THE DAILY SHOW HAS LOST IT

The original point of the show was to be a funny show on a comedy network. For a long while, all was well. But gradually, the show writers lost the ability to distinguish satire (that they were doing) from actual politics (with which it has nothing to do).

Jon Stewart spent a lot of his airtime making fun of things that were not political; he also reminded his audience from time to time that "we don't do any actual journalism; don't use us as a source of information". The new South African guy from South Africa, South African Trevor Noah, doesn't waste time with such disclaimers. He's replaced the space between the unamusing sketches with the usual self-flagellation and victimisation (did you know he had it rough in South Africa during his youth? Bet you didn't know that.)

That is one of the main problems with many of these satirical shows: they are so unfunny that it becomes very easy to forget that they are actually nothing but comedy. If you could get a regular laguh out of watching an episode, you'd have a better chance of remembering later on that what you saw was just a joke show on Comedy Central. Stewart hid behind the "I'm just a comedian" line all his career, but at least he had the decency of actually being a good one. Now what we have on air is pontificating, holier-than-thou smartasses that don't even try to make a joke. Being as funny as a real news show is a great way to get confused with real news.

I'd pay a fair sum to see the unedited versions of some of the interviews they have done the past couple years. I bet it would give off a completely different vibe. They tried to ambush Milo Yiannopoulos with this tactic and he acceted to be interviewed on the condition that his own staff could also record the whole thing and then make their own edited version. The Daily Show crew ran away immediately. That tells you a lot.

NOV 28TH!!!!! ELECTION DAY IS UPON US AT LAST !!!!!

I bet they don't find that lapsus as funny now.

THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL VERSUS THE PRESIDENCY

You're Donald Trump.

You love your country because it has been so generous to you. But it's not perfect. And lately, you feel like it's been going in the wrong direction. You wish you could do something about it.

So you decide to become president.

The first thing you need to do is to get elected. Because you have 45 years of experience dealing with wealthy and important people, you know a lot about how to speak in a manner that connects with your audience. You have an instinct for what makes people tick, what is gonna have a persuasive effect and what will and won't matter. It's already obvious to you that facts and policies don't influence people's decisions.

What type of discourse are you most likely to make...
- A rational discourse about the policies you want to implement?
or
- A populist approach that is the most likely to generate interest and votes?

Of course, along the campaign trail you're gonna run into some tough questions. The primaries are basically an insult contest, and you're pretty good at that. You and your team are working on a series of "linguistic killshots" to take out an opponent Whenever he becomes too prominent. Cruz has a rat face so Lyin' Ted should do it. Jeb looks calm and composed, why not turn that against him and call him "low-energy"? He could just be dumb enough to overact and ridicule himself while trying to get rid of the image.

You're an atheist, like most of the modern-day presidents were. But just like they did, you're gonna have to play the religiosity game. If you get in a tight spot, you'll just get out with the vaguest non-answer you can muster.

You think that Bush's Secure Fence Act is a pretty cool thing that wasn't sold well enough to the public. Obama liked it at the time. It's already half built....why not revive the project, build the second half and then claim credit for the whole thing? But instead of boring people with something like "Let's reinstate the 2008 SFA and build 313 miles of fencing while double-layering an additional 685 miles on order to curb illegal immigration by an additional 18%", of course you're gonna yell "Build a wall!" to get the blood boiling. And work out the rest with the appropriate people later on.

Like any politician, you'll promise a lot of things and then adjust and move along with public opinion and what's actually feasable.

You're pretty sure you can do this.

DUMB-KEYWORD SMASHING PART 2 : THE ONES WE HEAR A BIT LESS OFTEN

ANTI-LGBT Trump says he fully upholds gay marriage because "That was settled in the Supreme Court"
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/donald-trump-same-sex-marriage-231310

IMPULSIVE,  MAN-WITHOUT A PLAN Trump talks about politics and a possible presidential candidacy 28 years before it happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI

NARCISSIST Trump pays for ice rink construction in Central Park then gives away all operating income to charity.
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/15/nyregion/about-new-york-pssst-here-s-a-secret-trump-rebuilds-ice-rink.html

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE WAS ROOTING FOR CLINTON?

ISIS.

VIRTUE SIGNALING

Virtue signaling is a process by which an individual tries to better his social status within a given in-group by adopting a set of accepted ideas and opinions within that group, regardless of their validity or quality. Relaying those ideas around in the group rapidly becomes a way to increase your status; criticizing them, or having diverging ideas makes you lose status.

