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Comment by canadian_voter | Hacker News Reader

Your organizing principle is simple: don’t feed polarization, disarm it.

This is so important.

Samantha Bee can't stop making piss jokes about Trump. That's not going to win anyone over.

Nina Donovan's poem, recited by Ashley Judd at the Women's March, is brave and powerful. It is also polarizing. There is a line: "I’m not as nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheeto dust." That's not going to win anyone over.

Again and again, people are attacking Trump for the wrong reasons. Focus on the truly bad. Don't get hung up on his hair. It makes you look petty.

Edit: Frank Bruni beat me to this in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/opinion/the-wrong-way-to-...

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I want to quote another part of the article that I think is important. Even if you use the right reasons, it's still not effective:

> Don’t waste your time trying to prove that this ism is better than that ism. Ditch all the big words. Why? Because, again, the problem is not the message but the messenger. It’s not that Trump supporters are too stupid to see right from wrong, it’s that you’re much more valuable to them as an enemy than as a compatriot.

> The problem is tribal. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them: that you are American in exactly the same way they are.

> Again and again, people are attacking Trump for the wrong reasons. Focus on the truly bad.

I disagree. Attacking him at all is a huge mistake, at least until you/the opposition can offer a credible alternative (which Hillary isn't/wasn't). People will put up with all the bad that Trump is, as long as all the alternatives are worse (and yes, economic reasons will trump moral/social reasons for most people except the most well-off).

Unfortunately, there are also a large number of people who actively cheer acceptably childish behavior in a grown man, that they would have grounded their children for.

I absolutely agree. Your point about Samantha Bee reminds me of a podcast that Malcolm Gladwell did recently about satire. In it he criticized SNL's portrayal of Sarah Palin back in 2008. Tina Fay's impression of her was funny as hell, but it mostly made fun of the way Palin talks and her attitude. If you already dislike Palin (as I do/did) it seems like cutting criticism.

But the problem is that her mannerisms aren't really whats bad about her. And Trump's alleged kinks aren't whats bad about him. Its easy for his supporters to defend him and say that either it is not true, because there isn't any public evidence that it is, or that there is nothing wrong with a piss fetish. And they are right. There is nothing wrong with it.

Heres the podcast in case anyone is interested: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox

It does not need to be Samantha Bee's job to win everybody over.

> It does not need to be Samantha Bee's job to win everybody over.

Exactly. It's Samantha Bee's job to feed the polarization cycle. If she doesn't, who will?

Of course. It's her job to entertain her audience.

But that audience is free to ask for less focus on the insubstantial.

It's not her job to win everybody over. But if she wants to contribute to what she'd consider progress, she can stop injecting so much noise into the signal. People only have so much exposure to "the message", and are likely to dismiss it quickly given too many scatalogical & other insults.

There's a difference between "winning everybody over" vs "do your part to contribute to polite discourse" vs "make your side sound dominated by insult-spewing jerks". Parent wasn't asking for total perfect solution, only to stop contributing to needless antagonism.

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