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You and I live among tens of millions of people who think that, after the U.S. Marine Corps has successfully protected our nation for 251 years, it will finally be made battle-ready by Pete Hegseth, an alcoholic Fox News personality.
That’s pathetic.
In an earlier post, I wrote: Well, of course universities are the enemy of the Trump administration, and all other things stupid.
A key characteristic of college graduates is that we are unlikely to believe that “socialism is evil,” a core platform of the current-day Republican party.
We find this this so hard to swallow because we are aware of the social democracies of Europe, Central America, and Oceana; in fact, many of us have visited these nations and have come to see why their people consistently rank at the top of the World Happiness Rankings.
We also understand that the United States is far from a pure market economy, in that it offers its people a great number of free services: roads, bridges, tunnels, firefighting, national defense, embassies, air traffic control, food safety, libraries, public schools, FEMA, criminal justice and corrections, law enforcement, OSHA, auto safety, disease control, the upkeep of our local, state, and national parks and beaches, animal control, space exploration, and dozens of other items.
Stupidity (along with mean-spiritedness) is really what U.S. politics rests on at this point; without it, the entire Republican party would collapse. Sure, it would be supported by a handful of greedy billionaires who couldn’t care less about the needs of the world’s people, but it would control a tiny fraction of the electorate.
Are we headed toward oligarchy?
We wouldn’t be the first democracy to topple. I go back to what so many of my acquaintances from overseas have told me, “You have been the envy of the world since long before I was born. Now we just feel sorry for you.”
Well, of course universities are the enemy of the Trump administration, and all other things stupid.
College graduates are unlikely to believe that the traitor in the White House is an honest and effective servant of the American people, that climate change is a hoax, that Haitians are eating Ohioans’ dogs and cats, and hundreds of other things that the present-day Republican party stands for.
When we think of the U.S. population, we generally think of patriots who honor and respect our Founding Fathers, the flag, the Constitution, and rule of law.
That’s what makes it so incredibly bizarre that we re-elected this traitor in 2024, leaving the rest of the world shaking its head in pure disbelief.
Congressional Republicans are hoping that the majority of American voters are stupid enough to believe that illegal aliens are somehow being assigned Social Security numbers, making them eligible for benefits.
A stronger idea, in my view, would be to a) cut out the bald-faced lying, and b) offer the American people things they actually care about: healthcare, quality education, affordability, no asinine self-defeating wars, etc.
What happens when an authoritarian figure consolidates power around him and goes on a crime spree of epic proportion?
Well, that depends. There are plenty of examples all around the world of countries where the dictator successfully wipes out every shred of democracy and rule of law. And it’s possible that this is exactly what’s going to happen in the United States.
On the other hand, Jack Smith is not going to accept this sitting down. We’ll see what happens.
It depends on what you believe.
Fox News will tell you that our southern border is no longer being overrun, that we’ve discovered that vaccinations are unsafe, that we’re standing up against Sharia Law, we’re preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon, prices are coming down (or soon will be), Trump is an honest and effective servant of the American people and that the U.S. is once again respected on the world stage.
We live in a country where tens of millions of idiots believe every word of this.
I met a guy today from a rural part of Central England–“nothing but farms and pubs,” as he put it. His father was an epidemiologist working for the United Nations, and so, as a boy, he lived all over the world and grew up largely in developing countries that suffered from horrific diseases.
He and his wife had the conversation one would expect from such people:
Obviously, not everyone thinks this way, but to be in something of a “lovefest” for just a few minutes was a great relief.
relief.
I may have mentioned that I’m lucky enough to be a part of a group of boyhood friends from our prep school in Philadelphia that meets monthly on Zoom.
Yesterday the question came up as to how our political beliefs are formed, and the group found my input somewhat shocking.
First, from what I can understand from neurologists, our brains are “wired” to function in certain ways. Via some combination of genetics, epigenetics, and early experiences, we are incapable of looking at the world in a fundamentally different way than we do now. I am no more capable of being a Trump supporter than I am of starting as quarterback in the NFL or memorizing the first 22K digits of pi, the way certain savants can.
This is validated by studies showing that our political philosophies are shaped by the way our brains fire under certain circumstances. When experimental subjects were hooked up to electronics that monitored their brain activities were shown pictures that depict certain threats, the results from self-described “liberals” and “conservatives” differed considerably. When shown photographs of kittens and mountain ranges, both groups processed those images in the same regions of the brain. But when shown photographs of snakes and tarantulas, conservatives were far more likely to process these images through the amygdala, the “fight-or-flight,” or “reptile” brain that kicks in when we interpret something as a danger to our survival.
I’m not losing my mind about immigration into the U.S.; I’m unconvinced that hordes of immigrants from our south or the Muslims from the Mideast are destroying our nation.
Why is that? My brain is wired to doubt it. For whatever reason, I’m more inclined to think that I’m one of 8 billion people on this planet that have almost identical goals and ideals. We all want to survive, to love our children, to be productive and responsible human beings, and to appreciate beauty.
On top of that, I’m a follower of Sam Harris, neuroscientist, author, and philosopher, whose work has shown that free will is an illusion. He points to a study whose findings are that, when we make up our minds in an instant to do a certain thing, say lift our finger from a table at a certain point of our choice, that our brains have made that decision a full half-second before.
Needless to say, there is a ton more to understand here about Sam Harris and his work on this subject. I urge readers to take that step forward.
I’m not sure it’s as simple as this, insofar as Bush 41 and 43 weren’t criminal sociopaths.
I happened to be driving through Manhattan on the very day that Colin Powell was addressing the United Nations just a few miles away and claimed, and I think honestly, that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” and must be stopped by a U.S. military invasion.
Contrast that against what we’re doing in Iran. Fifteen years ago, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), included Iran, the P5+1 nations (the United States, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany), alongside the European Union made an agreement in which most of the developed world agreed that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon.
That stood firmly in place until Trump’s latest war crime, which is costing lives and choking the world economy, solely to defend our president’s neuroses.