A major problem in modern mainstream journalism is that journalists give way too much importance to virtue signaling to their peers as opposed to digging for complete coverage of a story. One particular angle becomes the "right" one, and the others fall in disregard. In Hollywood, the code of conduct is very complex and strict. You have to have the right opinions about lots of things if you want to keep your career going. These two factors combined limit the range of acceptable things to say in mainstream media to a surprising degree.

It is possible to commit virtue signaling errors if one possesses insufficient information or has the wrong prejudices towards a group. Those errors can be vey costly and limit or completely cut your access privileges to the target group. For example, early on election night, a couple of tourists entered a cosy bar in Los Angeles and started watching with the other patrons. Just to make conversation, the man asked the nearest patron "So, how are things looking?". The other answered "Looks like Hillary is winning." So the couple of tourists, eager to virtue-signal their political views, erupted in an exagerrated cry of joy and hi-fived each other. The 4 nearest customers turned towards them in an unfriendly manner, and one said in an icy tone "Actually we happen to be rooting for Trump here." Oops. After overplaying their opening hand in such a clumsy manner, the couple had little choice but to leave and try at another bar.

Finally, virtue signaling is most of what people do all day every day on social media by liking the right things and by showing outrage towards the right things.

PRIMARY SOURCES

The best way to form an educated opinion on any subject is "primary sources", ie information coming directly from what you want to learn about. A good example of a primary source is a a verbatim transcript of a speech, or the complete recordings of the speech itself. Primary sources let you avoid things like spin, quoting out of context, voluntary omission of important parts, and pre-priming by pundits.

In todays' media-oversaturated world, one problem is that there's so much more secondary and tertiary sources of information than ever before, that it becomes easy to get lost in the shuffle and to neglect consumption of the source material itself. For example, I'm sure you've spent countless hours in front of your TV and computer watching tons of commentary, analysis, crtiticism, and comedy about the election. You might have a favorite channel that tells you all you need to know; you might flip through them all to get more points of view and cover all the biases; all-in-all, you're pretty confident that your opinion is informed.

Buuuuut...
How many complete, unedited Trump speeches have you heard or watched during the entirety of the campaign? ___
Do you think that that amount of primary source information is sufficient to make your position a truly educated one?

Again, primary sources by themselves are not enough. But they are the most essential part of the evidence you need to build an opinion or a case, because litterally 100% of the rest is built upon that. Any news network edits and cuts exerpts and spins parts of the primary sources; analysts talk about the primary sources and tell you what THEY thought of it, and so on.

I have selected for you a few speeches that I personally think should be heard in their original form, without media bias and editing. You will probably hear things during some of those that you don't agree with; you'll probably hear things that will give you goosebumps or make you pull your hair out : that's all right. But after taking in some of it, you might soften your opinion. Where others saw rage, you might see passion; where you thought was hate, you might find clumsily expressed good intentions. What could have been perceived like classlessness might just be colorful talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-dZlm7m4Rw (Just a cool all-around one)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_q61B-DyPk (Yeah, the rapists one. He talks about hundreds of others things too :p )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im_uLJKzs-4 (He says he wants to rely on experts more than you might think.)

YOU LIKE THOSE KEYWORDS? LET'S CHECK'EM OUT.

Here's RACIST Trump actively fighting against racism.
https://spectator.org/64643_when-trump-fought-racists/

Here's SEXIST Trump hiring a woman to a top job in 1980.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/barbara-res-donald-trump-boss-article-1.2525669

Here's HOMOPHOBIC Trump.

Here's ANTISEMITE Trump lending his personal jet to fly a 3-year old Jewish boy to a hospital on the other side of the country.
http://www.snopes.com/trump-flies-sick-boy/

Bonus Track : He was on the ground to help out along with 200 of his staff on 9/11.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYXygIcIJ6I

HOW TO USE THE WORD "FACT" PROPERLY

Almost never.

Whenever you're about to say it or write it down, make sure that you're not talking about something else. Generally, the word "fact" should be replaced by the phrase "my personal interpretation of an anecdote or something I saw on TV". Sure, it's a mouthful; it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily. But maybe, you're only thinking of something as a "fact" because you have not been sufficiently exposed to other peoples' different perspectives on it.

