerful it is able to be executed in a moment during a conversation or a party speech and w/ decisiveness.

impossible to know who is smarter in a general sense because i've never met them, and there's no insight to be gained from their public statements/interviews/speeches.

I dunno why I'm bothering here but your metric for gauging "smartness" is, by your own admission here, not based on anything beyond their respective levels of success in appealing to morons. which is a not v meaningful measure of intelligence imo.

you should maybe stick to Billy Corgan threads.

I was about to write that he had a feeling for poetry.

btw last year's Svetlana bio Stalin's Daughter was fascinating.

brb gonna summon difficult listening hour

you should read Fitzpatrick's On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Alfred - that is another fascinating read.

i'm almost done the kotkin book. i thought i had much much more to go bc my kindle says i'm only at 35% but i looked at the toc and i only have 2 chapters left. it really is breezy for such a long book and it makes me feel like i want to read more v long books and trying to decide btwn zola's rougons, in search of lost time (w/ both of those my unrealistic ambition would be to finish the entire cycles and realistically only the first books of each), or finishing the caro lbj books which i'm only 1/3rd of the way through (and tbph i have a few chapters left of the 1st one).

thx for reminding me to put the Kotkin book on my reading list guys this thread has proved useful after all lol

"not who will win" =/= outside of the context of the election. campaign savvy is what i meant.

also fwiw if we're just going by campaigns and elections won - Hillary has mathematically won more. Guess she's smarter!

that Kotkin book was a rich souffle. He's a powerful aphorist too.

hillary's entire identity is constructed to be incompatible w/ the sentiments that trump is tapping into - you think she doesn't know that he has an 'ideology' (used loosely) that is attractive to a disturbing number of americans? but she's pot committed to steady hand on the wheel voice of experience.

I dunno why I'm bothering here but your metric for gauging "smartness" is, by your own admission here, not based on anything beyond their respective levels of success in appealing to morons. which is a not v meaningful measure of intelligence imo.

what's your metric in gauging the "smartness" of public figures? i agree, campaigning ability is not a measure of overall intelligence, but what else do we have to go off of? the question is too vague, beyond intuition, what do we have? i judged it on something we can observe - this *particular* campaign.

Trump scares the shit out of me, but I think he can "form sentences" if he wants to. but that's just my intuition

but she's pot committed to steady hand on the wheel voice of experience.

Could you translate this?

also hillary is a much better campaigner than trump. she has raised a significantly larger amount of money and throughout the primaries her ground game has been professional. she managed to fend off an unexpectedly popular insurgent campaign while saving practically all her funds for the general election. there has been reporting over and over that trump made basic errors in understanding delegate rules and had v weakly organized campaign. and you can tell by all the self-inflicted wounds he's given himself. somehow in spite of himself those wounds - like having a high level staff member be charged w/ assault, or insulting every identity group in america that isn't white male - he is polling only a few points behind hillary but that does not vindicate the fact that he's run the campaign like a buffoon. a buffoon can be v popular - ppl love clowns - it doesn't make them geniuses.

can't believe no one's mentioned:

http://thehayride.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ap_ronald_reagan_jef_120615_wmain.jpg

pot committed = in poker when you've bet so much that even if you might want to fold you are 'committed' to the pot and must stay in
hand on the wheel = you want a good driver to drive your country, trust the experienced politician xxp

what's your metric in gauging the "smartness" of public figures?

the sum total of whatever's in the public record.

idg why you are interested in asking a question for which, as you say, there is no basis for a rational or comprehensive answer. I mean why bother. why did you even create this thread. It seems like it was more or less an excuse for you to fearfully acknowledge that Trump has done well in this primary season. In which case, v perceptive of you, take it to the election thread.

xp

Pot committed is what threw me, I thought it was a spelling mistake. (xp)

idg why you are interested in asking a question for which, as you say, there is no basis for a rational or comprehensive answer.

actually I misstated this, I think there IS a basis for a rational and comprehensive answer, it's just not one that you acknowledge. You think the best we can do is judge "smartness" based on how well someone is doing in the polls with an electorate with a large share of non-informed idiots. I don't agree w that.

Mordy otm

I think he can "form sentences" if he wants to. but that's just my intuition

he never has before, why trust your intuition.

