One of the things that continuously amazes and depresses me is the success with which right wing politicians and media have successfully brainwashed millions of people. Every now and then a high school friend will post something obviously wrong on facebook, and you correct them WITH multiple sources, and they either don’t care and say they still believe it and then lash out at you. It’s crazy.
This time it was about a piece of commentary on Fox News alleging Dems had blocked a VA health care bill last year (they had, because it was an attempt to privatize the VA and then two months later an actual VA bill was passed), and the people were screaming PARTY BEFORE COUNTRY and how much they hate Pelosi and what not.
They’re all so angry, scared, and hostile, and will just believe anything FOX or the proper news source will tell them, and they just get livid with you for telling them that is not the truth. And it is always people who, in another lifetime, never had political opinions- but now they are just livid at the supposed enemy all the time, over made up grievances. And then they go out and actually reward the people screwing them and elect Republicans. Who just make up more lies.
I don’t know how to break the cycle of willing ignorance.
PaulWartenberg
The political outrage is like a drug.
The anger and self-righteousness feels good in the moment that it hits the emotional centers of the brain. Never mind logic or facts: Hell, denying such things makes the drug more potent.
The Far Right have figured out how to manufacture that drug and deliver it without care or concern. Like all dealers, they know they have a steady market for it now, and all they have to do is keep feeding their junkies just enough to get them to hand over more dough, more control, more desperation.
The only cure is cutting off the supply. But that can’t happen until the leadership in Congress and the White House flip completely over to a political party that understands the risks and are willing to effect reforms – stronger ethics to stop elected officials from lying like shitgibbons, breaking up the media conglomerates that are stifling facts for ratings-gold outrage – that could break the cycle of addiction.
And the leadership problem won’t change until enough Left-leaning voters outnumber the Far Right across enough states… which won’t be until the big demographic shift that’s due to happen by 2024-28… and by then it will be too late…
PaulB
We’ve gone from a time where we each saw the same set of facts but had different proposed solutions to a time when we cannot even see the same set of facts. A complete alternate universe has been created and the online world we inhabit today makes it not only possible but likely, and even desirable for the inhabitant, to remain exclusively in that alternate universe.
I don’t know how to break this, either.
Viva BrisVegas
Wasn’t there an experiment done years ago with rats in a big box?
In each corner of the box were feeding stations and initially the rats could eat as much as they wanted. Then the feed was reduced and the rats started fighting each other. Then a feeder was removed and the rats started eating each other.
As the share of the economy going to the 1% gets ever larger, the rest of us are left to fight over the scraps.
Many are aligning with the 1% in the hope of getting better scraps. That’s the source of “economic anxiety”, being left out of the in-group favored by the party of the 1%.
MoCA Ace
they will stop being ignorant when they stop breathing.
From natural causes… I’m no monster.
painedumonde
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
~ Isaac Asimov
Ruckus
@PaulWartenberg:
Nail, hit squarely on head.
kimp
It IS upsetting, the absolute refusal to entertain the actual footage or tweets that are FACTS.
Leto
My father has spoken about this at length (history teacher): American’s have always prided themselves on being stupid/ignorant. It’s not just a fad of our times, it’s something that’s permeated our entire history. We have spurts of growth, of scientific/higher education advancements, but by and large the American public is dumb, willingly stays dumb, and I think after 243 years of this we kind of need to accept it. (I’m posting an Asimov quote below and I want to see if it remains as large on everyone’s screen as it does on mine) Yes I know that’s bleak, but I’m not sure how many times we need the football pulled from us to accept the inevitable.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
ItAintEazy
New evergreen post:
https://twitter.com/cafernblue/status/1204492897002958849?s=20
hells littlest angel
We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside — irrelevant.
PJ
The people who gladly swallow this Fox/GOP stuff, and respond vehemently to anything that questions the veracity of it, believe it because it makes them feel good about themselves. Everything that’s wrong with the country, and all of the problems that they have personally, are because of those people – liberals, Soros, brown people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, whomever. And the only things that are saving them from the evil hordes are Fox, Breitbart, and Trump. They aren’t thinking about any of this, it’s purely an emotional reaction. So trying to persuade them rationally, with facts and logic and, god forbid, science, is going to fail, and just make them more defensive.
One way they can be reached is through long association with people they know – if a close relative, for instance, turns out to be gay, well then maybe all gays aren’t icky. But outside of a lengthy intervention, the way you would with a cult member, I don’t think these people are going to start responding to truth.
guachi
Same here.