An even better solution is to replace it with "I think". Here are two statements to illustrate my point.
- It is a fact that Donald Trump is racist. .
- I think that Donald Trump is racist.
I would argue that the second statement is preferable for a few reasons. First, it's actually more persuasive. You're explicitely stating that you're thinking; you're not just spewing out something you got from somewhere, you actually thought about it. Second of all, it's more inviting for another person to engage conversation. There's an implicit "What do YOU think?" at the end of that second statement. Not only are you sounding less authoritarian, but you also increase your chance of learning something.

The word "fact" should be reserved for boring things like....facts. Like the Earth is round and stuff. And even that can be questioned.

THEY EVEN GOT TO THE KIDS

When they see seven-year old kids bashing Trump on TV, some people go "Wow, that man is so evil and incompetent that even 3rd graders can see it."

Others go "Wow, the adults that are supposed to be responsible for those kids' education should really be doing a better job".

LET'S TRAVEL FOUR YEARS INTO THE FUTURE

Let's try a little thought experiment. Let's say you wake up and it's december 2020. First thing you do is you run to a pile of "old" newspapers in order to catch up on world events from 2016 to 2020.

And as you browse through the pile, it gradually dawns upon you that nothing major has really changed. Some people's lives got a little better, other's a little worse. There was the amount of natural disaster and mayhem you'd expect. It is now 0.09 degrees warmer outside on average.

But you mostly discover that the United States are, by and large, in a state comparable to 2016. The rich are still way too rich, the poor still need to work full-time just not to starve, everybody's obsessed with celebrity culture and entertainment. City people act all smug about country people; country people are angry that the system leaves them feeling stranded.

Donald Trump? Heh. He's mostly considered an okay president, a not-quite Reagan. His critics accuse him of flip-flopping on everything; his supporters praise his flexibility and ability to A-B test. His approval rating is 32%, and he's not going to run for a second mandate because he's tired and wants to spend more time with his family.

And that's it. The Republican party in power for the last 4 years hasn't done anything way out of the ordinary. They signed some dubious deals, and some great ones too. Immigration is a little bit different, minorities still get shafted in some ways, but no hecatomb or civil war or anything.

Would your mind be blown? It's shouldn't be, because after all, you're not an expert on politics; you don't know at all what's going on behind the scenes. You can barely make out a picture of what's going on on the public stage because the media are completely biased and untrustworthy. You have no notion of how teams of cognitive scientists work behind the curtain to shape public opinion. You're moslty ignorant about any notion of persuasion and large-scale communication. You're drowning in an ocean of information, misinformation and disinformation, and you have no way of sorting out what matters and what doesn't in that ocean.

Now let's travel back to 2012. I come up to you and I say "Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States."

Would your mind be blown? It's shouldn't be, because after all, you're not an expert on politics; you don't know at all what's going on behind the scenes, and you can barely make out a picture of what's going on on the public stage because the media are completely biased and untrustworthy. You have no notion of how teams of cognitive scientists work behind the curtain to shape public opinion. You're moslty ignorant about any notion of persuasion and large-scale communication. You're drowning in an ocean of information, misinformation and disinformation, and you have no way of sorting out what matters and what doesn't in that ocean.

(TL;DR for those of you who need the Tweet format : the concept of Trump being a perfectly fine president is as "unthinkable" now as the concept of him being elected was 4 years ago because we the public don't know shit.)

THAT DAMN POPULAR VOTE ARGUMENT

B...B...BUT TRUMP IS A NARCISSIST!

(Writer's note : I am mainly writing this piece as a counterpoint to the Huffington's post "Trump and Narcissistic Personality Disorder" article published on July 31st. Yes, I am a random faceless nobody blogger and I'm willing to tackle HuffPo head-on. That's how low my esteem of them is.)

Without going into too much detail about the clinical definition of what an acutal "Narcissist" is, because none of us have medical degrees or expertise, I will be content to use the layman's definition of the word, which is:

"Narcissism: a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultraconfidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism. Something something guy looking at his own reflection blabbity-blah."

Because anyway, that's what people mean when they call someone that. I do not consider Trump to fit the mold at all. He does manifest some of the behaviour associated with the word, but I think it's mostly for show. He's a very colorful speaker and he likes to remind us every 15 minutes or so how successful he is or how popular he is; however there's nothing worrying about that, it's just campagin self-promotion.

Need for admiration? Who doesn't have that? Next!

