• greenshirtdenimjeans
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    4 months ago

    Had to look it up. The full quote is great, even mentions his uncle at MIT.

    Now they’ll say all these stories are terrible. Well, these stories have, you know, you heard my story in the boat with the shark, right? I got killed on that. They thought I was rambling. I’m not rambling. We can’t get the boat to float. The battery is so heavy. So then I start talking about asking questions. You know, I have an, I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for many years, long, I think the longest tenure ever. Very smart, had three different degrees and you know, so I have an aptitude for things. You know, there is such a thing as an aptitude. I said, well, what would happen if this boat is so heavy and started to sink and you’re on the top of the boat. Do you get electrocuted or not? In other words, the boat is going down and you’re on the top, will the electric currents flow through the water and wipe you out? And let’s say there’s a shark about 10 yards over there. Would I have to immediately abandon or could I ride the electric down and he said, sir, nobody’s ever asked us that question. But sir, I don’t know. I said, well, I want to know because I guarantee you one thing, I don’t care what happens. I’m staying with the electric, I’m not getting over with it. So I tell that story. And the fake news they go, he told this crazy story with electric. It’s actually not crazy. It’s sort of a smart story, right? Sort of like, you know, it’s like the snake, it’s a smart when you, you figure what you’re leaving in, right? You’re bringing it in the, you know, the snake, right? The snake and the snake. I tell that and they do the same thing

    Edit: I don’t even think this is the full quote, he wasn’t rambling though.

    Edit 2: Grabbed it from here https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1804592040791122259

    • Nougat@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      He thinks that because “batteries are heavy” that it’s impossible to build an electric boat.

      Is he not aware that aircraft carriers exist?

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        It’s a reference to a previous speech in which he attempted to create an imaginary dilemma of having to choose between being electrocuted or eaten by a shark. That’s the “clever question”, because the boat salesman had never heard anyone ask that question.

        The boat salesman was probably just being polite, because it’s a stupid question. It’s not a dilemma or even a contradiction. He’s just making a sort of false equivalence and hoping that people are afraid of sharks so he can sell them his opinion on electric boats. In the same speech he also spent considerable time talking about how people ought to be afraid of sharks.

        The addition of a snake and the credibility of his late uncle is a wonderful development of the story. He’s probably going to add more stuff to it until he touches some topic that people actually care about…

        • FanciestPants@lemmy.world
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          I really wish i could get away with this shit at my job. Like, “…and then my uncle, who was the victim of a radical abortion, someone once told me that, and the left has no idea, no idea, most people do…” and then my colleagues just applaud and I get a promotion.

        • anguo@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          There was something about his stories being completely made up every time he starts with someone calling him “sir”.

          • Fetus@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            No electric, though. If it had electric, it would be too heavy. And if there was a shark 10 feet away? Not a chance.

          • dragontamer@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Fair enough.

            I guess I assumed that people were thinking of electric-battery powered boats based on the discussion. But if its just a matter of weight, we all know that boats can be arbitrarily heavy and still float (as long as they are big enough to compensate for that weight).

            • Nougat@fedia.io
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              4 months ago

              we all know that boats can be arbitrarily heavy and still float …

              I can point to one person who doesn’t know.

          • MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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            You’re completely right. But it is incredibly fucking hilarious to me that, out of context, your question to an assumed layperson is that they should know how nuclear power (a very complex subject that I (a power plant operator who worked at a nuclear power plant in various contracting capacities for about ten years) cannot fully explain) works.

            Idk, it’s like overhearing from a table over in a restaurant “how do you think brain surgery works?” How the fuck should anybody without intense familiarity with such a niche subject know that?

            But yes, you are absolutely right. All you have to do is google “do nuclear subs have batteries” lmao. We all could have that level of knowledge with two seconds of “work”.

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              Worth noting that Nuke subs have batteries but Carriers do not use batteries for auxiliary power. They have 2 independent plants (Enterprise had more, but that’s decommissioned now), and use diesel generators as a backup. That’s not to say there’s no batteries on a carrier, but not like a ship-wide battery system. But obviously that has nothing to do with “how heavy” batteries are, so I guess this is all beside the point.

        • Farid@startrek.website
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          No-no-no, this sucker’s electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need.

      • aramis87@fedia.io
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        I’m fairly sure he doesn’t know that in WWII, the US used some ships made of concrete.

    • Freefall@lemmy.world
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      I the Republicans said it best, "why would they run a candidate that is so very old and in clear cognitive decline‽”…

    • MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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      Is there a source for this? I tried to look it up but just kept getting links about him reading a poem called The Snake and using it to compare to immigrants or some shit. I’m guessing that poem is what he’s talking about here? Was the quote you and the post gave from one of his stupid rallies in the past 48 hours?

