A cult doesn't believe their cult leader committed crimes.
Color me 50 shades of unsurprised.
Funny how facts become harder to ignore when they start affecting everyday life. Reality has a way of cutting through the noise.
Not big surprise. Pretty much my first thought when I saw the results from America.
Sometimes the truth doesn't need defending. The results speak louder than anyone's opinion.
The logic is sound unfortunately.
Assumption A every politician is a liar. Assumption B politicians are partisian and will say anything about the other side to win.
This is a core belief in the sticks.
Decades now of propaganda add: Hollywood and liberal news outlets are politicians and partisian for the democrats.
So when they say anything about Republicans it's a partisan lie with no basis in truth.
Trump said these things, and therefor was speaking the assumed truth. That means he can't be a politician, so he is exempt from the previous things.
I mean it's stupid, because the default assumption are a logical falacy but it is the thread I run into, and it's so ingrained into the thought loop they really struggle to change it.
That makes a lot of sense. It also explains why the republicans do everything they can to obstruct anything that would improve people's day-to-day lives if credit could possibly go to the democrats. This line of thinking is so heavily weighted to tangible results that such a situation would destroy republican support.
I also appreciate that this explanation shows a rational-ized take on how the world works. That's a much more fair take than the "right-wingers must be irrational/crazy" that a lot of people are quick to toss around.
This is the sort of cynicism that Russia seeks to exploit. It’s sad.
I have noticed a few things about modern/MAGA brand right wing folks:
There is just a distinct lack of empathy.
This is the one I want to see a study on. The idea that a social group that has both a cultural identity and is lacking in empathy compared to other groups, is just wild to me. I really want to know how we got here.
Yeah I see this as a paradox of sorts. An intense focus on outgroups without empathy for them.
Is that along the lines of what you meant? Maybe I am misinterpreting
Kind of what I meant, yes. It opens questions like "does the group lack empathy for each other" and "is this a value that more resembles sociopathy or is it intense in/outgroup division?" Also, I'm wondering how far back this goes. Maybe we're looking at attitudes and sentiment that go back to colonial days, possibly along bloodlines, where people that don't think this way came along later and/or from other places?
They are also suspicious of long term of complex explanations and I believe this is because most systems that take advantage of this group (such as credit cards) have this same characteristic.
The narrow circle of concern makes things like climate change really hard to explain.
Bullshit. They're illiterate morons who believed whatever was politically convenient.
They've grown up in an environment that taught them to distrust media and therefore only believe that which directly affects them.
The reason they don't seem to care about the millions of deaths caused by Trump's cuts to USAID isn't because they're all sociopaths, but because they don't believe it.
The rightwing propaganda doesn't have to be believed in order to achieve its goal. The most dangerous thing isn't the lies. It's actually the skepticism towards the truth. They reached the point where their lies got so outrageous and distrust in news so high, they could actually start doing crazy shit like opening concentration camps for dissidents and attempting to rig elections, and people reading that news just saw it as the same insane lies, just from the other side of the aisle.
It's not only the propaganda but it's also the information about all the bad things doesnt make it past their privilege and racism. I know people from where I grew up who dont believe in systemic racism and seem to truly believe the 3 non white people they know have all the same ability to get a job and a bank account and house as they do and think others truly choose to sell drugs or work at McDonald's not that it's their only option.
God, I hate that the fight for democracy is essentially continuously trying to explain reality to the dumbest people to have ever lived, and hoping that they learn something.
This isn't default democracy; this is a failure state created by the rich's desire to own you (also known as capitalism). The media environment that makes such delusion possible and the deregulation that made that environment legal (looking at you Reagan and Clinton) were created by rich people and their stooges and they can (in theory) be destroyed by The People™. It also bears notice that when politics works for the average person (think FDR) it's not quite that dysfunctional; again the current situation is a failure state created by the oligarchy controlling politics, though you could argue instead that the oligarchy is the default and periods where politics works for the average person are the exception.
