The Triumph of Stupidity in American Politics

[pbrower2a]

The critical part of the electorate was the demographic best described as readers of the fecal tabloid National Inquirer.  All sorts of renowned, often conservative newspapers including the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit News, and the Arizona Republic endorsed Hillary Clinton.

The story about the health of Hillary Clinton was in the National Inquirer.

The way to get the votes of the most gullible voters is to get one's excessively-simple message to the least-learned masses through the intellectually-lowest means, typically the media most attractive to the least-learned of people, like low-brow tabloid media whose users are toward the bottom in effective education:

\Adolf Hitler' in Mein Kampf Wrote:"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (...) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."[5]

"I love poorly-educated people" -- Donald Trump

I do not say that our President-Elect or people around him learned this strategy from Mein Kampf. It is simply consistent with observations that people have made no matter how much they hate everything about Hitler. If it works it will be done.

Should Donald Trump be inaugurating a long period of American dictatorship, then you can be certain that the upper echelon of leadership will do everything possible to ensure that American education will be so debased that very few people get more than a marginal level of learning. Then they can keep loyal to leadership of intellectual and moral shallowness. The person of conscience who can think is the nemesis of any authoritarian regime.

[pbrower2a]

Unless the election was hacked (and the drama of the release of electoral results seemed to resemble a well-crafted horror story)  this is the consequence:




Unlike the maps that I derive from Leip's Atlas of American elections, this one has red for Republican wins and blue for Democratic wins. Full red and full blue are for strong wins (10% or more) for the party. Paler shades are for wins of medium strength (5-9%). and outlined states with red or blue are for bare wins (1-5%). The purple in Maine tells us that Donald Trump won the Second Congressional District.

The good thing is that the political process will operate smoothly, as in a freshly-minted plutocratic dictatorship. The bad thing is that the President and in the net Congress will operate as a plutocratic dictatorship. American politics will operate like a novel by Steven King for some time.

We will be obliged to suffer for people of unrestrained greed and little tolerance for dissent. Thank you, people who are so opposed to abortion that you are willing to tolerate even more deaths from relaxation in regulations of workplace safety. Thank you, opponents of same-sex marriage who give people good cause to defer child-bearing because they wonder whether they will be able to support their children due to falling pay. Thank you, gun fetishists who are so scared of a somewhat-liberal President whittling away at the rights of some fringe characters in America (people on the terrorist-watch list)  that you support a President with a capricious foreign policy likely to culminate in war that sends lots of American young adults back home in body bags. Thank you, supporters of creationism and school prayer for supporting someone whose political agenda is best supported through the degradation of the quality of education to the detriment of all children so that Americans can descend into the rottenness of the Gilded Age.


Should political distress or economic despair under Donald Trump cause people to commit suicide, then endure some guilt.

If you supported Donald Trump for one of those single, visceral concerns and I mock your choices -- then you are right; I mock you. No matter how competent you may be in other aspects of life and no matter how good you are to the people immediately near you (like family,co-workers, and fellow church-goesrs), you voted with a gross lack of insight, if not outright stupidity. You voted for an evil manas President. The sooner that you come to regret your choice, the better -- even if that regret comes with pain. As someone who actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton, I have pain without regret. But I started hurting earlier, so I am not sure that you have it any harder.

Americans will have to hit bottom before they realize what a huge mistake they made. That could be an economic meltdown as horrible as the Great Depression. Considering that Trump plans to remove the financial regulations in place to facilitate reckless speculation and that the deregulation will likely hit about as the economy goes into a tailspin, such portends a calamity for America. The good thing is that we will then know who the Enemy is.

Let's put it this way: if I were Vietnamese or Cuban and I wanted to go to a free country, I would not now choose the Corporate States of America. At the least the Commies give lip service to the value of the common man.

[Eric the Green]

That's a good map, brower, with red and blue in their proper places, but it should be noted that Minnesota, Colorado and Nevada were bare Democratic wins (under 5% majority).

