The matrix

I first started this blog maybe 15 years ago. I have never gotten a huge number of comments, but for the first 11 years they were always constructive and thoughtful. Then something happened. I had to start moderating comments because I got so many that were offensively racist, or consisted of disinformation and wild illogic. I even tried doing a series of posts on logical fallacies and verification to try to educate some of these commenters on critical thinking. Obviously that didn't work. What happened, obviously, is that we entered the Trumpian post-truth era. 

What is left of the journalistic profession is finally recognizing that new "reality show" unreality. Here are Linda Qiu and Michael D. Shear of the NYT. It's paywalled but if you have a free read left this month this is probably the one you should take. But if you can't read it I'll give you the headline and lede.

Rallies Are the Core of Trump’s Campaign, and a Font of Lies and Misinformation

A recent rally in Wisconsin was typical. In 90 minutes, President Trump made 131 false or inaccurate statements.

Two minutes and 28 seconds into a campaign rally on a recent Saturday night in Janesville, Wis., President Trump delivered his first lie.

“When you look at our numbers compared to what’s going on in Europe and other places,” Mr. Trump said about the coronavirus raging across the United States, “we’re doing well.”

The truth? America has more cases and deaths per capita than any major country in Europe but Spain and Belgium. The United States has just 4 percent of the world’s population but accounts for almost a quarter of the global deaths from Covid-19. On Oct. 17, the day of Mr. Trump’s rally in Janesville, cases were rising to record levels across much of the country.

Over the course of the next 87 minutes, the president made another 130 false or inaccurate statements. Many were entirely made up. Others were casual misstatements of simple facts, some clearly intended to mislead. He lied about his own record and that of his opponent. He made wild exaggerations that violate even the pliable limits of standard political hyperbole. . . .

A detailed examination of his statements in Janesville by The New York Times found that more than three-quarters of the president’s assertions were either false, misleading, exaggerated, disputed or lacked evidence. Less than a quarter were true.

Yet his besotted crowds cheer and scream and chant their approval. I get commenters telling me that people vote for him because he has kept his promises. Really? There are fewer manufacturing and coal mining jobs in the U.S. today than when he took office. There is no border wall, only repairs to existing structures and no, Mexico has not and will not pay one cent for it. Taxes on low and middle income people are nearly unchanged, while the wealthiest have gotten a huge tax cut, and the federal budget deficit has exploded. There has been no infrastructure investment program, and no new and better health care plan. Zip, zilch, nada.  I won't bother with further discussion of the pandemic, but you can read the basic facts above. 

All he has done is spew a non-stop torrent of lies and racist invective, along with whining about how badly treated he is. He's a cry baby who cares about nobody but himself, and he is an ignorant idiot. Bleach injections, anyone?

The problem is there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about this. The cultists have gone over to an alternate reality where facts and logic don't apply. It's just a world of raging id and resentment, with no practical direction or plan. All we can do is vote and put sane people in charge of government at every level. The insane cultists will still be out there but maybe they'll get bored with the game once it's no longer on TV every night, although I suppose it will be on Faux News. That's the best we can hope for.

And this is exactly what I mean:  In 1987, in his first run for president, Joe Biden's standard stump speech included some quotations from British politicians Neil Kinnock, which he always credited. Then, on one occasion, while using the same quotations he had always credited before, he forgot to credit Kinnock. That is the exact equivalent of the current resident spewing a continual stream of outrageous lies throughout his candidacy and presidency. Obviously no difference at all.