Obviously the Dumpster spews lies continuously, about everything. There's no need to belabor that point here. But a point that does need belaboring is that for Republican politicians, there's no penalty for lying. Somebody tried to keep track of Mitt Romney's lies during his presidential campaign and lost count somewhere in the two thousands. Yeah, he lost, but the lying didn't hurt him. The Dumpster was paying attention. When politicians lie, the corporate media won't actually say so in the news story -- they'll just regurgitate the lie. The story is that the person said that. If the opposing candidate disputes it, that might make it into the story, which is then A said X and B said Y.
Any attempt to sort out the actual truth goes into a separate "fact check" piece, like the one linked above. Of course, the problem "fact checkers" face is that they still need to be "balanced," which means that for every Republican lie they have to find a Democratic lie, which means that they need to balance a blatant falsehood with a tendentious argument about why a brief remark which is essentially accurate could have been expanded into a 1,000 word essay that better explicates the nuances.
While the linked example is reasonably straightforward, obviously the Dumpster's cultists aren't going to read it and even if they did, they wouldn't care. To them, there is no objective, shared reality. The world is whatever their Dear Leader and his acolytes on Faux News say it is. On some level many of them probably know that it's all lies, but that's a feature, not a bug. Being able to lie shamelessly and relentlessly, and so construct your own reality, is a kind of superpower. It's strength, it's admirable. The girlish opponents can't do it, they are bound by the truth, which is a weakness. That is literally where we find ourselves. You can't have a debate or a discussion with these people. They don't inhabit reality.
1 comment:
Despite the Bible's many inaccuracies, today's blog post reminds me of the seemingly endless cycle of the Israelites disobeying god's commandments, being punished, then being redeemed -- and it all starts over again.
Humans are mimetic. They tend to follow "leaders," and as you recently posted, many of these "leaders" are psychopaths. The reporters in the media are mostly just that -- "reporters," not "thinkers." We get story after story about "what happened," when what are sorely needed are stories about "what is" -- but that would require critical thinking.
Our society doesn't teach that.
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