"So why put out shit that, on its face, makes no sense?"
Answer: Because they're that fucking stupid and otherwise defective to be amused by rank idiocy. Listen, if they were geniuses and/or sane they wouldn't be R voters. And yet again: I keep saying they're insane and they keep providing proof I'm correct, fueling my endless (apparent) hyperbole.
* * *
"Some (not all) news reports attempt to communicate in their headlines that this claim is plainly nonsensical."
What burns my ass? Confusing the exception the rule with the rule itself. Occasional proper framing doesn't, like, negate the ~99.99% of the time that bullshit is reported uncritically or without what should be mandatory correctives.
The correct way to lead the reporting: "Trump, a known serial liar, claimed without any confirmation or verification that...". Get back to me when that becomes the norm.
From 2019, it resonates yet more at the present time. It also echoes a point I make on rare occasions: We have to be careful about wasting time overreacting to things that don't warrant overreacting. More on that, uh, inevitably.
I don't think Roy's "over-reacting" to anything. Everyone outside the US is starting to feel it. Here in Japan, a "Japanese first!" political party has opened a crack in the door. And it's all the same BS.
I may have missed the point but I read the piece as being about MAGAt-level insanity as opposed to the insanity of the nation’s leadership, public and private, which I rant about without end.
As for proto-fascists’ BS, the BS is universal. It’s always pigs wanting to take; only the means differ, never the ultimate goals…
Yes, even though Japan has maybe the lowest rates of immigration in the developed world, some people can still be whipped up into a hysteria about it. It never had anything to do with objective reality, just how you FEEL.
And really, what nation needs immigration more than Japan? I just checked, and it's right behind Monaco for highest median age in the world. Who's gonna keep things running when all the olds retire, or care for them in their final years?
I’m uncomfortable with arguments like this because they sound like an argument that we need an impoverished, overpopulated Third World to continue producing cheap labor for us in the form of immigrants. I know that wasn’t your point, but that seems to be the logical endpoint of this general argument. Instead, shouldn’t automation, productivity gains, and a more equitable distribution of wealth & resources be able to compensate for a declining population? (Ha, ha, Ayn Rand says no.)
Yeah, I could see how you could read it that way, and maybe that is what I was actually thinking, I may have spent too much time trying to craft arguments to appeal to people who don't give a single fuck for anything but themselves.
Anyway, declining population's no fun, ask anyone in Rural America. Briefly, during the Presidential campaign we did get some exposure to what immigration has meant for small towns in Ohio. Not much, but it was the only "Immigration is good" content we've gotten. The word "revitalized" got thrown around a bit. You don't get that from robots.
Declining population can only be a bad thing if you have bought the hokum that the only possible economic system is one that requires perpetual growth. SnarkiNorski is right that in a sane world that wasn't propagandized into imbecility, our artificially intelligent robot future would result in lots of leisure time and an overall improvement of quality of life. The senior citizens among us may recall that it wasn't that long ago - 50's through early 70's - that it was pitched that way. Yet somehow (cough neoliberalism) we can no longer consider the most logical possibilities and are wedded instead to the conundrum of either how to provide cheap labor or how not to become cheap labor.
Tinky Winky is rolling over in his grave, assuming older generations of Teletubbies are buried, not melted down and turned into Play-Doh.
They couldn't get away with this shit if our society/culture hadn't progressively gotten dumber, our attention spans shorter, and our passivity boundless as innumerable memes wash over us. But I guess all that goes without saying.
But Roy reminds us that fascism never really advances a coherent political philosophy, only an anti-philosophy that seeks to draw power to itself. The most coherent thing about fascism is who it targets and why.
Any parent who sat through interminable mind-numbing hours of Teletubbies with their toddlers would love to see the army mowing down giant mutant La La's and Dipsy's, lol.
When my kids were little, I remember watching a very old SNL episode when Charles Barkley hosted, and in one skit he was beating the shit out of Barney the dinosaur on the basketball court. My husband and I were still rolling on the floor 10 minutes later.
Fun facts from a long-ago profile of the show in the NYT Sunday Magazine: the sets are all indoors and the actors in the Teletubby costumes are adults, so the Teletubbies are 6 to 7 feet tall. Weird as that show is, now its weirder.
Thanks for pointing this out, even as it's really obvious it doesn't get any mention. The power of lying frees one from constraints like reality, other people's opinions, etc. It is the most potent weapon fascism has, and Tele-tubbies like trump have based their entire existence on pushing other people to lie knowingly for him. Now, they've picked up on the game and spread their own useless lies, hoping others will prop them up as well. Journalism may have been about the "truth" but the medium requires "popularity" so they're going 💯 with lies, truth and everyone be damned.
It's so obvious now! His size, like that of the Teletubbies, would be unremarkable under different circumstances. Fat man, fat cyborg baby, who cares? But the TV!
The remarkable thing is that his selfhood is so grafted to media that he's like a cyborg. He's like a man with an artificial heart. His lungs pump news cycles. His brain ... well, that's vestigial.
It's the inexplicable apparent entertainment some people get out of the cheesy nonsense. Seems as if it is getting MUCH easier to fool some of the people, etc, but also RIDICULOUSLY easier to AMUSE them.
"The power of lying frees one from constraints like reality, other people's opinions, etc."
I've said a version of this for years: Anyone can have reality; the lie is mine and mine alone.