I didn't ask the question or start this thread

he speaks in broken sentence fragments using an observably limited vocabulary, I've never seen him speak coherently about any subject, much less one of any depth or complexity.

ah my bad about the OP sorry

xp

sleepingbag and flappybird ran together in my mind. Sad!

I think they'd both give equally insipid answers to a question like "what is the meaning or purpose of life" so I call a draw

does anyone else watch buckley debates (or other supposed conservative intellectuals) and try to figure out if he's actually smart or just full of shit?

Like many skilled debaters, he's adept at sniffing an opponent's weakness and making a rhetorical lunge. When this doesn't work he smothers in Latinates, like an squid shooting ink before escaping.

i'll say this tho the further back in history you go the more thoughtful + coherent the conservatives become - the conservative intellectuals of today are a dumpster fire

Trump is a moron whose gotten lucky. No one could have guessed Americans would be so impressed by mere shamelessness.

Hillary has a reputation for learning things quickly and, watching her, I never get the sense that she is ever "in over her head." I think she has a very complex grasp of government. However, she doesn't seem to have the best judgment.

Regardless, Hillary is smarter than Trump to the same degree a human is smarter than a crocodile. It's a difference of kind not degree. Trump is too ignorant to even know he's ignorant.

Bill needed people around him all the time. Frequently, when he told me he had to write a column, I would offer to withdraw from the boat cabin or hotel room where we were. He urged me not to, and as he typed (with great speed and accuracy) he would keep talking off and on, reading a sentence to me, trying out a word, saying that something he was writing would annoy old So-and-So. When I appeared on his TV show to discuss a new book of mine, it was clear to me that he had not read the book—he was given notes on each author he interviewed. Once he asked me if I had read all of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I said yes. “Haven’t you?” He had not. I suspect that was true of the other capitalist classics he referred to, by Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Roepke, and others. He could defend them with great panache. But he did not want to sit all by himself for a long time reading them. One of his teachers at Yale, the philosopher Paul Weiss, told me that Bill was very good at discussing books he had not read.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/daredevil/307546/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8IQ4ZGZsbg

This whole "Trump is actually smart" conspiracy makes no sense to me, honestly. He hasn't won through masterful backdooe machinations. He's just been talking a lot of shit to get people riled up.

no wonder Stillman's a conservative

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEa119cEm44

"was very good at discussing books he had not read"

https://austenprose.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/metrop1990w3.jpg?w=640

lol xpost

or finishing the caro lbj books which i'm only 1/3rd of the way through (and tbph i have a few chapters left of the 1st one).

there are 5 now! assuming they don't bog down any further w bobby's adventures in meereen.

don't think we needed another thread with trump in the name (and i'm nothing but earnest in the fascism one). if hillary seems lame or wrong-footed in comparison it's because "hi remember those guys whose ideas of what is right and possible have determined the economic possibilities of your entire life? yeah still working for them!" is a problematic electoral strategy in 2016. but it's not as if hillary had the luxury of sitting down 18 months ago (or four years ago) and plotting her electoral strategy from scratch; she has to work with the hillary she's got and her vulnerability to a fascist isn't an unforced error.

trump has demonstrated good instincts for demagoguery (and certainly he has made a lot of people talking about him look pretty dumb) but we shouldn't be honoring him with stalin comparisons until we see him join a working apparatus of government, on equal footing with the other people in it, and wind up on top of a bunch of actual corpses. even should he be elected president and successfully refashion the office into dictator-for-life he won't have pulled off a stalin -- just a mussolini. was mussolini "smart"? as a demagogue and (literal) street fighter, sure. as an intellectual? well, smarter than donald trump.

shakey otm that there is a strange blankness to stalin, partic after his second wife dies, and even a kind of shallow, weepy sentimentality (nabokov's beloved poshlust) that whispers sociopath -- but also stuff that doesn't. people are weird

This whole "Trump is actually smart" conspiracy makes no sense to me, honestly. He hasn't won through masterful backdooe machinations. He's just been talking a lot of shit to get people riled up.