His reaction to criticism is actually very sane in my opinion. First of all he never attacks anyone gratuitously; he only retorts when he feels attacked. He uses social media in a very effective manner, putting people in their place and making it clear that it's not a good idea to trash him. He never (?) apologizes, but again to me it's pretty clearly just campaigning strategy. 

As for lack of empathy for others, well...the man is five years past the legal retirement age; he's got a numerous and loving family; he's worth ten freaking billion dollars. With that kind of money, he could be layin' on his ass on his private island somewhere sipping Margarita's; he could be grabbing all the pussy he wanted on a tropical beach without a care in the world. Instead of that, he gets up a 4 AM every morning to attend meetings, prepare and give speeches and go on tours, all of that with the ultimate goal of serving his country for a dollar a year. He believes so strongly in a better America for everyone that he's willing to put in an amount of effort that you or I could never put in no matter how much you paid us.

So.....is Donald Trump a narcissist?

I'm gonna have to say no.

GRAB THEM BY THE PUSSY!

Don't. I just wanted to talk about the almost perfect timing of the Access Hollywood tapes release by the Clinton clan. Why "almost perfect"? If they had made this public sooner, let's say early in the campaign, people would probably have not taken it seriously enough and it would have faded away easily. But at that time, paranoia and fear were at their peak and the tapes fully fed into the public's confirmation bias that Trump was just a classless jerk who mistook women for objects.

Of course, any rational person could see that a simple conversation in a bus 11 years ago, as classless as it could have been, had no real impact on someone's ability to be the president. The attack was not about policies, about facts, or anything boring like that. It was a 100% an attack on his personality; it appealed 100% to your feelings. And that is why it was so effective. It grabbed you by the balls.

(Thunderous applause)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Buuuut....here's the critical factor the Dems missed : the frantic flow of information around that period made so that 3 weeks was actually TOO long. We had had way too many scandals by that point, we got tired of this one in around 5 days. Plus, Trump the master manipulator, in one of his strongest moves of the campaign, completely deflected the ire of the braindead masses with a simple diversion : he changed the subject by bashing on well-respected cultural icon SNL. Less than a day after his tirade, everybody was saying he was a vain idiot for disliking Alex Baldwin and SNL, and it completely sucked the wind of the tape scandal. You can almost picture him sitting in his office going "Man, this is too easy."

PROJECT VERITAS : TROUBLING REVELATIONS

Do you know about Project Veritas?

It's a non-profit organization with the goal of exposing corruption and dishonesty in public and private institutions.

It hit upon something big about one month before the US election. Remember those "violent Trump supporters" at early Trump rallies? The media was extatic to jump on this precious footage of Trump enthusiasts harassing and fighting with "peaceful" protesters or standers by. It allowed them to paint those people as violent, impulsive and dumb.

Turns out, there is another layer to the story, one that Project Veritas's crew uncovered with a set of hidden cameras put on key personel during the campaign. Using extremely questionable methods, they caught people working for the Democratic campaign saying disturbing things while being recorded. Scott Foval of Americans United for Change describes extensively how democrats actively troll and provoke Trump ralliers in order to bait them and provide scenes for the media to capture and use as propaganda. The more juicy part is at 7:08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuJGHuIkzY
He basically exposes a gigantic machination initiated by the Hillary camp against unknowing republicans. The Trump supporters were not violent on their own; they were manipulated and framed.

Now, I want you to notice 2 things about what was just exposed here:
1- What actually happened is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you thought had happened;
2- That fact changes your opinion NOT AT ALL.
That's because people are not rational and don't care about facts. They only think they do.

TRUMP IS RACIST!

Just kidding, I know he's not really racist. I went with the "controversial" title to grab your attention, because I know a lot of people who have been conditioned into thinking he is the most racist man on Earth. So this is sort of a set of counterarguments that I want to put at your disposal.

---Now, the most obvious out of the way first. The most common argument you will hear about Trump being racist is what he said about Mexicans. Putting aside that "Mexican" is not even a race...
Actual quoite : "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Assuming that racism means "People from another race than mine are inherently inferior and/or all alike", that statement couldn't be any less racist. He says right there that some of them are good people, that the Mexicans have their own "best people". He's simply stating that the ones fleeing their country to come here without permission aren't usually those best people. And counting the fact that of the estimated 11 million illegals in the US, 3 million of them have committed felonies or worse (a rate of over 25%), he seems to be on to something. Colorful language to be sure, but not racist, and part of a much larger speech that shows a man that's full of love for his country and its people.