[pbrower2a]

(11-15-2016, 01:58 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-15-2016, 01:16 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-15-2016, 06:20 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The critical part of the electorate was the demographic best described as readers of the fecal tabloid National Inquirer.  All sorts of renowned, often conservative newspapers including the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit News, and the Arizona Republic endorsed Hillary Clinton.

And don't forget the dynamic of the new media. Most places people source news on the web filter that news based on a profile that the news engine has developed regarding the user. This promotes values lock. It takes people who start out without values lock and slowly filters things and steers them into a given demographic. This is how you get some of the less aware independents going for Trump. I'm not saying that all independents who went for Trump are unwitting, but a fraction of indies were. Same deal with some of the cross over Dems as well as some of the non-Alt-Right GOPers who voted for him. I'm guessing that many who voted for Trump saw more "lock her up" themed "news" than "Putin's bitch" themed news or "Alt-Right emperor" themed news. It was an unwitting self selection in certain cases. Enough cases to impact a close election.

On that note, there are some very interesting articles at the following URL:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology..._news.html

'That’s consistent with Zuckerberg’s approach to other deeper questions about Facebook’s role in the media, including the charge that it insulates users in ideological bubbles by reinforcing what they already believe. “All the research we have suggests that this isn’t really a problem,” Zuckerberg said on Thursday, citing a Facebook-funded 2015 study that has been criticized as misleading. The data showed that Facebook does in fact expose users primarily to political content that conforms to their partisan identifications. But the study concluded, a little defensively, that this problem was insignificant compared with the problem of users’ own choices as to which sort of content to engage with. As Jefferson Pooley pointed out in Slate, it’s impossible to reproduce Facebook’s findings, because the company won’t let independent researchers see its data.'

Good to check out additional articles that can be found by scrolling further down the site.

I have never thought of Facebook as a news source. It is more a rumor mill of people who say what they heard elsewhere...

People need to look for news from multiple sources (unfortunately most newspapers are now behind firewalls). They also need to do what one used to take for granted with a newspaper: fact-checking. Fact-checking makes such junk as "Barack Obama is a Muslim" and "Barack Obama was born in Kenya"appear as the fraud that it is.

I find it hard to believe that the e-mail server counted for so much more than deeds that I thought would utterly discredit Donald Trump for the Presidency, like his admiration for dictators, his calls for violence against hecklers, and his crotch-grabbing. I can expect a conservative to admire Margaret Thatcher -- but Vladimir Putin? Someone who can call for violent retribution against someone who insults him as a campaigner could order the FBI to beat or kill a journalist. Crotch grabbing without consent or the unlikely need to rescue someone that way is about as close to rape as one can get without it being defined as rape.

Needless to say, I dread his Presidency. I would rather that Mitt Romney had won in 2012 and have won this time in a landslide. This is not a difference between 'liberal' and 'conservative'; it is between 'decency' and 'evil'

We Americans have more information available, but we lack the ability to sort it out. If someone told you that he admired Al Capone or John Dillinger, wouldn't you be scared of him? There is a good reason for Donald Trump doing less well among white college-graduates than among white non-college people. College graduates are much more likely to have taken a course in psychology. What people admire says much about them. If it's Mohandas Gandhi or Sir Winston Churchill one might have a good foundation for judgment. If it is a criminal like John Dillinger or John Gotti, let alone a tyrant -- then watch out! If one can't recognize a difference between

K-12 is no longer enough to prepare one for the complexity of life. People need to know some knowledge characteristic of some survey courses of a freshman in college -- like economics, philosophy, and psychology -- if they are to be able to deal with the complexity of modern life even without a concern for vocational preparation. We have a surfeit of information and, worse, attractive disinformation to sort out, and we need to have the means with which to deal with it. If we lack the  wisdom to discern truth from dangerous lies, then maybe we need to cut ourselves off from the material. (And yes, watch what your kids get access to on the Web. There's stuff like  terrorist-cult garbage far more dangerous than pornography

We need to make K-14 education the minimal norm for life. We used to have no more access to information than the local library. Now we have so much garbage to go with objects of legitimate scientific, cultural, and political interest.

