Too Stupid To Live (Repost)

I know--we're running past Diogenes posts the way broadcast TV used to do summer reruns. Just hang on a bit longer, please, and enjoy these if you missed them first time.

Today's title is the favorite saying of a former workmate. It's harsh, but there are some cases in which it seems apt.

To wit: People who blindly follow Donald Trump.

Near the top of the long list of things I do not understand is why anyone would follow Trump for any reason. I think they actually don't follow, because he has proven himself not to be a leader. Perhaps a better word would be adherents: they are drawn to him unconsciously, and just sort of clump around him.

Having thought about this for a while I've decided Trump's human conglomeration can be divided into four groups, as follows:

Toadies and minions

These are people who are in some way beholden to the unpresident or feel a strong attraction to him. The group includes his staff, the Cabinet, associate Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and probably most Congressional Republicans.

For many politicians, bureaucrats, and functionaries, D. C. is Nirvana, the Promised Land, and El Dorado. Most of them are power junkies who prize being near the center of power above all. The closer they can bind themselves to the chief executive, the more power adheres to them. Many of this group don't care who the president is. All they want is to keep hanging on to a job that keeps them near the Omphalos of government, and they will do anything the incumbent asks of them to stay in it.

The Party Faithful

There is some overlap between this group and the toadies and minions, but it isn't huge. By and large these people have been staunch Republicans all their lives, and are likely the children of Republicans. A good number of them have been in office far too long. They still wistfully refer to the Grand Old Party, but deep down they know the Republican Party is broken. The president is nominally Republican, but they can't go to him to fix it, because they now know he's the one who broke it. Nonetheless, when November 3 rolls around they will hold their noses and vote for him, because, by God, they're Republicans, and they vote for Republicans, period.

The Mob

I don't know if The Mob is the largest of these four groups, but they are the ones who are most visible and make the most noise. I equate them with British yobs, who can turn any soccer match into a bar brawl.

They're not political. They come out for the action, to confront protesters and/or cops, to strut around shirtless waving Trump flags, to pointedly defy rules (e.g. wearing masks), and to shout slogans about foreigners and minorities. If they have a goal it is to show the Dumbass-in-Chief that they are men, too, and they identify with his anger and his displeasure with anyone who doesn't agree with him or isn't like him. (I'm sorry for all the masculine pronouns, but this group is testosterone fueled.)

The Fringe

This is the group I was thinking of when I decided on the title. The fringe is the group that gets their news from social media and takes as Gospel anything uttered by their ultra-right authority figure du jour, be it the Idiot Child-in-Chief, Archdemon Mitch McConnell, the faceless Q of Qanon, Sean Hannity, or their foreman at work.

They propagate and embroider conspiracy theories with such outrageous premises that any reasonable (not to say sane) person would reject them out of hand. Yet they hold to these beliefs like religion because someone they believe to be in authority said it was so. It's easy to dismiss them as gullible fools and paranoiacs, but we would do so at our peril.

Because these people so desperately need something to follow or to believe in, they will believe virtually anything. They become easy to manipulate, and the darker corners of the Web where they like to hang out are perfect places to recruit and persuade them to a cause. If all this sounds just too "out there," I recommend this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/ 

Don't read it before bed.


--- Diogenes, 8/13/2020     Reposted 10/14/2020

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America v. Америка (Repost)

Diogenes is on his way back. Here's another repost from his greatest hits.

There was a time when "America" was synonymous with strength, justice, freedom, opportunity, enlightenment, peace, cooperation, fairness, and understanding.

Other nations looked to us for leadership, for assistance, for intervention, for friendship, for alliances.

Now we are shunned by many other countries. We have become an outlier, indeed a pariah of the community of nations where we were once a major player.

Once when we spoke, nations listened; now they snicker.

This downfall of America's reputation has been brought about single-handedly by the ill-begotten president, Donald Trump. Tyrannis Trump has spent his term trying to change America into what he thinks it should be.

The unpresident's psychopathy dictates that the world has to be Trumpcentric. Whether he'll manage to make the world in his own image is doubtful, but he's been working hard to transform this nation into something he may have seen in a dream.

Trump's ultimate delusional goal is an America for Americans only, by which he means white English-speaking non-Catholic Christians. There is no place in his philosophy for people of any color or ethnicity, including the indigenous nations who were here long before Europeans arrived.

He was elected on a platform of racism, xenophobia, and paranoia. His only clearly stated plan was to build a wall to keep Mexicans out. By May 2020, only 3 miles out of 194 miles of wall constructed or replaced under the Trump administration was new fencing. The border is 1,954 miles long.

After almost 4 years of boasting about the wall and its progress the Bricklayer-in-Chief has only managed to add one-tenth of one percent to what already stood before he was elected. And everything that stands is only 10 percent of the length of the border.

He has steadily worked to isolate the United States from the rest of the world. He has used flimsy and nonsensical reasons to remove the U.S. from several organizations and agreements, including:

• The Paris Climate Agreement
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade bloc
• UNESCO, the UN's culture and education body
• The UN Human Rights Council, responsible for the promotion and protection of all human rights around the globe
• The UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees in the Near East
• The Iran nuclear accord
• The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty required the U. S. and the Soviet Union to eliminate all nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers
• The Open Skies Treaty allows member nations to overfly other members' territory to collect data on military forces and activities
• and others, including a possible withdrawal from the World Health Organization; he has threatened to withdraw but not carried through

 

Two trends are clear: (1) The Divider-in-Chief is taking the U.S. out of organizations and treaties that involve helping or dealing with ethnicities or races he doesn't like; (2) He is trying to control foreign nuclear weapon expansion while removing hindrances on American weapons development.

The Bumbler-in-Chief has never set out any coherent plan or policy, but the actions above reveal a sort of stream-of-consciousness approach to distancing the United States from the general community of nations.

Isolationism has never worked for the United States. Had Trump ever looked at the history of his own country, he might have come across Thomas Jefferson's 1801 inaugural address, in which he described his vision of American isolationism: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none…”¹

American presidents have never been able to avoid those entangling alliances. Whether coming to the defense of fellow republics or defending America's own interests, presidents and Congresses have become entangled, usually because it was the right thing to do.

That is a foreign concept to Trump. Everything he does is for his own personal gain and interest, and if anyone else can decipher what that is, they're not talking.

Isolationism is impossible when every citizen has access to worldwide communication. Citizens of the isolationist countries North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, among others, don't have this access.

Don't let the Isolator-in-Chief add the United States of America to that list.


--- Diogenes, 8/23/2020   (Reposted 10/11/2020)

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¹ Robert Longley, "The Evolution of American Isolationism," https://www.thoughtco.com/the-evolution-of-american-isolationism-4123832