I have a couple of family members who are profligate liars, and I often wonder how they keep them all straight. As in: how do they keep track of which lie was told to which person.
"Anyone can have reality; the lie is mine and mine alone."
Just 'spose you wanted to make a living harvesting the clicks on YouTube. Do you tell people the truth, that they can get anywhere? Or do you tell them some extra-special lies so crazy they can only get them from you?
Yes. A similar answer, is ignorance bliss or is it better to know? With knowledge we have a choice and a chance for change. Is it smart to pretend to be less intelligent than we are? Not most of the time.
You'd really have to be less intelligent. If you just pretended than at some point you'd realize what was going on and you'd be right back where you started.
I remain of the opinion that stupid doesn't fully explain the phenomenon. We witness the many faces of the con, each mark (stupid or not) bringing itself over the finish line.
I always wonder how these people function in the other, non-political areas of their lives. The MAGA roofing contractor, can he actually put a roof on your house that doesn't leak when it rains? Then he's not stupid.
The doctor and the pharmacist I worked for in South Carolina and their Limbaugh-esque conversations. There's a weird compartmentalization of "real" knowledge and wingnut belief. Of course it doesn't hurt that assholes like Alex Jones and Limbaugh pretend to be entertainment.
Coupla high school boys repeating, word for word, a Monty Python bit or something they saw on SCTV (I speak from LIVED EXPERIENCE here). The bonding is the point.
I think people are plenty smart, and it shows when they're doing something they really care about, but when it comes to politics they either turn off the smarts because it might lead to conclusions they don't like, or they look at the whole thing as entertainment which doesn't deserve any serious thought. The roofer who's all LOL about Trump being President probably wouldn't let Trump manage his business for a week.
My big problem with "stupid" as an explanation, well, one of the bigger ones, is the implication of a lack of awareness, understanding, and hence a lack of complicity. Au contrair, mon frere. They are extremely, violently aware of the implicstions, and they approve. You can argue they are "stupid" because of their belief those implications won't affect them, but that's a horse of a different color, more oblivious than stupid. We are just now only starting to see some consequences of Tariffs in the Heartland, TikTok posts by parents bithing about the inflsted price ofmschool supplies. Wait til the cofee tarrif kits.
It may or may not reflect individual stupidity. But willingness to believe lies and unreality if those match their prejudices--that credulity is heading to catastrophically stupid results.
OTOH, it won't be long til the diner's hit by the Biden coffee tariffs.
That "heading to catastrophically stupid results" is the big bet everyone not MAGA is making at the moment, the "this can't go on forever" bet.
But forever is a long, long time. Can it go on for 4 years? Barring an Event, a major economic crash or pandemic, very likely. Americans will be squeezed and annoyed by the tariffs, Medicate cuts and fallout of the "immigration policy", but enough to throw the bums out in 2026? Enough to get violent when Republican cheat enough to "win" anyway? Enough to go through it all again in 2028? Will it get bad enough for them to get mad enough? No one knows.
Americans don't have to be pressed so hard to "throw the bums out", what would be extraordinary - and would take real suffering to make happen - is Americans deciding to sit down and read something about the bums they're putting in.
I am a little fallen of crest that I was eager to approve your coined "implicstions" – pretty much exactly the sort of mashed potato word I look to create – til I realized you most likely meant "implications"...
Ackshually, that despair shit can get balanced out if we all go back and read this piece as an autopsy of how things went before !!???!! happens and we start coming back into focus as a 'liberal democracy' with certain re-attained flair for, you know equality, and beginning the long and hard and deep clean of the nation, eliminating cruelty (which in certain cases, will hafta run through the whole digestive tract, the small intestines of lege and then the large and out the anus of the judiciary. But we'll get there, and <record scratch>
what was i going for, "agst despair"? oh, fuck. sorry.
Good read. Got me thinking about Post-modern/Deconstructionist-type stuff (and how the "right" take everything interesting and useful and turn it into shit). It's like they've de- and then re-constructed Deconstructionism into something worse than Orwell imagined.
yeah, when karl rove told that guy sumpin' like "we make the reality, and you'll just write about that"... blah blah blah, that was when Foucault "became a neo-lib," the Repubs said "hold my beer," and here we are. Who knew pomo would spawn bizzaro pomo, like the superman comics a long time ago?
Hear, hear once again (I must find another way to say that). Aside from all the other dismal names the asshole deserves, Trump is, as he has been his entire obscene life, a huckster. The other day he claimed that his polling numbers were the highest they've ever been -- probably the highest of any president -- because his tariffs are so popular. This may be a "rhetorical construct to sell an idea" to academic scribes at Lagado but he isn't selling ideas, he's selling his glorious self, and he isn't lying, he's bullshitting -- saying what he thinks you need to hear to make the sale. The "sense that consequences don’t exist" may evaporate when the shit really does hit the fan, but I'm not sanguine that the darker fantasy won't come to pass. The huckster is also evil, and he has armies.
"he isn't lying, he's bullshitting -- saying what he thinks you need to hear to make the sale"
But who's buying? If the polls are to be believed, most people aren't. And if it's just MAGA types buying, why bother with the pitch at all? Although, to be fair, lying for him involves virtually zero effort.
Like with his lies about the Epstein Files, he couldn't think even one step ahead to how this might come back to bite him in the ass, and he just couldn't resist the opportunity.