Guy online posts that “everyone who lives closest to the border wants a wall and more funding”
I spent a moment searching and pointed out that entire border of the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the NW portion of Texas around El Paso and the southern quarter of the border were represented by Democrats. That this increased after the 2018 elections and that if what he said was actually true that they would have voted for Republicans.
His response? “LOL. Word games”
So I just mocked him.
wvng
@PaulWartenberg: You nailed it. For nearly 20 years I have considered Fox to be a singular threat to our country. Fox and fellow travelers make reasoned debate and governance virtually impossible. But frankly I never ever imagined it could get as bad as it is now, with the entirety of the republican party fully committed to gaslighting the nation over an actual real and serious threat. And 40% of the populace in thrall to it. I have no idea how to fix this, because even if we somehow shut Fox down, others are ready to take their place and the Fox addicts will move swiftly over to get their fix from a new source. When Shep left Fox, reporters reached out to Fox viewers who were elated. Some said they just shut him out when he came on and switched over to their alternate network (can’t remember the name, starts with an “O”).
Ruckus
@Viva BrisVegas:
Nail, once again hit squarely.
republicans just lie. There is no reason any longer for them to tell the truth. All they have to do is lie in unison. Say it enough times, loudly enough and it overruns every thing else. Until you get to the point that people believe whomever yells loudest. That’s what republicans have been doing and why when cornered like those rats they yell louder, trying to drown out the reality.
Roger Moore
@PaulWartenberg:
And bigotry, especially racism, is a gateway drug. A bigot will believe all kinds of vicious lies about the people they’re prejudiced against, and that gets them used to listening to blatant liars.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
they are, for whatever reason, unhappy with their lives, whether they’re measuring them against a past that never really existed, or easier, more comfortable lives that they see on TV or Facebook. trump tells them those could, and should, be their lives, but THEY won’t let “us” have those lives. THEY are of course the brown people, but also the snooty lawyers and college professors who look down on them, the crazy hippies with their trust funds who shut down the coal mines cause they like to go hiking in the woods, the politically correct people who turned their grandson gay and won’t let them say Merry Christmas, etc etc etc
Ruckus
@ItAintEazy:
Twitter seems to have blown up, at least for me….
khead
Welcome to my universe. Try not to start drinking again.
smintheus
Deprogramming is the only thing that likely can work with such people. They have to be convinced to try an experiment: Turn off Fox News and the rest of the GOP propaganda machinery for at least a week. Then see if they (a) continue to be angry about the things other people keep telling them are made up bullshit; and (b) feel more content with the world and happier with their own lives.
Martin
@PaulB: Every now and then we build up a mythos that flies so strongly in the face of reality that we can’t cope with reality once it finally punches through.
The US is still defined by the advertised glory of post-WWII, carried by an army of post-war children wondering how we ended up with transgender bathrooms instead of flying cars. We’ll bust out of this once those people are dead and the youngs take over.
Can’t come soon enough.
Baud
Facts not backed by strength will not penetrate a closed mind. Work to deprive them of political and social power whenever possible and things will slowly change.
hitchhiker
Working class people are full of rage because, (a) their opportunities keep shrinking, (b) they have always felt disrespected by the professional class, and (c), bad actors in the Republican party keep making sure (a) continues while pointing at Democrats as the primary disrespecters.
They’re not crazy. Opportunities ARE shrinking. The righteous anger of the old Tea Party was powerful (misdirected, but real), and it was smart of the Republican boss class to feed and harness it for their own benefit.
The ugly truth is that millions of people believe their personal dignity has been permanently taken away, and they freaking revel in the chance to stick it to the people they think took it. The depth of their pleasure in “owning the libs” is a measure of how disrespected they feel.
All those tedious NYT interviews with guys in diners are about that … about those hated professional class people showing up, hat in hand, to pretend this is about anything but the loss of autonomy, opportunity, and self-respect.
The trumpvoters will turn on a dime the moment they recover — or even see a path to recover — their lost autonomy, opportunity, and self-respect. Until that happens, they got nothing but contempt for the people they think have contempt for them.
Facts are no match for their lived experience of loss.
Kent
Honestly it’s always been like this.
When I was a kid it was endless lies about the Vietnam war and communists and race.
I don’t know where things end.
Butter Emails
@wvng:
I’m assuming it’s OANN.
Gvg
One thing i have to suggest is we need to bring back earmarks in order to bring back compromise instead of extremism. I wanted to end earmarks for decades. Considered them to be corrupt. Now i have seen the results and i was wrong.
I fear the lack of reward for compromises has put each Congressman more at the mercy of party leadership and big donors (like Russia?).