[pbrower2a]

(11-15-2016, 02:47 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: That's a good map, brower, with red and blue in their proper places, but it should be noted that Minnesota, Colorado and Nevada were bare Democratic wins (under 5% majority).

It's not my creation. I might come up with one of my own when the complete data come in.

[Eric the Green]

[Marypoza]

WTF??!!!!!?????????? I never heard of the Duran before. Is it a reliable source?

The Triumph of Stupidity is the most appropriate place to post this

http://theduran.com/war-with-russia-us-p...-in-syria/

[Eric the Green]

The triumph of stupidity: 100,000 people in 3 states vote to destroy everything that's valuable in this country and in the world.

Now I'd call that pretty damn stupid.

[Ragnarök_62]

Maryposa Wrote: WTF??!!!!!?????????? I never heard of the Duran before. Is it a reliable source?

Yes, because it's not CNN/FOX/MSNBC/NYT/WAPO/ etc.   <- Fake news Sites/ ministry of propaganda sycophants.

Also, all sites mentioned in the Alphabet<-"Google" owned "fake news" article are actually self same reliable sources.

Quote:The Triumph of Stupidity is the most appropriate place to post this

http://theduran.com/war-with-russia-us-p...-in-syria/

"Congressional proponents of HR5732 make clear the international dimension of the conflict. Royce explains:

Quote:“It is Russia, it is Hezbollah, that are the primary movers of death and destruction…it is the IRGC fighters from Iran.”

Engel echoes the same message:

Quote:“Yes, we want to go after Assad’s partners in violence…along with Iranian and Hezbollah forces.”

These statements are in contrast with the analysis of some writers who believe Israel is not deeply opposed to the Damascus government. For example Phyllis Bennis recently wrote that belief in an “arc of resistance” has been “long debunked” and that “the Syrian regime …. often plays a useful role for US and Israeli interests.”

-----

Yes, a no fly zone.  That's the #1 stupidity thing I've seen.  So the "I'm with Stupid" award goes to the House of Representatives.   Eric should agree, since the House is infested with MIC bought off Republicans.

[pbrower2a]

(12-01-2016, 11:52 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(12-01-2016, 06:02 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The triumph of stupidity: 100,000 people in 3 states vote to destroy everything that's valuable in this country and in the world.

Now I'd call that pretty damn stupid.

Irony - if one were to get down to those 100,000 or so people, among them you would find many who are of early 20th century immigrant stock. Many of Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Irish extraction. But the thing is, they didn't like blacks moving into their inner city neighborhoods during the 1950s and 60s. Lots of cheap subdivisions beckoned in the inner ring suburbs. My type locale for this is Warren MI. Even though it contains the GM Technical Center, in terms of residents, it is a core "Northern Ethnic" zone, which boomed due to White Flight. That's essentially who swung it for Trump. QED.

The trick of the demagogue is to make sure that people do not make rational choices but instead follow more primitive drives in the subconscious. I am guessing that those white ethnics (as a rule they are not stupid) fell for dog-whistle racism.  If Lee Atwater said at one time that Republicans could no longer use a word that rhymes with the name of Roy Rogers' horse... Donald Trump showed that one could come very close to saying that.  So take a visceral concern (Hey -- your daughter might be dating a n----r!) and keep pounding it into the subconscious. Of course it is not rational thought, but if a demagogue has a crazy agenda that rational thought would cause one to reject, it is necessary for the demagogue to put the debate outside the zone of rational thought.

Of course that also works on non-'ethnic' whites like WASPS...

By doing so Donald Trump can Make America Great Again -- as it was in the 1920s. Of course, the 1920s were bad times for any non-WASP whites. If one was "Irish" and successful, then one was almost certainly Scots-Irish, which is a WASP group, or was well up in the hierarchy of an urban machine. Catholic 'ethnic' groups did not enter the American middle class in large numbers until the end of World War II.


