It seems like it shouldn’t even be possible to be that irrational and function - like a person whose brain is that broken could never even make it out of the house because they can’t figure out how to work a doorknob.

I’m not an anarchist by chance.

Thanks for the response.

So at the very least, one would think there would be some sort of consequences for the plain fact that Trump’s thugs keep blatantly lying.

Furure sociologists are going to be spending entire careers trying to sort out how the US went so badly wrong.

Methinks they doth protest too much

It’s increasingly obvious that the classified dicuments thing wasn’t just an oversight or even merely an attempt to profit, but a significant and almost certainly treasonous criminal act with sufficient evidence that they have no hope of fighting it, so can only try to bury it.

Causing harm to civilians in order to coerce the submission of a government is the very definition of terrorism

Oh gee - who would’ve guessed that that brazenly compromised piece of shit Aileen Cannon would issue yet another bullshit ruling to protect Trump from the justice he deserves and she’s sworn to uphold?

There are times I almost feel sorry for conservatives.

Many of them genuinely don’t know any better. They’re crippled by stupidity, ignorance and/or neurosis and can’t see that their views are irrational at best, and they’re frightened and intimidated and thus angered by conflicting views, and further crippled by cognitive dissonance. And they can’t even consider the possibility that their views aren’t generally promoted in higher education simply because they’re irrational, so they instead want to ascribe it to censorship. And that seems likely to them because they themselves are frightened by opposing views and demand their censorship, and they just project that weakness onto others.

It’s an ugly little trap that inevitably just leads to them becoming more and more frightened and angry and willfully ignorant, and means that they’re going to grow old and die still locked in that ugly, hateful, frightened trap of their own making.

But I only almost feel sorry for them, because I always come back to the fact that they’re fucking assholes who are actively destroying everything of any actual value that humanity might accomplish.

Well… yeah. I thonk it’s fairly self-evident that individuals have different threaholds for suspension of disbelief, and that the thresholds even vary between subjects with a given individual (for example, it’s harder to maintain suspension of disbelief relative to an area in which one has expertise).

But that’s not really relevant - I just included “acceptably” to be more precise and accurate.

The relevant part is the core idea that the mechanism by which at least some seemingly rational people support blitheringly insane and factually unsupportable political views is not really some combination of prejudices and biases by which they convince themselves of the nominal truth and correspondence to reality of their beliefs, but by engaging in suspension of disbelief - by entirely switching off the parts of their brain that measure truth and correspondence with reality, just as I do when I read a novel or watch a movie.

I certainly don’t know that to be the case, but it’s a fascinating possibility

…there might well be something to that.

Yes - exactly as you say, research needs to be done on suspension of disbelief.

And thanks for sharing that fascinating idea.

Not quite.

Suspension of disbelief refers to the act of essentially switching off the parts of ones mind that check for truth and reality, and simply following a narrative on its own terms, whatever they might be.

It’s not that truth or reality are unnecessary under suspension of disbelief - they aren’t even relevant.

I think this is a fascinating idea.

And I just tried to explain it to a friend and she didn’t get it, then I came back to the thread to find respondents who didn’t get it in the same way she didn’t.

She kept trying to warp it into something like confirmation bias, even though I kept trying to get her to see that the significant thing about suspension of disbelief is that truth and reality don’t even enter into it - they aren’t even meaningful concepts.

The only thing that’s necessary when disbelief is suspended is that the narrative remain acceptably internally consistent. Whether itt true or not or corresponds with reality or not is entirely irrelevant, since the entire process of expectng and testing for those qualities has been set aside.

Again, that’s a fascinating idea. I’ve long suspected that Trump is unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, but that that was a consequence of his narcissism and egotism - that effectively the only measure he has for truth or falsehood is whether he believes something to be true or not - that the concept of consensual reality isn’t even coherent in his entirely self-absorbed internal reality.

But I’ve long wondered how the at least somewhat more sane people following him manage it. Something like confirmation bias would only work up to a point that Trump has long since gone beyond.

And I think you might be on to something - just as I do when I sit down to read a novel or watch a movie or a series, when they start engaging in politics, they switch the parts of their brains that track truth and reality entirely off and instead just follow along with the narrative, whatever it might be.

I know this is meant as sarcasm, but honestly I sometimes suspect it’s actually to some notable degree true.

First, Trump is collecting so much graft from so many different sources that there’s no way he could serve all of their interests, and he likely can’t even keep track of them all.

Beyond that though, I think that to some degree he actually pushes for things like coal power and gas-guzzling cars and open discrimination against minorities and LGBTQ+ people living in fear because they’re nostalgic reminders of his privileged childhood as an ignorant racist serial-raping piece of shit living off of someone else’s money.

You know - as opposed to his more difficult adulthood as an ignorant racist serial-raping piece of shit living off of someone else’s money…

It’s 1920 and the Pentagon just bought billions of dollars worth of buggy whips.

Republicans can’t win free and fair elections so they’re trying to eliminate free and fair elections.

By design.

Even stronger faith I’d say, since billionaires aren’t actively conspiring with politicians to keep you out of heaven.

Okay - here’s the moment again.

Frey could go down in history as a hero. All he needs to do is call a press conference and give a speech with a bit of background, then say something like, “So I would like to take this opportunity to, on behalf of the fine people of Minneapolis, say to Donald Trump (look straight at camera) ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Thank you very much.”

Somebody needs to do it, and very publicly. And the moment that someone does, the dam is going to break and "Go fuck yourself"s are going to start rolling in from all over the world.

The fact that he won’t be has no bearing at all on the fact that he should be.

The President of the United States is a deranged lunatic and needs to be removed from office per the 25th Amendment.

It would almost be better of Trump was a conscious agent deliberately working for the benefit of China, but he’s just an angry, petulant, bigoted moron whose rage and greed and stupidity have pretty much guaranteed that China is going to lead the world in pretty much everything in the coming years while the US clings increasingly desperately to a mostly illusory past.