That won’t be all thats needed, its just something on my list that i don’t hear mentioned much anymore and i don’t want it forgotten.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Butter Emails: One America News Network, isn’t it? I checked into a hotel last year and when I turned on the TV, that was on. I wondered if the hotel owners had done some kind of preset, but my brother checked in at the same time, and it seems like my room had been previously occupied by a whacko
dr. bloor
I hate to be That Guy, but a substantial portion of Americans are self-involved brain stems with just enough in the “marketable skill” department to keep themselves fed and housed on a month-over-month basis. The real question is how we managed to keep our republic as long as we have.
Roger Moore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I think that to some extent they’re measuring them against a life that did exist, but only for some people. Yes, the post-war decades were far from perfect in a lot of ways, but they were a really nice time to be a white man. It was possible to find a job that paid enough to buy a house and raise a family with a single wage earner, and white men were clearly in charge of the country and were granted a degree of respect based purely on their identity. I can see why white men who can’t get that today would want it back and would be happy to blame everyone else- women, minorities, immigrants, foreigners, etc.- for taking it away from them.
Butter Emails
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah. I’ve only caught brief clips of them. They’re for the crowd that thinks Fox has been captured by liberals.
Nicole
@PaulWartenberg: You’re right. It’s a drug. And Americans have always been susceptible to drugs.
Keith Olbermann’s show was like the liberal version. I watched it for awhile back in, what, ’05 or ’06, because at the time he was the only media show saying that Iraq was a disaster (confirmation bias for me: check). And I quickly became addicted- like, I was actively waiting for 8PM at night and my dose of outrage. I figured it out after a few months- I was spending all day angry and wasn’t used to that feeling- but I imagine lots and lots of people more susceptible to addictive behaviors don’t realize what the TV they’re watching (or talk radio they’re listening to) is doing to them.
Even in the late 1990s, in between jobs and with too much spare time, I briefly (BRIEFLY) watched Fox News (I was trying to get more informed, like a good 20-something, and back then the slant was not quite as egregious, so I thought, hey, news channel! Imma get smart!). I did finally realize it when I tried out one of the things I heard on the news (some trivial social issue, not even anything political) on my roommate. She rightfully ripped me a new one because the FOX News supplied position I was taking was ridiculous and she was right to point it out. And I stopped watching FOX News and switched to reruns of Friends.
So yeah, manufactured outrage is a drug, and as a society, we’re not very good at dealing with drug addiction.
cokane
I’m not even sure of the sincerity of some people anymore. I think FoxNews and others feed a certain demographic of folks a self-serving bullshit story. But I also suspect that a big chunk of its conservative viewers might not even sincerely believe everything said by those outlets.
Politics and government has become a kind of reality tv game that everyone can participate in. Notice the intense focus on politics and the short shrift given to actual policy, the actual doings of government in today’s world. Or the endless proliferation of people in media who do neither the realworld work of activism nor the necessary work of journalism (original reporting), but act as if they care passionately about politics.
People blame income inequality or some other despair, but I’m not so sure that’s right. If anything, so many people (especially the older, Fox-targeted demographic) have lives of relative luxury and tranquility. It kind of doesn’t matter if the government screws up big time, because the US has constructed a web of support that will not betray these people regardless of how bad conditions worsen.
I’ve long thought the narrative that Trumpism was the result of tragic, forgotten Americans was wrong. No doubt there’s some Americans that fit that description, but Republican voters tend to be more well off than average Americans, in 2016 as well. It requires a certain insulated privilege in order to create an alternate reality.
joel hanes
We have to take down Fox and Sinclair
Because of the First Amendment, the government can’t really do what needs to be done. So some of the heavy lifting will be up to citizens.
But should we ever again be able to govern, we should re-instate the limits on consolidation of media ownership, and pass a bill that somehow explicitly undoes Citizens United, perhaps by destroying corporate personhood for purposes of political activity.
Roger Moore
@hitchhiker:
I think there’s more to it. Many of the people who see things that way suffer from a zero-sum worldview, which limits the ways they are willing to believe will give them back their lost autonomy, opportunity, and self-respect. They think there’s only a limited supply to go around, so they only way they can regain their autonomy, opportunity, and self-respect is to deny those things to people even lower on the ladder than themselves. They can’t accept that they might do better to team up with other people who lack those things and try to make sure everyone has them.
joel hanes
@hitchhiker:
Economic anxiety? Really?
