DNFTT 🧌

Dr. Carl Hindy, Ph.D., HSP posted in a thread on X that the power of using phrases like "that's weird" or "that's just weird" is that it conveys, "That's just not worth of discussion." "Therein is the magic," said Hindy. "With Trump it means not allowing him to define the discussion or make the rules. It stops the Dems from chasing him down his rabbit hole. That seems to infuriate Trump, who’s now escalating to pull them back into arguments and to continue to define the game." Hindy thinks that it ultimately has a greater impact on the person who says it, by allowing that person "to dismiss the matter more easily." He wondered where it leads from there. "It seems like it would be a useful CBT/type intervention for ourselves at times," he said, referencing cognitive behavior therapy. "In other aspects of our lives: a self-cueing to 'just let it go by.'"

In the old days, when the internet was young and dinosaurs still roamed the plains and bees were currency, I wasted my mid-life in the “chat rooms” of Salon’s “Table Talk.”  We quickly recognized the strength of the fora (like minded people able to exchange views), and the weakness: people looking to be contrary, either for attention, or just because there are assholes in every crowd. Those obnoxious pricks in high school? Yeah, they never grow up.

These people we called “trolls.” And the solution to trolls was a simple one: ignore them. Or, in the language of the day: “Do Not Feed The Trolls.”🧌  Ignore them, avoid them, pretend they aren’t there. Starve them of attention, and they eventually go away. Attention was all they wanted, anyway.

Chat rooms and comments are essentially one-dimensional, like cartoon characters. Render the familiar Simpsons (or the Peanuts characters) in 3-D, they look a bit weird. Leave them in the flat world of, especially for Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the perspectiveless panel of the comic strip, and they are much more familiar. Chat rooms and comment sections are flat like that. You can step around, even tie off, trolls and pretend they don’t exist. You can’t as easily do that IRL, especially with major political figures who get attention whether you like it or not. But “weird” as a label is about as close to not feeding the trolls as you can get. And pretty much as effective.

Trolls in real life can’t always be ignored, so labeling them as unimportant, dismissed, discarded, unworthy of attention, is the best response. “Weird” does that. It’s dismissive, it’s decisive, it’s the perfect way of drawing a line that the person so labeled is irrevocably on the wrong side of. And for a troll like Donald Trump who thrives in labeling people as acceptable (to him), or supportive (of him) and thus dividing the world into those two groups (either/or), it’s kryptonite.

Suddenly he’s labeled, he’s on the wrong side, he’s outside the kewl kids, and he’s discarded. No appeal, nothing to argue about.

Trump tells @clayandbuck on the "weird" line of attack from Democrats: "Nobody's ever called me weird. I'm a lot of things, but weird I'm not."

— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) August 1, 2024

Yeah; that’s all he’s got; and that’s not going to cut it. Trump is now on the outside looking in. And he’s going to stay there. His overt racism and misogyny, which should have surprised no one when he took the stage for a mere 30 minutes at the NABJ conference, was more recognized because he’ been labeled “weird,” than in spite of it. Would that were not so, but dese are de conditions dat prevail.

He’s weird. He’s never gonna wash that off. Certainly not in the next 90 odd days. 

Stick a fork in ‘im, he’s done.