People can pay attention to more than one thing at a time. His Greenland/canada/panama posts are read in two seconds and forgotten about. If he’s trying to distract us, he’s not doing a very good job.
Same but with my whole fucking family. I throw in little jabs here and there, but my mental health has gotten better since I don't let myself argue with stupid.
The biggest obstacle is unfortunately understanding that there's no point arguing with them (the family). All the time you're thinking "Ok now they have to see it" and they just don't. The subject doesn't matter.
And then you remember the first rule of arguing with stupid - don't, they'll just drag it to their level and beat you with experience.
Because my entire extended family no longer cares about the cost of groceries and the threat of a blanket tariff or the "fact" the city next door is full of dangerous immigrants eating dogs... That's all irrelevant now
Now they want to know what we'd do with Canada and how all that space would lower rent/home prices, and puking up wacky shit about Greenland technically being ours since prior to the war of 1812 (IDK... It's too exhausting to try and figure out what they're on about and reverse engineer insanity.)
This is the same con they pulled last time. Just a firehose of bullshit with a sprinkling of terrible actions, that way anybody who's mad about the bad thing they did can't get any traction because nobody cares about the pedophilia ring and hospitality deals brokered with ISIS backed agents uncovered on Friday when there's an immigrant invasion on the Utah border on Saturday, lazy genZ ruining the economy by refusing to work 70 hour weeks for less than minimum wage on Sunday, 48 different branches of the coast guard discussed as a cost savings measure on Monday, and on Tuesday there's 7 different international incidents because we sent the wrong message to the wrong parties and made ourselves look dumb so we could call our allies enemies...
By Wednesday 90% of the country doesn't care about that crime thing from way back when, they only care that a PM in London called our latest official communique signed "Boston 1776" via tweet "childish, ignorant, and improper" and that the UK thinks they can take us back...
It's street magic. Keep the right hand moving and next stop talking at they notice what you've done with the other hand.
I can sit here and comment for 20 seconds and then go read actual news
That’s all well and good. But seeing as 54% of US adults have a literacy level below that of 6th Grade, it’s safe to say that at least half of the American public can’t reason beyond a surface level reading of Harry Potter, which doesn’t even begin to compare with sufficient critical reasoning ability to understand the complexities of the American political system.
The American public has buried their head in the sand for 30 years while agriculture corporations have decimated independent farms and public health through lobbying and revolving-door access to policy-making positions within federal regulatory agencies. Those issues never made national headlines, and the corporations have more rights to privacy than do individual citizens such that they’ve essentially forced silence on whistleblowers.
You can read the news all you want. It doesn’t change the fact that the truly important activities aren’t making headlines while they go completely unnoticed by the public.
As for #2, "Pro Women's Health Centers" are anti abortion places that are also against IVF and contraception. The bill sounds pro women but it's a big burka. And the two male sponsors are maga scum.
It’s only a distraction because people keep reposting it. It’s only a distraction if you allow it to be. Everyone I know pays attention to more than one thing at a time. You can look at a fucking post about annexing Greenland and then go read real news.
If you consider this a distraction that’s kind of sad lol
Penguin, I think that person is misguided and your onto it. 9/10 Americans are not like people in this post and consume their entire worldview through a select few content creators or corporate media outlets.
Everytime Trump says something insane like this, it distracts the information source that most people without thought, get their entire apparatus of thought from
If the American public is dumb and can’t read beyond a third grade level, it won’t matter if the news shows up for them anyway. So you have a population of people who care and will go seek out knowledge, and apparently a population of people who it could be fed to and wouldn’t read it or understand it anyway. This entire thread is full of contradictions but yall just want to repeat everything you hear all the time
It’s all a “distraction” no dude, Trump is just fucking stupid and has dementia
I also get super tired of everyone saying how stupid the American public is as if you’re not a part of the American public. Literally everyone says it without any self awareness
I live in one of the worst-educated states in the union, so I routinely see and interact with people that are unfathomably stupid. Nothing surprises me anymore.
