I won't try to argue about the true ideology or goals of the modern conservative movement in this post. I certainly have plenty to say about that but I want to make a point cleanly here. Whatever else you may think about conservatism, it is infested with delusion. As Stephen Colbert said, reality has a well-known liberal bias, and it has never been more clear. I'll refer you first to Krugthulu, who runs down a list of quacks, con artists and wack jobs who have featured prominently on Fox News and in White House counsel. When Anthony Fauci wasn't telling them what they wanted to hear, they turned to Dr. Phil. Then there is the beyond absurd Richard Epstein whose confident prediction that the death toll in the U.S. from Covid-19 would be less than 500 in the absence of any protective measures, a prediction which strongly informed the administration's dismissive attitude toward the epidemic for February and most of March.
Then there is the stupidest member of congress, which is saying something, Louis Gohmert, who claims that doctors in Germany are passing through a magic misting chamber that renders them immune for two weeks. Anyway, the question of whether this highly transmissible virus will cause an explosive epidemic and overwhelm the health care system if left unchecked is not a matter of conservative versus liberal opinion. It is a question of what has already actually happened in Wuhan, Lombardy and New York. But the only discernible ideology of the Republican Party right now is that you have to suck up to Donald J. Trump, so Georgia Governor-by-electoral-fraud Brian Kemp is announcing the opening of hair salons, gyms, tattoo parlors and yes, massage parlors. I don't see why it's hard to maintain social distancing in a massage parlor. He plans to reopen restaurants and theaters on Monday.
I fear that Governor Kemp is going to encounter a phenomenon as yet unfamiliar to him, reality. And he will discover that it does indeed have a liberal bias.
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7 comments:
I guess the biggest shocker to me in all this is that we've arrived at a place people have been in before in history--delusion, on the part of many--EVEN IN a time of factual information available at our fingertips, for the first time in history.
The American brand of censorship is not omission but rather the dissemination of copious amounts of disinformation. Lies, conspiracy theories ... the guy who rushed to DC to break up the Clintons' pedophile ring in a pizza parlor ... unbe-fuckin'-lievable.
What is also distressing to me is the dying out of our parents' generation, people who had bullshit detectors. Almost all of them are now, like our parents, in "places" and many of them have dementia. They were more educated than people are now, after the mass dumbing-down of the USA in the 1990s with the unctuous Gingrich et. al.
I've wondered for a long time, Where do jokes come from? Who makes them up? I used to joke that the reason Ted Kaczynski was surreptitiously running around delivering packages was that he wasn't, in fact, the Unabomber, but was "the joke guy." My never-developed comedy routine maintained that it was no coincidence that right around the time that Gingrich and others who possessed no discernible sense of humor or irony, in addition to being scumbags as humans, the nation got a lot less funny because Ted, the "joke guy," was arrested.
It does seem to be a characteristic of the right-wingnuts that they are not intelligent, funny, nuanced people. How else could they believe the tragically laughable conspiracy theories that they toss bag and forth to each other's intellectually hermetically sealed brains?
The inability to understand those opposed to your agenda is why liberals will have a very tough time in November.
You can count on this being aired pretty much everywhere running up to the election.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuzfmxSvnD0
Well yes, obviously people don't like being told that they're dopes. I wish there was a nicer way to say it, and it is important not to resort to personal insults or name calling. But you know, there is such a thing as reality and sometimes one person is right and one person is just wrong. You have go be able to say that.
That's it?
That's your 'understanding' of conservatives? They're all just dopes?
Good luck in November with that!
Correct. That is exactly my point. Conservatives are deluded idiots. That is the point of my post. Read it again.
The above cucumber commenter's response perfectly illustrates my point ... that people to the right, politically, do not possess nuance, nor true humor or irony. That is why they project onto others--like crazy! Because they cannot see the flaws in their own thinking, they project their flaws CONSTANTLY onto others. They cannot "own" anything, own up to responsibility for anything at all. That is why a narcissistic sociopath like Shitler is their hero. He seems to get away with never taking responsibility for anything--not even for screwing others, which is all he seeks to do. They want to get away with shit, too. So they support him. Some folks merely support him because they relate to his virulent racism. Racism is based on the erroneous belief in different "races," when mitochondrial DNA proves all humans alive at this time came from one common ancestor in Africa. That's just fact. Deal with it. There's one "race," and it's referred to as Homo sapiens. Hypocritical people like Strom Thurmond and Tom Jefferson knew that--it's why they bred with, and produced offspring by, African-American women to whom they were attracted.
How did the cucumber commenter illustrate my point? He does the very thing he accuses me of: labels me, claims to understand my political orientation (he obviously doesn't). I'm no liberal, believe me. I'm a radical. From Latin "radix," meaning to get to the root of a problem. I seek truth--not bullshit, its opposite.
He also seems to think I have an "agenda" and can't understand people "opposed" to it.
This thinking is so muddled it's beyond rescue. I understand quite well the perspective of people on the right, politically; I have worked with them for years, and I have friends I know and love who are to the right, politically. My only "agenda," if I have one, is for facts, science, and proven information to determine policy, as opposed to wild-eyed conspiracy theories and ugly racism.
If Shitler makes it to November without dying or being deposed, he'll lose and wind up in jail. Because the biggest psychological motivator among humans is self-preservation. And no matter how many hundreds of people protest for their right to contract coronavirus (and these same people display swastikas, and demand the lockup of female Democrats--when Shitler is obviously the criminal who has projected his need to be locked up onto them), and are in fact idiots who think "freedom" means unfettered freedom, which it does NOT, and no matter if their chief idiot/sociopath/rapist abets them, well ...
November is Mueller time.
When the issue contested doesn't have immediate, tangible consequences it is possible to deny the facts. For example, showing that smoking shortens your life by 10 years on average (fact picked out from the end of my GI tract) can be 'disproved' by Rush by trotting out a smoker who lived to 102.
This pandemic is different. It's hard to be in denial when someone you know dies from the disease. And it looks like lots of folks will know more than one person who dies.
It may just convince some true believers that the Republican party is no more than a giant scam operation and that they have been its marks. When they realize that the people in the video are laughing at them for good reason they will have two choices:
1) Admit they were idiots and do a 180.
2) Double down on their delusions.
Which one will you pick Pickle Rick?
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