I get what you are saying. But it seems there is a tipping point; a critical mass. At some point the “victims” become the liars. It’s not difficult to understand how these liars work. They were once victims. Perhaps a peer group or family influenced the victim. Perhaps it was just greed.
Trump was a victim of his father. That’s sad, but at this point who cares? He is a monster. So are many of his supporters. Yes, FOX lies, peer pressure, and innocent ignorance all contributed to their creation. But now they are here fully developed, attacking our democracy and our Capitol. There are enough of them to create a civil war. Continuing to view them as victims at this point in the game is to turn a blind eye. Christian nationalism and Project 2025 are rampant.
Well, the music was good at least. Keep in mind, the Silent Generation (ie my mother born in '44) had kids roller discoing, without drugs. Anyone who says Disco died, doesn’t realize it evolved into Trance, Dance, [prance], House, EDM, Rave… Did I miss any? You should be dancing and keep on dancing, but I must admit, I haven’t figured out how to dance on the ceiling, not even after a couple glasses of wine.
This is the statement that would keep me out of getting elected to anything, because I’ve said it enough in different ways; there are stupid people in the world. Any system of justice and peaceful participation needs to recognize that. It is often stated, with references, that our Constitution was designed with the thought in mind that it requires good people to maintain it. Some say “Christian” people, or “Christian values”, I put those in scare-quotes for obvious reasons. Populism for the sake of power takes advantage of that (I won’t call it a weakness, but it’s something that can be exploited).
One way everyone recognizes there are stupid people is by having a way to isolate them from the rest of us. But, we’ve been pretty bad at that. We have punitive prison systems and death penalties and mass incarceration and racist police. But, the most compassionate system, one that recognizes mental illness and bad parenting, would still need a way to take a threat and surround it with some barriers. That’s the easy case.
Not so easy is the stupid people who can function. We have licensing, regulations, testing and evaluation, counseling, community support groups, help getting food, help to get an education, child protective services, to name a few. We can never eliminate all of this, because people are born stupid. An infant can’t do anything and someone with dementia needs similar care at the end for their life. There will always be millions of people who need and hopefully billions to take care of them.
No one is actually a victim or a liar. I used “victim” generally, but I did not mean it specifically, as in, “that person is a victim”. There are victims of propaganda, in a sociological sense, but you can’t take the percentages in polls and then say you know something about a person who wears a certain hat. People do not become something and then are forever stuck being that. Everyone is wrong about something all of the time. When I find out I’m wrong, I will be just as adamantly righteous about my new found correctness as I was when I was wrong, and I can still be wrong.
Bill Hicks had a routine that doesn’t get quoted quite as often, I’ll try to find it in my archives. He mocks people who say, “think about the children”. The people who say that, pretty often, could care less about a person in their 20’s who doesn’t have a job and maybe is developing a drinking problem. Somewhere around age 19, they flip from being a child we’re supposed to think about, to someone who is supposed to have “personal responsibility” and “equal opportunity”. As Bill puts it, “when do they fall off your love list?” I don’t remember that getting a big laugh.
Bill also said, “I’m an American who loves an America which doesn’t exist, which is a land of freedom and free ideas.” We can go to our cocktail parties and sip our $5 coffees and talk about what’s wrong with America, but when someone starts hating America in the wrong way, a guy like @stateless for example, we turn our anger in that direction. That’s when Donald Trump, and people like him, pick both or our pockets. They take advantage of not just the stupid people, the ones who believe when they say they will address their pain, but of human nature that gets us to create out groups, to label people, to consider ourselves’ right and them wrong, and to believe that those others can be eliminated and defeated.
THE TRUMP PROPAGANDA MACHINE! CEASELESSLY POUNDING THE SAME MESSAGE BY EVERY PART OF THE TRUMP NETWORK.
New message: Kamala Harris is “DEI”, a product of
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability.
(Diversity, equity, and inclusion - Wikipedia)
Poor Kamala, she only reached her success by virtue of her underprivileged status.
In Reality, this is a little background of poor Kamala.
See also: Family of Kamala Harris
Kamala Devi Harris[a] was born in Oakland, California,[14] on October 20, 1964.[15] Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a biologist whose work on the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast cancer research.[16] Shyamala had moved to the United States from India as a 19-year-old graduate student in 1958. After studying nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley,[17][18] she received her PhD in 1964.[19]
Kamala Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, [20] is a Stanford University professor of economics (emeritus) who arrived in the United States from Jamaica in 1961, for graduate study at UC Berkeley, and received a PhD in economics in 1966.[21]
Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan met in 1962 at a college club for African-American students (which Shyamala was invited to join). They were married in 1963.[22][23]
I saw a Joan Crawford interview of Betty White, when they were on Tonight Show, much younger. They were joking about how the other slept their way to success. This stuff is old jokes. We should be laughing at the people who tell old jokes.
I don’t think you are reading posts very carefully. I don’t minimize it, I also don’t take it seriously. That’s one of the definitions of “joke”. As in, “Trump is a joke”. You play into it when you address the childish insult as if it’s serious. He could care less about Harris, her race, her ancestry, her skin color. He only cares about someone voting for him or donating to his campaign. There is very little negative for him because people who want his tax cuts will dismiss the childish, old fashioned, stupid rhetoric and go on supporting him. A few will like the comments, or say he “speaks freely”, not PC.
The worst thing you can do is engage it as if it’s intended to be a logical argument.
I guess that’s why there’s been next to zero progress in getting society to take climate science seriously - we don’t take the misinformation campaign seriously. Not worth addressing, let alone confronting.
No, I am engaging it as if it is intended to "fraudulently"slander and ridicule a competent person.
Politics are not a game, it is serious business and I cannot condone the cheapening of every standard of civil discourse by a convicted felon and his croonies.
When Trump lies it is not a joke. It is an insult to every person who has any appreciation for the privilege of living in the US, and its reputation in the world.
If we don’t learn these lessons, we might just end up with another NAZI regime and that is no joke…
The problem is, the one outlier gets put on a news show with an actual scientist and it’s called “balance”. Also, when confronting, start with the science, in the middle show the denier and be brief, then end with science. Too often I see the denier’s statement in the dang opening. Might as well pay them while you’re at it.
