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[silverspawn]

I feel like the explanations for Trump have been really, really bad. He's had more than an entire term, and I still haven't seen anyone explaining the phenomenon in a way that I found impressive. No-one has given me a model that would have predicted it in advance.

The part where people are dissatisfied and anti-establishment and conspiratorial is the easy part. But why Trump? Why not an eloquent right wing nutjob. Why not someone like in House of Cards? Why not someone who doesn't contradict himself every two sentences?

The point about fiction is important because it's a more honest showing of how no-one gets it. If they did, there would be a story about someone who's like Trump. But there isn't. In fiction, usually either the author is too inept to understand that the other side thinks they're the good guys and just writes the bad guy as trivially evil, or they make a genuine effort and end up with something, well again, plausible. But it's never Trump.

[silverspawn]

And there was this 538 podcast episode with a guy who's read like 200 books about Trump or something, and he didn't have the answer, either.

[silverspawn]

Really curious what the Everett Branches where Bernie Sanders won in 2016 are looking like right now. Is Bernie still president?

[silverspawn]

Maybe the single axis that's most inexplicable about Trump is just that he's genuinely unintelligent. He just doesn't understand complicated things.

Of course most people say 'of course he's smart, he won the presidency lol' and then ignore the functionally infinite number of nails in this coffin of a theory

but this is the thing I don't recall ever having seen in fiction. Perhaps that's why I didn't even think about Trump with Don't Look Up until reading reviews. The president there is terrible, but she's not dumb. Neither is any other bad politician or even comparable fictional role I have ever seen ever

[silverspawn]

Also difficult because I believe Trump is playing a character to some extent, e.g. it seems like he always knew that Covid was bad and just lied about it. But his real self is still a moron. In fact, lying about this is one the biggest of the aforementioned nails; it was an epic own goal that very likely cost him re-election.

[silverspawn]

Completely unrelated

"CORONA: Mangel an PCR-Tests! "Die Steilheit der Omikron-Welle hat alle überrascht" I WELT Interview"

No it didn't you dipshit, exactly this was predicted on lessWrong when we first had data about Omicron, and in this case I'm pretty sure plenty others also were competent enough to do that.

[silverspawn]

youtube keeps recommending me these German corona videos. I don't know why, this was the first time I ever clicked on one.

[silverspawn]

Someone should write a hypothetical review of a hypothetical book predicting someone like Trump before Trump became a thing.

"And then it includes a ridiculous Deus Ex Machine where the enigmatic president makes a political move everyone would have advised him against and therefore loses re-election. In a way, it fitting how the person who was simultaneously brilliant enough to woe millions of Americans and too stupid to understand how the government works ends with something similarly incoherent. While at times you seem to discern moments of sanity in The Rise of Trump, in the end the number of ridiculous ideas thrown into an already unbelievable story just makes it impossible to take any of this seriously. Trump is not an enigma; he is a slave to the whims of author, whose inability to maintain a plausible story becomes painfully obvious throughout the book."

1/5 Stars

[silverspawn]

Like if people actually read this book, I guarantee they wouldn't make the same moronic mental gymnastics to explain how Trump is secretly smart because then they'd have no reason to. They would see that he obviously isn't smart and then write about how that's dumb and surrealistic.

[Awaclus]

I feel like the explanations for Trump have been really, really bad. He's had more than an entire term, and I still haven't seen anyone explaining the phenomenon in a way that I found impressive. No-one has given me a model that would have predicted it in advance.

Well, Nate Silver gave it like a 25% chance (although I guess his model is not really an explanation). Things with a 25% chance happen sometimes.

[faust]

but this is the thing I don't recall ever having seen in fiction. Perhaps that's why I didn't even think about Trump with Don't Look Up until reading reviews. The president there is terrible, but she's not dumb. Neither is any other bad politician or even comparable fictional role I have ever seen ever

I can think of a few.

Iron Sky predates Trump by some years and has a Trump-like president (modeled after Sarah Palin).
Idiocracy, for all its faults, presents the president as equally stupid as the general population.
I think there was also a Simpsons episode that predicted Trump being president but I haven't seen it.

[faust]

The part where people are dissatisfied and anti-establishment and conspiratorial is the easy part. But why Trump? Why not an eloquent right wing nutjob. Why not someone like in House of Cards? Why not someone who doesn't contradict himself every two sentences?

I think it comes down to the fact that smart people who want power don't want to be president. There are ways to wield similar amounts of power that come with way fewer obligations.

The main thing Trump had going for him was that he was entertaining. I mean, not even his political opponents really debate that. You seem to imply that he's not eloquent, and certainly he isn't eloquent the way someone like Obama is, but he certainly knows how to keep a crowd's, and the media's, attention.

What's way more strange to me than Trump becoming president is the way he keeps the entire Republican party in his thrall now that he's no longer president.

[silverspawn]

I feel like the explanations for Trump have been really, really bad. He's had more than an entire term, and I still haven't seen anyone explaining the phenomenon in a way that I found impressive. No-one has given me a model that would have predicted it in advance.

Well, Nate Silver gave it like a 25% chance (although I guess his model is not really an explanation). Things with a 25% chance happen sometimes.

I was thinking about predicting something like him before he was running though, not predicting his chance once he was already doing well.

[silverspawn]

Have to say Sir David Mark Rylance Waters who plays the tech ceo in don't look up is an amazing actor. He's so good that I spent quite a bit of time hating him before remembering that he's playing a role.

[silverspawn]

The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle praised the film and wrote, "Don't Look Up might be the funniest movie of 2021.

Don't Look Up is the least funny movie I've ever seen in my life. It's impressive how earth even managed to apply so much optimization pressure to create something so unfathomably unfunny.

[silverspawn]

Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, believes that "critics were not only missing the point of the film in important ways, but that the very way they discussed the film exemplified the problem that the film was trying to draw attention to. Some of the responses to the movie could have appeared in the movie itself"

Amen.

[silverspawn]

Iron Sky predates Trump by some years and has a Trump-like president (modeled after Sarah Palin).

Interesting, and it's on Netflix. I'll give it a shot.

[silverspawn]

It appears Axel Stoll was onto something after all

[silverspawn]

Thanks, anyway, this movie is a lot of fun so far

[silverspawn]

that hitler imitation

[silverspawn]

well the second half of this movie definitely dragged on for too long but still, good time

Now I know that this is literally what I asked for since it's a dumb president, but I don't actually think it's in the spirit of what I asked for. There is no political prediction here, it's just a comedy.

[silverspawn]

A reason for why god doesn't exist/we don't live in a simulation, one that people sometimes give, is that unlikely things happen about as often as they should.

The problem is that this doesn't actually seem true. I feel like unlikely things happen way more often than they should.

[silverspawn]

The more fundamental problem is that it's very hard to know how much they should happen.

But my life seems to be but a ridiculous concatenation of extreme coincidences in both directions

[silverspawn]

and then there's I don't know TRUMP

[silverspawn]

Now I know that this is literally what I asked for since it's a dumb president, but I don't actually think it's in the spirit of what I asked for. There is no political prediction here, it's just a comedy.

Also, like, this movie doesn't approximate how politics works. The woman has the 'president' label and is in charge, and there are a bunch of jokes about how america lies and negotiates with terrorists, but that's about where the similarity stops. There is no political process