Saturday 12 November 2016

The Hindsight Bubble

Bet Fair were offering 8 to 1 odds for Trump winning the election, normally the only gambling I do is low stakes poker but looking back upon his campaign I have realised that it was a forgone conclusion that he would win despite what everyone else thought.

The campaign itself was pure theatre and at no point did you think he was going to win, he however ripped up the rule book of political campaigning.  At no point did you know what was going to happen next, many of his speeches were completely unscripted.

It was not until towards the end of the campaign trail that the Obama/Clinton partnership realised that it was impossible to predict what Trump was going to do next.  Everything Trump did or said was designed to create controversy and it did not matter whether it was true and false.

It would not surprise me if many of the sexual allegations made against him were hoaxed by his own campaign.

This article from Vox shows Trump's ability to speak to the voters as opposed to speaking at them as most politicians do.

I read Trump's policies after he had won to see what what we were in for and what effect he would have on the world, to say I was surprised would be a somewhat understatement.  Zero evidence of a southern wall and in fact very little of what was said in sound bytes throughout the campaign appeared in his official policies.  His policies are heavily watered down versions of his rhetoric, unfortunately his ideas on huge tax cuts, deregulation and massive public spending looks like a recipe for disaster.  Although since he is a successful businessman I would like to think he has a better understanding of managing money and running a country than Hilary Clinton.  As Mae West said

"Between the lesser of two evils, I always pick the one I have not tried before."
Clinton had decided to stick with The Obama administration's failed policies which gave the voters an impossible choice.  The voter turn out was just over 50% a big drop from the last election, in one of his more understandable speeches Trump advised the voters not to vote which effectively took votes from the Democrats.  If the turn out had been higher it is possible that Trump would not have won.

This film from the BBC about HyperNormalisation shows how Trump's win occurred because of the way society and those that manage it have effectively placed us into mirrored bubbles of what we as a group or individuals wish to see.  The film is nearly 3 hours long but it is definitely worth watching.

Our perception of reality is controlled you only have to look at Amazon adverts to see that.

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