Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats

[HCGLNS]

My statement is based kn two things; the next four years will be an unimaginable disaster for the American people, and it will all be the Democrats fault.

Tribalism worships victories and achievements of their own and blame others for all else. Without any actual accomplishments, what will their be to remember and celibrate? Feelings will fade quickly and all of the moronic things cumsock will be responsible for will still be felt, they will never be assigned to him.

I'm not saying his moronic policies will not linger and percolate for decades of pain and suffering. I'm saying none of it will be attached to him, and America will move on to the next big thing.

"History doesn't remember failures, but historians can find them."

 

[PatrThom]

it will all be the Democrats fault.

I don't think we can lay this blame 100% at the feet of "The Democrats," because "Didn't do a good enough job of educating/convincing the American public" isn't a tale you can pin on the D any more than you can say, "The fact that students are so dumb these days is all the teachers' fault." I mean, you could certainly say it, but it's not true.

The populace is being goaded (encouraged, even!*) into thinking with their amygdala instead of their prefrontal cortex, and this is the result.

--Patrick
*Think about video games. Which ones are the most popular? Turn-based ones that reward careful consideration and planning? Or action-based ones which require timing and split-second decision making? And this is not a comment about video games destroying minds or anything like that, it is about measuring different games' popularity as a barometer to measure sentiment. I wonder if @MindDetective or someone else knows whether anyone has tried to do this? Chart the ebb and flow of game emergence/popularity (not just video games) and try to correlate it with the dominant social norms, as opposed to painting games as the reason for/cause of social behavior? Especially since the emphasis on "engagement" means that people are no longer able to spread their leisure time across multiple games, so they are forced to distill their attention down to fewer and fewer games.

 

[Bubble181]

Sadly, I think it's far too early to call Trump a failure.
He's a villain and a crook and in many ways a pawn in the hands of several interest groups (on the one hand, the extreme right/fascists/Christian fundamentalists who want to install a pseudo-monarchial theocratic state with strict mores; on the other hand big tech/oil/etc who want to install an oligarchy with as little power as possible for lawmakers and consumers).
But history is written by the victors.
It may well be that we look back on Trump as an aberration, as an exponent of general global unhappiness with certain movements, a result of successful hybrid warfare even, the failure of the "completely open" internet under the control of a select few. It may also be that we look back on Trump the we we now look back on Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Hitler - the worst humanity has to offer but somehow managing to convince millions. Or Reagan and Nixon - heroes to half the country, terrible people to the other half. Or he might be the Nero/Caligula of the American hegemonial period.

Perhaps, in a few hundred years, when all of the time period between 1850 and 2050 is considered one big period of radical change and evolution (second Renaissance? Second "decadent fall of the West and rise of a new world order"? Who knows?), he'll be remembered the way we now remember someone like Henry VIII.

We've already lost sight of what is and isn't really real, and what is or isn't propaganda. This will only get worse. Good luck to historians, I say.

 

[@Li3n]

We've already lost sight of what is and isn't really real, and what is or isn't propaganda. This will only get worse. Good luck to historians, I say.

They seem to have done pretty well at figuring it out so far... like, they know for sure Marie Antoinette never said "let them eat cake"... letting the general public know, that's way harder, because, unlike what is being implied by the idea that AI will make it worse, propaganda's effectiveness was always been high all over history.

In the end, the actual thing that make it work isn't being able to fake evidence better, but that old X-Files tag line. People just have to want to believe...