Yeah, there's that. But I think what Roy is getting to is the lack of subtlety about it, the drift toward nonsensical, and the apparent need of his audience for MOREMOREMORE, irrespective of their ability to ID bullshit. Seems as if they are perfectly willing and indeed delighted to be bullshat.
Yup. He's a salesman, whose favorite product is himself. Lie all you want but *make the sale*. You don't like what you bought? See you in court (that I now control).
My husband gets Tubby's daily email, and boy oh boy does he have the finest direct mail bullshit artists in all the land working for him. Today's offers my partner, and just a few elite others on his list, the opportunity to vote on whether the "savings" from the tariffs should be returned to all of us real Americans in the form of fat checks. He'll abide by our decision! But you have to donate to vote. And you might want this limited edition MAGA cap for a low, low price today only.
An aside. When Musk wore two MAGA hats, one on top of the other, then made a joke in a cabinet meeting, he was unintentionally demonstrating a principle of marketing: you can manufacture needs.
It doesn't matter if wearing two hats is ridiculous. With a little more encouragement, they would all do it. How many of them have multiple hats already?
They come in different colors. (The hats, not the people.) I'm sure you can get a MAHA one now.
I've been saying this since 2016. He's a salesman, in the worst sense. Capitalism condones lies, bullshit, and exaggeration if it's in the service of making the sale. That's why the anagram of E Pluribus Unum is Caveat Emptor.
The destruction of certainty, logic, knowledge, empiricism, with science and education as inevitable victims, is a well-known method of keeping the fascist bubble inflated. The details, as limned by today’s REBID, are important in that they are the tea leaves to decipher. I don’t have any answers I’ve gained from this that anybody else hasn’t taken away, but I do notice that the purposeful conflation of adverse satire and pro-fascist propaganda may be something new. Like it is garishly displaying the defiled corpse of parody to the masses who will gleefully cheer its demise. Pretty soon they’ll openly and unapologetically embrace swastikas and Confederate battle flags or some other sordid symbols for fascism. Maybe the titular axe-and-a-bunch-of-sticks will make a comeback — all in good fun!
Some pundit's hot take on Chris Cuomo getting fooled by an AI video was "We've lost our ability to distinguish between truth and reality." Speak for yourself, buddy. My hot take was "Chris Cuomo is a fuckin' idiot."
Are people being fooled by AI in any other area of their lives? Seems to me like the AI lies that get taken up are political lies, which suggests a lot of the people peddling the slop know it's slop and just don't care.
The MAGA faithful who are all LOL about Trump's lying, when they take their car in for repairs, how do they feel about lying then?
I'm at a loss as to how he was fooled by that video - it said right on it that it was AI generated! I'm pretty sure he figured no one else would notice that and call attention to it, and "I was fooled" was his weak sauce of a coverup.
Show anyone an AI fake that contradicts their political biases and suddenly they're Sherlock Motherfucking Holmes. Nobody's "fooled" by this shit, they're all getting exactly what they wanted, it tickles them right where they want to be tickled, that's all they ask for.
I wonder how many aspiring fascists need to have this explained to them, "See, they're LITTLE sticks, but there's a BUNCHA them, so..." [fascist wannabe looks puzzled] "But why not BIG sticks, huh?"
--It’s like that time we were sweeping out the warehouse. I said, wouldn’t this go faster if we taped three brooms together? And you know what, it did.
Trumpism disappearing up its own asshole. They've completely given up on winning over anyone who's not already a fully bought-in member of the cult, all communication is only for Our Gang. Like with teenagers, you're not supposed to understand and if you ever did understand they'd change to some new code so you wouldn't understand. Skibidi toilet!
Very much a keeper. The developmental stages of absurd imagery that have formed Trumpsurdism. All in service of working towards the fuhrer.
Yes, it's a new phase. "Take his claim that he will reduce drug prices by 1,500%. Some (not all) news reports attempt to communicate in their headlines that this claim is plainly nonsensical. But you can tell that their hearts aren’t in it..." It's only taken seven months to get here. If we get his "census," the numbers will be as credible as the drug price miracle.
This morning it's normalcy as usual, from NPR and local network stations, as they report on the invasion launch. "Trump's D.C. Crime Crackdown"...
It's instructive to see the whole thing in context:
"We're going to get the drug prices down, not 30 or 40 percent, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No. We're going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent, numbers that are not even thought to be achievable because I've used a certain talent that I have and convinced the drug companies that you have no choice."
He's clearly not interested in what's true or even mathematically correct, just what he thinks sounds good, and getting drug prices down 1,500 percent sounds a whole lot more impressive than an actual number "thought to be achievable", which he's also not doing.
[Hard to believe this guy bankrupted casinos 6 times.]
And it's part of how he's always winking at the brethren. And counting on our free press to clean things up for him.
The believers don't have to swallow the numbers. They've got the vibes, to tell them Dear Leader is making deals, just for them. While cleaning up the country, to be sure only Real Americans are the beneficiaries of the deals.
Odd thing - I've been reading Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev the last few days, and it details a similar weird detachment from reality in Russia about a decade ago; the world made surreal, meaning lost, a kind of "positive nihilism", if you will.
The section I've gotten up to makes some points about how detachment from reality makes it harder to assert any particular criticism of the system, and that there's always a core of "reality" that centers around bigotry or fundamentalism or fear.
