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.

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.