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Hmm. You could model press conference discourses as a sort of game of taboo. You must answer all questions without using words or phrases that the outgroup uses as its shibboleths, since usage means you accept the frame being invoked, which means they win.
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There is a certain childishness to wanting leaders to say things, or disambiguate what they said to confirm your wishful reading. You’re not a child. A leader is just another adult in a position of power. That power exists via your consent. If you disagree, withdraw that consent
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The game is: outgroup tries to make you use certain terms, you try to respond without them. 4 outcomes: You use their term: they win You answer without their terms: you win You use their term, but cancel it out with ingroup anti-term: draw You fail to be coherent: all lose
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Eg. Trump vs mainstream media. Get him to use terms like “white supremacist” Trump usually plays for the draw by pairing it with “antifa” but usually lands in the all-lose situation of incoherence.
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The result is generally a confused outcome, with all sides analyzing transcripts to claim it shows they won and that the other side’s reading is a “hoax” as happened in the original fine-people round of the game.
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There’s never a point to analyzing the transcripts of any adversarial conversation Trump’s in. It always shows a stream of incoherent bullshit that does not admit a clear reading. Noise wins, all lose. But importantly, nobody can declare victory, nobody need concede a point lost.
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One possible outcome that’s possible when the encounter is NOT framed as a hostile zero-sum/negative-sum one, is that somebody actually has a breakthrough positive sum insight, other acknowledges, conversation moves to “yes, and”, and both sides walk away win-win.
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There’s a sense in which Democrats aren’t counterparty at all. For four years it’s been Trump vs. media. His base views the mainstream media as the primary adversary and he is required to fight them first, Dems second. He can concede to Dems in the back room, but never to media.
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😁
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Trump says he tried to get Biden to say the words "law and order" and "he wouldn't say 'em." He then immediately says that Biden did say "law and order" but then added other words ("with justice") after them, suggesting it doesn't count if you add other words after the words.
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