Given that I have read this same well known fact approximately a zillion times right here on these boards, your second sentence is dubious.
except they always seem to spell it “boarders”. Not sure what that’s about, but seems nearly always the case for some reason.
My cite is the thread title.
They really are morans.
That word “all”…?
This is getting a little too abstruse for me.
How’s this for arguing with trumpers? Just this past weekend, I tried–fool that I am–to discuss how wrong the new restrictions on voting in Georgia legislation is. The trumpers said, “Well, there must be something wrong going on. That’s why the law was passed. The legislators are worried about something.”
Well, damn. They got one right. What they did not get right is that what those Republican legislators are worried about is minorities voting.
But the level of logic displayed is even more worrisome than it was five years ago.
It’s actually trust not logic. They trust the Republican legislators and not you. They assume there must be facts you are not revealing because they don’t trust you but do trust those Republican legislators.
All these things tend to come back to who you trust. It’s like arguing with anti-vaxxers. You point to what you quite reasonably consider to be a trustworthy source of mainstream medical thought for your facts and they point to some weirdo struck off Dr of Woo as their source of facts and you say “he’s not trustworthy” and they say “right back atcha” and you are stalemated.
Trumpeters are the same.
We have the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Gilded Age, and even the Age of Enlightenment. I have a sneaking suspicion this will be known as the Age of Alternative Facts.
I would not exactly use the word “trust”. I would use “obey”, though they are related.
Trumpists only have one functioning ideology, which is authoritarianism. Not in the sense of explicitly endorsing a dictatorship (though that’s where it usually leads), but in the sense that have no use for consensus and would prefer the clarity of a few (or one) person being the decider of what’s right and wrong.
And naturally the choice of decider doesn’t depend on merits such as education or experience. We do come back to trust here, and the people they trust are people with similar speech, behaviors, and ethnic background. They trust someone who is “one of us”.
Even looking like them isn’t quite enough; your existence should support their narrative of power. If Stalin killed 10 million people, and 8 million of them were black, they’d probably say it’s fine, and the whites he killed were enemy collaborators. They only respect authority, and only the authority of people who look like them; anyone else had better roll over or get out of the way. If someone who doesn’t look like them ever gets authority, woe betide.
The trust comes first. The obey follows.
You’re describing a normal rational person. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think they’re following the herd of people who look like them, and they rationalize it by saying they trust that person.
Who would ever listen to Donald Trump speak and think he’s trustworthy? If your definition of “trust” means “I can rely on him to hurt people I don’t like”, yes, that’s a thing.
But in the sense of “I can rely on this man to tell the truth, and to practice what he preaches”, no, of course nobody can look at the record and believe that. They’ll certainly act as if they do, though. They understand they’re foot-soldiers of a narrative that cares nothing about verifiable fact.
Well exactly, and it’s really a fascinating (but also scary) example of cognitive dissonance.
Many Trump supporters will admit Trump doesn’t always tell the truth, or they’ll say some nonsense like “take him seriously, not literally”.
Yet if you ask them to mention a Trump lie, many would be unable to do so. Because that would involve not just a vaguely negative statement in the abstract, but coming to terms with a specific, deliberate deception.
And being a Trump supporter necessarily means never thinking of such things, because then it would all quickly unravel.
My problem with a lot of the logic here is this: prejudging someone as unreachable becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I also don’t believe you can judge based on a single reaction. I don’t know how many times I’ve said thing that people didn’t agree with right away, but over time they came around.
There definitely are Trumpers who are unreachable. I don’t believe it’s all of them. Not when there are examples of people who get out of it, just like there are examples of people who leave other cults.
It’s frustrating work, but it’s not pointless. You never know if what you say might hit them at just the right time. You might hit the right emotions.
I feel like there’s no cognitive dissonance nor ignorance of Trump’s lies. People like this would never admit it and might not ever reflect upon it, but they understand that they’re foot-soldiers in a war of narratives.
If you were to observe one that said they could not mention a specific Trump lie, it doesn’t mean they’re wearing blinders. They’re holding a pair of blinders and trying to sell them to you, and they can’t do that without acting as if blinders are the best thing in the world. They may have been doing this sales-job so long that they forgot it’s a sales-job, but I think most of them know what they’re doing on some level. It’s about the conflict, not about the truth.
On some level they know it’s bullshit, but admitting it’s bullshit would mean giving the libs the advantage, and that’s the only sin that is truly unforgivable.
Disagree.
I mean, yes, obviously it’s a sales job and pushing a narrative; after all, that 100% what Trump is, there’s no substance behind it whatsoever.
The question is, is the confidence trick internal or external? And with most Trumpists, it is demonstrably internal; they have to strongly believe the things they are saying otherwise their actions are knowingly harmful (e.g. trying to defy lockdowns, storming the capitol etc)
Not worth pressing the nitpick too far, but I feel like there’s a difference between holding a certain strong belief, and the belief that one ought to hold a certain strong belief.
I gotta call BS on this line of reasoning. Trumpists have manifestly declared that they are little interested in whether they’re harming other people. Their rationale for storming the capitol or coughing on people in a pandemic is “I want it because I want it.” Zero thought as to whether they’re harming others, except to assess how to blame the person for harming themselves.
Sure, and what I am saying is that they do hold the belief, even if it’s on completely flawed grounds.
I don’t see any reason to think they are just play-acting.
I obviously meant harming themselves. If they don’t believe the rhetoric that they are spouting, then they are knowingly putting themselves at risk, and knowingly harming the democracy and system of government that they live under.
The simpler explanation is simply that they believe it.
If we’re talking about their attitudes toward putting democracy at risk, we know they give zero fucks about that. Some of them used to act like they cared, but that stopped the minute that democracy gave us a Black president.
If we’re talking about their attitude toward putting themselves at risk, the easiest answer is that when heeding a risk means I have to make an unpalatable sacrifice, if I’m an immature person, then I simply pretend the risk is too remote to matter. Or can only happen to someone else, or the risk is fake news altogether. Until, of course, it happens to me, (and of course then I blame liberals). Hence the immense popularity of the meme “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face.”
In this case, the simplest answer is not most likely to be correct, because we’re talking about mental gymnasts who go to absurd lengths to misrepresent external reality as well as obfuscate their own motives. They’re trying to conceal the most obvious explanation of their inner state, so the most obvious explanation is likely to be wrong.
pretend - that just doesn’t make any sense. If someone is genuinely worried about a threat then they don’t put themselves at further risk for…no apparent motive.
Obviously someone can be ignorant enough to not know something is a risk. Or they could have cognitive dissonance and although they know something is a risk, it’s getting overridden by another part of the mind that is telling them “Trust in Trump” or whatever.
Neither of these things is pretending though, and I just don’t think you have given any reason to think that Trumpists are merely playing dumb.