Something else I realized while driving to work and listening to DEVO - if nothing's real, the Leader/Party can promise you whatever and can't ever be held accountable. Prices going down? Release the Epstein Files? No, he never said that, and even if you show me the video I'll deny it! Fake news! Democrat hoax!
This is a great companion piece to something you wrote earlier this year (maybe March). "I think Trump has intuited that ours is an age in which reality has become so much less important than appearance that reality not only can but pretty much has to be ignored — that is, the false front is no longer a distraction from the grim reality, it is now all that matters."
I look forward to future musings on the Trump-o-verse psyche.
Then why not, to coin a phrase, flood the zone with shit? Dems (or their covert operatives) should create and disseminate AI simulations of either the Tubster himself, or his "spokespersons," promising ludicrous things that even brain-dead MAGAs can sense are insulting in their impossibility or cruel in their never coming to fruition.
"Breaking news! President Trump has just announced that, in co-operation with his good friend Elon Musk, every native-born American will be given a Tesla Model S free of charge!" (No pun intended.) "Just ask Bob Dickhead of Missoula, Montana!"
And worse. Why not? Sauce for the goose, etc. Finally something useful can be wrung from deep fakes. Think of it as a strategy similar to that of including obvious mistakes in Nigerian Prince emails, to weed out the non-imbecilic.
In a wild White House press conference, Donald Trump surrendered to federal agents in an attempt to stop the rampant crime wave in Washington DC. Mr Trump, a failed business operator, convicted felon and generally awful person, stated "I finally figured out what crime actually means, and it was clear I did it and would do it again if I got the chance!" He will be incarcerated on an island in the middle of the Bay of Mexico as soon as the maps get rejiggered.
Reached for comment, Mexico grinned and said "The island prison has a little moat around it that we will rename 'Alligator Pond', and stock accordingly."
Pete Hegseth, cabinet official (spit), ordered alla his troops to attack every woman in the federal workforce, beginning with Dept of Defense ,members of congress, other officials in the Capitol, the Supreme Court, Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Archive, Mint, USDA, Education, etc, as well as all the female officers on the DC police force. Later that afternoon, as the remaining male members of the Army were frog-marched into makeshift tent cities, Hegseth was "unavailable for comment".
Whoa, someone's been overthinking...
Anyway.
"So why put out shit that, on its face, makes no sense?"
Answer: Because they're that fucking stupid and otherwise defective to be amused by rank idiocy. Listen, if they were geniuses and/or sane they wouldn't be R voters. And yet again: I keep saying they're insane and they keep providing proof I'm correct, fueling my endless (apparent) hyperbole.
* * *
"Some (not all) news reports attempt to communicate in their headlines that this claim is plainly nonsensical."
What burns my ass? Confusing the exception the rule with the rule itself. Occasional proper framing doesn't, like, negate the ~99.99% of the time that bullshit is reported uncritically or without what should be mandatory correctives.
The correct way to lead the reporting: "Trump, a known serial liar, claimed without any confirmation or verification that...". Get back to me when that becomes the norm.
* * *
"I would call this Trumpsurdism..."
Maestro, points for the creating a neologism.
* * *
Reading this morning:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n07/adam-tooze/is-this-the-end-of-the-american-century
From 2019, it resonates yet more at the present time. It also echoes a point I make on rare occasions: We have to be careful about wasting time overreacting to things that don't warrant overreacting. More on that, uh, inevitably.
I don't think Roy's "over-reacting" to anything. Everyone outside the US is starting to feel it. Here in Japan, a "Japanese first!" political party has opened a crack in the door. And it's all the same BS.
I may have missed the point but I read the piece as being about MAGAt-level insanity as opposed to the insanity of the nation’s leadership, public and private, which I rant about without end.
As for proto-fascists’ BS, the BS is universal. It’s always pigs wanting to take; only the means differ, never the ultimate goals…
Yes, even though Japan has maybe the lowest rates of immigration in the developed world, some people can still be whipped up into a hysteria about it. It never had anything to do with objective reality, just how you FEEL.
And really, what nation needs immigration more than Japan? I just checked, and it's right behind Monaco for highest median age in the world. Who's gonna keep things running when all the olds retire, or care for them in their final years?
I’m uncomfortable with arguments like this because they sound like an argument that we need an impoverished, overpopulated Third World to continue producing cheap labor for us in the form of immigrants. I know that wasn’t your point, but that seems to be the logical endpoint of this general argument. Instead, shouldn’t automation, productivity gains, and a more equitable distribution of wealth & resources be able to compensate for a declining population? (Ha, ha, Ayn Rand says no.)
Yeah, I could see how you could read it that way, and maybe that is what I was actually thinking, I may have spent too much time trying to craft arguments to appeal to people who don't give a single fuck for anything but themselves.
Anyway, declining population's no fun, ask anyone in Rural America. Briefly, during the Presidential campaign we did get some exposure to what immigration has meant for small towns in Ohio. Not much, but it was the only "Immigration is good" content we've gotten. The word "revitalized" got thrown around a bit. You don't get that from robots.
Declining population can only be a bad thing if you have bought the hokum that the only possible economic system is one that requires perpetual growth. SnarkiNorski is right that in a sane world that wasn't propagandized into imbecility, our artificially intelligent robot future would result in lots of leisure time and an overall improvement of quality of life. The senior citizens among us may recall that it wasn't that long ago - 50's through early 70's - that it was pitched that way. Yet somehow (cough neoliberalism) we can no longer consider the most logical possibilities and are wedded instead to the conundrum of either how to provide cheap labor or how not to become cheap labor.