      Also, fucking ludicrous that his dipshit followers will simultaneously question the extremely credible Democrats’ credentials’ credibility and pine on and on about personal responsibility, all while their guy takes personal credit for his uncle’s education and career as if his uncle’s accomplishments have anything to do with Donald Trump, convicted criminal and fraudster. It’s painfully obvious that it’s intended as a dog whistle but is actually just a racist, eugenics-driven regular fucking whistle that everybody can hear, interrupting everything in every crowd, forcing everybody to say “what the fuck, why is that guy blowing that very obviously normal whistle and then getting butthurt when everybody looks and points and asks why he keeps on blowing that obviously normal whistle and disrupting everything around him with it? Did he think that it was for secret signaling like he’s doing something covertly? Is he, in fact, a stupid person, blissfully unaware of how stupid he is, yet somehow getting away with convincing his stupid fans that he is smart, exclusively because of the confident fervor in which he is claiming that he is not a stupid person and is instead some sort of stable genius? Is the answer to that question ‘yes’?” And the answer to that question is yes.

      He would be hilarious if he hadn’t somehow swindled like 80 million people into doing things that put all of us in danger.

      • Just convincing them to wear ear bandages?

      Fucking hilarious.

      • Buy a specific brand of beer specifically to destroy it, illustrating that they don’t actually know how boycotts work?

      Pretty damn funny.

      • Wear his ugly hats?

      Kinda funny, except that all red hats are kinda ruined now, but funnier if you aren’t a Caps fan who now laments the Rock The Red thing.

      • Disregard masks during a deadly pandemic;
      • incite xenophobic, racist violence;
      • dismantle regulations that protect the planet and therefore all of humanity in exchange for money;
      • storm the Capitol with the intent to murder democratically elected politicians and/or engage in a coup?

      Markedly less funny and, dare I say, bad.

      I got off track and perhaps foolishly have decided to not delete all of that. I could’ve instead used this time looking harder for a source, but then I wouldn’t have made you push air out of your nose slightly more forcefully than you otherwise would have. And that’s slightly more important to me than verifying that the stupid thing that the stupid man supposedly said was in fact what he stupidly said. But I still kinda wanna know where you got the longer quote from so I can still verify that he stupidly said that stupid thing stupidly like some sort of stupid.

    • CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
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      Fucking Christ, that might be the most incomprehensible thing I’ve ever read and then watched! It is marginally better than if I wrote a script that just grabbed random words out of the dictionary and place them together like it was a sentence. I’m talking something super basic like get a file that has every word, tell the script to import it as an array, and just start grabbing random words no other logic. He speaks like Lorem ipsum, but with English words.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      He always brings up his uncle. He has some eugenics-based idea that because his uncle was really smart, he is really smart.

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      I still think his babbling makes about as much sense as some kids I’ve met at preschool but in context this actually makes some semblance of sense. Am I safer with the boat or the shark?

      I think, anyway… I’m deep into happy hour after a mentally taxing work day, on next to no sleep. So there’s that…

    • zephorah@lemm.ee
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      That was my first thought, that he was having a stroke.

      And seriously, he’s in the same realm as Joe. The same thing can happen to him if it hasn’t already.

      We need an age cap. It’s too dangerous not to have one.

    • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
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      Plot twist: this is from 2016!

      (Okay, not really, but it may as well have been. He’s a demented sociopathic conman, his mental buffer is tiny and keeps getting smaller.)

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    It’s starting to make sense how 19th century people could fall for literal snake oil salesman, but would never elect a clown like Trump. He couldn’t exist if he was only able to communicate through print.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      Been saying for years, since I first read a bland speech transcription, listening to and reading Trump are very different experiences.

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        I don’t really think so. That’s what all his speeches have sounded like to me. If he stays on the teleprompter he can do OK, not good but not terrible either, but he rarely stays on the teleprompter. This is what it sounds like when he improvises. Still, some people listen to that schizophrenic-stream-of-consciousness and hear a great orator. That’s something I’ll never understand.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          It’s a different way of processing information. It’s a flow rather than discrete packets of information being decoded and given meaning. Interestingly, there are stong parallels with Ebonics. A lot of hip hop uses this. If you tried to transcribe many hip hop verses as prose, they would make no sense, but given the general context and the vibe and tone of what’s being said, you get the meaning.

          It’s also similar to the kind of baby talk that you might give to a pet. Why do you always call your cat, whose given name is Bartholomew, “Dingly Wingly / Dinglebutt / Dingity dogg”? The specific, discrete, quantised definition of what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. But “doggo” conveys a very different meaning than “dog”. Animals have a limited grasp of English, but they understand tone and intent.

