Election fraud! It's always been a thing, almost more feature than bug but its intrinsic to the system and that human beings are involved. But besides re-raising the issue that if Team Donnie are alleging specific acts of fraud, then they surely have proof (a/k/a knowing what they're talking about) (then again, their standard bearer has based his career on being full of shit and getting rewarded for it so why not his (His??) followers?). Which they repeatedly fail to produce.
As for the deranged cohort amongst the GOP, well, they've been tripping on their fantasies since at least the 1990s. Talk about swooning from the vapors...
As for the ammosexuals who want to kill the commies and take back the country, well, I'm on record as saying that that coup happened long ago.
If there's a silver lining at all to this, the fact that they can't even be bothered to use the search function to check on what they're being told is consistent with their general gormlessness and fecklessness. In other words, the wingnut tendency toward incompetence is our saving grace. If a few of them actually knew what they were doing, we already would have a Reich Wing State.
I think the media's problem is they keep trying to find reasons for Trump support besides ''This REALLY pisses off liberals/leftists'' and there just aren't any.
I think the fuck you fracts thing isn't new at all. There is a short video from Myth Busters where one of the guys looks at the camera and says (after an experiment obviously didn't turn out as he'd expected): "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Of course he was making a joke.
I also vaguely remember a short essay by Slacktivist from maybe a decade ago about, in his previous job, trying to convince evangelicals that P&G was not Satanist by providing them evidence (didn't work).
Where I'm going with this I think is that this denial of reality been around for some time, but it might be reaching critical mass.
They didn’t check because 1) they wanted it to be true, in order to feed their bile stores and 2) their go-to 14 year old wasn’t around to show them how. (“CTRL - how do you even pronounce that?”)
I've long maintained that one of the biggest crises America faces is that most of the population is functionally illiterate.
I don't mean that they can't recognize words on a page, it's that they can't read anything that forces them to think for even five seconds. If they read anything at all, it's The Federalist-level crap---just dumb talking point text that tells them *what* to think. Then factor in that these people listen to Limbaugh or Hannity or Shapiro (which isn't reading, just listening) or that their news comes from Facebook memes or 200-character Twitter posts, all of which tell them what to think while insisting that they're actually free, independent factors, and that it's libtards who are sheep.
Being illiterate, then, means that their ability to break down duplicities or think about something for more than 10 seconds is severely inhibited, and it also affects their abilities to form strings of connected/complex thought or even intelligibly articulate themselves (it's one way I explain how the Qanon "narrative" has shifted so dramatically over the years and actually *grown* its base). Go on YouTube and watch 35-year-old white dudes in their car ranting about Democrats and you'll notice something: 1) they all think they're free thinkers, 2) they all repeat the same phrases verbatim, and 3) they can't adequately fill in the gaps between their talking point phrases, largely because they don't know what they're talking about, so they huff and puff and say things like "I mean, this is just crazy," or "It's ridiculous," or "I mean, come on!"
I'm not exaggerating when I say it's a crisis. The world is a complex place, and the problems plaguing it are more complicated than "Democrats bad." But you've got a good chunk of the population who are (rightly, in some instances) very pissed off, incapable of expressing themselves in anything more than adolescent tantrums, and being fed a steady stream of very simple and easily digestible right-wing propaganda. And I don't know how we get out of it, because people really hate reading.
It’s not just Trumpkins. One thing I’ve learned and that’s help keep me employed through the long decades is that in general, people have no idea how to do research. I grew up ore-Internet and so had to grok such quaint antiquities as the Dewey Decimal System and how a microfilm reader worked and how to use a phone to make, y’know, a *phone call*. To information to find another number, even. Nowadays with the web life is simple. Since I’m the guy who can somehow magically come up with information I get asked to find something at least once a week. My secret? Google. I do kind of miss libraries tho...
I dunno. After all, nothing they say re the Insurrection Act makes sense. First of all, it doesn't mean what they think it does, as anyone can tell just by googling it and reading its text -- it only applies when rebellion or civil unrest has made it "impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States . . . by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." So [a] it grants no authority so long as the courts are open; and [b] it only allows use of the military to enforce existing federal law. Second, a look at the image Callesto posted makes clear that the bill it describes *wouldn't* have nullified the President's authority under the Act; it would only have required him to send a document to Congress when he invoked it. If you can get past both of those, what's a little failure to control-F?
