Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Ship of Tools

I refrained from writing anything about the MAGA bomber until we knew who was doing it and why. Not so Vulgar Pigboy (the guy with a radio show that Dick Cheney used to visit all the time) and the rest of the wingnut swamps, up to and including National Review which tries to pretend it's respectable. They all quite confidently claimed that this was what they like to call a false flag operation, intended to make the Trump cult look bad and probably financed by George Soros. Actually His Organgeness himself made precisely that suggestion.

It seemed to me at the time that the perpetrator obviously had an IQ typical of MAGA hat wearers and would soon be caught. Which would make Vulgar Pigboy and his friends look like idiots. Which they do look like, because they are. So what's the point of engaging in this speculation when you know, or should know perfectly well that in a day or two you'll be eating shit?

The reason is that the cultists exist in an alternate reality. Once you anchor them in an alternative fact set, they'll stay there. So the van with "CNN sucks" and Hillary in crosshairs is just part of the plot. Since that's going a bit far for Faux News their strategy was to hide the perp's political orientation altogether. The reason CNN sucks, of course, is because it reports more or less truthfully, which is incompatible with Republican rule. The policies the Republicans actually support, and are in fact imposing, are deeply unpopular. So they have to keep their supporters in opposite world.

One has to wonder how long the bubble can stay intact. The Third Reich lasted 12 years.

1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

Hey, I really like the moderated comment format so far. I'm sorry if you have to read garbage to filter it out, but I sure appreciate its absence!

As discussed previously, we're living in a time redolent of Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle." It was so brilliant, that book ... illustrating the consequences of people living in an alternate reality but not knowing that it's a sham. Just like the Allegory of the Cave. The fascinating part to me, now, is that we can exist in that same cave despite rapidly-available information. But as always, the United States's method of censorship--that is, by flooding the public press/airwaves with disinformation--has been transferred to the internet, and official sources no longer dominate the discourse, no matter how crazy. And there sure is a lot of crazy out there!