The righteous anger of the old Tea Party was
primarily racism.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
A lot of them aren’t old enough to have lived that treasured life of bullshit, first because it never existed, second because they are not that old in the first place and second their history concepts have totally been replaced by conservative talking points rather than any facts.
Another Scott
@hitchhiker: +1
But that feeling of resentment of others is taught to them by the press and politicians who are using them.
Refugees who are kicked out of their homes and have to start over at the bottom of the social and economic ladder have a right to be hugely resentful, but they (generally) know better than to let that dominate their thoughts.
Lots of bad things have happened to millions of people in the last 40 years, and it doesn’t look like things are going to be getting better for them any time soon. :-( You’re right that that builds resentment. But we all have a responsibility to think clearly about how to make things better.
One of my mantras is:
The problem with America isn’t that poor people have too much money.
Another is:
Cui bono?
I wish more of our fellow countrymen would think about things like that…
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
The thing is:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2019/12/11/fox-news-ends-2019-with-highest-rated-prime-time-ratings-ever/#528a757b3347
Fox’s Prime Time viewership just hit an all-time high of 2.5 million. In a country of 300 million that’s just not that many people. Trump got 4.6 million votes in Florida alone. the average NFL game gets 16 million viewers.
Fox is toxic waste. But there just aren’t really that many people watching, and fewer still who weren’t already tilted GOP to begin with. If 60 million Americans are in the tank for Trump, it isn’t just Fox news doing it.
Mai naem mobile
1/People are more inclined to believe what they agree with so FOX and the GOP are just taking advantage of people with bigoted views.
2/ The Dems do a piss poor job of taking credit for legislation they’ve passed and not letting the GOP take credit for it. I remember talking to two people during the Obamacare debate and these people truly thought Ronald Reagan was responsible for Medicare. I guarantee you there are a lot of people out there who think Reagan was responsible for Social Security and other social safety net stuff. There’s a lot of stupid Americans out there like Trumpov who don’t realize that Lincoln was a Republican.
3/ the Dems need their own FOX/Rush/NRO/Wingnut Welfare/Hoover Institution/Hudson Institute/Heritage/FreedomWorks/ALEC etc
4/Bring back the Fairness Doctrine
Mary G
After the thread about the eerie similarities between the Johnson impeachment and Trumps, I find myself wondering if America just runs through the same cycles every 75 years and never really gets any better. I refuse to stop fighting though, because I do believe that the Republicans will have to go farther and farther in their insanity to keep the rubes riled up, and at some point there’ll be a tipping point where it can’t be sustained and we try to do better again. I just wonder if I will live to see it.
jonas
Those are easy emotions for demagogues — i.e. today’s Republicans — to exploit. Thoughtfulness, reflection, and reason take effort and discipline and dialogue. It’s much easier, and gets faster results, to just fling red meat that fires up the lizard brain than to nobly appeal to the “better angels of our nature.”
jonas
@painedumonde: That quote never gets old. Unfortunately.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
more on topic, because relating to the military and how they and much of the public view their role in the polity:
THEY won’t even let our boys fight our wars because of the politically correct! Reschenthaler is a US rep from the Pittsburgh area, served with the Navy JAG, Wiki tells me. Wiki also gives me this bit of history:
he’s not racist cause he knows not to say the quiet parts loud, you see
SectionH
@Leto: It’s a known thing. Hofstadter wrote the history of it in his well known 1963 book… I was a kid then, but my mother thought I was bright, but then most mothers think their offspring are “bright”.
Otoh, I do think the assault today is worse than it’s ever been.
Baud
Many of them have built whole social communities around hating us. They’re not just going to adopt a new culture the way someone would change clothes.
Imagine if someone told you that you had to give up Balloon Juice for the greater good. How much would you resist?
Ruckus
@Gvg:
There was a reason that they were ended and that is that some took advantage. And of course earmarks were advantage. But in a system that requires the Joe Bidens of the world to find a way to compromise, you take the minor, not so terrible method of doing just that and everything becomes a battle. The two sides in politics are generally liberal and conservative. Or change for the better and retreat to a time that never existed and hurts everyone but the accepted few. Liberals want ponies and rainbows, conservatives want a bigger bank account. And not to have to share that account with anyone else.
Reality is somewhere in the middle, faux news is not. At least now it has become understandable what it is that conservatives actually want. All. They want it all.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
This was the rationalization, but I don’t think it was the real reason. Earmarks were a way of maintaining party discipline and encouraging inter-party compromise, and the people who fought against them wanted neither. They wanted the most extreme wing of the party to be able to dictate terms to the rest, and eliminating earmarks let them do it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: A zero-sum world view is what characterizes conservatism in the modern era.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Truth.
