The poisoned well of American politics

But the genius of Trump morphed a disaster into an opportunity. In the next article I’ll try to explain how this is possible in my estimation. Side Note to the election results. I’m not used to American television. You Americans surely put up with a shocking (and I mean, shocking, exhausting) amount of commercials! At times I thought that the entire point of election coverage was insurance plans and prescription drugs, with frequent interruptions informing us about Arby’s, pillows, windshield wipers, a crooked penis condition (!) and, yes, repetitive announcements about the upcoming interview with a politician…   Midterm: Everybody Wins? The political climate that lead to this US general…

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More crowd counting lies, less common sense

CGIL rally. Rome, Circo Massimo, 2009

Women vs.Trump, NYT vs.Trump In my last article I discussed the crowd sizes for the Presidential Inauguration Ceremonies in Washington DC, offering my rough estimates: O 2009: 500;   O 2013: 350;   T 2017: 300 (in thousands)   while according to the mainstream media you’d have to believe the following baseless reconstruction: O 2009: 1800;   O 2013: 1000;   T 2017: 250 or some unspecified number in the low 100s (of thousands)   Most news outlets chose to contrast Trump’s crowd with the Women’s March against him, where a large number of people gathered to express their anger against the newly elected President, on the Sunday following the Inauguration. My…

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On Trump, crowd counting & lies. Look what I found!

How big was the crowd at Trump’s Inauguration? Bear with me. I wasted waaay too much time on this study. But the results are significant.   This is a teachable moment. What happens when literally everybody is lying, and the matter is quite difficult to verify to begin with? Ideally, you’d expect people to notice and demand better standards from politicians and journalists, but no. The two sides just choose the narrative they like, then run with it. Eventually the public moves on. But I’m not. I waited a few days to see if someone came up with a decent article on the subject, in vain. See, the topic itself isn’t…

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