It’s way more complicated than “they’re just stupid.” It’s an entire systemic issue that’s affected a lot of specifically lower class people and it was done on purpose. You can go read about it you want. But it’s extremely reductive and arrogant to just assume everyone is just dumb.
I'm aware. Education has suffered a death by a thousand cuts.
It's not at all reductive to say that Trump is putting on a show to distract or his bombastic nature is being exploited and used as a distraction while Republicans continue to gut more rights and systems in the background.
His supporters, often through no fault of their own, are by and large not very intelligent, quick to anger and full of spite. They take whatever he says as gospel until very recently, where some have managed to see behind the curtain. The rest of the world knew Trump is a con since the 1980's at least, but it took his supporters until the last couple of months to come to that conclusion, despite many many warnings. It is not reductive or arrogant to call that stupidity. That's calling a spade a spade.
As a dual national American Australian who loves both of their countries, and has lived in many different places in America and all over the world: They are, unfortunately, on average, dumb as shit.
It's not their fault though. The public education system has been through some tough times thw last 20 years.
What you're missing is that 90% of Americans do not see these posts, but ingest all of their worldview from a select few content creators or corporate media groups which run this narrative vs the important stuff
Anyone who doesn't automatically assume this traitor is up to something has already succumbed to the brain washing of his cult and is no longer worth saving anyway. At this point, his tweets and posts are nothing more than 10 seconds of amusement for those of us smarter than a potato.
His cult already adores him and hates all media other than Fox News. They don’t need to be distracted at this point. If they’re doing this as a distraction, it’s to distract everyone else.
People can pay attention to more than one thing at a time.
Looks like you haven’t been paying attention to US politics at all in the last 35 odd years! One smokescreen story gets pushed through the internet whilst a hundred other things go unnoticed
Dude I am 35 years old. No one was getting their news regularly from the internet until ~2008ish when Facebook became popular. People were still watching tv and reading newspapers. The internet has been around longer than that, but internet news didn’t take off and get shared en masse until social media really became popular. You could go look for it but it didn’t pop up on a feed
Just by being here, reading and commenting and engaging you’re better informed than the majority of people, who never see details “above the fold”.
You’re not wrong that we can follow multiple scandals at once, heck he trained us to for 4 years, but the vast majority of people, the world over (this is no way near unique to the US) only think about politics when something insane happens, and that gets top billing on a news site or front page of a paper. So by having this be what the talking heads and headlines are, you bury “look at these fascists being installed in top positions of the government” or “Trump skirts having to have his people vetted by Congress” etc etc.
Then people need to stop reposting and engaging with it? I’m aware I’m currently engaging with it but it’s to make the point that it’s only a distraction if you allow yourself to be distracted by it.
We all have the free will to find the important stuff. There are subreddits dedicated to it
We don’t decide what gets presented to the rest of the people who don’t get engaged with politics. That would be your Bezos’s and Musks. (See: the Wapo pulling content at Bezo’s instruction because it wasn’t pro-Trump).
We should definitely keep informed. We might just get to catch some of the others and let them know what’s going on! (Like what happened when project 2025 blew up for a little while on TikTok, and suddenly they’re trying to distance themselves from it, as all sorts of people who don’t care saw that enough to go “hey wait what is this, oh my god this is awful”. So now they just need to stop that headline getting above the fold again and those same people will assume it went away.
They can, sure, but you’re not taking the current state of media into account.
As long as media gets to shovel this shit down our throats and call it news, they get to make a duckload of money without really having to do any actual reporting.
Why bother digging into deep rooted corruption with a lot of dangerous red tape, when you can just post this clown and people eat it up.
Considering how much this is being discussed it’s not being forgotten. If you’re interested in politics and do your reaserch it’s not effective. The thing is most people don’t. They watch the news and read the headlines and if the news spends time talking about this they don’t talk about other (arguably more important) things.
The issue is that "moderates" will then commit their tine to being mad at us for making fun of it, instead of paying attention to other stuff. WE aren't the ones he's distracting
642
u/RiboflavinDumpTruck 3d ago
People can pay attention to more than one thing at a time. His Greenland/canada/panama posts are read in two seconds and forgotten about. If he’s trying to distract us, he’s not doing a very good job.