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Comment by thedavinci2000 | Hacker News Reader

thedavinci2000

I wonder if the guy is stupidly ignorant or willfully ignorant. He has said some really despicable things.

I don't think Trump is really in either of those categories. He's optimized for feeling confident and saying things that (some) people want to hear.

It's not that he's lying, because he doesn't even know what the truth is. I also think he doesn't know that he doesn't know that. In this regard, I think of him as like a sophisticated bot: he doesn't track input in terms of true or false facts, but in terms of word-strings to say that are useful for his particular purposes. Any belief necessary to sound convincing is generated from the word strings.

My grandfather was a master salesman and as best I can tell, this was his basic approach to managing reality.

The scary part is that he has gained a large following of people who think he's just saying "what everyone's thinking". There are many, many people in the U.S. who hear what he says, and then think, "Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm living in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum.

""Yeah! That's so true!" on their gut instinct without having any background knowledge on the subject. I'm live in the U.S. and it's a scary momentum."

This happens on the other side of the fence, and no one bats an eye about it. In fact, they call it democracy, or something like that.

Snarkiness aside, if these people agree with him, then that is their vote. Really, we can't have democracy if we don't call it democracy when people vote the way we don't like them to. It's the same as free-speech: we can't suddenly abandon it if we don't like what's being said.

Populism does have both right and left forms (and others besides), but that doesn't mean that it isn't inimical to democracy. It is not hard to find historical examples of populists who have used the vote to seize power. Democracy is a lot more than voting, and it's certainly more than having one last free vote for a populist who ends free voting.

There's also a particularly ugly history of populists stirring up racial hatred as a means to power, which I think is especially dangerous.

Right, but this conflation comes up with most political arguments and I think it's a straw man. I don't think that people shouldn't have the right to follow Trump, but it's also true that people are free to hate certain types of people. That doesn't mean it isn't scary.

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