Revitalization Demands Redigitization!
Well, remember - it's not JUST declining population, it's declining population of a certain melanin quantity
Robots. Just watch.
I think the incels have first call on any Japanese humanoids.
Robots: "We LIKE to watch!"
WORLD NEWS WEEKLY: Twiki on Helplessly Watching Buck and Wilma Do the Deed! "I couldn't look away!" He wails. "I was PROGRAMMED to PERV!"
Wait, but I thought "Fuck Your Feelings." Oh, right, YOUR feelings, not MINE.
Fuck YOUR feelings, make sweet, passionate love to MINE
Easy there, boyo...
Tinky Winky is rolling over in his grave, assuming older generations of Teletubbies are buried, not melted down and turned into Play-Doh.
They couldn't get away with this shit if our society/culture hadn't progressively gotten dumber, our attention spans shorter, and our passivity boundless as innumerable memes wash over us. But I guess all that goes without saying.
But Roy reminds us that fascism never really advances a coherent political philosophy, only an anti-philosophy that seeks to draw power to itself. The most coherent thing about fascism is who it targets and why.
"assuming older generations of Teletubbies are buried"
The dump has a special area for appliances.
The older models with the CRTs are a bitch to recycle.
Where they shall rise as a tentacled, multicolored eldritch horror: the Teletubbies Out of Space.
I would not only watch that show, I would PAY to watch that show.
This fall on NBC! [laugh track]
Any parent who sat through interminable mind-numbing hours of Teletubbies with their toddlers would love to see the army mowing down giant mutant La La's and Dipsy's, lol.
When my kids were little, I remember watching a very old SNL episode when Charles Barkley hosted, and in one skit he was beating the shit out of Barney the dinosaur on the basketball court. My husband and I were still rolling on the floor 10 minutes later.
I thought that was the original show.
Fun facts from a long-ago profile of the show in the NYT Sunday Magazine: the sets are all indoors and the actors in the Teletubby costumes are adults, so the Teletubbies are 6 to 7 feet tall. Weird as that show is, now its weirder.
Thanks for pointing this out, even as it's really obvious it doesn't get any mention. The power of lying frees one from constraints like reality, other people's opinions, etc. It is the most potent weapon fascism has, and Tele-tubbies like trump have based their entire existence on pushing other people to lie knowingly for him. Now, they've picked up on the game and spread their own useless lies, hoping others will prop them up as well. Journalism may have been about the "truth" but the medium requires "popularity" so they're going 💯 with lies, truth and everyone be damned.
"Tele-tubbies like [T]rump"
It's so obvious now! His size, like that of the Teletubbies, would be unremarkable under different circumstances. Fat man, fat cyborg baby, who cares? But the TV!
The remarkable thing is that his selfhood is so grafted to media that he's like a cyborg. He's like a man with an artificial heart. His lungs pump news cycles. His brain ... well, that's vestigial.
"He's like a man with an artificial heart."
Especially because he doesn't actually have a real heart. Or soul.
It's the inexplicable apparent entertainment some people get out of the cheesy nonsense. Seems as if it is getting MUCH easier to fool some of the people, etc, but also RIDICULOUSLY easier to AMUSE them.
"The power of lying frees one from constraints like reality, other people's opinions, etc."
I've said a version of this for years: Anyone can have reality; the lie is mine and mine alone.
I have a couple of family members who are profligate liars, and I often wonder how they keep them all straight. As in: how do they keep track of which lie was told to which person.
"Anyone can have reality; the lie is mine and mine alone."
Just 'spose you wanted to make a living harvesting the clicks on YouTube. Do you tell people the truth, that they can get anywhere? Or do you tell them some extra-special lies so crazy they can only get them from you?
"With artificial intelligence comes artificial stupidity." The Trump-oids have certainly capitalized on that.
I believe that they are genuinely stupid.
As I get older, the difference between stupid and evil becomes less clear...
"Stupid v. Evil" becomes less and less important as a distinction. It makes no difference to the victims.
Soon to be top-billed on WWF!
Evil wins because Stupid can't figure out how to work the folding chair.
Evil knows the best strategy involves working the ref, not the chair.
Evil knows what it's doing.
With respect, no it doesn't. I come from a Socratic background, so I will argue this point to infinity.
That's interesting. (W/ respect to the UFO's, yes. We know that they're theh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-ere.)
Socrates and Graham Parker, the secret connection...
Bonhoeffer said stupid is worse than evil. I agree and this cult is the epitome of stupid: unpersuaded of reality.
Yes. A similar answer, is ignorance bliss or is it better to know? With knowledge we have a choice and a chance for change. Is it smart to pretend to be less intelligent than we are? Not most of the time.
You'd really have to be less intelligent. If you just pretended than at some point you'd realize what was going on and you'd be right back where you started.
I remain of the opinion that stupid doesn't fully explain the phenomenon. We witness the many faces of the con, each mark (stupid or not) bringing itself over the finish line.
I always wonder how these people function in the other, non-political areas of their lives. The MAGA roofing contractor, can he actually put a roof on your house that doesn't leak when it rains? Then he's not stupid.
