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Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

The whole "shake things up" meme was among the dumbest. It made me think of:

"Honey, the toilet isn't working again! Those dammed plumbers don't know WTF they're doing. I'm calling an electrician to shake the f'n toilette! We'll just see how that works!"

Seriously, this is kakistocracy levels of thinking, but that's what happens when people are a.) legitimately frustrated and b.) have no idea how to vent it. So they basically just role the dice and go with the stink bomb approach. All I can think of is we're just going to have to collectively suffer, and hopefully learn from the mistake but at this point the pain level isn't high enough for a proper feedback loop to kick in. Everyone is still really attached to the idea their tribe is just inherently obviously vastly superior and the others are either stupid or traitors.

Politics by emotion. And embrace of denialism.

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I have observed that engineers (myself included) are especially bad at evaluating the challenges faced by a politician in the course of doing their job. That lack of understanding makes it difficult to evaluate which 'change solution' might be the most effective.

In what way is it dumb if the alternatives looked even worse?

If you follow the metaphor, the idea of shaking a toilette to fix it is stupid as is hiring an electrician. Rationally, you'd find another plumber, maybe choosing a different selection metric.

Extending the metaphor, the electrician has a long record of saying demonstrably untrue things about both water, electricity, and plumbing.

And the idea that alternatives look worse is just more stupid denialism, the idea that literally all alternatives are worse than someone who poops on all the furniture is just non-credible nonsense and begs for ridicule because it is that ridiculous. It's not rational.

Regardless of what you think about Trump, he distinguished himself enough from the rest of the field that he became the only viable choice for enough people at the right stages to push him through. Apparently your lofty rationality isn't developed enough to see that. What does rationality even mean in this context? I'd love to know where you draw the line between a rational choice and an irrational one when it comes to voting.

> ... he distinguished himself enough from the rest of the field ...

...by not being a plumber?

The idea that only professional politicians should be admitted to office would've incensed the left 10 years ago. These days, because Trump made it in instead of say, Jon Stewart, the left is suddenly very pious about political office.

Of course people without professional political career can be presidents, even great presidents sometimes.

However, if the main differentiating factor of your favorite candidate is that he had zero experience in politics, it's hard to take that argument seriously.

People considered Bernie Sanders an outsider, and he's been a senator since 2007. Trump isn't an "outsider": he's simply unqualified.

It depends. If you consider political experience (especially extensive political experience) to be a marker of corruption and ingrained hypocrisy, political inexperience can look good by comparison. There seem to be enough people sufficiently cynical these days to see it that way.

Birtherism.

That is the sole datapoint a thinking, rational, ethical person needed to know to properly character assess Trump. If you still voted for him, you either liked that sort of blatant Nixon southern strategy 2.0 type of bigotry; or you're dismissive of it as a problematic attribute in a leader for this country.

And sure, Clinton necessarily must have been a fundamentally flawed candidate, hindsight being 20/20, to lose to that. But I put more blame on Democratic and Republican parties for sabotaging the Electoral College with party loyalists. Dead people would have done a better job, randomly selected people likely would have too, and contemplative people even more reliable. The two parties get way more blame from me for this setup to failure, than the people I think are deeply ignorant people in some form of denial for having voted for the Celebrity Chaos Clown.

>If you still voted for him, you either liked that sort of blatant Nixon southern strategy 2.0 type of bigotry; or you're dismissive of it as a problematic attribute in a leader for this country.

Ok, but neither of those are irrational, they are judgements based around premises that are different than yours. You can argue whether those premises are rational, or ill informed or whatever, but then you're basically just wading into the usual swamp of political discourse - these issues haven't been definitively resolved and just dismissing the whole stance out of hand by calling it irrational doesn't get you anywhere. You're effectively just venting.

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