The Trump Administration: A Clusterfuck in the Making Part Deux (Part 1)

The BBQ Pit
4318

I guess that makes sense.

There used to be gatekeepers of information, of news. In the medieval period, that was pretty much the church.

Now, we look back, and see that the church losing its grip on the populace was a good thing, but those who lived through that transition may feel differently.

Instead of having one authority telling you how it is, suddenly Luther comes on the scene and translates biblical works into the common languages, and now everyone has an opinion.

That transition was not exactly peaceful. Still has some lingering resentments.

And now, rather than everyone getting the news from Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and maybe having different opinions as to what that news meant, everyone has their own source of news, that tells them the version or of the slice of reality that they want to know about, what they want to hear. We are not starting from the same basis, from the same foundation of knowledge and information, so we cannot possibly agree on anything meaningful.

The answer is not to bring back the gatekeepers of information, it is to further education so that people are able to understand the quality of information that they are receiving.

How we go about that, when our education systems are failing to ensure even basic functionality, is an exercise left to the reader.

4319

Precisely. The problem we have is Europe literally went to war over religious issues, issues beyond our comprehension as to why they needed fighting over, for 150-odd years, until 1648 & the Peace of Westphalia (and other treaties) effectively said ‘We’re no longer fighting about religion. Fuck this shit. Too expensive. Let’s go colonize the world.’

With nuclear weapons, we don’t really have the option to go to war trying to find a new accepted mental framework. Europe did. And that is a major concern for me.

4320

Assuming that there are survivors, they won’t understand why we went to war over Twitter and Facebook either.

We need a treaty that says, 'We’re no longer fighting over social media. Fuck this shit. Too stupid. Let’s go colonize the solar system."

Or, we get to find out firsthand the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Yay!

You’re right, we used to like us some war. We still do. We’ve just gotten so good at it that we can wipe out pretty much everything almost by accident. Religion was a part of the reason for the wars, but the big part was that we liked war, and religion seemed as good an excuse as any.

Now, if we can find an excuse in misunderstandings over a tweet or a social media post to start up the gears of destruction, I do worry that the temptation to just let it all loose may be too great.

4321

So… sorry for the diversion, people… what we are fighting over isn’t what we’re fighting over. It’s deeper.

Luther was mad about some interpretations and implementations of Church policy. He had no desire to replace medieval Christendom with a collection of nation states which put religion on the backburner, and if he saw the outcome of his Reformation, he might go back and recant.

Same thing here. For many of us, this is a very intense debate over the long-term policy decisions of the US (even ‘fascism vs democracy’ can be put in this category), but… long-term… the true issue which the world is grappling with is bigger.

Will the world replace the nation state? Are we beginning… and this is my guess… to see the true beginnings of the end of the Western hegemony, the idea that the world needs to follow in the footsteps of its 19th-century conquerers in how economies, countries, and ideologies are run and developed?

I don’t, and will never, know. But, like I said, review the Reformation-era. It’s almost a blueprint.

Now back to the Clusterfuck!

4322

May I ask why you no longer consider yourself a Christian-?

Maybe you can convince me to stop being a Christian too

4323

I have a friend who’s been known to blow an imaginary whistle, and throw a big napkin in the middle of the table, intoning “Tangent Flag!”

I hope you start a new thread, or DM the guy. Times are crucial right now, and I for one am refreshing this thread minute-by-minute to keep track of developments.

Or you can tell me to shut up and start a hijack… I ain’t no mod.

4324

Because I do not believe in the divinity of Jesus.

I actually do consider myself to be a Christian, in that I am a follower of Christ, I think that he set a good example of how one can live a good life.

But, I do not believe in an afterlife, nor of a god who has any interest or interaction with us.

As a child and young adult, I was very into religion. I didn’t just go to church on Sunday, I went several times a week. I had long chats with my pastor, and went on retreats and had long chats with many other religious figures.

My questions tended to piss them off. I’m a scientist at heart, which means that I am never satisfied by any answer. I will always ask, “Why?”, and I will never accept, “Because”.

When you pose this to a scientist, they will give you the answers that they have worked out, until you either get tot the point where you can no longer understand the answers, or they are at the limit of our collective knowledge, at which point, you still know that there is more to learn, you just have to learn it. A scientist may say, “This is above your education level,” or they may say, “This is beyond our knowledge, and we are trying to find out.” But they will never say that this is knowledge that is not meant to be known.