Ruckus
@joel hanes:
Yes it was. Racism.
But. And it’s a big, full, round but, the racism was and is sold as an economic issue. Not in so many words but the money people know that to sell bullshit as something else, you have to change the smell. And that is what faux news, does. Change the smell and you can sell bullshit as perfume. The racism is the reason you can’t have nice things but it’s also the basis of the sales pitch to keep conservatives in power. Because if everyone was full on honest the republican party would be an old man and his son.
Obdurodon
@Mary G: Sounds like the Strauss-Howe “Fourth Turning” theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
I don’t necessarily buy it, but I do think we’re approaching the nadir of some sort of cycle and will have to pass through it before things start getting better again.
Chris Johnson
I do wonder how much of it is outright cheating and made up, and then using a willing and paid-for media to crow loudly about how badly the libs/labour/etc were trounced. It was already full Orwell, the question is how completely is it a total work.
As for Brexit, plenty of leftists actively wanted Brexit, just not this way. Corbyn totally wanted Brexit, for arguable but pretty coherent reasons (if you’re not Germany, the EU is not great. OTOH the UK had its own currency, which counts for something)
What a mess.
SectionH
@Baud: Yes they have, but no, I don’t think it’s comparable. I think it’s where the “economically anxious” – and I think that should be actually be read as “status anxious” in a lot of cases – intersects with major culture changes from racial equality, women’s rights, LGBT rights, blah blah blah.
pluky
@PaulWartenberg:
Just that morning, Moneo had said: “Lord, there is a terrible violence in her.”
“She has the beginnings of adrenaline addiction,” Leto had said. “It’s cold-turkey time.”
Frank Herbert — God Emperor of Dune, pg.261
mad citizen
From Bob Dylan, circa 1974-75 (of course it’s a personal song, but kind of applicable)
Idiot wind
Blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Funny you should bring this up, because I just saw some depressing news on Maddow tonight.
Republicans are spending millions on Facebook to spread lies about impeachment. And the Democrats? Nowhere.
Democrats always think that stupid, obvious lies are so stupid and so obvious that they don’t need to answer them. We’ve seen it so many fucking times.
We saw it ten years ago, when Republicans went around lying about death panels in the A.C.A., and the Democrats, led by President Obama, I’m sorry to say, just stood around and said nothing about it, partly because they believed that the lies were so dumb nobody would believe them, and partly because of some misplaced belief that if they called these lies out, they’d be somehow making them “legitimate issues”.
And we saw how well that worked. Republicans rode those lies into control of the House and five or six seats picked up in the Senate.
We saw it 15 years ago, when the Bush campaign tried to make John Kerry into some kind of disloyal traitor when he fought in Vietnam. And again, Kerry and the Democratic Party just let them do it, because they thought it would “legitimize” the claims if they answered them, and because they thought the lies were so self evidently lies that nobody would believe them.
Again, we saw how well that turned out. Bush won another four years, and the Republicans picked up seats in Congress.
Now, it’s true, Mike Bloomberg is spending millions of dollars on pro-impeachment ads on television, and that’s nice. But where the fuck is the Democratic Party here? Do professional Democrats still believe that slick lies won’t sway people?
And yeah, it’s true, slick lies won’t fool me, and they won’t fool most of the people here who tend to keep well informed about what’s going on.
But I’m not typical. Most of you here are not typical. Most people couldn’t pick Rachel Maddow out of a fucking lineup. Most people will give these lies a fair hearing, and if they don’t hear something convincing from the other side, they are going to believe them.
This is political malpractice. Calling lies lies doesn’t “legitimize” them. It answers them. I may be optimistic, but I do believe that most Americans, a healthy majority of them, can indeed tell lies from the truth. But they can only do this if the truth answers the lies. When Democrats don’t answer Republican lies, the lies stand.
Republicans are spending millions to spread lies. When are Democrats going to get their shit together, pull their heads out of their asses, and do some work and spend some money to spread the truth for once?
Another Scott
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): Why should Democrats be giving Zuckerberg more money? Are you giving Democrats.org money to spend on Facebook?
Being reactive to the daily nonsense from the Teabaggers isn’t the way to win. Democrats need to construct and present their own gameplan. And I think they’ve shown they are very good at that since January 2017.
IMHO.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
@Gvg: Yes, bring back earmarks. And while we’re at it, get rid of term limits on the state and local levels.
West of the Rockies
I get now Vulcans deciding to purge emotions and embrace logic.
