The Stupid Hurts So Bad

Dead effin seriously, someone in my circle sent this to me to explain why he or she (purposely vague so sometime later you do not figure which member this came from) had no choice but to vote for Trump. So this is one of the sources that was hidden from me before the election so I could not dispute it.

I am about a third of the way through and the number of factual error I can spot off the top of my head without looking anything up is beyond counting (without pencil and paper). This same person told me the Friday before the election “Temporary, you just believe everything you hear don’t you?” You may find that comment ironic if you bother to listen to this. It is still on in the background but I am not paying attention because it makes my brain hurt.

Before I post the link, I know I owe many responses in many threads. Once out of town visitors leave tomorrow I will work on those, apologies for the delay. Link:

Aside from disowning loved ones, any suggestions? They believe this shit! Counter arguments are attributed to the devil getting my soul under his control – not to, you know, facts.

This applies to that video:

I almost just pasted something my numbnut distant relative retweeted, but then I realized I’d only be hurting your brain even more.

Just curious, how much were you able to view in one setting? It took me a couple of tries to get all the way through. (Although I wondered why I was bothering to go to view the whole thing, I was glad I did eventually because it gets even weirder toward the end.)

needscoffee, my brain is already numb after this weekend. Please share the retweet.

https://twitter.com/BeholdIsrael/status/1322135121609347072

This guy? Well, I guess we now know who God really likes. Turns out it was Islamic Jihad all along.

Okay, but I warned you…

Retweeted by a distant relative:

"I would strongly recommend that voters go to the Biden/Harris website and read their tax plan. Does everybody realize that if you go to pages in the 40s, 50s and 60s, you will find that they have a plan to tax you on your house at 3% of its value. This is above and beyond your property taxes you currently pay to your local municipality. In addition, families earning $50k or more will have their taxes raised by $7,800, over a 10 year period. This is aside from the loss of $750 a year from the repealing of the Trump middle class tax cuts. They also want to tax your 401K and IRA’s. Do people realize that, until 1983, you paid no taxes on Social Security? Joe Biden put up the bill and sponsored it to tax Social Security at 50% AND then raised it to 80%!!! A man of the people? Is this what you want to happen? Really?

Nobody is reading his plan.

Please, wake up. Research!!!

Copy and paste!"

Okay, but for the benefit of people who were born without the critical thought gene, here is the FACT CHECK on Biden’s Tax Plan.

Highlights include:

  • it’s a pack of lies start to finish

You can always tell it’s fake when they can’t cite a page number.

Yep. And they know nobody will bother, especially when they claim it’s on “pages in the 40s, 50s and 60s”. But somehow it lends fake legitimacy to the claim.

Basically, this is the answer to why so many people still support Trump: because they live in a completely different version of reality, created by their tiny but intense media and social bubble that reinforces every preconception they have and never strays from the Approved Narrative.

And thus we have people who believe that Biden is a Communist Marxist Socialist Fascist who is going to tax this country into oblivion and give the money to lazy slackers who don’t work in return for votes, while also selling out the country to China, Russia, Iran and, I dunno, San Marino for vague ill-defined reasons, but basically because Democrats are all evil anti-American monsters who are trying to destroy Christmas and promote gay Islam.

None of it makes sense. It’s all incoherent, contradictory, and disconnected from any actual facts. But they believe it because it’s what they want to believe. The critical thinking begins and ends with “If I want it to be true, it’s true. If I don’t want it to be true, it’s not true.” Not only can you not reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, you can’t pump their stomachs once they’ve guzzled the Flavor-Aid.

And I speak from personal experience of multiple relations that have guzzled and gone over to the Crazy Side, and now spend their days spouting ludicrous conspiracies and praising Trump for “defending America”.

Trump supporters have repeatedly demonstrated that they would prefer to believe whatever crap makes them feel good about Trump, or themselves, or how much better they are than The Eeeeevil Democrats, versus doing even the least amount of fact checking.