When the Trump nightmare is over we will need major changes in American life, changes beyond undoing the damage to political life. Going back to Obama will not be enough, for if we should have another bad time not of his doing, some other demagogue will be in the wings... and if President Trump didn't establish a police state fast enough, then this one will start on Inauguration Day. We will need to teach youth the philosophical basis of a workable democracy -- formal logic that allows people to parse political claims and enough psychology at the least to have a defense against crass manipulation. That may require expanding the expectation of schooling from K-12 to K-14... but just think of all the teaching jobs such will create. Because such will be in public education there will be some control of the topic. It may be arrogance on my part to say that reality has a liberal bias, but when conservatives choose to sacrifice rationality and service for power, reality defaults to liberalism.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN -- it looks much like a sign I saw in an archive of Italian news footage from the Fascist Era. It roughly translates "Restore the glory of the Roman Empire!"

(Slavery? Gladiatorial contests? Feeding Christians to the lions? No thanks!)

[Warren Dew]

(11-15-2016, 04:45 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Needless to say, I dread his Presidency. I would rather that Mitt Romney had won in 2012 and have won this time in a landslide. This is not a difference between 'liberal' and 'conservative'; it is between 'decency' and 'evil'

The right viewed Obama in much the same way by 2012.  Pity folks on the left didn't see that the right's response would be to nominate an equally extreme candidate in 2016, and vote for Romney in 2012 as a compromise candidate.  Of course in 2012, it was Romney that the left was painting as evil.

Pity also that Romney didn't run this time, if we assume he would have won.  I met him briefly at a fundraiser for Governor Baker in 2013 or 2014 and encouraged him to run again, and I'm sure many others did as well.  Ultimately, though, he disliked campaigning too much to do it again, exactly because of the negativity one has to engage in to win.  That is, of course, one of the main reasons he didn't win in 2012; he wasn't willing to go as far down that road as the other guy.

[Warren Dew]

(12-02-2016, 11:55 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: "Hancock said that groups of trusted sources may also include people you don’t know personally, as long as they seem to be someone with whom you can identify."

Exactly why Bush, Obama, and Trump won, though they benefited from identification from different groups.

[pbrower2a]

(12-02-2016, 01:35 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(11-15-2016, 04:45 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Needless to say, I dread his Presidency. I would rather that Mitt Romney had won in 2012 and have won this time in a landslide. This is not a difference between 'liberal' and 'conservative'; it is between 'decency' and 'evil'

The right viewed Obama in much the same way by 2012.  Pity folks on the left didn't see that the right's response would be to nominate an equally extreme candidate in 2016, and vote for Romney in 2012 as a compromise candidate.  Of course in 2012, it was Romney that the left was painting as evil.

Pity also that Romney didn't run this time, if we assume he would have won.  I met him briefly at a fundraiser for Governor Baker in 2013 or 2014 and encouraged him to run again, and I'm sure many others did as well.  Ultimately, though, he disliked campaigning too much to do it again, exactly because of the negativity one has to engage in to win.  That is, of course, one of the main reasons he didn't win in 2012; he wasn't willing to go as far down that road as the other guy.

Donald Trump is about as far to the Right as Castro was to the Left. Both hid their extremism until taking power, and both even use the same low level of political discourse. Barack Obama is far closer to the center.

Nobody can predict who the next Presidential nominee will be in the upcoming election. Maybe we would all be better off had Mitt Romney, for all his faults, been elected over Obama in 2012... but I would not be screaming so much had America gotten Romney this time.

[pbrower2a]

This thread might be good for revival this week.

[Bob Butler 54]

(10-31-2020, 02:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: This thread might be good for revival this week.

Shouldn't you rename the thread 'Stupidity Trumps All?'  

[pbrower2a]

(11-16-2020, 06:34 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(10-31-2020, 02:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: This thread might be good for revival this week.

Shouldn't you rename the thread 'Stupidity Trumps All?'  

That would be fitting. Trump could go too far in appealing to stupidity, among other vices.