JaySinWA
I don’t think you were wrong, it is a form of corruption, but one that makes compromise possible. Absolute purity is not a human trait. You go to government with the people you have, not the ones you wish you had.
wvng
@Kent: I know those Fox viewership stats but I also see stable polling showing 70% of republicans say they only trust Fox for news. Those numbers are irreconcilable (3 million versus 50 million) but it sure seems that the latter number better explains our lived reality.
Kent
@Baud: Honestly I don’t think it is really even hatred. It’s more of a bubble. I have a bunch of MAGA relatives who live in Mifflin County PA which is the heart of Amish/Mennonite country. The county went 75% Trump to 20% Clinton and the township my relatives live in was even more pro-Trump. Their facebook feeds are mostly about bible verses, recipes, and raising families in “wholesome” rural America and how farmers feed the world. About the only time politics ever leaks out it’s usually something about cheerleaders are standing up for God by putting bible verses on their signs or some such nonsense. They are living in a Currier and Ives or Norman Rockwell version of America, or as close to it as they can come. And the stuff I get forwarded to my feed are articles like these:
https://www.facebook.com/faithfarmingfitness/photos/a.1544799762453829/2408910572709406/?type=1&theater
There is pretty much zero chance they will ever not vote GOP because they live in a bubble that is church/school/facebook/neighbors/talk radio/religious news magazines, etc. etc.
They are deeply suspicious of the cities, and perhaps fearful of the unknown. Going into central Philly would be like venturing into deepest darkest Africa. So there is that racist strain underscoring everything to do with modern urban America. On the other hand, my cousin’s daughter did a medical mission to Eswatini (Swaziland) and married a local black doctor just last week and that was the big family happening this month.
wvng
@JaySinWA: earmarks allowed politics to work. Once reforms made them transparent any objection I had to them vanished. We need them back.
unrelatedwaffle
Strangers in Their Own Land sums up what many have posted here already. I revisit this excerpt often: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters/
Being kind and educated is an extreme minority position. We have to keep fighting the same old fight of questioning authority, cherishing the humanities, standing for ideals and rejecting apathy and cynicism with America’s youth. We need to fund our schools and libraries and consider all children our children to look after and help become healthy and happy adults in body and mind. We have to start by taking care of each other but at the same time giving up on the depressingly high number of lost cause humans out there. It really is just too late for some people to be reached without massive amounts of therapy.
JaySinWA
@Roger Moore:
This may be a chicken and egg problem, but I think it might actually be the other way around. Lies from others and misunderstandings and bad experiences with individuals lead to bigotry. and bigotry begets more lies and lack of understanding. It is a loop back effect.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
I’m confused. Are the kinds of ads useless, as you imply with your sarcastic “that’s nice”? Or is it the obvious solution that the Dems would see if they would “pull their heads out of their asses”?
Also, do you think the fact that Rs have pretty much unlimited resources and the Ds don’t might be a factor here?
also
extremely optimistic, very optimistic. A lot of people don’t even want to know the difference.
namekarB
George Carlin said it best:
cokane
@wvng: The discrepancy in these numbers isn’t hard to explain. Most people do not watch the news regularly or follow politics regularly except very close to election time. Even then only a tiny bit more than half the country even votes in our best turnout elections.
So on any given day, most conservatives aren’t watching Fox News. But when conservatives want to catch up on the news, that’s where they turn or some other partisan outlet.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
what’s the quote, “against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain”?
JaySinWA
@wvng: I don’t disagree much, but I do see politics as a dirty business that yields less than optimal theoretical results. Earmarks allowed that business to work, without them we are at sea in a perpetual war of purity.
zzyzx
I haven’t heard yet if he was just trolling or if he was really arguing this, but this is reaching the point of getting scary. Float the trial balloon and eventually just do it.
RSA
This makes me sad, and I’m a little at a loss. I’ve been reading BJ since the early- to mid-2000s, when John was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. His conversion to the dark side (though he still may be a conservative, temperamentally, even as a Democrat) was so gratifying. But if he doesn’t know how other conservatives might be convinced… who does know?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Or they live in “Both Siderville”.
Kent
@wvng: Republicans say they only trust Fox news because they know that’s what they are supposed to say. But I’m guessing that the great majority don’t watch any news ever. They watch football. They watch endless streaming of shows like 24, NCIS, Marvel series, fast and furious, the Voice, Dancing with the Stars, Duck Dynasty, etc. etc.
And when they vote they just vote tribal. Which in red America means GOP. Cause “Hitlery” wanted to take away your guns.
