proximoception | (no subject)

From W. Post:

"I think the surprise of a great many in the White House was that as soon as this became a Trump decision, all of the Democrats who had long been calling for Comey’s ouster decided that this was now an awful decision,” Dubke said. “So there was a surprise at the politicization of Democrats on this so immediately and so universally.”

This is likely bullshit, just a way to pretend that they're unaware they did something that looks like obstruction of justice (hoping this appearance of innocence will create the impression they fired him for legit reasons), but if it isn't ... it's kind of fascinating. And if untrue of the players it must be at least true of many of the people being played - they assume Democrats love and hate merely for partisan reasons rather than based on, like, thinking. They're so dumb they don't know non-dumb is possible.

Though even there the surprise doesn't quite make sense, since if Democrats are operating by lizard brain rules shouldn't the enemy of one's worst enemy become one's friend ... or something? The argument could be made that right wingers are used to things being put on a Hate List from which they can never be removed, I guess, but that seems belied by, you know, their new embrace of condemning Comey's handling of the Abedin development, which loads of them thought was the best thing ever. So Dubke would have to be assuming that Democrats aren't just partisans but some extremely dumb version thereof. Maybe that's how he accounts for the fact that, unlike Republicans, Democrats do not tend to switch positions, but keep loving and hating who or what they did before. To someone who doesn't understand them, ethical principles might look like excessively sluggish groupthink. Our day's hate's so 2008, would then be their read on why we're so opposed to their mass-murder-by-negligence health bill.

No, it's not that, surely. Nor is it quite the bullshit thing. It's that when your group loyalties require you to believe bullshit that's so ridiculous it simply can't be believed any snapshot of your head will be like one of those photographs from The Ring. The syllogisms you're using to explain your own actions all have to blur out at some point. You need to switch assumptions mid-clause just to finish any sentence. Conway's speediness explains why she can do this - Trump's too. You need to keep hurtling forward so you never have time to listen to yourself. Trump said something much like that at one point, as I recall - about not analyzing his actions or motivations because he's afraid of what he'll see. People who are too slow to be blithe are going to have more trouble with this. Like with Spicer needing the lights off by those hedges.

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Since last fall I'm questioning everything I ever thought about USA politics. The R party is clearly just a rogue PR platform for the massive and growing inequality of the ruling class. None of them believe anything they say when it comes to any moral issue. That huge chunks of non-elites do, though, remains staggering. They've succeeded in flipping reality entirely.

Good point. I remember thinking on my first long visits back to America c. 2004 that parts of the country were getting richer than I could ever have imagined possible - and those same parts are now much richer than that. I'm less sure inequality's the story than wealth itself. It makes so much of life artificial and so many of the people who get anywhere near positions of influence have so much of it.

They go hand in hand. When you have the top 10% of families with 76% of the country's wealth and bottom 50% of families with 1% of the wealth you have to have an amazing PR game to distract people from the gigantic immorality of the set up. You make that not a moral issue and distract with moral arguments about other things like abortion and immigration. With the present world's transparency it's getting harder and harder to pull off.

They seem to be simultaneously losing the public on an issue-by-issue basis but successfully keeping their pawns in office. A lot of it's that they're getting very good at aiming their money fire hose and at scaring people in the right ways at the right times.

But what I mean is that I don't think that shit would work so well if a huge chunk of voters weren't enveloped in various comfort cocoons - foodwise, sexwise, shoppingwise, entertainmentwise, ideaswise, home-and-self-decorationwise. The 10 percent can squeeze the fuck out of the bottom 40 percent because the 50 percent chunk in between is scarcely ever touched by political reality. They spend most of what they get so "wealth" isn't the right word, but money is. On paper they're not much richer than in 1980, perhaps, but they were richer then than any national majority had ever been, and unlike those Americans have largely been raised in a nation where that's been true for decades. And their TVs are larger and brighter and distractinger, their lawns landscapier, their cars bigger and wombier and shinier, their fingernails more colorful, plus they're drowning in sugar and their phones have gone mad. I'm just repeating all the the stuff we all complain about, but I think even though we're aware of all of it we can forget how it all interacts, or how it makes the average American a new sort of beast.

And when this middle-to-lower-upper earning group does open its eyes briefly, like it had to with the great recession, it's so unused to the light that it's easy to trick with mirages. There's honorably low information voters - not educated, not enough time, haven't seen enough of the world - and then there's a second group we don't really have a name for since we abandoned "bourgeois." "Suburbanite" fit once, but the suburbs have invaded the inner cities via gentrification and the countryside via ... well, mostly by the great increase in the number of places that would be considered cities by 1960 standards. Brains and need will keep two slightly-overlapping groups of people woke but overmet needs have put the others into some amazingly deep forms of sleep.

Not saying voters of generations past weren't generally morons but this particular flavor of extra-protected moron didn't predominate. Is what I meant about wealth. Fox News can only make into jackasses people already lounging around much of the day and inclined to hear only what flatters them. You're right that better info is changing things, but the ability to not care how uninformed one is has been making advances too.

Yeah. Well said. Not sure if it's scary or thrilling that it's not sustainable. When Jeff Bezos has every American dollar, then what happens.