Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

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> Worst of all it normalizes the idea that one political party is smart and rational, and another is stupid and illogical.

Donald Trump is a single politician, and not the entire Republican Party. Having an opinion on one is not the same as calling an entire party stupid and illogical.

> the idea being repeated more, another swing voter who could go either way clings tighter to the Republican party.

If someone is a swing voter, and unsure which side to pick, why would reputable sources offering well reasoned advice lead them to cling tightly to the opposite (you said “tighter” here, which I assume was a typo, since you previously claimed they were a swing voter and so Therefore wouldn’t be clinging to either side yet).

Thanks for correcting my typo. Yes.

I've read first hand accounts about what happened in Venezuela. About twenty years ago, Chavez turned a democracy into a dictatorship. How could this possibly happen?

Well, one ingredient was that the people who were against Chavez repeated over and over that the dictator was not logical.

In Venezuela, this type of argument did not persuade Chavez voters. It did the opposite. Chavez won and the country is now a dictatorship.

I see the same thing happening here. Trump supporters with a high school diploma are personally insulted when a bunch of PhD's get together and declare that their candidate is not scientific.

I really didn't explain it yet. Did I? Let me try this. The battle is asymmetric. One side, Trump, is using fear. The other side, Scientific American, is using logic.

Fear actually gets voters off their couches and into the voting booth.

Logic gets people to nod their heads, but doesn't translate into actual votes.

Well, they definitely could have bumped the fear component up more, but perhaps Scientific American feels their subscriber base is more likely to respond to reasoning than to fear.

“This was a mistake because they weren’t fear-mongery enough” is definitely an interesting take, though.

Haha. I can't imagine them jumping on the fear bandwagon.

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