Another Scott
Twitter just decided to complicate their web interface (for me, using Dark Mode on Chrome on a Mac, anyway). Good. Gives me an excuse to close all of those distracting Twitter tabs.
Thanks Jack!!
Cheers,
Scott.
JaySinWA
@, Foolish Literalist:
I just read a study about students around the world being able to distinguish factual statements from opinion or propaganda in articles with honest language making clear opinion v asserted fact. In the US it was about 14% IIRC and in the best countries about 22%. Not much hope in those numbers.
khead
This thread is like a giant Cletus Safari.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I think most residents of that town are just Republicans who want their taxes cut, but are embarrassed to be associated with the likes of trump and Jordan and Blackburn, so they pretend those extreme Dems leave them no choice but to vote R
zzyzx
FYI he was just joking, but the line between a joke and a trial balloon is dangerously thin.
hitchhiker
@Roger Moore:
Hell, I don’t know. I can only tell you about the ones I personally know & try to extrapolate from them based on what I see around me. We live in a culture that scarcely values anything properly, and my impression is that the losers with chips on their shoulders tend to be people who are dead certain that unfairness & disrespect land more on them than anybody else. It’s why people like my house-painter brothers get SO MAD when someone suggests they’ve enjoyed white guy privilege. (They have! They’d all be in prison for the shit they’ve pulled if they were black.)
I can imagine a world where guys with their skills and work ethic were understood to be very important members of their community, but that’s not the world they inhabit. They understand themselves to be lesser. They — not I — think they don’t have any place in rooms where people talk like we are right now. And that pisses them off. It’s not really about money … tho’ now that I think about it … hmmm.
I had 5 brothers, all working class. 3 of them still work quite hard into their 60s & own homes & have managed to see their kids get thru college. The other 2 are dead, one by suicide and one by falling down a flight of stairs while blind drunk. Those 2 never did get the hang of making a stable living.
So, money comes into it only in the sense that they know what happens if they don’t drag their butts out of bed and climb into those pickup trucks every day. Beyond that, they don’t need to be climbing on anybody or seeing anybody put down … but they would definitely say that people like me (their sister who left town and got degrees and writes books) hold them in contempt.
I never have, of course. I’m one of them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zzyzx: a couple of years ago, I would’ve said it was a bridge too far, now….
also a couple of years ago, I would’ve said the chances of Dips-His-Cheeseburgers-in-Mayonnaise living long enough to violate the 22nd Amendment were slim to none, but the Deity I don’t believe in has one sick fucking sense of humor.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I disagree, they see politics as dirty and corrupt, where everybody lies. Most probably don’t vote but the media tends to cater to them.
khead
@hitchhiker:
I can imagine a world where we tell your peeps to “Buck up little camper, it will be ok”.
cokane
@JaySinWA: Ya, it’s a good point. I’m not sure how I feel about earmarks. But one point in their favor is that they would given Reps and Senators something to jealously guard, so that partisan interests weren’t the only operating principles in Congress.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Shudders.
Raoul
I don’t know how to break the cycle of willing ignorance.
Given the UK vote tonight, I’m not sure we can
something fabulous
I’m gonna jump right to the bottom to comment before reading, in case John is still actually around and reading– sorry if is repetitive to others, but:
this is where I wonder why you JC don’t actually have some insight into this. not snark, not trying to be rude. you were so W ride or die at one point, for a long time, despite what so many here and elsewhere tried to say. is there anything you can take away from that time that would be useful? we all know you changed your mind eventually, but before that. either about the brick wall part, or things that did make a dent back then, why or how they did?
sorry for mixed metaphors, but just thinking in a rush before dashing out. back later to read!
debbie
FB is telling me that Gohmert blurted out the name of the whistleblower. Is this true?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@debbie: I saw that going around twitter yesterday, but I didn’t see a clip
David ??Booooooo?? Koch
I was listening to a podcast involving Billy West. You may know him as a renown voice artist from “Futurama” and “Ren and Stimpy”, as well as the voice of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.
He was talking about how he grew up with a messed Irish father in the 50s and 60s in Detroit and Boston. He said his dad was so resentful that any time a black family bought a nice car he would slash their tires.
It’s a mistake to say this kind of hateful tribalism is based on economics and not on racial animosity. Here’s West describing the idyllic social and economic 50s and 60s for working class whites and yet his dad still lost his mind every time he saw a hard working person of color getting a slice of the pie.
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Here’s the link. I have no knowledge of the site, but people are seething. If true, I hope there are consequences for this turd.