---The tired routine about the KKK. So many factors render this "argument" completely moot. The KKK didn't even endorse Trump : its leader simply said that he found qualities in him. Even if they DID endorse him, that wouldn't mean anything. You have no control over who endorses you. The communist party endorsed Hillary; nobody batted an eye. Trump has repudiated and denied any interest in David Duke and his KKK innumrable times, except that one time where he seemed to not really understand the question and said "I'll have to get back to you on that" and did the next day. Of course the media jumped on that soudbyte and abused the hell out of it, but that doesnt' mean it's valid. THE KKK ARGUMENT IS NOTHING.

---The wall. I've already written quite a bit on this, so TL;DR is : several walls already exist in other countries and have supporters; the wall does nothing against people who want to come in a legit manner; it's perfectly feasable. As a matter of fact, both Obama and Hillary are on record voting for the construction of a fence between Mexico and the US in the last decade. Bet you did not know that.

---So many "racist" things attributed to him are so stretched that they barely mean anything anymore. We have anecdotal evidence of one of his black employees saying he said means things 25 years ago: what can I argue against that? Other than "it weighs nothing"? There's a giant page titled "Final Answer about Trump's Racism" with a hundred entries, but all those entries link to either Buzzfeed or Jezabel or Gawker (RIP) articles with no primary sources and no evidence. And do not forget that the zeitgeist changes very quickly: some of the things he might have said in 1981 will sound very rough to our ears, but they could have been pretty innocuous at the time. Running decades-old events through the filter of our offense-prone ears is not very fair. It's very easy to overblow everything in today's outrage culture.

After all this, my very boring conlusion is that Trump is no more or less racist than any other presidential candidate of recent history. He said several hair-raising things, sure. The man is a bit strange and seems to be having minor brain-farts sometimes. But he's far from the white-supremacist monster that his opponents wanted to paint him as.

This research was my main source for information. It's very interesting and nuanced, but I suspect no one will ever take the half-hour needed to read it.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/

THE BLUE WALL

Actually heard on the news :

"Unfortunately, the blue wall of the Democratic fortress did not hold and a wave of red crashed on the northeastern states."

It's not gonna be easy, but I'm gonna try to report the same news using MORE biased language.

"The cute little angels of the nice and beautiful princess Hillary did not bring enough marshmallows and ultrasoft WhiteSwan bathroom tissue to retain the fatal hordes of the mortal enemy of evil demon Donald Trump and his gang of studded Hell's who invaded the territory while laughing maniacally and distributing crystal-meth to 4-year-old kids." 

TRUMP IS #NOTMYPRESIDENT

Because I live in Canada.

THIS IS NOT A POLITICAL POST, IT'S A LINGUISTICS POST

Just wanted to clear some confusion about the use of the word "Literally", mostly by millenials it seems.

The word is defined as : ‘in a literal sense, as opposed to a non-literal, figurative or exaggerated sense’.

Literally literally means "to the letter" if you refer to it's latin root "litter".

For example, I've heard several people say  "Trump is literally Hitler" or "Trump is literally a clown". Both statements are false. Only one person in the history of mankind could be literally Hitler and he's dead. As for the clown thing, unless I misread or skipped parts of Mr. Trump's biography, I don't think he ever was literally a clown. He was however, elected democratically as the 45th President of the United States early on November 9th 2016. So the statement "Trump is literally the President" would be accurate.

I'M THE MOST RATIONAL PERSON I KNOW BY FAR

(Apparently our level of discourse has sunk so low that we now need warnings like this. So here goes : THIS PIECE IS SATIRE!!!)

Why? First of all, I'm a very well-informed customer. Whever I need to buy something, I do a lot of research to evaluate what's available on the market. So when I finally do make a purchase, I can be sure that my choice is objectively the best one for what I need. I'm not an impulse buyer or a trend follower, unlike most people.

Does advertisment affect me? That's kind of a stupid question, no? I just told you I only take rational factors into account. But does advertisement work on other people? Another stupid question! If it didn't work on other people, do you think there would be as much advertisement everywhere? If everyone was as rational as I am, companies would have stopped advertising long ago. I often hear people comparing BRAND-X to a cult. In find that very funny because that is so obvious to me too. I saw a guy with a BRAND-X the other day, and I thought "What a fool! If he hadn't been blinded by all the hype, he'd clearly see why BRAND-Y is better".

