Trump: 5D Chess, the longform

It's not often that the payoff comes so quickly for even the best laid political trap. But that happened Tuesday morning after another one of President-elect Donald Trump's tweets produced just the kind of response he and his team must have hoped for all along. It was so easy and quick, it was kind of like watching a Washington version of the old practical joke show "Punked."

Here's how it went down. At about 7am Eastern Time, the following message appeared on Trump's Twitter feed:

It's likely the tweet was in response to some flag burning incidents that have been reported across the country in protest of Trump's election. The most famous of which occurred at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and resulted in the school's administration taking the drastic step of removing the flag from the campus flagpole.

But right on cue, an army of sanctimonious Trump critics took to social media and even newspaper web sites to attack the President-elect's tweet and use it as proof that he is a reckless and scary fascist. Almost uniformly, the critical comments pointed out that flag burning was a protected form of Free Speech protected by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision joined even by the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

The Washington Post's political writer Philip Bump perhaps bit the hardest and fastest on the bait as he quickly attacked Trump for flouting existing law but also for supposedly letting this flag burning comment distract him from the more important work he should be doing assembling his cabinet.

Well, the joke's on you folks. As Trump and his team must have certainly known, the last nationally prominent American politician to propose making flag burning illegal and affixing a hefty fine of as much as $100,000 for doing so was... then-Senator Hillary Clinton in 2005. She and the late Republican Senator Bob Bennett introduced and co-authored the Flag Protection Act of 2005 and it came to the floor in October of that year but was never passed....

And the Times and the other Trump bashers today all failed to mention Hillary Clinton's eerily similar position in their attacks on Trump today. And in so doing, they were basically the victims of a sneaky practical joke that Trump is likely to use again to continue to embarrass and delegitimize his opponents. If Trump can make it appear that his opponents don't actually believe in any political philosophy and only attack and defend policies based on who's proposing them, then he makes all that supposed principled opposition quite moot.

But even without the delicious Clinton connection, the tweet served to get Trump's opponents to very loudly defend the right to burn the flag. Legal or not, that's simply not a very politically popular position. Every politician of course holds a few unpopular positions, but the trick is to get him or her to go public with them. This ploy Tuesday morning from Trump did that too.

And social media platforms like Twitter help Trump achieve that delegitimizing goal instantly and publicly. After today's quite gratifying exercise, we can all forget about getting Trump to stop tweeting. As long as so many people are going to be gullible enough to give him exactly what he wants every time he tweets, this will continue. Tune in tomorrow or the next day, when he does it again. For Trump, Twitter isn't a problem. It's a gift that keeps on giving.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/29/trump-tweets-his-opponents-into-a-trap-commentary.html

/R bans inc. no wonder reddit is dying

More than anything, I want Reddit to heal, and I want our country to heal, and although many of you have asked us to ban the r/the_donald outright, it is with this spirit of healing that I have resisted doing so. If there is anything about this election that we have learned, it is that there are communities that feel alienated and just want to be heard, and Reddit has always been a place where those voices can be heard.

However, when we separate the behavior of some of r/the_donald users from their politics, it is their behavior we cannot tolerate. The opening statement of our Content Policy asks that we all show enough respect to others so that we all may continue to enjoy Reddit for what it is. It is my first duty to do what is best for Reddit, and the current situation is not sustainable.

Historically, we have relied on our relationship with moderators to curb bad behaviors. While some of the moderators have been helpful, this has not been wholly effective, and we are now taking a more proactive approach to policing behavior that is detrimental to Reddit:

We have identified hundreds of the most toxic users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans. Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no longer appear in r/all. r/all is not our frontpage, but is a popular listing that our most engaged users frequent, including myself. The sticky feature was designed for moderators to make announcements or highlight specific posts. It was not meant to circumvent organic voting, which r/the_donald does to slingshot posts into r/all, often in a manner that is antagonistic to the rest of the community.

We will continue taking on the most troublesome users, and going forward, if we do not see the situation improve, we will continue to take privileges from communities whose users continually cross the line—up to an outright ban.