Originally published at: The cult members of Trump-landia | Boing Boing
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Yes, let’s medicalize it. That ought to be a constructive and problem-free application of the soundest branch of science.
“/s”
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Stupid ass breathing Idiot white supremacy lemmings.
That will be a hundred dollars. You’re welcome.
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One would think that it would be more demanding to believe everything he says given how often he directly contradicts himself, but I guess cognitive dissonance is NBD for people who just avoid cognition as a matter of course.
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I can’t even make it all the way through.
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There being an asymmetry between the effort of belief and disbelief seems interesting; especially when the state normally characterized as positive is actually the easy one and the privative state is the demanding one; but it seems like a very, very, partial explanation given that people have(and appear to exercise) the option of simply shifting focus to a new set of beliefs and simply ignoring, rather than actively disbelieving, the old ones; or of maintaining multiple sets of incompatible beliefs at once(most dramatically visible with alt-medicine enthusiasts: it’s pretty rare for someone to be all in on chi meridians and a vociferous enemy of homeopathy; and much more common for them to be equally sold on a half dozen different systems with incompatible implications).
It wouldn’t be at all surprising(and would be interesting to see poked at), if there are differences that predispose people to only feel at home when they are a firm adherent of someone, rapidly adopting a new authority figure if the original’s charisma is damaged, and others predisposed toward skepticism; but that seems different from the question of what factors cause people to either cling more closely to their current leader or jump ship to cling to a new one(which definitely seems to be a complex tipping point: on the one hand some degree of outside criticism normally causes the wagons to circle reflexively; but on the other hand it’s those who believed most ardently who have the greatest capacity to feel betrayed, should the evidence of a problem manage to become impossible for them to dismiss).
TL,DR, seems like an explanation of why we aren’t seeing a stream of former Trump enthusiasts concluding that actually fascist strongmen are a bad idea; but not an explanation of why we are seeing continued Trump adherence, rather than angry conclusion that Trump has betrayed Trumpism and a better Trump is required to continue the revolution.
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All information is subject to your personal bias. In the age we live in, with so much info readily available, you also stand a high chance of involuntarily creating a bias bubble around yourself.
I spent an entertaining hour twice last week explaining to my wife and mother how their youtube and website browsing/searching was building a bubble around them. My mother was looking into some options to change her bank, was served a popup add about crypto (which she knew nothing about), clicked it out of curiosity, then closed it, but now with that cookie set on her system, is getting constant messages about crypto banking. She called to ask why it was so popular, since she would see ads and messaging about crypto on nearly every site she went.
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Yes, critical thinking is a learned skill. Even so, the garbage these people accept as fact shouldn’t deserve more than 30 seconds’ thought before being dismissed.vl I don’t call them the Know-Nothing 27% for nothing.
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Huh, it’s so interesting that everyone is so upset about “the border.” I wonder white - I mean why - that is.
The freaking ironies on display is amazing, though. Especially the whole thing about Trump being internationally respected and Biden not. It’s also the most understandable - Americans treat the rest of the world as if it doesn’t exist, so of course they have no idea how Trump was openly laughed at and mocked, globally. How the only positive comments came from Russian media - who were crowing about how they “owned” this “puppet.”
You may joke, but it’s apparently quite true - authoritarian followers like MAGAts simply accept what Dear Leader tells them so they don’t have to think about it at all. They seemingly don’t get far enough into the ideas to realize they’re in conflict, and they feel reassured that they can ignore any contradictions that are obvious.
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To the lady who thought that while the rest of the world didn’t like Trump they respected him…no. No one respected him. And we thought less of your country for voting him in. Remember when everyone mocked Toronto for Rob Ford? That, but with nuclear weapons.
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He had so many gaffs on the world stage we can’t even remember them all. He was a profound embarassment - I was almost glad I couldn’t travel internationally. During the Bush presidency, people thought he was goofy and at worst you could pretend you were Canadian to avoid issues. With Donnie, people would hear you were American an immediately assume you were a moron.
I can’t recall what speech that was where he made what he felt was a severe strong statement and the leaders actually laughed at him. Or when he paused for applause after making a nationalistic statement and no one did anything.
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That’s a lot of pixels just to ignore the baseline fact of “fascist billionaires own legit-seeming news organizations.” I mean, if powerful people are willing to relentlessly lie to you, where is the “cognitive dissonance?” You are getting this “news” from a place that has all the trappings of a legitimate source of news. It’s only cognitive dissonance if you think that it’s obvious to the average person which news organizations are legitimate. It’s much harder to tell than it should be.
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It would seem obvious that to believe in a series of lies takes more cognitive effort than to accept the truth of reality. We already knew that people who construct edifices of lies need to think harder about the lies they are telling.
To continue to believe in Trump is to continue not only to believe his lies but also to lie to yourself about all the evidence that defies your beliefs.
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The history of the GOP for almost as long as I can remember is one of never-ending invented controversies and crises. The War on Christmas, Whitewater, Benghazi, the importance of using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”, Obama’s birth certificate, “cancel culture” (while they ban books, no less), “grooming”, the New Black Panther Party, the “gay” Teletubby, George Soros . . . you could make a parlor game out of trying to remember them all.
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It goes back to at least Reagan talking about welfare queens.
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No, we’re all supposed to listen in order to understand them- reaching across the “aisle” while holding hands singing Kumbaya togerther. /S
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Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true.<
And yet there are probably the societal group who most like to emphasize they “think for themselves” and “do their own research.” They haven’t thought for themselves for one femtosecond of their damned lives.
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You best be wearing a flag pin as you type that…er else you done hate the country!
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There was this instance, when he stated that his administration had accomplished more than any other US administration, and had done so in only two years. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/25/politics/donald-trump-un-speech-laugh/index.html
There may be other times this happened, there was a lot of unintentional comedy during his four years, in addition to his intentional horror, drama and tragedy.
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