First, upvoted for the callback to the greatest DEVO song that DEVO never did.
Second, the Right has always been reality-inverse to some extent. Iraqi WMDs, Whitewater, and the like. But the era of Qanons seems to have driven them into an actively reality-ADverse space, where even confronted with evidence, or at least signs of their beliefs being bullshit, they throw up their shields and retreat into "It's crazy". How DO we deal with the fact that half the electorate is this willfully ignorant?
Second: Maybe there are two basic emotional yin-yang orientations to the world: a), that you and your loved ones prosper; b) that your enemies suffer. And since MAGA are not prospering, they at least want option b). That's why 'tribal' has proved such a useful word. And it makes Marcotte's point all the more telling.
Third: I've been assuming (and writing ad nauseam) that MAGA has never been a political movement, but a religious one. Hence "cult." Hence all the magical (or MAGA-cal) thinking about Trump-the-hero, etc., etc. Hence their dogged ignoring, not only of objective facts and proved documentation, but *their own common sense.* They not only *want* to believe in their fictional, magical version of Trump and etc., they *need* to--which is to say, through events and decisions, some of which are of no fault of their own, and some of which are very much of fault of their own, the fundamental stability of their lives (and personalities) depends on hewing to all this bullshit and turning both blind eyes to everything else.
They care about what's true, but only secondarily. Primarily they care about how to sustain these necessary illusions. They're Wily Coyote who's run off a cliff. The one thing he mustn't do is look down.
Fourth: Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland deals with all this and is very good.
Fifth: How is all this possible? Because Isaac Asimov was right: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
Many on the left/liberal side have a need to find some simple, rational explanation for what, to us, is inexplicable: why do Trump supporters exist? What Trump people believe and why they believe it has been a vast media endeavor for years now (despite countless Cletus safaris to Heartland™ diners, the NY Times is still clueless). But, IMO, the response to "What are the reasons that people support Trump?" is "All of them, Katie."
I'm a big fan of Amanda Marcotte but your linked essay on Trump supporters is much, much more on target, IMO. Marcotte reduces Trump supporters to those who "never believed he was an honest man" and who see themselves as "in on the con." For some percentage of them, this is clearly true. However, you identify, among other things, hatred of who they have been brainwashed to believe are their enemies as a key motivator. Which is also true. (Trump sometimes thinks they're in on the con, too.)
And hard to believe as it is, some of them really do love the guy. A recent WAPO article quoted the mayor of once-safe Tangier Island now ravaged by COVID: "I love Trump as much as any family member I got." There are books written about Trump's -faith- for chrissakes and millions of evangelicals make up a huge part of his base. When his fans talk about Trump, it's apparent that for many of them he is a chimera, a phantom with whatever attributes and virtues they want and need him to have, but bearing no relation whatsoever to the piece of shit he really is. Sheer self-delusion is yet another a reason (and why many of his fans would never bother to look up the Insurrection Act claim -- it wouldn't occur to them that it -could- be fake.)
I don't know what percentage believes what, and for most it's probably a combination of reasons, but all's I know is this: one day someone will write a dissertation on the topic, and she'll still be criticized by wingnuts for calling herself "Dr."
The United States of America is collapsing - so is the rest of the world. Flight from reality?
Climate change. No one, and I mean not me, not you, not anyone, is dealing with it in any manner that will make a difference. The world is headed straight on into frequent natural disasters, food emergencies, rising seas, mass migrations and refugees, water wars... you get the idea.
I don't think that failing to check things you hear from people you trust is that Trumpist, or rather particularly Trumpist. Though ad hominem argument is logically invalid, we seem to be built to use it as the primary method of truth assessment—this saved a lot of time and energy back when we were in small bands (with strong sanctions against liars), and I'd hazard is part of the social technology that helped us become half-assed masters of this globe.
The 'lust to see Trump kill his opponents' is a selling-point, and part of the vicarious freedom you get when identifying with the Powerful Leader. Even in a misogynist dictatorship you'd quite possibly hang for killing your wife, and you'd definitely swing for killing your boss, and maybe for killing that guy who cut you off at the intersection, but you can identify with the Leader who is Free.
(I realised this as a riff on someone else's brilliant 'Fascism is Anarchism for one man.')
Election fraud! It's always been a thing, almost more feature than bug but its intrinsic to the system and that human beings are involved. But besides re-raising the issue that if Team Donnie are alleging specific acts of fraud, then they surely have proof (a/k/a knowing what they're talking about) (then again, their standard bearer has based his career on being full of shit and getting rewarded for it so why not his (His??) followers?). Which they repeatedly fail to produce.