I do wonder a lot about this, he's definitely relatable to a certain group and he's unmistakably tapped into something big, but outside of his masterful ability to deflect everything and never answer a straight question I honestly wonder how planned or calculated any of his statements are. When he talks and constantly makes up stuff...e.g. "we're losing 500k jobs every month to China!", I wonder if he just doesn't know, or is purposely lying knowing full well that his base doesn't really care.

Purposefully lying. He's a successful businessman and a vicious narcissist - it's P.T. Barnum.

He hasn't won through masterful backdooe machinations. He's just been talking a lot of shit to get people riled up.

yeah. reports always were that cruz was stalin's kind of smart btw. gotta take people's word for it. but it fits okay cuz i think stalin, despite the later solidity of his personality cult, could have been troubled in the early 30s by the sudden rise of a nimble outward-facing charismatic. maybe there's some partial analogy w kirov here, who very conveniently died.

or he thinks it doesn't matter. that's kinda smart i guess - realizing that you can offload a large % of your thinking bc it doesn't matter what you say. but that also kinda points to how limited he is that he is ultimately as shallow as a confidence man. xp

trump has demonstrated good instincts for demagoguery (and certainly he has made a lot of people talking about him look pretty dumb)

This is such a huge part of it too, he appeals so hard to the "everyone in politics/on TV is a moron" crowd and he's won that battle pretty thoroughly. had the GOP been even remotely organized going into this he probably never would've gotten past that 20% threshold or whatever but his opponents (especially Cruz and Rubio) were so willing to fight him on HIS level which is a level you cannot win at. Watching Rubio and Jeb get visibly frustrated on TV played right into his tiny little hands.

Stalin had unexpected bits of wtf sentimentality, like when he wondered aloud to lieutenants at Tehran or Yalta why fate had punished FDR so.

or all the musicals.

i.e. Ted Cruz reading Dr. Seuss

just saw the buckley talk. otmmmmmmm that guy was a fucking idiot. nothing but vicious instincts and the cartoon affect.

i do watch a lot of firing line tho yeah.

have you watched the one with Reagan

well his shade is always present

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c-UmT-KPh00/hqdefault.jpg

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/15/11225128/donald-trump-gullible-internet Some of these examples might be canny, but some seem the work of an idiot.

He reminded me of one of Wodehouse’s blithe young men—Psmith, say, or Piccadilly Jim—who act forever on impulse.

^^^ note how this goes straight to psmith. because bertie has a good heart.

xxp is that in technicolor

maybe more interesting question is who is the smartest current head of state.

agreed, was kind of hoping to see if we could all agree on any one smart person at all, how about "who is the smartest public figure"

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Trump is a moron whose gotten lucky. No one could have guessed Americans would be so impressed by mere shamelessness.

― Treeship, Friday, May 27, 2016 11:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Uhm...

(America isn't unique in this, but c'mon)

how the fuck does this thread have over 100 posts

sleepingbag, how much was the bet?

I've read that Trump cannot be stumped, so I guess that pretty much settles it

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/21/scientists-who-are-actually-really-stupid-1-neil-degrasse-tyson/

This is the seventh google result after searching Tyson's name

How smart could the man be if he is actually really stupid?

Quality source there

No one could have guessed Americans would be so impressed by mere shamelessness.
― Treeship, Friday, May 27, 2016 11:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Uhm...

(America isn't unique in this, but c'mon)

― Le Bateau Ivre, Friday, May 27, 2016 8:11 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Come on man, there is no precedent for this. And even she wasn't all about transgression the way Trump is.

If it was common knowledge that being an obnoxious dickhead/liar was a winning electoral strategy more people would have tried it.

Position itt of "everyone disagreeing with me must be stupid" is a huge indicator of the damage the us presidential carnival does to the site imo

Ban us presidential discussion on ilx. It makes americans stupid.

Deems otmfm.

Lol i skipped a sentence. "She" in that first sentence refers to Palin

Position itt of "everyone disagreeing with me must be stupid" is a huge indicator of the damage the us presidential carnival does to the site imo

Ban us presidential discussion on ilx. It makes americans stupid.

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac), Friday, May 27, 2016 6:10 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just stop fucking reading ilx, your constant objections to non-existent "positions" is absurd and appears to be based on selective reading. maybe try reading posts that are more than a sentence long if you can handle it??

