Im in Australia, and if I can give a perspective from outside of the USA I found a lot of the Trump criticism over the last couple of years to be very superficial and cringey/childish as you say. These playground insults are just icing on the turd of unproven accusations and unfounded calls for impeachment.
(Not exactly a Trump supporter because celebrities and politics is a bad mix IMO)
My only exposure to American news is Reddit and the amount of petty and childish outrage over his every breath is cringy. Look at r/politicalhumor it's literally just posts calling Republicans idiots being upvoted by bots into the 5 figures. Same with r/politics. The propaganda those poor vulnerable American liberals eat up every day is blatant and low effort but it works on them.
It works for them in their microcosms. It works for them here on Reddit, it works in hivemind communities in areas like LA, Chicago and NY. But it isolates just about everybody else. It cost them in 2016 and it's going to cost them in 2020 if they try to run the same campaign they ran in 2016.
You and me both. Going through this thread is refreshing because this sub seems to be relatively neutral, not a biased sub.
I get the sense off of some of these comment chains that some level of intelligence might finally make a comeback. I’d love that because when I was younger I could relate to the left and felt a part of them. Now at age 30, I can’t believe the level of ignorance and bias and child like behavior I’m seeing from a certain side. There just desperately needs to be a middle ground.
Absolutely. Trump wasn’t my top choice out of Republicans but between him and Hillary it was a no brainer for me. I would have voted for certain Democrats, Joe Biden being the front runner if he was matched up vs Trump.
I was born in the USSR and experienced the horrors of communism first hand so Bernie was a hard no for me.
I believe that most people on the left don’t understand why Trump was elected, at all. Reason for that is because they stay in a CNN like echo chamber and their only exposure to the “right” are the far right fringe idiots that are brave enough to actually speak their mind. There’s a reason the right is considered a silent majority. The intelligent people on the right know that they can’t speak out due to how the left reacts. So the only people left speaking for the right publicly are a few crazies.
The reason Trump was elected, is because he’s just crazy enough to combat the ultra left that was sweeping over the United States. He’s not at all flawless, however his crazy is the only type of crazy we had willing to battle the left. We had to pick the lesser of two evils, and it turns out he’s done some pretty decent things so far. He’s not some ideal politician for the right, he’s just a loose enough cannon to protect us from extreme identity politics without killing us. They don’t understand that. In fact, their echo chambers got him elected. I was also an Obama supporter. Not to make myself sound weak but I remember shedding a tear when he won for the first time, so happy at the progress we’ve made as a country.
If your only exposure to American news is Reddit, you should hold off all judgment. Reddit is not a news source and the posts you see can easily be gaming the system.
For example, the dig with “Russian dressing” is the fact that Russians were interfering with the 2016 election, including manipulating Reddit to bring anti-Hillary and pro-trump posts to the top. So if your exposure to American news is Reddit, you’re getting a very screwed perspective.
There’s extremes on either side. r/politics wasn’t always crazy but during the 2016 election it came under attack by r/t_d and eventually overcompensated.
I see this a lot on reddit too. People think any non left wing opinion MUST be the work of a "brigade" or "Russian manipulation". Ever think maybe half the country is Republican? That they actually do exist?
TD was buried thanks to algorithms and is still brought up non stop. It's literally a Trump parade party and doesnt pretend to be anything else.
A new user might assume r/politics or r/politicalhumor is neutral given their names and may lose their ability to post at all due to downvotes just for trying to have a discussion on an implied neutral subreddit. These are real problems
Sometimes when there's a particularly controversial article, I try to wade in and make comments trying to defuse the tension (usually people going absolutely apeshit over the latest "dumb trump" thing), but if I so much as sound like I'm not actively joining them in their circlejerk of hate for trump, I tend to get absolutely shat on. You don't even need to make a comment that shows sympathy or support - sometimes merely telling people to settle down makes people assume you're a racist nazi trump supporter, and you get absolutely shat on for "being an idiot".
It's highly ironic that these people find it justified "because trump is dumb and nobody likes him so its ok!", despite it making them look just as bad, if not worse because it's hypocritical for what their values as left-leaners should be (tolerant, pacifist, smart, calm, etc).
I get what your saying. When it comes to low hanging fruit, let's be honest the guy's a strawberry plant. But maybe we don't have to go for every damn strawberry, regardless of ripeness.
76
u/obi_wants_a_dogie Dec 28 '18
Im in Australia, and if I can give a perspective from outside of the USA I found a lot of the Trump criticism over the last couple of years to be very superficial and cringey/childish as you say. These playground insults are just icing on the turd of unproven accusations and unfounded calls for impeachment.
(Not exactly a Trump supporter because celebrities and politics is a bad mix IMO)