          This also means that these forms of language / communication are rapidly evolving since they’re based on similar context and events and aren’t beholden to a strict list of defined meanings. The connotation of a word is far more meaningful than the definition.

          Trump says, “I ride down the electric.” That’s a nonsense phrase. But what does the word “electric” feel like to a right winger? You can imagine a word cloud with “poorly constructed”, “scam”, “dangerous”, “overhyped”, “expensive”, and of course the ever popular “liberal” but also some things that are difficult to put into words. A sense that we are better than them because they spend a lot of money on sketchy tech but we believe in the tried and true old ways. A feeling that they think they’re so smart but we know the truth of the world. A house of cards propped up by technology and no soul, which will inevitably collapse at any minute. Trump conveys all this in a word, and his followers understand all this in a word, and they all do it without thinking. It’s shorthand. They communicate almost nonverbally. And if you’re not part of the in-group, you don’t have the context to understand the flow of the speech.

          • krashmo@lemmy.world
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            I appreciate your effort in understanding the processes at play but it seems like it would be much simpler to summarize by saying “they’re dumb”. It may be reductionist but I don’t think it’s inaccurate.

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              No you’re absolutely right. It’s incredibly dumb. I just attempted to explain the flavor of dumb.

  • FarFarAway@startrek.website
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    Somehow, came upon Trumps speech from the RNC last night. Started reading random parts outloud. Ended up convinced all the Democrats have to do is run ads with all the incoherent crap he says.

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      It’s really frustrating because he absolutely speaks worse than Biden as far as having a coherent statement, it’s just that he still has the capacity to speak loudly and quickly that people confuse it for still being mentally capable… Meanwhile Biden has a decent address to the nation regarding his decision not to run but he sounds like he’s whispering and because he’s always had a studder he stumbles a bit.

      Again with Republicans it’s all about projecting strength so Biden appears “weak.”

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      Just a 30 second clip of Trump rambling, with a 3 second “This ad brought to you by the Harris for President campaign”

  • bcgm3@lemmy.world
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    This is a sample from a speech where he talks non-stop for 82 minutes.

    If you started playing the movie Toy Story the moment he first speaks, the end credits would finish, and there would still be another full minute before he finally stops talking again.

  • Vedlt@lemmy.world
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    This belongs in /c/aneurysmposting. I can’t remember how to link to communities in lemmy.

    • EnderWiggin@lemmy.world
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      “Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?” - Donald Trump

      Some people are saying he said it first.

    • Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world
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      Have you ever had a dream that that you um you had you’d you would you could you’d do you wi you wants you you could do so you you’d do you you could you you want you want him to do you so much you could do anything?

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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    I stopped actually listening to his words in 2015.

    I leave to people with stronger constitutions to do this work.

    • Ech@lemm.ee
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      I feel terrible for people that are obliged to transcribe his word vomit for a living, or for historical posterity. Even with all that effort, I fully expect people in the not-too-distant future to wonder why the data of every single transcript of this one guy was somehow corrupted. I would struggle to believe it was real if I hadn’t heard it myself.

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        In any sane world, he’d have been kicked to the curb the day he said he ‘liked soldiers who didn’t get captured.’

      • Tavi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        Try listening to the elderly. This “sort” of speech is really common, but my family also has a history of mental illness, so, -(-_-)/-

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      I couldn’t bring myself to watch video footage of him until he was out of office… feel that

      Why the fuck would anyone waste their time?

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        I guess it’s like when you watch a Marvel movie and they start talking about an ‘arc reactor’ or ‘vibranium.’

        People know it’s nonsense but it’s okay because there’s a big fight coming.

  • rsuri@lemmy.world
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    I have a theory where Trump actually can’t really read, he can maybe vaguely tell what 100 or so words look like and has been faking it ever since he was a small child, to the point where he’s very good at fake reading. This would explain why he does so terribly with teleprompters.

    • Pringles@lemm.ee
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      I believe that. You never see him actually read something. At most he glances at something before having someone else read it and summarize it for him in a dumbed down way.

      • BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee
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        I actually know a guy who can’t really read. I mean he can, but he has some learning disability mixed with adhd. He got through school okay, and i never really knew. I only figured it out when we played video games together and he would read things wrong, and always say something like: “what?” Pretend to read it again but quietly and then say:“aaah, got it.” But he didn’t get it, he just read the 3 words that seemed important and the rest was context clues.

