Not only did you not explain the original comment, you added more assertions that are significantly more extraordinary without explaining your reasoning for those either.
If you heard this quote without knowing who said it, you would think it is most likely that the speaker meant “vote again for me”. When a politician says “go vote”, it’s normally implied “go vote for me”.
In context, I think it is obvious that is what Trump meant. People that have been told Trump is a dictator that wants to end democracy obviously won’t approach that quote with normal grace they afford others.
Lets say you are right and the correct interpretation is:
"and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote for me again"
Trump would be term limited, so they would not be able to vote him in as president again anyway. That is why this interpretation does not make sense to me.
It would just be a useful reminder of that fact. Remember: you're trying to sell voting to someone who doesn't normally vote. It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
> It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.
So a promise to permanently and irrevocably change the country? If it is truly one off that is what it would have to be, which is not possible via normal legal mechanisms in the USA.
If one heard this quote without knowing who said it, they would think it is most likely that the speaker meant "If I win, I will make sure further consent of the governed, unnecessary", which is why the quote got the attention it did, and why, to my knowledge, no other US presidential candidate in the entire history of our nation has ever dared utter it.
I can't imagine where they'd get that idea from. Certainly not from Trump saying he'd be a dictator on day one to close borders and a few other things. But not to worry, "after that, I won't be a dictator".
Haidt offers up a low expectation parenting trick, just a one-time easy harmonic 'no socials for kids' from them and if it fails like ever other attempt then we make the state make us sing in key.
The way he feigns much difficulty to understand the baby & the steak argument is very revealing. Responsible kids deserve the chance to have fun and be taught by elders where the line of too risky play is. When he seems so indifferent to the slippery slope of the state picking up all the slack for the parents it can easily be taken for the main aim of his work.
What is your proof that he "deliberately" edited the text to change the entire meaning rather than just misstated it? As others pointed out above, this edit/mistake doesn't seem to negate his claim given that the two agencies were working together in this regard.
Regardless of if they were mistakes or not, there is more than enough found in the Twitter Files to be concerned about. It would have been much more interesting to hear Medhi discuss the substance of Tabbi's work. Instead he tried to discredit everything by cornering him on air with small details that Taibbi clearly wasn't prepared to fact check live.
Given the timeline of events in reporting on the Twitter Files, it seems likely that Taibbi et al were working long hours, digging through thousands of emails and messages, trying to piece together what was happening at Twitter over the previous 4 years. Typing one letter wrong in an acronym, among hundreds of acronyms they had been seeing in emails, doesn't surprise me. They were essentially live tweeting their research.
Also, Taibbi and others responded to this claim that he exaggerated the 3000 tweets as 22 million tweets. https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1644111356709289993. It was not 3000 tweets but rather 3000 URLs that they targeted for removal by removing any tweets containing those URLs. Seems like many reporters are making mistakes to support their preferred claim here.
I would recommend you subscribe to your own advice and approach the disastrous side effects of these lockdowns with empathy instead of just chalking it up to an "inconvenience". There are people dying due to these policies and lockdowns and others will suffer long term negative effects. It's not just an inconvenience. People with preexisting conditions (depression, suicidal thoughts, addiction, violent/murderous) make up a significant percentage of the population. These policies will be a major factors in some percentage of them dying. They will also be a major factor in increasing the number of people with these conditions (more people will become depressed, suicidal, form addictions). Others will face years of mental and physical suffering due to economic effects.
It's essentially the same argument you are trying to make in favor of the lockdowns. Without the lockdowns, families will have to bury their loved ones and grow up without grandma/grandpa around. Other people will have long term health effects from catching this virus. With the lockdowns, some people will have to bury their (usually much younger) loved ones and grow up without brother/sister/son/daughter/friend around. Others will have long term mental health effects.
My cousin overdosed in May 2020. He had battled with addictions for a while before lockdowns but nothing to the point that we thought it would kill him. He went off the rails being forced to isolation and is now dead. His family had to bury him with no one else allowed to be present. In the same way that it's easy to overlook the impact of the virus if it has not severely impacted your family, its easy to overlook the lockdown effects if you and your family have not been severely impacted.
Stopping to think about the value of a life in a real sense should horrify you by all of the deaths and suffering caused by the virus but it should also horrify you to think of the value of the lives taken/affected by these sudden policy implementations. It does not make you a monster to consider both sides.
As for the clear path in terms of policies, both sides of the coin should be considered to the degree of certainty we know the risks to be. Unfortunately, this usually does require you put abstract/monetary/years-of-life-lost statistics in play.
