This is how they do it
I refer, of course, to the self-deluded Democrats.
I have an amazing memory. As in, highly unusual bordering on gifted good memory. I can tell you the names of half the kids in my nursery school photo. I remember the granular details of my childhood. I remember the Goose with her goslings on my baby blanky and concluding that it must be Mother Goose™.
So I'm not surprised when my experiences show me that other people have a more limited memory. A much more limited memory.
I believe it is a symptom of the modern era. People get so caught up in work, in the motuwethfrisas routine (h/t Nabokov) that they lose grip. They lose grip on things like memory.
I know someone who is badly afflicted with poor memory. I'll call her Beth, the prototypical Democratic supporter. Her memory is good for about 6 weeks. The other day Beth was talking about the House passing Obamacare repeal, and a Republican noted that it was wrought with problems. She insisted that the problems were solely a result of President Trump. The Republican tried to defend his point, but poorly. I know better than to intervene in these conversations so I kept mum. But I was thinking about articles like this:
From the New York Times, or this from Bloomberg, or this, from the WaPo, circa 2015.
And then it dawned on me, most of America is like Beth, and that is a dangerous fucking thing, because they are reshaping reality as it becomes a memory. Beth is a subscriber to the Washington Post. She reads the New York Times. She wasn't living in a vacuum during 2015 and 2016. But as that information became a memory it was overlaid on top of other fading and mutated memories, all of it shaped by the prejudices of the present.
I always thought Beth had a skewed take on the world. The deeper I delve into her point of view, the more I realize it really isn't grounded in reality at all. It's a fucking fantasy. No wonder the Democrats think all they have to do is think good thoughts and the voters will come back to them.
Comments
Many people know
that when you overload the mind with trivial and useless information it has a detrimental effect on thoughts and events that are important.
Fear is a prime example that those in power use to hide things they don't want seen. It works very well on those who are easily manipulated. Look over there. Big snake. My father once remarked that he hadn't seen as much fear in people even during the great depression as he has witnessed in the last five years.
We need to find a way to channel the fear into anger against those who create said fear. Maybe then things will change.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
You have a nice essay
but I believe an incorrect conclusion:
.
If that sentence refers to the Democratic leaders, which it seems to do, I would suggest a different sentence.
"So the Democrats wonder when the people will start realizing that they are motherfucking rat-bastards as they scoop up their bribes."
I hope you see the irony
There is a hefty amount of self-delusion on both sides there, as the leaders rely on people's short memories to get away with being rat bastards. The people, for their part, realize they are motherfucking rat bastards, but then a few news cycles go by, the memory fades, and it gets overlaid on top of the "Democrats good, Republicans bad" frame they live in, and now the memory of the Democrats being rat bastards becomes kind of vague. 'They're all the same' turns into 'Weren't we talking about Republicans being rat bastards?'
“He may not have gotten the words out but the thoughts were great.”
A primary purpose of msm "news & opinion"
is to frame a picture of the world in such a way as to disconnect current events from any meaningful historical context. The flash and bang of NOW, of BREAKING, and of THE LATEST NEWS is meant to distract public attention away from all thoughtful considerations of reality, and focus it instead upon the loudest, brightest, most sensational "stories" available at any given moment.
These "stories" appear and disappear as passing phenomena in succession, like flashing images, one bearing little or no relation to the next. Before one set of images can be properly analyzed or understood, a new set is presented as being URGENT or IMPORTANT. Mass media consumers are discouraged from thinking much about what has previously happened, and persuaded instead to focus on what is happening NOW, or what might happen SOON.
Msm makes little or no attempt to relate the past with the present, in any meaningful way. The "attention span" of the general public has been deemed "too short" for such an endeavor to be commercially viable. As a result the narrative links between "then" and "now" are repeatedly broken, dissociated, or ignored -- leaving people to wonder stupidly, how the hell we get into the awful situations we get into.
native
we have become what we defeated
https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/
08 MAY 2017
It Can't Happen Here: Pride, Power, Fear, and the Smoking Chimney
"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness...
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.
The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.
He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
POSTED BY JESSE AT 8:49 AM
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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
Surely you've noticed this already?
A quick tour of DKOS indicates that Democrats are largely detached from any sort of objective reality. When I talked to my brother, who is a highly analytical individual I was surprised to find out he also was entirely caught in the liberal bubble. He was so caught that absolutely nothing could be said which would impact that world view.
Are you sure that people don't remember? I'm thinking they never knew. What makes you think Beth rad those sources or simply didn't immediately dismiss them in favor of the rainbows and unicorns myth of the Democratic party? I doubt those data points were ever in Beth's mind just as I know for a fact that my brother has no idea how many bombs we've dropped or how many people we've killed in Syria or even why we are there. Amazingly, he doesn't really care why we're there. He just thinks it was good when Obama did it and bad when Trump did it.
A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
I have a terrible memory...
... but when I'm trying to recall something I once knew, I look it up. Beth's problem is that she reads without a critical eye...without curiosity...without questioning. And yes, the rulers play on the fact that most of us are like Beth: to busy or too uninterested to find out more.