761 Trump. Election. More
Update, 11 Dec 2016:
Bombshell Secret CIA Report Says Russia Aimed To Steal White House For Trump (The Washington Post, via The Huffington Post)
Two headlines, two
newspaper articles that sent a chill down my spine:
Donald Trump's election win marred by Russian hacking,
but
Americans look away
and:
Donald Trump has already defeated the news media,
and it's
unclear what we can do about it
The story about the US
election so far is that Trump won on account of 1) the unemployed blue-collar
workers in the “rust-belt” states, and 2) because of the uproar that was caused
by Hillary Clinton’s horrendous pre-election comment about the “basket of deplorables”.
But it turns out there
is more to it, much more. For a start (and trust me, I’m not the type to fall
for conspiracy theories), for a start we have the extraordinary situation of
the Russians having exercised a crucial influence on the election, helped by
Wikileaks; here is another article that is hugely disturbing:
Why was I blocked by WikiLeaks on Twitter?
But above all ... get a load of this:
"Perhaps, as some have suggested, Trump tweeted his ridiculous
lie about millions of fraudulent votes on Sunday in order to distract people
from this lengthy investigation in the New York Times of the overseas
partnerships that present unprecedented conflict of interest problems for his
foreign policy. But even if that wasn't his intent, it's what happened - and he
accomplished some other things as well.
"The first thing it does when Trump kicks off a frenzy like this
one is thrill his supporters (and I'll admit that I was among those who said
that just playing to his base wouldn't be enough to win him the election).
Here's how the cycle works. First, Trump says something outrageously false, but
which his supporters either believe already or would like to believe. Then
Trump gets criticised in the media for it, and his supporters say, "There
they go again, the liberal anti-Trump media." Instead of convincing
everyone that the claim was false, the criticism only reinforces for Trump's
fans the idea that nothing the media says can be believed, which further
undermines their ability to act as neutral arbiters in any debate.
"The more outrageous his claim, the more coverage it gets. At
first, a disturbing amount of that coverage just passes along what Trump is
saying, particularly in headlines and brief mentions on television, which often
take the form of "Trump says world is flat." Then the news media find
their footing a bit and begin explicitly calling him out for the falsehood. But
the more it ends up looking like an argument between Trump and the media, the
more that even Republicans who are skeptical of Trump will get pulled to his
side, because they've long been invested in the idea that the media are
hopelessly infected with liberal bias.
"The entire sequence of events enables Trump to create a
meta-message, which is that there's no such thing as truth and no such thing as
genuine authority. Think about it: the president-elect is claiming that an
election that he won was beset by fraud, because he heard it from a lunatic
radio host who thinks that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged using child
actors and the September 11 attacks were carried out by the
US government. At the same time, the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief is
turning away the intelligence briefers who are prepared to deliver him daily
updates on the world's hotspots and potential dangers to the United States -
what one might call the actual conspiracies we have to be worried about.
"The question isn't whether the news media will be able to cut through to the truth - that's the easy part - it's whether anyone will listen when they do. So when Trump makes his next ludicrous claim, what are the options?"
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
All this, I have to say, if anything re-inforces my lingering belief I wasn't so totally wrong when I suggested before (blog 758):
Voters should be grouped according to their IQ: Below average IQ
voters get 1 vote; average IQ voters get 2 votes; above average IQ voters get 3
votes.
Actually one could probably argue people should get either 1, 2
or 3 votes according to their level of education!