Monday night football
He’s confirmed that the “press briefings” are not about the pandemic but about his “ratings” and the beautiful music he makes with that fiddle.
See you at 5 pm for more showboating and lying and display of ignorance and psychotic attacks on journalists! Ratings, baby! Woohoo!
I repeat: Trump is a narcissistic nut case. Where is Impeachment #2?
So in that empty shell that is his head, it’s all still reality T.V., ain’t it?
via GIPHY
And yet Glen Greenwald, Mike Pesca, and others are all huffy about one NPR affiliate announcing their decision not to air the briefings live.
Democracy implies that the political representatives must be popularly chosen. Those representatives in turn will themselves be indicators of the total strength and power of the crap detectors in the population’s collective head. Whether or not modern life in say, America, produces a discriminating population there will rest upon the educational and experiential background of the voters. If they are gullible en masse, they will be dudded.
Thus the validity of the old expression: ‘we voters get the politicians we deserve.’
Authoritarians (including dictators) operate to stifle competing voices, up to and including the murder and imprisonment of dissidents where that option is available. The worst example in history has to be Josef Stalin, though Adolf Hitler certainly gave him a run for his money.
The father of John D. Rockefeller was a two-bit con man and salesman who made his living selling such vital items as snake oil (literally) around the county show scene of America. He took charge of young John D.’s education; meaning the construction of his crap detector.
At the start of each week, Rockefeller senior would give Rockefeller junior a dime. He would then proceed to use the rest of the week operating to chisel young John D. out of it. In that way, he passed on a whole lot of survival skills of the business variety to his son.
By the time John D. Rockefeller jnr was 24 years old, he owned Standard Oil of New Jersey. He went on to become the richest man in America, with a resident staff including a personal accountant and a personal physician. But there was a catch. If by John D.’s bedtime the accountant could not tell John D. the sum total of his entire fortune and worth down to the last dime, the physician would have to give him a sleeping draught to save him from tossing and turning all night.
Since ancient times, education for democracy has been based on the development of critical skills in the population at large. Education for dictatorship encourages mental conformity where the former encourages critique.
No American regime has ever given its voters’ crap detectors the road test that Trump’s has.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/
Omar, there is a lot in what you say. And in America for at least the past two generations, and arguably longer, the education system has been eating itself. Between making the young ones feel good about themselves, arguing that all ideas are equally valid, and turning into a tech system to turn out more trained cogs for the economic wheel, there has been little attention to crap detection. Those of us who attempt to do so are undermined by a popular culture that reinforces the worst possible parts of uncritical thinking, coupled with the idea that experts have nothing to say to those who are non-experts, because being an expert apparently renders you incapable of understanding things at the level of Junior’s gut.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944/3123184044366702/?type=3&theater