The First Debate

If there is one rule that everyone should follow while watching the Presidential debates, it is this one: Turn the TV off immediately after the debate because the talking heads are there to persuade you to favor the candidate of their choice. This was apparent to me as I was watching the debate on CNN.

How did the debate go? The debate was designed to have 3 segments. Because of the intensity of the exchanges that initially occurred, the first segment resembled a bizarro version of an Ali-Frasier fight. Both candidates were rapidly landing heavy punches with Hillary jabbing first. This surprised me because of the 3 scenarios I envisioned, one of them involved Trump trying to get under her skin. BTW, I call this first segment a bizarro version of an Ali-Frasier fight because what was on display was not the candidates' strengths, it was their weaknesses. The last two segments of the debate were pretty much like the first except that there were not as intense as the first segment.

What can we learn from this debate? We can learn only what the candidates want us to learn from the debate itself. To learn more than that, it is best to have taped the debate (on the DVR of course), wait for the fact checking to have occurred, print out the fact check results, and then watch the debate tape with the fact check results in front of you. I could give my impressions of the debate, but then you would be subject to my wanting to persuade you.

In the end, this debate shows us how controlled our elections are with TV pundits trying harder and harder than the candidates did to persuade us. But that isn't the biggest flaw of the debate. The biggest flaw of the debate is seen in how the voices of all the other candidates are prohibited from participating so that many of us believe that we only have 2 candidates to choose from. Thus, our elections are controlled supposedly for our benefit but not really. And not enough Americans are willing to make any noise about this.

Why are most of us so passive in considering only two candidates to vote for? It is because many of us have been groomed into embracing a passive authoritarianism. And it is this passive authoritarianism that leads the fight against the US having a real, working democracy. What should we do before deciding on for whom to vote? We should not just pay attention to this debate and what these 2 candidates have done and said in the past, we should offer the same courtesy to the third party candidates who could represent us. That means that those of us who are conservatives should also pay attention to conservative third-party candidates while nonconservative third-party candidates should do the same to nonconservative third-party candidates.