It's explaining a reality that disagrees with the pre-conceived beliefs. The reason why Facebook works is that the algorithm makes it so it feeds them information that they already believe.
I don't get it personally. I don't see how they conspiracy-hole this and that, and pretend the most outrageous things, but then supposedly diesel or whatever is the last straw. Decades of being financially fucked into the ground by conservative policy, a decade of But Joe Biden!, and now diesel does it??? Ok I guess.
The rest of the economic woes are boiling the frog slowly, and have been inflicted during both parties being in power.
Large sudden swings in an unavoidable day to day resource that costs over a hundred a week are harder to miss.
It is how human psychology works. Fuel prices are something people are confronted with on a regular bases and they are a direct expensive, easy to understand, in the moment.
You can’t logic people out of situations they didn’t use logic to get thenselves into in the first place. They based everything on feels, feels that wouldn’t contradict their ideology. And at the upper levels projection took over and “do unto others before they do unto you” became the rule in a power grab.
And we come back to Ronald Reagan.
Reagan gutted the FCC. There used to be rules restricting the number of TV/radio stations one company could own. There used to be a Fairness Doctrine that gave equal time to anyone who opposed an editorial.
There are still roots of this with Nixon. He was able to walk away with his indiscretions. Then we got Fox News.
Back in the day, after Ford pardoned Nixon, there were two kinds of folks.
Most of the Nixon haters were willing to accept his resignation. Very few people at that time were ready to see an American President on trial, let alone behind bars.
Nixon's pals looked at everything and started plotting to make sure none of them would ever be treated like that.
Is it too much to ask for politicians that are not fraudulent rapist assholes?
Think how broken our system is to allow this to rise up the top.
To them it's just "the other side lying" though. The same way trump lies about his opponents and they think it's ok when he lies so they just ignore the other side all together assuming everything they say is lies too.
Same thing with q annon. They put out all of this obviously false info so when the real info about Epstein came out people would doubt it.
no it's because they support rape
no excuses
they support rape
It's not just that. Those people are also really really stupid. They don't have the ability to connect any dots. They can hear the dumbest shit straight from Trump's mouth and they don't realize he's an idiot. Where they get the news from is a secondary issue. If you forced them to watch CNN all day they would simply not understand any of it. But yes, they can understand diesel getting expensive the same way a dog can understand a stick. When prices fall they will still not understand why it happened and will go back to voting for racists and homophobes.
Actually, they've done studies where they've taken people off Fox News, and had them watch other news, and their political views soften very quickly when exposed to stories they don't hear in the Conservative Propaganda Machine.
I have a business acquaintance who is still an unapologetic MAGA, and he isn't aware of 75% of the crazy shit that's these people do, and when I tell him, he thinks it's all fake, because Trump and MAGA wouldn't do anything bad. He has Fox News playing next to his desk all day long, every day. It's his sole source of news.
yes, that being his sole source of news makes him stupid
Aunt clara can't conspiracy theory the oil and gas industry?!?!
British petroleum invented the carbon footprint and climate change denialism but aunt clara want to talk about little simon's gender...
Yep, they're all clincally diagnosable as having presistent, specific delusions.
Other actors creating a misinformation campaign to confuse the electorate. We have seen what Fox news and CNN and the 25 hour news channels have done in the 90s and amplified it and democratized it and made it freely accessible to everyone with an internet connection. Grandma never stood a chance against it.
This is true, but it’s also true that Cambridge Analytica specifically utilized military psychological operations tactics to weaponize messaging via social media.
Facepals et. al. are more virulent and sadistic than they would have been without evil manipulation.
Why are Americans obsessed with gender reassignment more than much else? Of all the things.
Because it's peculiar and a classic outgroup. Can't kill gays and black people as freely anymore, so they went elsewhere.
A more comprehensive answer, because oligarchs need to steal money from somewhere in order to fuel their fortunes. They disenfranchise some to take from them and distract people with culture wars. It's globally very politically consistent.
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