I also pride myself in being extremely open-minded. I an entirely open to all sets of ideas and opinions. As long as they make sense, of course. Even though I have a very powerful intellect, you can't expect anybody to waste their time reading or watching stuff that is clearly propaganda, bullshit or just plain nonsense. That's why I love watching PROGRAM-X. SHOWHOST-X is so funny! Clearly a superior mind like me. I respect SHOWHOST-X for being honest and having integrity in his reporting, for telling it like it is. Whenever SHOWHOST-X covers a topic, you know he's gonna do a deep-dive on it, like the entire 21 minutes of his show on one single topic, Wow! That way I can learn a lot about that topic, not just some superficial, coffee-machine-conversation-caliber knowledge. He's also balanced, and fair too. Not like SHOWHOST-Y on that other network, ugh! What a crook. That guy is mean and only promotes the establishment's view. He's just a pawn in the system, and I'm sure he knows it. SHOWHOST-Y has no conscience and only spews his clearly-false, one-sided narrative because some crooked corporation is willing to pay him millions of dollars to do it.

And when I vote, I carefully examine each candidate's strenghts and weaknesses, and positions on issues that really matter. Look, I know democracy does not work perfectly, or even very well at all, because every vote counts the same. My well-informed, well-researched vote is worth the same as that of any other silly ignorant hippie. Most people just cast their vote for stupid resons, like they saw their candidate holding a cute baby or saw a decade-old tape with another candidate saying something they didn't like on it. If only other people weren't so irrational and easy to influence, we would live in a much better world, because my candidate would win easily and do what's truly right.

(Once more with feeling ; THIS PIECE IS SATIRE!!!)

ABOUT THAT POPULAR VOTE THAT HILLARY WON

Picture, if you will, a game identical to classical chess. Only instead of needing to capture the opponent's king in order to win, you need to capture both of his bishops. Or something like that.

Do you think that that game would look anything like the chess we know about? It's pretty easy to see that even though the board looks the same and the pieces move the same, the strategy involved would be quite different. You wouldn't have the same openings; the theoretical point values of the pieces would be yugely different; the grandmasters would have very different systems, and so on. But most importantly, you wouldn't be able to argue "B-b-but I took his king first!" after losing a game.

The rules of the election were pretty clear since before the beginning of the campaign, right? Every party involved knew fully well that the stakes of the presidency would be decided by the 538 votes of the electoral college, right?

Picture, if you will, an identical election campagin but instead of having to win the electoral college, you had to win the popular vote in order to become president.

Now, do you think that that campaign would have looked anything like what we saw unfold during the last 18 months? It's pretty easy to see that even though the candidates are the same and the people are the same, the strategy involved would be quite different. Candidates would have campaigned in a quite different way and in different places; the relative importance of votes in different counties would de vastly different; and so on. But most importantly, you wouldn't be able to argue "B-b-but I won the electoral college!" after losing that election.

If you're still sour, you can always resort to saying "Bah, most people are stupid and uninformed anyway."

But don't forget that most people voted for Hillary.

SPOTTING AND DISARMING LOADED QUESTIONS IN TIME

Let me ask you a question.

"How can people be so stupid?"

Can you spot how the question is dishonest and loaded? How it is really an affirmation followed by a question?

Let's unpack it.
The question really means :

- People are so stupid.
- How can they be?

A more honest, unloaded question would be :

"Are people stupid?"
My personal opinion is that no, people are not stupid. So I don't even have to answer the loaded question.

YOUR WORST FEARS CANNOT POSSIBLY COME TRUE

 Even if Trump DOES gas millions of Jews, that still doesn't make him literally Hitler.

INCLUSIVENESS

In 2016, Edmund Burke would have to say “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good aerogender, anongender, autogender, bigender, blurgender, boyflux, cloudgender, demifluid, demi-vapor, epicene, femflux, genderfuzz, hemigender, horogender, libragender, magigender, nanogender, neutrois, nonbinary, omnigender, pangender, perigender, subgender, tragender, vapogender, vibragender and vocigender people to do nothing."

ARE THE NUCLEAR CODES IN GOOD HANDS?

Let's talk about the nuclear codes that everyone is so afraid to give to a "mad man".

