Watch: Marjorie Taylor Greene complains that January 6 rioters' rights are being "fragrantly" violated

Its not an ad hominem if you are attacking the person’s specific views or actions either. Just insults.

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Her plan is to do a Trump - you can’t kick me out of the party, I AM the party.

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“But not on any committees. We need an evil lackey who does the work”
-GOP overlords

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I don’t think that works in America. Watch Idiocracy. Fascists can’t look weak, but if it makes them more of a “common person” they can look unintelligent… because middle America has the idea that over-educated idiots lack common sense, and they’d spend 100 five dollar words where just a few would work. I’m saying this having been a plant engineer in a rural part of NY - there was a consistent “I’ll just do this with common sense” approach that they never tired of trying to one-up people with, and they ended up getting into some very, very stupid situations that way. One example would be a mech supervisor having his guys tighten the mounting bolts of a 250hp motor while it was running… and an exasperated mech eng having to tell them that it’s really important that the bolts be relaxed when they do this (I’m not a mech eng so forgive me if this is off) was that they could over-torque and break them.

Also reminds me of some geniuses from Brooklyn at the Figment festival in 2009 taking all of the slack out of the mooring lines of a barge, because the rocking at high tide was bothering them. (And that’s an excellent example of both the red and blue side thinking “I’ve done my own research” and getting in over their heads, but the hipster would have a really nice complex way of explaining their Dunning Kreugerism.)

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Fragrant Violation - that’s what you get for Casting Nasturtiums :smiley:

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We are far worse off than Idiocracy.
In that film:

  • There was a functional universal healthcare program.

  • The President, although a preening moron, listened to reason and accepted evidence, changing his policy to solve a problem.

  • Starbucks fulfilled a purpose in society which justified its prices.

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I mean, it wasn’t a documentary.

It also wasn’t a particularly good movie. It was full of classist bullshit and basically endorsed eugenics. It was a vehicle for the upper middle class to feel superior and justify their suspicions that “stupid” and “common” people ruin everything, rather than the system being corrupted by billionaires and lobbyists.

Citing Idiocracy is second only to people going on about “the Dunning-Krueger effect” while completely misunderstanding what their research’s conclusions actually were.

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So many places to go:
Something’s rotten in the state of Republicanism.
They flaunted laws know they’re wrights are fragrantly violated.
EngRish: English as spoken by dumb Republicans.

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Read “The Marching Morons.”

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So the “poorly educated” know not to listen to personal attacks, but also broadly support monsters like Greene who do nothing but make personal attacks. Sure, that makes perfect sense.

No matter how you oppose people like this, someone will tell you it’s not being done exactly the right way, somehow blaming you for what the fascists were planning to do anyway. It’s disingenuous nonsense and I’m sick of it.

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That’s the unacknowledged inspiration for “Idiocracy”, bad science and misanthropic attitude included. Understanding that, I can still enjoy the story and the movie for what they are: satires about how culture and society can degrade when stupidity and ignorance are embraced as virtues.

One of rhe best aspects of Kornbluth’s exquisitely nasty story was left out of “Idiocracy”: Smart people still exist, but they’re a minority who keep humanity alive and running while pretending to be low-status workers despised by the idiot majority. When the time traveller (a shady real estate promoter) is revived from suspended animation, they see his amorality as a means to finally end their exhaustion.

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I’ll bite. In your experience- what has been the most effective tactic.

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That may coincide with what one learns in school, but in reality, the main job of a congressperson is to dial for dollars and bring in money to the party. Sadly, she is pretty good at that.

Which is why it is so important to limit campaigns to the six months prior to the election, max. No campaigning, no fundraising. Just legislating.

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As much as I like the thought of her spending most of her life in that dingy call centre across the street from the Capitol (they’re not allowed to make calls from their Congressional offices) pretending to be interested in the opinions of wealthy arseholes, it’s a huge waste of resources and distraction from what they’re all supposed to be bloody doing, good or bad.

All things being equal and despite that, she still does a lot of damage when she vomits out her hate and stupidity. If she turns out to be one of the scumbags who asked for a pre-emptive pardon she’ll be next after the GOP establishment is finished with Boebert (unless they go after Gosar first).

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You sure about that? “First name ‘Not’…”

Dunning Kreuger colloquially (aka, the John Cleese version) is you lack of knowledge in the area makes you bad enough at it that you lack the ability to rate yourself vs others. I think in both cases I mentioned, that was the problem. It is exactly the “I did my own research” issue. The actual original research might be quite different… and who gives a shit now? Might as well argue about “I could care less” vs “I couldn’t care less”, that battle is over for 99% of the people… and if you care about the fine points then yknow, what were you saying about elitism?

As the son of an Irish immigrant who was a Sandhog and cab driver, who also got a PhD in anthropology, I assure you I can appreciate a lot of the shittiness that’s presented there. I grew up in Queens, and went to high school on the upper east side of Manhattan.

I bring up Idiocracy, because I have seen all of those tropes play out in real life. I can really appreciate the irony of one of my fellow engineers, who grew up in India as a dalit and had to fight his way to where he was being treated as bougie by a redneck from a pretty rich local ag family because he uses complete sentences. I’ll give you that the eugenics crap is stupid, they could have just left it at “cultural decline because people can’t be bothered to give a shit” and that’s much worse because that doesn’t operate in biological time. But that’s complicated and wouldn’t have been as funny in the intro.

That’s also essentially the plot of the Walter Trevis book Mockingbird, except there they foist it all off on an intelligent robot - who they program so that he can’t kill himself. He decides in the end to just eliminate people by turning the birth control way up, so that when his last charge dies he can self-destruct.

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The endpoint of this kind of ironic “logic” is surrendering to anti-intellectualism and granting equal time (or, in reality, MORE time, in front of more viewers) to fools and grifters of every possible variety

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