Trump has “proven to be one of the best debaters in political history..."
What? What a weird statement.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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I mean, if the goal is to flabbergast your opponent he's the king.
"Baffle them with bullshit" has been a saying for quite a while. But with Trump it's more like "give them a stupidity migraine." The stuff that comes out of his mouth hurts my brain to hear it.
You can't help but to try to parse some meaning out of his words. They sound like English. But he assembles them in an arcane order where the harder you try to understand him, the less anything he says makes sense. He is like a human word cloud where you just have to infer the message based on the biggest, boldest words.
So yes, it's hard to beat an opponent in a debate when you have to try to understand what he's saying in order to form a cogent counterpoint. His audience of the hearing- and vocabulary-impaired only absorb the gist without ever attempting to parse actual meaning out of it.
It is truly a thing of wonder, and if the future of our nation didn't hinge on it, it would be fascinating to explore. I hope future generations, unburdened by the threat of another Trump Presidency, might be able to study this and harness this power for good.
The first AI President
AI is at least coherent. You can understand it and argue or agree with it. Trump talks like someone who just blew a .3 at a DUI checkpoint trying to explain that he really hasn't had that many, just without the slurring.
And somewhere in the middle of his explanation of how his aunt Patty accidentally ate a gekko tail once and cast a sobriety spell on him, and his great great grandfather was the famous Irish whisky distiller Terrance Trent Darby O'Gill and his descendants all naturally have that much alcohol in their blood genetically—the cop realizes his own night would be so much easier if he just just drove the asshole home instead of arresting him and having to listen to another 3 hours of that.
Imagine trying to think while a dimwitted centaur's front end plays an invisible accordion to accompany his dementia-riddled and bigoted stream-of-consciousness.
Trump would rarely be the best debater in the room.
Even in an empty room
I don't think there's anything special that Gabbard did in that debate to make Kamala selfdestruct. She just asked her about the laughing about smoking weed after locking people up for smoking weed. Kamala had no answer prepared and in general isn't great at thinking on her feet. Kamala's prep needs to be better this time, otherwise it could be a repeat of the dem debates which could be catastropic in a close race.
Honestly the whole thing that she "eviscerated" her in the debate (as the New York Times put it) is a bunch of horseshit.
Here's the exchange. I think Harris was a little taken aback because it was at least 50% complete fabrications, and that's harder to deal with in a debate setting than in a prosecutorial setting. It's fair to say she handled it a little poorly and Gabbard did a good job at landing the dishonest attacks. But most of what it accomplished, at the end of the day, was to accelerate the putting of those lies into the public discourse in a big way as talking points, alongside the idea that if anyone in Harris's office was prosecuting people who broke the law at the time, that represents a fair reason to attack Harris today because obviously what she should have been doing was letting them go and instructing every prosecutor in California to do the same, and that wouldn't have caused any problems.
I think Harris was a little taken aback because it was at least 50% complete fabrications.
Hopefully Harris is prepared for that, because a heap of fabrications (or blatant lies as most people would call them) is exactly what she will be getting from Trump.
FYI it's pretty normal for DA's to juat say were not gonna prosecute a crime. This is just the first result when I searched for examples with weed:
Also if she has trouble countering lies, she'll get smoked by Trump so prep is really important here.
Nashville had already decriminalized weed as of 2016. I only find one other case (Houston) where it was a prosecutor making a policy decision not to prosecute weed, ahead of the rest of the government. Honestly, just read the rest of the article you cited -- it matters that a lot of the rest of the city government was on board for it, but it still left a little bit of a confusing way to go about it even after decriminalization, which the chief of police among some other people pointed out, along with the idea that yes weed should be legal so maybe it's a good thing.
Left unsaid in among all of that is that selective enforcement by police and prosecutors in almost every case works out, in practice even up to the modern day, to be racist selective enforcement. Honestly it's better for the legislature just to make it legal. I'm not trying to throw cold water on any prosecutor who wants to take the initiative to do a good thing if they can make sure it'll work out right, but generally, the prosecutorial portion of the government isn't where you want to be making your creative departures from the law the way the legislators wrote it down.
I do see that Nashville had decriminalized it in 2016, but it's kinda weird since the article I posted definitely acts like it was still criminalized in 2020. I can't find where the chief of police says anything about it being decriminalized, in the article he just says
“I agree that General Funk, as District Attorney, has the authority to determine what cases to prosecute,” Chief Anderson said. “Marijuana possession remains a violation of Tennessee law, and we cannot be in a position of telling our officers to begin ignoring lawful statutes passed by the legislature. Nashville police officers continue to be encouraged to use their discretion in carrying out their duties, as guided by MNPD policy.”
Maybe a bad article or it had be recriminalized?
It sounds to me like the Nashville city government (mayor and prosecutor and part of the city council) sort of decriminalized it on their own unofficially, even with it being still illegal by state law. Which is… kind of fine. It’s messy but whatever if it keeps people out of jail I’m fine with it. I mean that’s what the states did already that got us to this point.
My whole point was just that having the DA lead the process isn’t the normal way to do it, and that’s not how it happened even in Nashville, and attacking Kamala Harris for this wide variety of half-truthful bullshit including that it’s all her fault that California still had some level of criminalization when she was DA and that makes her automatically a bad person, is IMO a variety of half truthful bullshit.
Ah I get what you're saying, I think the smart money would have been to lie about whether she smoked weed. Could have avoided all of this lol.
"Decriminalization" doesn't mean "its legal", it means "Its illegal but the state is not obligated to prosecute."
Typically it means there is no criminal offense to prosecute. It turns it into the equivalant of a speeding ticket.
She wasn't a District Attorney, she was Attorney General for the state of California.
AGs don't have the same prosecutorial discretion that DAs have.
Harris better be ready this time because I assume Trump will be coached to try that jab too.
It's an easy question to answer. "I smoked weed in college, my position on cannabis as AG followed both the Democratic and Republican party positions at the time, and I advocate today for recreational legalization and restorative justice for those who suffered under the war on drugs."
Tulsi "I Love Putin" Gabbard.
And that was before she started pushing that "U.S. bio weapons labs in Ukraine" lie.
Teaching a pig to sing comes to mind.
What is Gabbard's story these days? She hates Harris (nothing wrong with that: in the US we are all entitled to hate any politicians we want)? Or she aligns with Trump in deeper ways now? I remember Gabbard from the 2020 Dem primary. She clobbered Harris pretty well back then. But she didn't come across as even slightly likely to sympathize with Trump.
Since then, she has been on Fox News a lot. I wonder if it changed her?
She’s a grifter and has always been a grifter.
Hillary Clinton called Tulsi out explicitly as a Russian asset. I think she was right about that.
There's some evidence she's a cult member, and was posturing as some kind of Manchurian candidate.
No, really.
Mike Prysner has made a few decent podcasts (QAA, eyes left) following her political career and service. I don't think you can definitionally tie her to membership, but she's got some questionable associations.
Which cult?
Science of identity?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ashCzbsVdFI8ves0cF4HW
I hadn't heard of it til the odd confluence of seeing Prysner's name on QAA. His own podcast eyes left covers her recent bio.
She is showing typical grifter behavior like many who changed their ideologies on a dime to further self interest.
Tulsi Gabbard is part of the Science of Identity cult. She was literally raised in this cult and is Chris Butler's heir apparent. They're viciously anti-gay and she lied to the voters to be elected in Hawaii as a Democrat.
Q-Anon Anonymous did a great episode about this
Thanks, I hadn't heard of that and it is interesting.