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Trevor Noah: How QAnon Is Taking Over the GOP

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The Ghost of a Flea11/23/2020 1:53:02 pm PST

re: #142 Targetpractice

Yeah, I was about to say that there’s three key qualities that Trump and Sanders share that make the comparisons so true:

1. Massive egos that make it impossible for them to admit fault, but instead constantly work to pin blame on others “lesser” than themselves.

2. Incompetence that constantly thwarts their plans due to starting with what they want to happen and then failing to do the basic work to get there.

3. Tendency to surround themselves with sycophants who tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear, which plays to those massive egos but also leads to their plans failing due to poor leadership.

I’m sorry but those are Barnum statements and I value general critical thinking too much not to point this out. You could seemingly-accurately apply them to anyone with power because they’re the things that everyone with power commonly does wrong. In fact, they’re so applicable to the people seen as the centrist alternative to Sanders that this merits…

They all suck. They all suck because power has the same effect on individuals regardless of their stated ideology, and they also all suck because our system is fundamentally broken so that rich people that want to be landed gentry get more say than the rest so basically nobody’s agenda ever gets through and what does get through is deliberately tainted on the product line (stares in latest price increase to insurance), and they also all suck because our media system is fundamentally unserious and pegged for entertainment value that it has now infected our entire political discourse in manner similar to a cordyceps fungus.

I don’t understand why I’m supposed to be mad at Bernie Sanders for wrongly imagining that the white working class boosted Trump because they’re alienated, but not mad at the centrist confidence that middles-class conservatives weren’t going to vote Trump because he was slightly nastier than an average Republicans, thus alienating them.

I can befrustrated by leftist overly-grand rhetoric, but I’m just as pissed that the alternative is apparently hypervigilant gauging of what will play well with conservatives when it’s abundantly clear that they always operate in bad faith. I’m tired of being told that “realism” is letting the Munchausen-by-proxy parent poison their child once a day.

And while I find leftists grifters and sycophants gross…they’re less dangerous than the “both sides” and “centrist” grifters and sycophants who have continuously normalized worse and worse shit for decades directly creating the current administration and the current media sphere in which reporting is simply letting people lie for the sake of “balance.”

I detest cults of personality, so I find Bernie Mania to be silly and fetishitic, and in an age of instant commentary and inherent internet hyperbole, it is very easy for such things to form…but much of what I find objectionable about Bernie Mania applies to every other person who’s been abstracted into a brand that collects and regurgitates sentiment like a honeydew ant colony. Which is currently fucking everybody because internet discussion is a Skinnerian/Kahnemanian hellscape that we probably need to start think of as a systemic problem. How many rounds of magical thinking and myth-making have we done about people who were going to End Trump? Or inflated minor acts of pique into victory? It’s all the same inflorescence feeding off the same medium.

But I also detest the equal and opposite desire to locate singular scapegoats for large systemic failures…which where most of this Bernie stuff ends up going. No, the one independent senator and his interent stans isn’t causing the Democratic Party all it’s problems any more than Donald Trump spontaneously generated a buzzing cloud of fascists inside the Republican Party via a post-fast-food dump. The attempt to lay these problems at the feet of singular actors and lament how we could still have normality without them is bullshit.

And, yeah, I am really really strident about this because…this is how normalization actually functions. Things were already generally bad, but it’s easier to find some symbolic thing that is The Source, the Thing That Makes The Bad, and focus on it, purge it, then declare against facts that now normalcy will resume. There is no normalcy, there has never been any normalcy. All the horrible shit happening now is a direct consequence of the horrible shit happening in the past that was mostly burden-shifted onto people who didn’t have a platform. It’s not karma, it’s not fate, it’s the serial killer getting lazy and targeting his next door neighbor. I don’t accept the basic premise that the people living with the serial killer and making excuses for his periodic cat mutilations and blood-and-cum-stained overalls actually get to dictate terms to me about how to process all the murders.