Interesting.
Nov. 12th, 2016 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyUnlike many people, I was disappointed and horrified but not really shocked by the election... mostly, because - despite my frequent advice - I do "read the comments". (That's also why I think the ACA is a coin toss - even the most hardliner trolls are no longer spamming liberal blogs just to say that "nobody deserves health care". A lot of things about the next four years concern me, but that's not the top of the list.)
So I've been reading the comments, and two things jump out at me.
First, there's been a definite uptick, on both sides, in people who think a winning argument is to accuse the other party of being young. Which... well, I don't say so to them, but it's actually a really immature argument. I thought we all were supposed to outgrow calling things "babyish" sometime around middle school. (And I'm aware of the minor hypocrisy of this thought, but still, I think the fallback on "but really, you're only a kid, right?" is telling of ones mental state.)
Second - and this is coming straight from the Trump supporters - is the accusation that caring about a popular vote is "sour grapes". It's not the sentiment that surprises me, it's the wording. There must be several ways to express that idea, but they all do it using those two words. Up until this election, I think I could count on one hand the number of times I've heard/seen/used that phrase outside of specifically reading the related fable. Is it really more common than I've hithertofore assumed? (Is the word hithertofore really so unusual that spellcheck doesn't recognize it!?)
The first was just a personal observation. The second... well, I don't know. Some of these I know are real people, I've spoken to them before on a variety of subjects and I just don't think they sat down for three years pretending to be normal people before revealing themselves as Trumpbots. Still, that level of similarity in their comments is startling. I know I'm just cynical, but I wonder about the implications here.
So I've been reading the comments, and two things jump out at me.
First, there's been a definite uptick, on both sides, in people who think a winning argument is to accuse the other party of being young. Which... well, I don't say so to them, but it's actually a really immature argument. I thought we all were supposed to outgrow calling things "babyish" sometime around middle school. (And I'm aware of the minor hypocrisy of this thought, but still, I think the fallback on "but really, you're only a kid, right?" is telling of ones mental state.)
Second - and this is coming straight from the Trump supporters - is the accusation that caring about a popular vote is "sour grapes". It's not the sentiment that surprises me, it's the wording. There must be several ways to express that idea, but they all do it using those two words. Up until this election, I think I could count on one hand the number of times I've heard/seen/used that phrase outside of specifically reading the related fable. Is it really more common than I've hithertofore assumed? (Is the word hithertofore really so unusual that spellcheck doesn't recognize it!?)
The first was just a personal observation. The second... well, I don't know. Some of these I know are real people, I've spoken to them before on a variety of subjects and I just don't think they sat down for three years pretending to be normal people before revealing themselves as Trumpbots. Still, that level of similarity in their comments is startling. I know I'm just cynical, but I wonder about the implications here.
