Reminds me of the old joke: A man is asked during a job interview “I see there’s a 4 year gap in your resume. Care to explain that?” “That’s when I went to Yale”. The interviewer is impressed. “A Yale man! We could really use someone of your caliber here. You’re hired!”.
“That’s great, I really need a yob!”
I heard this joke LONG before the Simpsons existed.
I don’t doubt you. I was riffing on a South Park episode where the joke was no show could do anything the Simpsons hadn’t already done. One of the recurring jokes was every time someone did something that has been done by the simpsons the character would shout “Simpsons did it!”
*Diktor
I know that was @dasmoocher 's point, but I guess I’m the only one old enough to remember those silly “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” cough syrup commercials from 1986 (which I helpfully, but too subtly 
, linked in my post).
For the LEFP party faithful, appearance is evidence of competence.
And, I have the sense that they bought into the hagiography about Trump that that show wove, without knowing many more details about him. Once they had, they ignored or dismissed any stories or evidence to the contrary as being lies and slander.
Sorry to add to the hijack but this thread reminded me of Tyra Banks and her Harvard Business degree.
Was it a hair extension course? That could make sense for a model.
Another Trump-loving Fascist crying over her freshly severed face:
Except, it hasn’t really moved the needle for this person. Quoting from the article:
“Everyone feels like a fool and regrets the decision. I personally didn’t vote in the last election, and neither did my parents. At this point, I believe there are bad people on the left and the right,” Gardner said.
And that’s after she said that other administrations wouldn’t have detained someone who was married to a US Citizen. So, sure, she’s angry with the Leopards, but if Trump granted her personal exception right away she’d be right back to supporting Felon47 because they’d have somehow proved that it works for the right people.
Sorry, but like most of the the De-faced ones, I hope you continue to get your faced good and mauled, because that false moral equivalency is screwing all of us. And you can’t even figure that out.
(oh, and I have great doubts that they or their parents didn’t vote, just none of them want to admit that they voted for someone who screwed them and look like chumps, though it’s completely possible that their detachment from reality towards supporting Trump was accompanied by complete abrogation of their social responsibility to vote)
No one ever said that having one’s face eaten by a leopard makes one any smarter.
A cartoonist makes an accurate appraisal and is lambasted for it.
What we’re seeing now, though, is that no matter how badly the magaflatearthers suffer at the hands of their idol, his co-conspirators, and even themselves, they will still not recognize the true source of their suffering. And they will blame the usual suspects: the Clintons, Biden, Harris, Obama, immigrants, and anyone that doesn’t look like them.
And they will be most angered by anyone throwing it in their faces or mocking them for it, and will use that as a “look what you made me do for being so mean to me” justification.
I was a Vanderbilt researcher.*
*spent a couple hours looking up papers in the University library.
It’s not really about intelligence though. Stupid people learn their lessons. They might have to burn their hand on a hot stove two or three times before the lesson sinks in, but eventually they learn. Even after Trump hurts them, his supporters go through mental gymnastics to continue their support for him. I suspect there’s a lot of reasons for this; It’s hard admitting your wrong, they’d be turning their back on their peers, being MAGA is part of their core identity, etc., etc., but whatever the reason it’s more serious than just being stupid.
I doubt that many of you have played Red Dead Redemption 2, this reminds me of a line from that game:
I know I’m getting repetitive here, but I really think the difference is the relentless propaganda. And that fact that so many on the hard Right now follow political propaganda more avidly than any sports fan follows the ups and downs of their favorite team.
If you’re a trump fan, the ONLY news you’re getting is all about the wonderful things he’s doing each and every day. Which news includes exactly zero about millions of people from coast to coast who’re having their faces eaten just like yours is.
So it’s fairly easy to dismiss how you personally got hurt by one policy item as an anomaly in the overall drumbeat of remaking America into a place where you and your kind will be major Winners and all those people will be major losers.
AKA Good Stalin, bad boyars. That ICE agent who arrested your naturalized citizen spouse & the ICE official who started their deportation were almost certainly making an unauthorized move or an error. If only trump knew!!?!.
That’s certainly part of it, but I’ve come around to thinking it’s something fundamental to human beings.
It’s like drinking OJ out of an opaque container when somebody tells you it’s Coke. At first, you might react in disgust. Not because the OJ is bad but because your immediate reaction is WRONG.
Or having a friend pop up in front of you when you expected somebody else. You might not even immediately recognize them. You just recognize WRONG.
That sort of instinctive reaction is great for savanna apes trying to survive. Less so for presumably intelligent beings living in a technologically advanced society.
And that seems to be where we’re stuck. The propaganda and learned behaviors are the default and anything that suddenly contradicts that just sticks in brains as WRONG potentially without the recognition that taking a second and evaluating the dissonance is better than following an immediate, instinctive reaction.
One of my go-to entries from the Newspeak Dictionary (Eleventh Edition) seems appropriate here:
crimestop n. The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short…protective stupidity.
Agree. There’s a lot of everything you say in this post.
And the points other have made about MAGAs having to admit, both publicly, to family, and to self, that they were bamboozled. That’s a big ask for everyone, and even moreso for the blowhards. Being a blowhard personality is also I think highly correlated with being a trump fan.