Yeah, with Trump there’s no bottom. Or perhaps I should say, he’s all bottom, in more than one way.
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If you can’t be a good example, be a cautionary tale?
Like John Oliver said:
That is a candidate for President of the United States urging America to check out a sex tape. Just do me a favor. Look up into the sky right now. Higher. No, higher still. Do you see that? Way up there? Way up above the clouds? That’s rock bottom.
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“You just referred to Trump as a god.”
“Yeah, he is. Well, like she said, Jesus, then Trump.”
Is anyone getting lots of Revelations vibe here? And in general? Trump -> Trumpettes -> Trumpets -> The Final Trump?
I gave up the superstition long ago, but how is no one (like loony Youtube Jesus Beyonce demon freaks) making the call that Donny is the Antichrist? Seems like not very much dope would need to be smoked to start making end of days connections.
Why didn’t I look this up first
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I always thought the whole idea of a philosopher king ignored the corrupting influence of power on anyone. Technocracy has the same problem.
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I dunno… have you seen the secret service scandals lately… I’m not sure their judgment is always top-notch.
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I don’t know what type of -ocracy you could call Plato’s utopia but yeah, it sure as hell wasn’t democracy. I really need to read Republic again, because I can’t recall what (if any) defense he made on this point.
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Probably something about how philosophers are smarter or some such. I’m not a classicist, so I can’t say for certain. But of course, the Greeks were living in a very class-ridden society, with slavery. Not much of a model for modernity, even if we can find a great deal of value in the writings of thinkers of the day.
In general, there has never been anything like a democracy with full participation in the history of what we think of as civilization. That sort of went out the window with the end of most people living in face to face communities. Civilization is really about organizing resources to support power structures, and that has included various levels of participation from the populations that make up the civilizations. Honestly, I have no clue what a real democracy would or should look like.
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I know exactly what you mean. I do the same on public forums, say with pro-Brexit types. I pick the sort of person who makes the sort of comment where I can tell there’s a lot of batshit bubbling under the surface, and I just take their comment apart, systematically, and then their responses get wilder and wilder until they expose just how racist, stupid and crazy they are. It often ends with them going “I don’t know why you’re bothering - you won’t change my mind!” but of course, it’s not their mind I’m trying to change - I’m just trying to expose the hatred, stupidity, and simmering violence to the more moderate people they know.
It didn’t work in the case of Brexit - well, it did work in several instances, but there weren’t enough of me.
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Excellent points. Something I tend to think really limits people’s thinking on this is the tendency to conflate “democracy” as an ideal with voting. Universal enfranchisment solves a lot of problems, but nowhere near most of them.
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Indeed. I also find the concept that “stupid” people shouldn’t vote deeply problematic. I’m sure there is some XKCD thing about this. I find the bigger problem to be media distortion and the struggle of “truth” as a political target, not necessarily “stupidity.” And plenty of people who are supposed to be smart are really fucking ignorant of other human beings.
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Ok, then they should have no difficulty distracting him with drugs, booze and protitutes (even if some of them believe the bullet option to ultimately be the safer one for the future of the planet).
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Now you’re thinking like a secret service agent! 
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Hey, whatever works. I momentarily forgot that the SFV has the attention span of a toddler.
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Trump fans aren’t “the people who are struggling the most”, though.
They appear to mostly be low-education lower-middle-class whites. Their world may not be perfect, but they are not the great American underclass.
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For what it’s worth, a google search for ‘hillary clinton is the antichrist’ returns slightly more results than ‘donald trump is the antichrist’. (427,000 vs 417,000). The Hillary ones seem a bit more unhinged, though.
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That’s because when we call Trump the antichrist, it’s mostly in jest. He’s a whole basket of deplorable in and of himself, but not the literal antichrist.
Now I’m going to read a biography of P.T. Barnum.
Thanks! You’ve helped me to find a glimmer of something cool in an otherwise dismal story.
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I do not believe Obama is He Who Shall Not Be Named. I believe he is Severus Snape, and Hillary Clinton is (s)He Who Shall Not Be Named.
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I think Trump would be a good False Prophet, but so would a lot of other Republican politicians.
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