[pbrower2a]

And this is how about 51% of the electorate nationwide and states and districts with 306 electoral votes put an end to the vilest (by far) Presidency in American history. Maybe Trump was too incompetent to do the damage that he wished. The usual Republican excuse that one voted for the candidate who at the lest is a devout Christian, has a conservative family life, and shows respect for veterans and active-duty service personnel is void this time as it has not been for a long time other than for Bill Clinton's sexual antics which are far less severe than those of Donald Trump. America is still extremely polarized. I have a neighbor who won't talk to me... it's as if I were a dope dealer or child molester or wore a shirt with an image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara.  



(Allowances should be made for Maine-02 going for Trump and Nebraska-02 going for Biden. 

You will notice that of Trump wins, North Carolina and Florida were very close, Texas was sort-of-close, and Iowa and Ohio were on the fringe of contest. Other states that went for Trump went by landslide margins, including a margin of 43% in Wyoming, 33% in North Dakota and Oklahoma, and 39% in West Virginia. 

Yes, Donald Trump has developed a strong cult of personality, and don't assume that what goes with it won't go away soon. His mindset awaits the next demagogue who appeals to deep-rooted superstition, anger, and cruelty. Such is the essence of support for fascistic causes and leaders. Were it on the Left it would be just as bad. Maybe much of it reflects that many Trump supporters know hardly anyone who didn't support our 45th President, as they are in heavily rural areas and can be very isolated.  

As Eric Hoffer put it in The True Believer,  the opposite of a raging fascist is not a raging Communist. The opposite of a raging fascist is a sober liberal. 

...My suggestion for people who have those very durable, large "Trump 2020" banners: give them to animal shelters. Doggies and kitties won't know the difference.

[pbrower2a]

Stupidity has consequences. It is easy enough for me to say "mask it or casket"... thoughts (or the lack thereof) have consequences.  




People will die pointless deaths.

[pbrower2a]

A mere 3% of voters for President Donald Trump think President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election, while 73% think the incumbent was the victor, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll.

As Trump repeatedly loses vote challenges in court as his lawyers fail to prove wrongdoing in the election count, two-thirds of his supporters think he should never concede to Biden.

The findings underscore the harm Trump’s unsubstantiated claims have done to confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/23/2020-ele...inner.html



Caption: A cutout of U.S. President Donald Trump is pictured as supporters take part in a protest against the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Atlanta, Georgia, November 21, 2020.

Something seems to be missing here. 

[Mickey123]

(11-25-2020, 02:26 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: A mere 3% of voters for President Donald Trump think President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election, while 73% think the incumbent was the victor, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll.

As Trump repeatedly loses vote challenges in court as his lawyers fail to prove wrongdoing in the election count, two-thirds of his supporters think he should never concede to Biden.

The findings underscore the harm Trump’s unsubstantiated claims have done to confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

What you're missing here is that Trump's action is just one step in a long process.

The electoral system was already broken, as the entire media organization of the U.S. chose to abandon their historical role as objective (more or less) reporters of the news, and openly opposed Trump.  When the media openly oppose one of the two political parties, that party can't have a fair election.  This is why Trump is able to get away with claiming the election was stolen.  Because it was stolen, but far earlier than election day, and not by anyone messing with ballots.

Of course, the media themselves did this because under the old system, Donald Trump never would have been the Republican presidential candidate in the first place.  Under the old system, each party only nominated someone reasonable, someone who plays by the rules.  Trump wasn't a politician and didn't play by the rules, and Republicans broke the old rules by nominating him.

This is how it goes in a Crisis.  The system becomes increasingly unstable, and every reaction to this leads to yet more instability. 

This process will continue until everything spirals out of control and the country is in a civil war or a revolutionary war. The only thing that can "save" us from this is a major external war, against China or Russia.

I think you, and the members of this forum in general, are making a mistake when you try to root for one side in this conflict.  You have no idea where this is headed, and there's no way to even predict whether the outcome of any battle is good or bad in the long run.  Maybe Biden winning the election results in Trump refusing to leave office and we have a successful fascist takeover of the U.S.  Maybe Trump leaves, and Biden in time takes us to war against Russia, and this ends in nuclear war.  The outcome of all this is currently unknowable.