When I look for someone to give the nuclear codes to, what I'm looking for is someone who can withstand pressure and keep a cold head in critical moments. I want a person with their head on their shoulders at all times, who will not be intoxicated or made incapable of clear thinking and action for any reason when critical situations occur.

So let's look at Hillary, who almost got those codes. It's public knowledge that she's a social drinker. She appeared suspiciously drunks in public on several occasions. Wikileaks revealed a troubling exchange where one of her staff members had to "sober her up" at 3:30 in the afternoon. Some of her speeches and public apparitions were peppered with incidents like her looking dazed and confused for no particular reason. She has concerning health problems. She passed out on the way to her car on 9/11. On election night, she couldn't even come out to give a speech when she learned the bad (for her) news. If she's made incapable of taking action by a simple electoral loss, how well could she react to a situation involving civilization-threatening weaponry?

On the other side, we have this uber-alpha male with rhinoceros-thick skin who can withstand tons upon tons of unfair and fabricated criticism for months on end and who loves his country so much that he's not even gonna draw his salary to serve it. (That's right, this narcissitic self-centered money-grabbing lunatic is going to serve his country for 1$ a year, the legal minimum he was allowed to take.) The man does not drink, never has. No drug use of any kind. Couldn't be more straight edge.

Oh, and that night where he had to be taken off-stage in a hurry because someone yelled "GUN!". While he was being escorted by his concerned secret service personel, in a moment where there was a very real threat for his own life, he had that look on his face.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-NB094_0312go_J_20160312131419.jpg

BUILD THE WALL

Is it a stupid idea?

Well, my apartment has walls. I don't think they're a stupid idea. They come with the upside of keeping people out if I don't want them coming in. And you can leave a hole in a wall, put a door there. If someone wants to come inside, they can knock and you can let them in if you want to.

But a wall across a whole country border? It's not that different. It just takes more bricks. Some sections can be just fence. I'm pretty sure China did something similar a couple thousand years ago. Created lots of jobs for lots of people.

Can we do it?

We built skyscrapers so high that your watch goes faster on the top floor than on the ground floor. We have dams made of billions of tons of concrete that hold back quadrillions of tons of water. We got a particle accelerator that runs across two countries. We spent ten billion dollars over 20 years to dig a tunnel under the Alps because we didn't feel like going around them. So yeah, we can build a wall.

And it's gonna be an amazing wall. It's gonna be amazing. It's gonna be the best wall.

CHECK YOUR INDOCTRINATION

You might be a victim of indoctrination if...

- millions (or tens of millions) of people disagree with you on a particular topic, and you are completely unable to conceive that some or all of them are rational, well-informed, or well-educated;

- you find it so hard to argue for your position that you mostly or entirely rely on links to outside sources that support it;

- you have a hard time differentiating comedy and social commentary, you rely on comedians to provide you with actual insight on social issues even though they themselves will hide behind the "I'm just a comedian" defense whenever criticized;

- whenever someone on "the other side" says or does something violent or extreme, you feel that it's because THEY have been indoctrinated; but whenver someone on "your" side does the same, you feel that it's "for the greater good";

- you experience an excessive physical or visceral reaction when thinking or talking about a topic that really does not affect you in any immediate, physical manner, or you are willing to pay a high personal price (losing contact with friends or family members) over something that really has no effect on you personally;

- whenever you're reading a text about some abstract concept, you just can't stop yourself from mapping the abscract and general concepts expressed in that text onto some specific facts or recent events.

CRITICIZING JOHN OLIVER SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO.

Or rather, because nobody ever fucking does it.

This piece covers only the season 3 finale episode, "We Must Fight Trump, a Klan-Backed Misogynist Internet Troll" and then again, only a fraction of what was said on that episode, because there is just way too much bullshit to cover everything.

Since there is dishonesty and bias right there in the opening statement, let's start with that. The very first word is manipulative. What WE are they referring to? Are they implicitely admitting that this show is exclusively for people who voted against him? Or are they implying that even the 60 million Trump supporters should come to their senses and join "Us"? This US vs THEM framing is not a good indicator of the fairness of what is to come.

Klan-backed : Well first of all, who backed whom? Did Donald Trump endorse the KKK? Not even close. You can choose who you back, but you have no control whatsoever over who "backs you".The KKK has been reduced to marginality, even insignificance, for a long time. The fact that they choose to post a piece about Trump in their newspaper means nothing. And it's not even real "backing" as seen here http://www.snopes.com/…/02/kkk-newspaper-backs-donald-trump/ . And even more importantly, the Trump campaign completely disavowed the not-really-an-endorsement.