        I think it’s nuts that no one ever questions the shit Donnie says. Is it because they know how much of an embarrassment that would be? Like every time he talks shit about a country or even state, he should be asked if he can point on it on a map. Or when he just does stupid ass monologues like his nuclear speech, wouldn’t you ask again and again until his story makes even a lick of sense? One guy didn’t get elected because he spelled potato wrong. I remember obama doing an ama and he wrote “an meteor” instead of “a meteor” or some shit, and the spelling mistake was the biggest thing of the ama.

        • ____@infosec.pub
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          Dan Quayle is the infamous “potato” politician.

          English isn’t a particularly easy language, on a relative basis, at least for those who don’t study it academically at the post-grad level. “An” vs “A” is one of the last errors I’d ever fault someone for, because it’s poorly defined and tends to have precious little impact on the actual meaning of the overall sentence.

          Is it a marginally annoying error when I “know” what’s correct in my head and I’m listening to someone else make the error? For sure. Would I ever point it out to someone on their second, third, or fourth language? Not a chance, because it’s largely an irrelevancy and also damnably difficult to explain efficiently as a “rule”.

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        He couldn’t follow his intelligence briefings, which had to be reduced to fit on one page, without it mentioning his name in every other sentence. He’s only gotten more senile since.

    • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
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      No one who has tried to stage a coup to take over the United States should be able to run for public office.

      • irreticent@lemmy.world
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        No one who stole classified documents and stored them in an insecure location should be able to run for public office.

        Strike that. Regardless of where he stored them he had no reason (other than treason) to steal those documents in the first place. I can’t believe people aren’t more outraged about that. Many people who will vote for him know it was wrong but will overlook it and vote for him anyway. It’s outrageous!

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        They can’t even properly sentence Trump for campaign finance violations. Good luck getting him on treason.

    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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      He reads the snake poem/lyrics at every campaign event. His events go so cultish at the end when the music ramps up, and he does his prepared speech, it’s all so weird. I get why people would go though, it’s a cult of personality for sure.

          • DogWater@lemmy.world
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            Holy shit that’s the wildest thing I’ve never heard of.

            I haven’t seen any mainstream satire about this. It’s so funny that he reads a “poem” like a little bedtime story at all his events about the scary immigrant coming to bite us. It’s an awful message but that’s so wild

            • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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              Yep, it’s wild. But rather than be a bed time story - it appears to be a highlight of his campaign events.

              Usually his events are like an hour of him ranting and riffing, people just getting to see him talk… Usually half way or two thirds of the way through he’ll notice the crowd getting sleepy or losing interest, and he’ll say "do you wanna hear The Snake poem?" - and the crowd will cheer.

              Sometimes near the end, they’ll join in with the words… Then he’ll go back to just talking about whatever he wants. Then often without warning you’ll start to hear this music ramping up, and he’ll go into this prepared verbatim speech with the music in the background getting louder and louder.

              “Whilst immigrants flow across our boards and gangs cause chaos on our streets only I Donald J Trump was capable of stopping the boarder crisis…”

              Same swelling music, same faster paced campaign speech over it - always at the end of his events. The events are very much rituals. Like going to church, because it’s a cult of personality.

              Having one of these campaign events on in the background of what you’re doing and half tuning out of it whilst going about your day is a very strange experience. Like something out of a TV show. An American cult of personality playing out in real time. It becomes obvious he was giving people’s lives meaning and zest.

              …and I agree with your reading of the poem’s meaning. It’s anti-immigrant, “save our women”, white nationalist type of stuff. But it’s very clever, because the original lyrics were written by a black guy (it’s some song from the 70s), so he can use that if he’s accused of it being racist. So he’s really got his bases covered.

              The way he reads it, it’s very sly, because maybe it’s about the democrats, or foreign aid, or the media, or the disabled. Accuse everyone else of being a snake, so no one’s looking at YOU as the snake.

              I think it’s the kind of thing his mentor, Roy Cohn would have taught him. Roy was a gay lawyer for the mafia, who loved discos, young blonde men, and being a psychopathic tyrant, and Trump used “Ready-Mix” brand concrete for all his buildings in NYC, a brand/type of concrete the Mafia exclusively controlled the supply of.

              Roy Cohn also collected toy frogs, and I think it’s interesting the alt-right used a frog (pepe) as their mascot. Perhaps Trump paying homage to Roy.

  • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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    I got about 1/3 through this and then my brain just shut down and refused to continue. Kind of like the literary equivelent of Foul Old Rons smell.

    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz
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      How can I give more than one upvote!

      This is the perfect analogy, taking an actual literary genius who uses words to describe the indescribable and mapping it to the indescribable ramblings of the ‘stable genius’