Nearly verbatim from a Facebook exchange, when a high school classmate announced truculently that hospitals were deliberately overdiagnosing COVID because it got them more money, especially when they had to go on a ventilator. I googled the source of the rumor, provided a link to a reasonable sounding rebuttal, and followed it up with my own summary which was roughly “The person who started the rumor even admits publicly that he does not have any evidence of it happening”.

Her response: “I don’t care. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

Now, this is someone who was in the “smart” crowd in high school. Maybe not the all-honors classes, but definitely in the college-bound crowd. You would expect her to have some willingness to at least do some research to support beliefs - if for no other reason than that you can be hella lot more convincing when you can cite your reasons.

But her attitude is like that of so many Trumpists: Evidence is not only not required, but ACTIVELY DISCOURAGED, especially when it doesn’t fit your tidy little view of the world.

My own sister in law - whom I like, mostly - responded to a vent on Facebook a year back where I was amazed that Trump didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a cat-5 hurricane. A couple of people jumped in with Trump-bashing which was not helpful - but SIL said “Well, there have only been two cat-5s that have ever hit the US”.

  1. The article she cited was outdated, at that point there had been another one
  2. It didn’t matter what strength they were when they hit, as many massively-damaging storms were below 5 when they hit,
  3. I wasn’t complaining about that, but about the fact that Trump thought they didn’t exist (and had said the exact same thing a year before)

And she finally huffed off saying “You all won’t listen, when the facts don’t support what you believe!”.
Now, she was offput by the trump-bashing - but SHE HERSELF REFUSED TO READ THE FACTS.

Like I said: the past 4 years have been one example after another of right-wingers actively discounting facts and science in favor of whatever rhetoric they’ve been told to believe.

To top it all off: on SEVERAL occasions when I’ve tried having a factual discussion with someone from the other side, and they can’t rebut something, their parting salvo has been “All you Democrats just want to kill babies”.

Seriously. Not making that up.

The UAE? But Trump just ended their vicious decades-long war with Israel! Is Trump a traitor?!

Remember this (Trump with a Sharpie)?

Exactly. There’s no evidence to support the voter fraud accusations, but they know it’s true. There’s a MOUNTAIN of evidence of Russian involvement with the 2016 and 2020 elections (and with the Trump campaigns specifically), but that’s just the “Russian Hoax”.

My thanks to all of you, you are like members of my support group that keeps me from believing I am living in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

It isn’t just my circle, the evidence denying, reality rejecting die hard Trump supporters are really out there. We need … I don’t know what, but these people need a dose of reality. We love our family and long time friends, but some of them just need to be deprogrammed (like those Dungeon and Dragon esque cult deprogramming experts from the 1980’s).

Again my thanks, you folks keep me going!

I feel like half the country is living in Bizarro World.

You know, I’ve always felt people didn’t give the Sharpie incident the attention it deserved. Sure, it was all over the news, but it was viewed as evidence of Trump’s crazy. In actuality, it was evidence of how he thinks the office and the world works. He wasn’t trolling- he EXPECTED everyone to just accept it

The fact that nearly half the country voted for this guy almost makes me break down and cry. America is going through her dark ages; if Trump got a second term it would not be long before Neil DeGrasse Tyson was called to the White House and forced to sign a decree stating that Global Warming is caused by the Socialist Agenda of the Democratic Party and not by greenhouse gasses (under threat of death).

I kind of caught it in passing — I wasn’t really watching — but Deadline White House had a statement from a WH staffer (anonymous, natch) to the effect that Trump is 95% convinced that he’s lost but feels that his supporters deserve a “show” fight, presumably to keep their spirits up (and the money rolling in). If true, that certainly justifies an additional 100K or so Covid dead.

Yes, what a leader he has turned out to be!
Do you think we could squeeze one more face on Mt. Rushmore?

The man was President of The United States, and he hit his high point when he tackled Vince McMahon during a Westlemania event.

God I wish I was going to be alive in the near future to see how history records this time. I remember Nixon personally; how I wonder what some ten year old will think of Trump when he is my current age.