As for the deranged cohort amongst the GOP, well, they've been tripping on their fantasies since at least the 1990s. Talk about swooning from the vapors...
As for the ammosexuals who want to kill the commies and take back the country, well, I'm on record as saying that that coup happened long ago.
If there's a silver lining at all to this, the fact that they can't even be bothered to use the search function to check on what they're being told is consistent with their general gormlessness and fecklessness. In other words, the wingnut tendency toward incompetence is our saving grace. If a few of them actually knew what they were doing, we already would have a Reich Wing State.
I think the media's problem is they keep trying to find reasons for Trump support besides ''This REALLY pisses off liberals/leftists'' and there just aren't any.
I think the fuck you fracts thing isn't new at all. There is a short video from Myth Busters where one of the guys looks at the camera and says (after an experiment obviously didn't turn out as he'd expected): "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Of course he was making a joke.
I also vaguely remember a short essay by Slacktivist from maybe a decade ago about, in his previous job, trying to convince evangelicals that P&G was not Satanist by providing them evidence (didn't work).
Where I'm going with this I think is that this denial of reality been around for some time, but it might be reaching critical mass.
They didn’t check because 1) they wanted it to be true, in order to feed their bile stores and 2) their go-to 14 year old wasn’t around to show them how. (“CTRL - how do you even pronounce that?”)
Happy Festivus, everyone!
I've long maintained that one of the biggest crises America faces is that most of the population is functionally illiterate.
I don't mean that they can't recognize words on a page, it's that they can't read anything that forces them to think for even five seconds. If they read anything at all, it's The Federalist-level crap---just dumb talking point text that tells them *what* to think. Then factor in that these people listen to Limbaugh or Hannity or Shapiro (which isn't reading, just listening) or that their news comes from Facebook memes or 200-character Twitter posts, all of which tell them what to think while insisting that they're actually free, independent factors, and that it's libtards who are sheep.
Being illiterate, then, means that their ability to break down duplicities or think about something for more than 10 seconds is severely inhibited, and it also affects their abilities to form strings of connected/complex thought or even intelligibly articulate themselves (it's one way I explain how the Qanon "narrative" has shifted so dramatically over the years and actually *grown* its base). Go on YouTube and watch 35-year-old white dudes in their car ranting about Democrats and you'll notice something: 1) they all think they're free thinkers, 2) they all repeat the same phrases verbatim, and 3) they can't adequately fill in the gaps between their talking point phrases, largely because they don't know what they're talking about, so they huff and puff and say things like "I mean, this is just crazy," or "It's ridiculous," or "I mean, come on!"
I'm not exaggerating when I say it's a crisis. The world is a complex place, and the problems plaguing it are more complicated than "Democrats bad." But you've got a good chunk of the population who are (rightly, in some instances) very pissed off, incapable of expressing themselves in anything more than adolescent tantrums, and being fed a steady stream of very simple and easily digestible right-wing propaganda. And I don't know how we get out of it, because people really hate reading.
It’s not just Trumpkins. One thing I’ve learned and that’s help keep me employed through the long decades is that in general, people have no idea how to do research. I grew up ore-Internet and so had to grok such quaint antiquities as the Dewey Decimal System and how a microfilm reader worked and how to use a phone to make, y’know, a *phone call*. To information to find another number, even. Nowadays with the web life is simple. Since I’m the guy who can somehow magically come up with information I get asked to find something at least once a week. My secret? Google. I do kind of miss libraries tho...
I dunno. After all, nothing they say re the Insurrection Act makes sense. First of all, it doesn't mean what they think it does, as anyone can tell just by googling it and reading its text -- it only applies when rebellion or civil unrest has made it "impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States . . . by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." So [a] it grants no authority so long as the courts are open; and [b] it only allows use of the military to enforce existing federal law. Second, a look at the image Callesto posted makes clear that the bill it describes *wouldn't* have nullified the President's authority under the Act; it would only have required him to send a document to Congress when he invoked it. If you can get past both of those, what's a little failure to control-F?
Well, as of 8:30 a.m. MST, "Insurrection Act " is trending, and the thread is not of the 'debunking" kind.
"Because, I’m guessing, they’ve gone beyond Fuck Your Feelings, and into Fuck Your Facts." But they don't believe in so-called facts.