Nah im good toots x

suppose I could have clarified that I was taking the piss with the breitbart article

you see, neil is stupid because his cosmos reboot featured a spaceship making spaceship noises in space, and as any sensible conservative knows, in space, no one can hear you scream about those dastardly liberals

ayn rand didn't date because she could never find anyone smarter than her.

Treeship: no precedent? it's happening all across the globe. The rise of Boris Johnson (UK), Geert Wilders (NL), Rodrigo Duterte (Phillippenes, elected prime minister), Norbert Hofer (Austria, missed being prime minister by a mere inch), Marine le Pen (France), Berlusconi earlier. How does Trump not fit into this? The fact free, lying dickheads are having a blast and are enjoying their day, probably more than ever before. Being a liar and a dickhead never got you further than it does today.

"constant objections to non-existent positions" would make for a p decent board description tbh

I seriously cannot believe this thread

^

think of it not as a thread but a room

Bill Clinton was "smart."

Didn't do us much good, did it?

question is moot

i am the smartest

Question is mook

Does it matter how "smart" we think either Trump or Hillary are? No, except insofar as it affects the outcome of the election, which is probably a quantity too small to measure. I doubt it would greatly affect any ilxor's real life actions, if in their opinion Trump was some kind of genius or they thought Hillary had rather a dull intellect.

Since the answer to this surpassingly stupid question is self-evident, I'll take this opportunity to play U.S. Gabbnews:

Wellesley College, to which Hillary, the daughter of a suburban Chicago small business owner, was admitted in the mid-'60s, was probably one of the two best colleges in America to admit women at the time. Fordham University, to which Drunk, the son of a multimillionaire local real estate developer, was admitted around the same time, was and remains a school of no great repute at the undergraduate level, and presumably was chosen so that he could remain in New York after being rejected by Columbia, probably among other (then-)better local schools, which may have remained unwilling to admit him when he transferred to the undergraduate division of Penn's Wharton School, which is a lot easier to get into than the graduate business school he didn't attend, and to which he was reportedly admitted as a result of an admission's officer's friendship with his brother Freddy, who later died an alcoholic.

Yale Law School, where Hillary was among the just 15% of the class that was female in the early '70s, is generally regarded as the best law school in America. Donald Trump has no law or other post-collegiate degree or, as far as I'm aware, education.

In 1991, Hillary, the wife of the Governor of a small flyover state, was named one of the top 100 lawyers in America for the second time. The same year, Drunk's billion-dollar casino, built by the $200 million company he inherited from his father, filed for his first corporate bankruptcy, and his wife filed for divorce, accusing him of rape. The next year, Hillary's husband was elected the 42nd President of the United States; Drunk filed for his second corporate bankruptcy, and sued his wife to prevent her from talking about him.

In 2009, Hillary resigned her position as United States Senator from New York State to accept her appointment as the 67th United States Secretary of State. Drunk, recently married for the third time to his second wife who was not a citizen at the time of their marriage, filed for his fourth corporate bankruptcy and appeared on television as part of a "World Wrestling Federation" event.

Donald Trump, like noted intellectual giants Kim Kardashian and Phil Robertson, is very "smart" at getting on television. If he keeps it up, maybe one day there will be as much B-roll of him as there is of Hillary.

jfc

Trump is:
a) smart enough to know how stupid Sarah Palin sounds
b) not smart enough to understand that the way she sounds to him is the way he sounds to actual smart people

Question is mook

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac), Friday, May 27, 2016 11:04 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://mobile.twitter.com/sam_rosenfeld/status/708819820360245248

haha Phil Robertson is one of the few people I would not vote for over Trump

xp every single post you've made here over the past 15 years can be summed up as 'look how smart i am!' so naturally you can be counted on to weigh in on the acceptance rate at peoples' universities 50 years ago and consider it dispositive

mookiesplaining

and if that's what you got from my post perhaps we should consider the possibility that you are less smart than donald trump

i don't understand why more people aren't calling him ronald mcdonald trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI8BpOKMzRw

http://cde.3.elcomercio.pe/ima/0/1/1/8/1/1181892/base_image.jpg

http://www.thefinaledition.com/images/g_image/content-000016.jpg

Gene Simmons lookin' good!