So...we have to PAY him to think? Crap. I had not budgeted for that.
Don't sweat it. Pay him in Trump meme coins.
"Look, buddy, that shit's OK for ownin' the libs on the internet, but this is REAL LIFE we're talkin' about here."
The doctor and the pharmacist I worked for in South Carolina and their Limbaugh-esque conversations. There's a weird compartmentalization of "real" knowledge and wingnut belief. Of course it doesn't hurt that assholes like Alex Jones and Limbaugh pretend to be entertainment.
Coupla high school boys repeating, word for word, a Monty Python bit or something they saw on SCTV (I speak from LIVED EXPERIENCE here). The bonding is the point.
I see that as a matter of different skill sets.
I think people are plenty smart, and it shows when they're doing something they really care about, but when it comes to politics they either turn off the smarts because it might lead to conclusions they don't like, or they look at the whole thing as entertainment which doesn't deserve any serious thought. The roofer who's all LOL about Trump being President probably wouldn't let Trump manage his business for a week.
My big problem with "stupid" as an explanation, well, one of the bigger ones, is the implication of a lack of awareness, understanding, and hence a lack of complicity. Au contrair, mon frere. They are extremely, violently aware of the implicstions, and they approve. You can argue they are "stupid" because of their belief those implications won't affect them, but that's a horse of a different color, more oblivious than stupid. We are just now only starting to see some consequences of Tariffs in the Heartland, TikTok posts by parents bithing about the inflsted price ofmschool supplies. Wait til the cofee tarrif kits.
It may or may not reflect individual stupidity. But willingness to believe lies and unreality if those match their prejudices--that credulity is heading to catastrophically stupid results.
OTOH, it won't be long til the diner's hit by the Biden coffee tariffs.
That "heading to catastrophically stupid results" is the big bet everyone not MAGA is making at the moment, the "this can't go on forever" bet.
But forever is a long, long time. Can it go on for 4 years? Barring an Event, a major economic crash or pandemic, very likely. Americans will be squeezed and annoyed by the tariffs, Medicate cuts and fallout of the "immigration policy", but enough to throw the bums out in 2026? Enough to get violent when Republican cheat enough to "win" anyway? Enough to go through it all again in 2028? Will it get bad enough for them to get mad enough? No one knows.
Americans don't have to be pressed so hard to "throw the bums out", what would be extraordinary - and would take real suffering to make happen - is Americans deciding to sit down and read something about the bums they're putting in.
I am a little fallen of crest that I was eager to approve your coined "implicstions" – pretty much exactly the sort of mashed potato word I look to create – til I realized you most likely meant "implications"...
There's no meaning that we can find
Because the country's lost its mind.
"He uses statistics less as a factual statement of, “Here is what the best data says,"
Lie like a motherfucker is shorter and more on point.
Robert C. Rowland, professor of communication studies can kiss my ass.
I honestly fear for any students placed in a classroom with this jerk.
Always be sure to write in the most elevated, stilted, convoluted prose possible. It proves you’re superior. Communications Studies!
But make it extra-cynical too, that's what gets you all the big jobs!
What he has here is a failure to project ability to understand "communicate".
Well, some pretty awful diseases are communicable, so there's that interpretation available.
Given that a major portion of comm studies grads turn into news anchors and such, the entire (alleged) discipline can join right in with RCR.
Awwwk, it's a living!
" Bud Dry" could come in handy. Like at a breakfast meeting or in church.
Ackshually, that despair shit can get balanced out if we all go back and read this piece as an autopsy of how things went before !!???!! happens and we start coming back into focus as a 'liberal democracy' with certain re-attained flair for, you know equality, and beginning the long and hard and deep clean of the nation, eliminating cruelty (which in certain cases, will hafta run through the whole digestive tract, the small intestines of lege and then the large and out the anus of the judiciary. But we'll get there, and <record scratch>
what was i going for, "agst despair"? oh, fuck. sorry.
You really had me goin' there, that's how desperate for optimism I am.
"the anus of the judiciary."
But enough about Clarence Thomas.
The Anus Most Heinous.
Hearted because I remembered that time when Famous Amos did a cameo on Taxi.
Good read. Got me thinking about Post-modern/Deconstructionist-type stuff (and how the "right" take everything interesting and useful and turn it into shit). It's like they've de- and then re-constructed Deconstructionism into something worse than Orwell imagined.
yeah, when karl rove told that guy sumpin' like "we make the reality, and you'll just write about that"... blah blah blah, that was when Foucault "became a neo-lib," the Repubs said "hold my beer," and here we are. Who knew pomo would spawn bizzaro pomo, like the superman comics a long time ago?
My thinking exactly!
Hear, hear once again (I must find another way to say that). Aside from all the other dismal names the asshole deserves, Trump is, as he has been his entire obscene life, a huckster. The other day he claimed that his polling numbers were the highest they've ever been -- probably the highest of any president -- because his tariffs are so popular. This may be a "rhetorical construct to sell an idea" to academic scribes at Lagado but he isn't selling ideas, he's selling his glorious self, and he isn't lying, he's bullshitting -- saying what he thinks you need to hear to make the sale. The "sense that consequences don’t exist" may evaporate when the shit really does hit the fan, but I'm not sanguine that the darker fantasy won't come to pass. The huckster is also evil, and he has armies.