When you pose this to a theologian, they have definitive answers, until they don’t anymore, and then they tell you to stop asking questions.

Eventually, I realized that I didn’t actually believe any of that stuff, and they were not very convincing with their dogma.

Sorry, @digs, already typed up before I saw your objection. It’s been 28 minutes without any new clusterfucks given by the Trump admin, no new developments yet. But sure, @rboyce, if you want to continue this conversation, I’ll participate if you start a thread.

Not tonight though, I need to get my closing paperwork started or I’ll be here all night again.

4325

Great answer: we.,.,.,. you & I have a lot in common

I wish you and yours a great day, today and beyond

4326

That was so well articulated (and didn’t become a multi-reply mess, yay!) that now I feel bad about trying to quash it.

And now that’s it’s been shown that no one notices me, I’ll never become a moderator here… “You, a Mod? You can’t even Junior Mod!”

4327

That’s what they get for ignoring RBG’s dying wish.

4328

Would it be bad taste to observe that, after 45 months, the ShitGibbon could well be in a position to abruptly and drastically reverse his consistently negative approval ratings?

4329

She’s not tall enough to be a convincing Jadis, and Deplorable Words are her husband’s department.

4330

You mean by dying? That would make me feel better towards him.

4331

Damn, @JohnT and @k9bfriender, that was probably the best derailment I’ve ever witnessed. Educational, interesting and articulate. I didn’t know about the history discussed and the impacts those events had, let alone the implications about the new information paradigm we live in. This is why the Dope is so cool.

Oh yeah… Trump sux.

4332

Y’all might want to read Red Pill, Blue Bill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us. It doesn’t actually provide much useful information to non-trained individuals on how to drag people out of the rabbit hole of conspiricism (basically, you have to deprogram someone like they’ve become part of a cult, because they have), but it does a good job of tracing how they get dragged in.

In large part it has to do with people who feel aggrieved at the world for the state of their personal lives or who find the world confusing and inexplicable who want to find simple explanations that let them feel powerful and in control (or at least in the know), and how the various conspiracy believers curate their web sites to slowly draw them in.

4333

This week’s events will be a massive font of conspiracy theories. The Moon landing and 9/11 will be as nothing to the topics arising out of Trump’s positive COVID diagnosis.

And the thing about the sites mentioned at the end of the quoted post, above: this is the first time in history when it is wildly, insanely profitable to peddle conspiracy theories. So that will increase their numbers.

It’s going to be bad.

4334

That profit is one of the big reasons the book cites for the conspiracy theories growing wilder and wider, connecting themselves to each other and adding new speculations because the only way they can keep their audience’s attention is to keep making their claims more sensational. The thrill of having others agree with the authors is one of the reasons those authors keep making things more sensational, too.

4335

Sounds like an interesting book–I’ll go take a look at it.

Certainly money changes everything. Without restarting the side-discussion of a few hours back: the right-wing media bubble obviously does play a huge role in the bitter divisions we see in the USA population today.

But the money angle goes further than just the profits the Murdochs make out of selling gold coins to simpletons.

The bitterness also stems from the end of civility in government, and the end of civility in government largely stems from the fact that right-wing politicians now have an entire alternate-economy in which to make their fortunes (and live out their entire social lives, to boot).

Thanks to foundations, lobbying shops, and other well-funded creations of the Koch Brothers, the Mercers, and other dark-money sources, a GOP Rep or Senator or state legislator can be as vicious as he possibly can to his Democratic opponents, and still find a happy, supportive, lavish-paying workplace in which to spend his post-government years.

There’s NO need to be civil anymore.

And the example set by these vicious pols is emulated by their entire voting bases—emotionally supported, as previously noted, by everything they hear in their right-wing media bubbles.

4336

Meanwhile, lots of speculation on twitter, and none of it good for the WH:

4337

The phrase beginning with, “The agency says…” should be read as, “Trump appointee says…”.
Dad’s a convicted fraud. Jared is “not involved” in the family business due to his masquerading as a diplomat/health expert/any other job DumpsterFire doesn’t trust to someone outside TrumpInc and Freddie Mac made almost a billion dollar loan to them. Underperforming properties, below market rates based on risk, and interest only with a giant balloon payment at the end (or bankruptcy). Taxpayer funded if the government has to bail out Freddie Mac again. No giant smoking red flag but everything about the loans is right on the edge of impropriety.