At this point I don't even know what the attack is supposed to be? It's not even perceptual entropy anymore so much as erosion.

Now, here's a question: Where does Sanders fit in in this equation? He obviously can't do math, can't even count to 2383, but does that make him dumber than Clinton, who can't do email, or Trump, who, uh, I don't even know where to begin...

Like George W. Bush, but less so, Sanders has a reasonable amount of raw intelligence (Brooklyn College was a pretty good school back in the day, and Chicago is still a great one; he also did some brief grad work at CUNY iirc), but he's lazy and ignores information he doesn't like - he says he didn't ho very well in school because he "found the classroom boring and irrelevant" and today seems to too often substitute attitude for analysis, with the depths of his policy knowledge/preferences that supplied to him by interest groups. i'll take his ideology over Bush's any day, but both even if to different degrees are a measure, as is any ideology or "religious" devotion to a cause, of anti-intellectual, and that is my chief problem with him and his supporters.

Also, Bernie is not completely without the conspiracist bent of Drunk, probably the most anti-intellectual of the three, a walking monument to confirmation bias who may (intentionally) never have been particularly schooled in the liberal arts

i wish you were a walking monument off a cliff.

How are you so terrible? I can't figure it out, but then again I didn't go to a highly selective undergraduate institution. x

How are you so terrible? I can't figure it out

He's an odd one. He yearns to be accepted here, but he's a bit like a cat who brings us gifts of dead birds. Its touching that he wants our praise, but we're reluctant to encourage him to pile up more dead birds on our doorstep.

I am always amused by this particular reaction to dismissal perceived or otherwise, especially when voiced in the collective, to which the individual assigns themselves both membership and representation.

Don't take it personally, guy - this is just a wall I'm writing on; I can't control who else writes on it.

"Treeship" - did you have a substantive response to anything I wrote?

Rhetorical question btw

Gene Simmons lookin' good!

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, May 28, 2016 8:37 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd-call-her-Lebo-if-that-weren't-someone-else-in-politics is a pretty good exponent of his not-unrelated pose

I am always amused by this particular reaction to dismissal perceived or otherwise, especially when voiced in the collective, to which the individual assigns themselves both membership and representation.

lol good one

I'm glad my post amused you, but I'm a bit disappointed I can't lay claim to any virtue in this fact. As you stated, such posts as mine never fail to amuse you, no matter how often you encounter them. It's as if your amusement were a reflex and I'd caused your knee to jerk.

Rhetorical question btw

― normcore strengthening exercises (benbbag), Sunday, May 29, 2016 1:31 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol this guy

I'm glad my post amused you, but I'm a bit disappointed I can't lay claim to any virtue in this fact. As you stated, such posts as mine never fail to amuse you, no matter how often you encounter them. It's as if your amusement were a reflex and I'd caused your knee to jerk.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Sunday, May 29, 2016 1:51 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njHE4S-HD3I

http://www.youtube.com/embed/VDJsgtoizj8?feature=player_embedded

Much like the real thing, voting is what actually counts itt

Bookmarked

i find this question strangely fascinating, even though the dumb-but-true answer is that there are lots of different ways to be "smart" and lots of different ways to be "stupid" and they can coexist in the same person

i get the sense that in very many ways that matter to us trump is "stupid" but he's not /as/ stupid as he often appears in this campaign season. i don't have that hard a time picturing him sitting at the head of a table with various underlings pitching him ideas for, say, advertising a new housing development, and him thoughtfully deciding among them. that sort of business intelligent doesn't--whatever trump and a big chunk of the american people may think--really scale up to the federal government, though.

as for the question of whether trump "lies", which came up above, of course he does. though i think a lot of what comes out of his mouth isn't a "lie" in the sense of "i will say this thing i know to be untrue to gain advantage" as much as it just reveals a serene indifference to truth. it's all braggadacio, all branding... it couldn't be less relevant to him whether it's true, half true, or a total lie.

there seems to be a narrow zone of trump's life where he may have room for genuine feeling (his kids seem to like him), but in general he strikes me as almost completely amoral.

and trump seems to lack the sentimentality of many dictators. can anyone imagine him getting weepy on television as putin has, and mussolini would have on strategic occasion?