Obdurodon
@unrelatedwaffle: The “waiting in line” analogy is really good. I even remember feeling like that myself a long time ago. Even people who believe in a better new system are often offended by any suggestion that they give up what they feel was promised under the old system. A promise is a promise. Justice can get in line *behind* me. There’s a lot wrong with that attitude, too much for me to go into this close to bedtime, but the appeal is undeniable.
Matt McIrvin
@Raoul: Here’s the thing about the UK vote: the Tories got about 42%. In an American presidential election, that would likely be a loss (what with the Electoral College and the Big Sort/cheating, who knows, but it probably would–Trump got 46% in 2016). But it was a landslide win for Johnson because his opposition was split between multiple major parties. Here, we worry about the Greens getting 3%.
The big takeaway for me is that in a FPTP election with more than two big parties, there are going to be a lot of perverse results. But we knew that.
Another Scott
@debbie: Yesterday he rattled off a bunch of names that should be subpoenaed to testify before the Judiciary committee. I didn’t pay much attention to the list at the time, but the rumored name of the whistleblower apparently was among them.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@debbie:
Google says it is so. Interesting to see a RWNJ outlet (Washington Examiner) putting the whistleblower’s name in the headlines. His attorney is not amused:
ETA: Link.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Easy John, they were always like this. Just current politics mainstreamed them.
TCS
30 percent of the population is truly ignorant or willfully so. A loud, obnoxious 30 percent but only 30 percent. This has always been the case. It is baked into the population. Luckily, the majority of America is not anti-intellectual. This is not a time to be cowed or timid. Look for the boldest people to advance the issues. No middle of the road. Go big or go home.
debbie
@Another Scott:
At the very least, he should lose committee assignments.
CaseyL
It’s a worldwide epidemic of sheer bloody-minded hatefulness.
Watching the UK election returns tonight made me think about the parallel between the UK voting for Brexit in June 2016 and the US voting for Trump five months later.
I am not at all sanguine about the future. It looks really, really dark.
hitchhiker
@khead:
you trying to be rude, or is it just coming through that way?
James E Powell
@CaseyL:
I can’t think of a better way to put it. It puzzles me because it’s happening at a time and in places where things are not that bad for most people and certainly not for the people who are all pissed off and eager to hurt people who are not like them. And the people who are the targets of their hatreds are certainly not better off.
What are they really pissed off about? Why do they never direct their anger at the people who keep their wages and benefits down?
I will die not knowing the answers to those questions.
James E Powell
@hitchhiker:
We live in a culture where multi-millionaires – winners with chips on their shoulders – are dead certain that unfairness and disrespect land more on them than anybody else.
Chief Oshkosh
@Another Scott:
Yep, worked for President Kerry.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Didn’t say it was a bad advantage. The advantage was that it helped the system to work. It brokered something for something, because otherwise it’s just one side against another, who disagree on most everything. Yes they wanted it gone because we made some progress with it. And any progress screwed up the message about liberals being the bad guys, wanting something for nothing. Hard to sell that when actual compromise is happening and working.
grelican
I don’t think “messaging” is just a formality we need to get through in order to get on with our policy priorities. In an election, it’s the whole game. Afterwards, with a changed national mood and different leadership, we can argue over policy. Knowing we all play a part, here’s are 10 general attributes that I think apply equally to politicians, Facebook users, and dinner tables:
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kent:
True, that it isn’t watching Fox alone. It is people posting stuff (Facebook & Twitter) from Fox and other conservative propaganda online. It is AM radio. It is rightwing sites online. Each of these Fox addicts are basically influencers who are pushing that worldview on most everyone they interact with. That worldview is like a virus that keeps replicating itself.
km
Step sideways. “It sounds like you really care about health care.” Talk about that, maybe you will get to a point where they are not just ranting and some communication can happen. Maybe you can get some truth across, maybe they’ll just remember you listening to them.
Not that I’m any good at this, but I have seen friends keep their cool and do it.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@PaulB: Exactly. It isn’t a recent development, either. I remember arguing with my folks during W’s first term. We could not agree on the basic facts. Anything I pointed to from reputable news sources was ‘biased’. When it became obvious how badly W bungled things and how correct the non-conservative coverage had been, I thought for sure they would see just how wrong their media sources had been. They didn’t. They dug in more. Its been disturbing for a long time how unmoored from reality the right has been. Now my far left wing friends are doing the same kind of thing — only listening to themselves, buying into conspiracy theories, etc . I feel like my world is being pulled apart at the seams.