First, upvoted for the callback to the greatest DEVO song that DEVO never did.
Second, the Right has always been reality-inverse to some extent. Iraqi WMDs, Whitewater, and the like. But the era of Qanons seems to have driven them into an actively reality-ADverse space, where even confronted with evidence, or at least signs of their beliefs being bullshit, they throw up their shields and retreat into "It's crazy". How DO we deal with the fact that half the electorate is this willfully ignorant?
First: great thread.
Second: Maybe there are two basic emotional yin-yang orientations to the world: a), that you and your loved ones prosper; b) that your enemies suffer. And since MAGA are not prospering, they at least want option b). That's why 'tribal' has proved such a useful word. And it makes Marcotte's point all the more telling.
Third: I've been assuming (and writing ad nauseam) that MAGA has never been a political movement, but a religious one. Hence "cult." Hence all the magical (or MAGA-cal) thinking about Trump-the-hero, etc., etc. Hence their dogged ignoring, not only of objective facts and proved documentation, but *their own common sense.* They not only *want* to believe in their fictional, magical version of Trump and etc., they *need* to--which is to say, through events and decisions, some of which are of no fault of their own, and some of which are very much of fault of their own, the fundamental stability of their lives (and personalities) depends on hewing to all this bullshit and turning both blind eyes to everything else.
They care about what's true, but only secondarily. Primarily they care about how to sustain these necessary illusions. They're Wily Coyote who's run off a cliff. The one thing he mustn't do is look down.
Fourth: Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland deals with all this and is very good.
Fifth: How is all this possible? Because Isaac Asimov was right: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
Many on the left/liberal side have a need to find some simple, rational explanation for what, to us, is inexplicable: why do Trump supporters exist? What Trump people believe and why they believe it has been a vast media endeavor for years now (despite countless Cletus safaris to Heartland™ diners, the NY Times is still clueless). But, IMO, the response to "What are the reasons that people support Trump?" is "All of them, Katie."
I'm a big fan of Amanda Marcotte but your linked essay on Trump supporters is much, much more on target, IMO. Marcotte reduces Trump supporters to those who "never believed he was an honest man" and who see themselves as "in on the con." For some percentage of them, this is clearly true. However, you identify, among other things, hatred of who they have been brainwashed to believe are their enemies as a key motivator. Which is also true. (Trump sometimes thinks they're in on the con, too.)
And hard to believe as it is, some of them really do love the guy. A recent WAPO article quoted the mayor of once-safe Tangier Island now ravaged by COVID: "I love Trump as much as any family member I got." There are books written about Trump's -faith- for chrissakes and millions of evangelicals make up a huge part of his base. When his fans talk about Trump, it's apparent that for many of them he is a chimera, a phantom with whatever attributes and virtues they want and need him to have, but bearing no relation whatsoever to the piece of shit he really is. Sheer self-delusion is yet another a reason (and why many of his fans would never bother to look up the Insurrection Act claim -- it wouldn't occur to them that it -could- be fake.)
I don't know what percentage believes what, and for most it's probably a combination of reasons, but all's I know is this: one day someone will write a dissertation on the topic, and she'll still be criticized by wingnuts for calling herself "Dr."
The United States of America is collapsing - so is the rest of the world. Flight from reality?
Climate change. No one, and I mean not me, not you, not anyone, is dealing with it in any manner that will make a difference. The world is headed straight on into frequent natural disasters, food emergencies, rising seas, mass migrations and refugees, water wars... you get the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_apocalypse
And we wonder why people are fleeing from reality? It fucking goddamn sucks, that's why.
I don't think that failing to check things you hear from people you trust is that Trumpist, or rather particularly Trumpist. Though ad hominem argument is logically invalid, we seem to be built to use it as the primary method of truth assessment—this saved a lot of time and energy back when we were in small bands (with strong sanctions against liars), and I'd hazard is part of the social technology that helped us become half-assed masters of this globe.
The 'lust to see Trump kill his opponents' is a selling-point, and part of the vicarious freedom you get when identifying with the Powerful Leader. Even in a misogynist dictatorship you'd quite possibly hang for killing your wife, and you'd definitely swing for killing your boss, and maybe for killing that guy who cut you off at the intersection, but you can identify with the Leader who is Free.
(I realised this as a riff on someone else's brilliant 'Fascism is Anarchism for one man.')