Comment on Opinion | It Isn’t Just Trump. America’s Whole Reputation Is Shot.
cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
This is a well written piece full of astute observations. I have a problem with one point, though:
The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft*.* Don’t overthink this. Trump is not playing four-dimensional chess and trying to pry Russia from its alliance with China. American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft. Elon Musk codes as hard; U.S.A.I.D. codes as soft. WWE is hard; universities are soft. Struggles for dominance are hard; alliances are soft.
It’s not the difference between “hard” and “soft” that matters here, it’s the difference between “simple” and “complex”. Trump, in every conceivable way, is a simple man, and his followers find that one of his most attractive traits. He, like them, neither understands nor accepts complexity and that informs his world-view and actions.
Carrolade@lemmy.world 1 week ago
These are not mutually exclusive preferences, they can easily coexist in a single person. I think you’re both correct, basically.
We could even examine if simplicity vs complexity have any coding as “hard” or “soft”, if we wished. Say, a piece of equipment breaks, do I bust out technical sheets, troubleshoot what went wrong and replace a broken component, or do I whack the whole thing with a wrench? I would argue that the simpler option of intentionally failing to understand and whacking it with a wrench codes as “harder” than the alternative, due to stubbornness and unwillingness to learn/change being a component of our cultural understanding of “hard” in America.