Misogynist : while there is some validity to the criticism, this word has become such an overused keyword that it barely means anything anymore.

Now on to the piece proper.

QUOTE : "It turns out, instead of showing our daughters that they could someday be president, America proved that no grandpa is too racist to become leader of the free world"
The american people very much showed that a woman could be elected president. Hillary was the Democratic party's candidate, she received over 60 million votes, won the popular vote, got tons of support from every possible angle. Any younger woman can look at what happened and conclude that a woman can become president if she does like Hillary but is just a little less corrupt, just a little less bad at campaigning, and knows how to work the actual rules of the college electorate just a little better.
The "racist" thing would warrant its own column. Let's just mention that he never said "All Mexicans are rapists" and maybe revisit the topic later. http://www.politifact.com/…/tim-kaine-falsely-says-trump-s…/

QUOTE : "Some of Trump's policies are alarming, including repealing and replacing Obamacare"
That could mean replacing it with something better. Obamacare is far from perfect. Nothing alarming about re-working a health system.
"building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and having Mexico pay for it"
The wall-building idea is gaining more and more traction worldwide as time goes on and nations realize that ILLEGAL immigration is actually a problem. Several countries in Europe already have or are planning walls. Norway, that haven for globalism and openness, is building one right now. https://www.lifezette.com/polize…/norway-builds-border-wall/ . And yes, that one is only 600 feet long and the US/Mexico border is thousands of miles long, but that's a question of feasability and not principle. If the principle is sound, the US have the means to build it.
"deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country"
That policy has since been changed to "work on deporting the 3 million immigrants that are in the US illegally and have commited felonies or worse". What would be more alarming than that would be sending the message that these people can do whatever they want. What is so wrong about wanting to enforce your country's laws?

QUOTE : "That leaves us with two devastating options: Either we just elected a president who didn’t mean a single word he said, or we elected one who did.”
Very weak false dichotomy fallacy. Reality is obviously not limited to those two options. Maybe they just elected a pretty normal president, who made thousands of statements, some of which were fully true, some partially true, and so on. Probably some of his promises will be completely fulfilled, others partially, others not. Trump is a very good campaigner and a master at persuasion; he obviously used simplified and colored language on countless occasions, like any normal human being does. Obama has left dozens of unfulfilled promises on the floor and is still considered a good president.

QUOTE : (about social media) "It’s best to avoid this new breed of “hyper-partisan, wildly distorted clickbait "
Very weak double fault fallacy. Traditional media has been losing the people's trust for ages and is at an all-time low mainly because it's heavily biased and dishonest.

In conclusion, the Last Week Tonight Show and its host and team of writers are about as fair and balanced as Fox News, with the added sucker-punch move of being able to hide behind the tired and clichéd "I'm just a comedian" when they are put in front of the weakness of their political discourse.
Additional criticism and analysis available here https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/…/john-oliver-isnt-mad-max…/

Facts don't matter no matter how hard you want them to.

If you want to reduce the apprehension, fear and frustration that you feel about the world, one way of doing that is by increasing your comprehension of that world.
One way of better understanding the world is, instead of trying to force your expectations and prejudices on it, you look for postulates that you could make that if true, would help you create a model that predicts and describes the world around you.
To make a postulate is to suggest or assume the existence, fact, or truth of (something) as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or belief. You do not pre-test this (something), or pass it through the filter of the worldview that you would like to be true. You just posit it. For example, here is a postulate that I choose to accept to describe the political world.
FACTS DON'T MATTER.
Lets see how it performs in answering various questions or vexations we have about said political world.
How come Donald Trump is so relentlessly popular and well-liked even though he is on record lying and denying reality hundreds of times?
FACTS DON'T MATTER.
How come he got 60 million votes even though he doesn't have a clear platform or specific policies?
FACTS DON'T MATTER.
How could he be elected president after losing badly to his opponent in all three presidential debates?
FACTS DON'T MATTER.
I could go on. But to summarize, my postulate seems to be working pretty well. It's not that I want it to be true; it's not that I find it intuitive, or sensible, or reasonble; it's just that if it WERE true, it would do a hell of a good job at describing the world I see around me, and it would thus increase my comprehension of that world.
So I can sleep better at night.