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Bluesky Social is a microblogging social platform being developed in conjunction with the decentralized AT Protocol. Previously invite-only, the flagship Beta app went public in February 2024. All are welcome!

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TheArstaInventor@lemmy.world

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red hats (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago by distantsounds@lemmy.world to c/peoplebluesky@lemmy.world

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https://bsky.app/profile/craigbrittain.com/post/3lsrtwivr522a

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

He’s not exceptional at his job either.

He's won the Presidency twice and he's forced the opposition party to make enormous concessions to his ideological end goals both times.

His job isn’t to get elected

It is to get elected and to get allies elected. And now he's President again with a Congress even more MAGA-pilled than in 2016.

If you’re talking about enriching himself, and you think that’s the primary or sole job of a politician…then sure?

A system's purpose is what it does, and it sure looks like the thing elected offices do is enrich their office-holders. So in that sense, he's done a stellar job.

LOL, man, what are you trying to even discuss here?

If you go back up to the very tippy top, I'm noting how "stupid" gets flung around as a pejorative, which inevitably leads opposition groups to underestimate people and play into their hands.

Reagan, Bush, and Trump have all been excellent instances of this. Hell, Clinton, too (Bush Sr had him pegged as a know-nothing hick). Obama as well, if you consider how Hillary got fleeced in the primary.

There are also people who have actual values and do not believe in continually violating them in order to achieve whatever their objective may be.

Values like "Greed is Good", "AIs are superior to humans", and "Israelis are entitled to a militant ethno-nationalist enclave state". They're the ones currently running the country.

If you think that’s stupid, that’s like your opinion, man.

There are some very, very good poker players who cannot tell you the name of the state they took all your money in, because they could not be bothered to learn the name.

It is asinine to insist they are stupid and you are smart when you're the one wearing the barrel-with-suspenders.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

A system’s purpose is what it does

You may like this quip, and I'll admit I'm partial to it myself, but it's just a quip. A system can have other purported or actual purposes and then simply not be structured correctly to reach them. The quip is skeptical and cynical, but not everyone is a cynic, and not all non-cynical people are stupid.

Values like “Greed is Good”, “AIs are superior to humans”, and “Israelis are entitled to a militant ethno-nationalist enclave state”. They’re the ones currently running the country.

Great? The values espoused or imposed by the currently ruling regime aren't universally shared even in fully developed totalitarian states.

There are some very, very good poker players who cannot tell you the name of the state they took all your money in, because they could not be bothered to learn the name.

A better analogy is if there was a poker player that came into the game with more chips than any other player at the table, was allowed to continually and openly cheat and evade the established rules of the game, and was still crowned the winner. Is that player possibly stupid? Yes, it very easily could be the case that he is.

Trump's chief insight in his entire life is that the people who enforce the rules in this country are weak-willed and will fold under applied pressure. That's not exactly theory of relativity stuff, and many other people knew this just as well as Trump but were restrained by other things that don't apply to Trump from exploiting it.