"he isn't lying, he's bullshitting -- saying what he thinks you need to hear to make the sale"
But who's buying? If the polls are to be believed, most people aren't. And if it's just MAGA types buying, why bother with the pitch at all? Although, to be fair, lying for him involves virtually zero effort.
Eh, force of habit. He’s been bullshitting all his life, he couldn’t stop if he wanted to.
Like with his lies about the Epstein Files, he couldn't think even one step ahead to how this might come back to bite him in the ass, and he just couldn't resist the opportunity.
Maybe he LIKES having his ass bitten, didja ever consider THAT?
"Things Donald Trump likes having done with his ass" is a whole area of human consciousness that I have walled off from my brain.
I am reminded to revisit that book On Bullshit / Harry Frankfurt.
The distinction is useful, but I forget the subtleties.
Yeah, there's that. But I think what Roy is getting to is the lack of subtlety about it, the drift toward nonsensical, and the apparent need of his audience for MOREMOREMORE, irrespective of their ability to ID bullshit. Seems as if they are perfectly willing and indeed delighted to be bullshat.
If only their parents had...ah, never mind...
The podcast If Books Could Kill did an episode on On Bullshit, in which they pointed out BS is neither truth nor lie, but something totally different.
The fundamental premise in the book itself.
Yup. He's a salesman, whose favorite product is himself. Lie all you want but *make the sale*. You don't like what you bought? See you in court (that I now control).
My husband gets Tubby's daily email, and boy oh boy does he have the finest direct mail bullshit artists in all the land working for him. Today's offers my partner, and just a few elite others on his list, the opportunity to vote on whether the "savings" from the tariffs should be returned to all of us real Americans in the form of fat checks. He'll abide by our decision! But you have to donate to vote. And you might want this limited edition MAGA cap for a low, low price today only.
"We'll send you back the money we stole from you on false pretexts!" MAGA will eat it up.
An aside. When Musk wore two MAGA hats, one on top of the other, then made a joke in a cabinet meeting, he was unintentionally demonstrating a principle of marketing: you can manufacture needs.
It doesn't matter if wearing two hats is ridiculous. With a little more encouragement, they would all do it. How many of them have multiple hats already?
They come in different colors. (The hats, not the people.) I'm sure you can get a MAHA one now.
I've been saying this since 2016. He's a salesman, in the worst sense. Capitalism condones lies, bullshit, and exaggeration if it's in the service of making the sale. That's why the anagram of E Pluribus Unum is Caveat Emptor.
I'll take your word for it, I'm too lazy to check.
OTOH, if it were your job to tell Trump his poll numbers, the truth would not be to your advantage.
Does he know he's unpopular and getting more unpopular by the day? I don't think he does, who would have the nerve to tell him?
He's very much a Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News person
The destruction of certainty, logic, knowledge, empiricism, with science and education as inevitable victims, is a well-known method of keeping the fascist bubble inflated. The details, as limned by today’s REBID, are important in that they are the tea leaves to decipher. I don’t have any answers I’ve gained from this that anybody else hasn’t taken away, but I do notice that the purposeful conflation of adverse satire and pro-fascist propaganda may be something new. Like it is garishly displaying the defiled corpse of parody to the masses who will gleefully cheer its demise. Pretty soon they’ll openly and unapologetically embrace swastikas and Confederate battle flags or some other sordid symbols for fascism. Maybe the titular axe-and-a-bunch-of-sticks will make a comeback — all in good fun!
Some pundit's hot take on Chris Cuomo getting fooled by an AI video was "We've lost our ability to distinguish between truth and reality." Speak for yourself, buddy. My hot take was "Chris Cuomo is a fuckin' idiot."
Are people being fooled by AI in any other area of their lives? Seems to me like the AI lies that get taken up are political lies, which suggests a lot of the people peddling the slop know it's slop and just don't care.
The MAGA faithful who are all LOL about Trump's lying, when they take their car in for repairs, how do they feel about lying then?
I'm at a loss as to how he was fooled by that video - it said right on it that it was AI generated! I'm pretty sure he figured no one else would notice that and call attention to it, and "I was fooled" was his weak sauce of a coverup.
Show anyone an AI fake that contradicts their political biases and suddenly they're Sherlock Motherfucking Holmes. Nobody's "fooled" by this shit, they're all getting exactly what they wanted, it tickles them right where they want to be tickled, that's all they ask for.
"axe-and-a-bunch-of-sticks"
We had the Nazi salute, so why not.
Buncha little sticks is for Beta cucks, I want ONE REALLY BIG STICK.
Well then you're in luck.
I wonder how many aspiring fascists need to have this explained to them, "See, they're LITTLE sticks, but there's a BUNCHA them, so..." [fascist wannabe looks puzzled] "But why not BIG sticks, huh?"
--It’s like that time we were sweeping out the warehouse. I said, wouldn’t this go faster if we taped three brooms together? And you know what, it did.
--There were no brooms for you and Tom, though.
--Who you gonna believe, me and Tom or your lyin' eyes?
--This isn't about fascism anymore, is it?
--I dunno, is it? [Looks at camera. Fade to black.]
It's still on the US dime.
Trumpism disappearing up its own asshole. They've completely given up on winning over anyone who's not already a fully bought-in member of the cult, all communication is only for Our Gang. Like with teenagers, you're not supposed to understand and if you ever did understand they'd change to some new code so you wouldn't understand. Skibidi toilet!
