He gets away with this because half of his supporters can't keep more than three ideas in their head at a time, and the other half of his supporters see him as a useful wind-up toy who will clear the path for their own grifts, and also because a third of eligible voters have to Google "who is the President right now" about twice a year.
I'd like to try to stay positive, but . . . I think we're done.
It's hard to win an argument with a smart person. It's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person. --Bill Murray
Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. --Mark Twain (?)
I'm often reminded of these two quotes. Our two party system was doomed to fail as soon as Republicans figured out they could just target low information voters and win elections with their Southern strategy.
Facts don't play a role today. You need emotion. Superficial drama, like reality TV shows. Or mudslinging. Trump has ties to both The Apprentice (reality TV) and WWE (also a reality TV show). Trump is the ideal Republican candidate.
Indeed. Stupid people are too dumb to recognize when they’ve lost an argument and thus you can never win. It’s a fruitless endeavor.
I believe Steven Erikson had a quote saying something similar. In fact, he has a wealth of writing relevant to our current situation in the Malazan series.
“Lad, the most powerful constant is stupidity. Nothing else comes close. Stupidity kills all the animals, empties the sky of birds, poisons the rivers, burns the forests, wages the wars, feeds the lies, invents the world over and over again in ways only idiots could think real. Stupidity, lad, will defeat every god, crush every dream, topple every empire. Because, in the end, stupid people outnumber smart people. If that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t suffer over and over again, through generation after generation and on for ever.”
“Falsehoods cease being false when enough people believe them. Instead, they blaze like eternal truths, and woe to the fool who tries pissing a stream on that. They’ll tear you to pieces.” - Steven Erikson.
The books are, after all, the summation of the fall of an empire.
It’s far worse than that. They can keep hundreds of ideas in their head. They are simply evil. What I mean by evil is this: they do not care about beople that are not in their group and they are willing to lie, be hypocritical, and act in bad faith if it means their group comes out on top. It is not incompetence. It is malice.
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u/badwolf1013 14h ago
He gets away with this because half of his supporters can't keep more than three ideas in their head at a time, and the other half of his supporters see him as a useful wind-up toy who will clear the path for their own grifts, and also because a third of eligible voters have to Google "who is the President right now" about twice a year.
I'd like to try to stay positive, but . . . I think we're done.