I don't like Musk and have not for many years, but the left has been venerating some very flawed people for a very long time. It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others.
Let’s not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections. I remember when Ron Desantis was successfully undermined by the news media casting him as weird if he was even covered at all. The left celebrated at the time because they assumed Trump would be easier to beat. When our leaders are picked by their enemies it’s understandable that they’re extremely flawed.
I see it as an emergent behavior where it’s easier to damage than it is to build, it’s easier to undermine an opposition than it is to build up your own side.
I would suggest that political parties stop trying the pied piper strategy but if we are to learn one thing from history it should be that no-one learns anything from history.
> It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others.
A key tactic of the current administration is to pretend that all politicians are massively corrupt. This cynicism is easy to digest, but it normalizes bad behavior. Then when this team does it, they can pretend they’re behaving normally.
Anyone paying attention can recognize the difference, but to casual observers who like cynical takes it’s easy to take the “both sides bad” bait and become numb to it.
Regardless, the logic doesn’t even make sense. It’s literally the “two wrongs don’t make a right” fallacy to try to defend this by saying that you didn’t like something the other side did in the past. In the process, you admit this is actually bad too.
This bears no relationship to reality; he won the primaries in the normal fashion. He's the candidate of the right, who love him, go to his rallies, and buy his crypto.
The parent comment's claim is that he won the primaries because corporate news deliberately and tirelessly covered his campaign to give him tremendous visibility, which led to his winning campaign. I disagree and think they covered his campaign because it generated clicks and therefore money, which is most of what they care about, and accidentally got him elected in the process. I think they guessed incorrectly at how successful he would be, probably because they're massively out of touch due to both being in a echo chamber while also extremely privileged.
> I don't like Musk and have not for many years, but the left has been venerating some very flawed people for a very long time. It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others.
Such as? I'll be seriously impressed if you can come up with anywhere near the volume and severity of flaws of the people in Trump's orbit.
I don't blame HRC's team for trying the pied-piper strategy in 2016. It would have seemed rational enough at the time. It didn't come into play in 2020 at all, though -- do you have any insight to the contrary?
It is an emergent behavior and the negative consequences, that HRC was insentiviesed to use the strategy is why it’s an emergent behavior. I don’t expect parties to learn from this mistake and not use the strategy - but for the sake of the country I really wish they didn’t.
2020 was an incumbency, I doubt the democrats felt they could realistically replace Trump with someone less likely to win.
HRC was insentiviesed to use the strategy is why it’s an emergent behavior.
That's not what emergent behavior is... Emergent behavior is unexpected behavior that occurs as result of the addition of new rules or variables into a system arising from unexpected local maxima created by the confluence of those new rules/variables.
Parties trying to get a disliked opponent to win the opposing primaries has been a strategy since the very beginning of the U.S. party system in the late 1700s. They do it because it can be very effective. Case in point: the GOP and Fox News urged Biden to run for re-election in 2024 because he was so unpopular his campaign virtually guaranteed that whoever the GOP candidate was would win. Similarly, the GOP has spent extensive resources supporting Jill Steinman and Bernie Sanders in the last 3 presidential elections, and in 2 of those elections the margin of votes those candidates got in battleground states was enough to give them the win.(Contrapositive: Obama was the pied piper candidate in 2008; Fox News promoted him with the expectation that the GOP candidate would have an easy time winning and if McCain hadn't completely bungled his campaign that likely would have been true. )
The Pied Piper strategy was to draw media attention to Trump, Cruz, and Carson in order to force the mainstream candidates like Bush and Walker to comment on issues they'd prefer not to. It was not to get Trump nominated, which you can tell from the plain text of the email. In any case, the strategy was almost immediately obsolete, because Trump was the frontrunner from the moment he went down that escalator.
You seem to be suggesting that the media undermined DeSantis in 2023-2024 in order to assist "the left" in winning the election. The problem with this is twofold: first, media outlets that nobody would accuse of sympathy with the left (Fox News, the New York Post, etc.) were no friendlier to DeSantis; second, mainstream media outlets continued to treat Trump favorably after he won the nomination (for instance, uncritically accepting his false claims that he had nothing to do with Project 2025).
It would be better to be more precise about who the left is according to you. If you think Hillary Clinton is the left, the media that is owned by billionaires or the democratic party leadership is left I feel like there is a wide range of political theory for you to learn about.
One way you might learn what the left is is by looking at some history.
the left has been venerating some very flawed people for a very long time. It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others.
Name one.
Let’s not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections....The left celebrated at the time because they assumed Trump would be easier to beat.
This was not true in 2016 or in 2024. Dems preferred Cruz as an opponent in 2016 because he was the one candidate even more disliked than Hilary. In 2024, DeSantis was undermined by Fox News and News Nation...at Trump's urging). Trump was already ahead of Biden in the polls dating back to summer 2023; Democratic leadership would have preferred DeSantis as an opponent because he was extremely disliked even by Republicans outside of Florida (one can't claim the mantle of "family friendly" and "business friendly" when they go to war with Disney, the largest employer in their state) and they would have at least had a shot to retain the presidency.
Let’s not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections. I remember when Ron Desantis was successfully undermined by the news media casting him as weird if he was even covered at all. The left celebrated at the time because they assumed Trump would be easier to beat. When our leaders are picked by their enemies it’s understandable that they’re extremely flawed.
I see it as an emergent behavior where it’s easier to damage than it is to build, it’s easier to undermine an opposition than it is to build up your own side.
I would suggest that political parties stop trying the pied piper strategy but if we are to learn one thing from history it should be that no-one learns anything from history.
> https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120