"Skibidi toilet!"
[Nods sagely]
See? Time to change the code!
You spelt 'commode' incorrectly.
Very much a keeper. The developmental stages of absurd imagery that have formed Trumpsurdism. All in service of working towards the fuhrer.
Yes, it's a new phase. "Take his claim that he will reduce drug prices by 1,500%. Some (not all) news reports attempt to communicate in their headlines that this claim is plainly nonsensical. But you can tell that their hearts aren’t in it..." It's only taken seven months to get here. If we get his "census," the numbers will be as credible as the drug price miracle.
This morning it's normalcy as usual, from NPR and local network stations, as they report on the invasion launch. "Trump's D.C. Crime Crackdown"...
It's instructive to see the whole thing in context:
"We're going to get the drug prices down, not 30 or 40 percent, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No. We're going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent, numbers that are not even thought to be achievable because I've used a certain talent that I have and convinced the drug companies that you have no choice."
He's clearly not interested in what's true or even mathematically correct, just what he thinks sounds good, and getting drug prices down 1,500 percent sounds a whole lot more impressive than an actual number "thought to be achievable", which he's also not doing.
[Hard to believe this guy bankrupted casinos 6 times.]
C'mon, that's a real quote?
Let's go to the tape!
https://www.facebook.com/meidastouch/videos/trump-this-is-somebody-nobody-else-can-do-we-will-get-the-drug-prices-down-1000-/1148135243811816/
I like how he's just spittin' out numbers, and for a bit they're goin' in the wrong direction, down, 600, 500... so then back up for the BIG FINISH.
Sondheim ain't got nothin' on Alligator Whisperer!
When he gets to 1500 he whips out JAZZ HANDS
And it's part of how he's always winking at the brethren. And counting on our free press to clean things up for him.
The believers don't have to swallow the numbers. They've got the vibes, to tell them Dear Leader is making deals, just for them. While cleaning up the country, to be sure only Real Americans are the beneficiaries of the deals.
Odd thing - I've been reading Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev the last few days, and it details a similar weird detachment from reality in Russia about a decade ago; the world made surreal, meaning lost, a kind of "positive nihilism", if you will.
This all sounds REALLY familiar.
The section I've gotten up to makes some points about how detachment from reality makes it harder to assert any particular criticism of the system, and that there's always a core of "reality" that centers around bigotry or fundamentalism or fear.
Something else I realized while driving to work and listening to DEVO - if nothing's real, the Leader/Party can promise you whatever and can't ever be held accountable. Prices going down? Release the Epstein Files? No, he never said that, and even if you show me the video I'll deny it! Fake news! Democrat hoax!
". . .and that there's always a core of 'reality' that centers around bigotry or fundamentalism or fear."
We have at least one entity that encompasses all three; it's called the "Southern Baptist Convention".
This is a great companion piece to something you wrote earlier this year (maybe March). "I think Trump has intuited that ours is an age in which reality has become so much less important than appearance that reality not only can but pretty much has to be ignored — that is, the false front is no longer a distraction from the grim reality, it is now all that matters."
I look forward to future musings on the Trump-o-verse psyche.
Selling the feeling of the sizzle, not the actual sizzle OR steak
[Peter Sellers voice] "Nothing sizzles anymore. We can't get the wood, you know."
Selling the feeling of a sizzle of a steak that *you don't even have*.
I sold my stake in steak sizzle feelings a few months back – took a huge loss – but at least the steak broke even.
What's that?
Oh. Well.
Selling steak-sizzle collateralized debt obligations. No, futures contracts on steak-sizzle collateralized debt obligations.
Then why not, to coin a phrase, flood the zone with shit? Dems (or their covert operatives) should create and disseminate AI simulations of either the Tubster himself, or his "spokespersons," promising ludicrous things that even brain-dead MAGAs can sense are insulting in their impossibility or cruel in their never coming to fruition.
"Breaking news! President Trump has just announced that, in co-operation with his good friend Elon Musk, every native-born American will be given a Tesla Model S free of charge!" (No pun intended.) "Just ask Bob Dickhead of Missoula, Montana!"
And worse. Why not? Sauce for the goose, etc. Finally something useful can be wrung from deep fakes. Think of it as a strategy similar to that of including obvious mistakes in Nigerian Prince emails, to weed out the non-imbecilic.
In a wild White House press conference, Donald Trump surrendered to federal agents in an attempt to stop the rampant crime wave in Washington DC. Mr Trump, a failed business operator, convicted felon and generally awful person, stated "I finally figured out what crime actually means, and it was clear I did it and would do it again if I got the chance!" He will be incarcerated on an island in the middle of the Bay of Mexico as soon as the maps get rejiggered.
Reached for comment, Mexico grinned and said "The island prison has a little moat around it that we will rename 'Alligator Pond', and stock accordingly."
Pete Hegseth, cabinet official (spit), ordered alla his troops to attack every woman in the federal workforce, beginning with Dept of Defense ,members of congress, other officials in the Capitol, the Supreme Court, Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Archive, Mint, USDA, Education, etc, as well as all the female officers on the DC police force. Later that afternoon, as the remaining male members of the Army were frog-marched into makeshift tent cities, Hegseth was "unavailable for comment".
THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
You just write the prompt, out comes content.
AI, AI!
Suits me, so long as I don't have to do it.