the mystification of the "businessman" and the conviction that business success is some kind of master key to any form of achievement is one of the weirdest and nastiest aspects of capitalism. (it's running rampant in china right now, so i'm not going to pin this to the USA or the "western world.") trump has benefited a lot from this false idea, but the irony is that he's not even a sam walton -- he's a silver-spooner.

both have a knack for politics

neither are smart

didn't vote

who's more of a weasel?

i don't know

Hillary is an ordinary shop-variety politician and therefore her weasel-like qualities are well within the ordinary tolerances of the system. Trump is a salesman whose moral foundation is infinitesimal and therefore his weasel-like qualities are expandable at will to near infinity.

hillary is not really weasel-like. she is willing to compromise -- is too quick, even, to accept the necessity of compromise. it's not that she has no beliefs, it's that she believes too much in the parliamentary system. the same system that blocks liberal initiatives have prevented conservatives ones too, she would say if she were being candid. i really think her main problem is over-cautiousness and a conservative over-investment in the labyrinth of washington.

trump is lower than a weasel. i am going to try to write about him as little as i can.

there's something very strange about Trump's weaselhood though - he straight up says "I never said that" w/r/t things he clearly DID say, on television, in front of millions of people - and somehow doesn't seem to get called out on it. it's like a whole new level of weaseling.

he gets called on it all the time

however, the people doing the calling are largely irrelevant

he has such little respect for the american people that he doesn't feel the need to level with them at any time ever. you see this with abusers who employ "gaslighting" tactics with their spouse.

he is manipulative in the most banal, moronic way possible. when i see his face or hear his voice i want to vomit.

trump creates fear, uncertainty, and doubt to discredit everyone and goes in for the attack by saying exactly what the group he's talking to wants to hear

it's easy to do in politics as just about everyone has their hands dirty

but this has created an even playing field in the eye of the regular joe

i don't think trump is smart. he's like a virus that's thriving in the broken body politic of america.

otm

ban gabbneb

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

did any of u actually vote? lol

can't wait for the results, gonna be a nailbiter

obv the answer to thread question is obama

― Mordy, Friday, May 27, 2016 8:37 PM (6 days ago)

agree w/ this

and a lotta good it's done us

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

When all is done (perhaps very soon, ie if he quits the race in a shitfit before Cleveland), this will probably be the most lucid two minutes of Donald Trump's (sad!) life:

TRUMP: What I’d like to see is a private [healthcare] system without the artificial lines around every state. I have a big company with thousands and thousands of employees. And if I’m negotiating in New York or in New Jersey or in California, I have like one bidder. Nobody can bid.

You know why?

Because the insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians, of course, with the exception of the politicians on this stage. (uneasy laughter) But they have total control of the politicians. They’re making a fortune.

Get rid of the artificial lines and you will have…yourself great plans…

BAIER: Mr. Trump, it’s not just your past support for single-payer health care. You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies….You’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, and Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”

TRUMP: You’d better believe it.

BAIER: — they do?

TRUMP: If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.

TRUMP: I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you get from Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi?

TRUMP: Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why?

She didn’t have a choice because I gave....

leaving the kremlin out of it, in retrospect maybe she didn't run a dumb campaign so much as a clean campaign, with all the trump shit exploding everywhere?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clintons-ground-game-didnt-cost-her-the-election/

. . . but was it hubris/arrogance not to 'fight dirty' given how obviously and abjectly filthy (it's becoming increasingly obvious, news cycle after news cycle) trump's been for years?

haha this thread didn't age well. though I will say in partial defense of those who claimed Trump wasn't a moron that his brain has certainly been liquefying to at least some extent in the interim.

its true - elections are bought - there's the real collusion - not with russia, with wealthy american oligarchs

I do get a little tired of waking up each day in the nightmare scenario though.

https://i.imgur.com/J8Ymaxn.jpg

Trump’s superpower is absolute shamelessness. There are tons of considerations that subtlet moderate the behavior of you or I or Hillary; not so Trump. There is something special about him but it’s not intelligence. He tramples over complexity like an elephant and has no need to ever figure something out or articulate something well or any of the other tasks that require intelligence/discernment

It's a nice consolation prize for Hillary, I'm sure, to at least know she's much smarter than Trump.