Ignoramus In Chief

To witness the sheer ignorance displayed by the current president of the United States of America, is enough to boggle the mind of any rational person, but what's even more amazing is that this man has somehow garnered enough prestige to get away with it, time after time again.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Or maybe it's not so amazing; we live in a post-truth world, the fictional reality I discussed in yesterday's post, Welcome To The Real World. We are capable of amazing feats, but we're equally capable of internalizing the most outrageous lies, just because those lies are truths in the mental fabric we've built on top of actual objective reality. An example I neglected to mention yesterday is "overpopulation"; it was the central theme in one of the most successful movie of all times, Avengers: Infinity War, in which the antagonist Thanos wants to kill half the population of the universe. Overpopulation is one of the most dangerous lies sprung forth from a mental construct dominated by the ideology of capitalism; there's no such thing as overpopulation in the real world. In the real world we produce far too much food and goods for the number of Earth's inhabitants and we can feed the entire population twice over. In the real world we could fit the entire population of more than 7 billion people on the 268,000 square kilometers of New Zealand; there's no shortage of room whatsoever. Only because scarcity and poverty are key features, not bugs, of capitalism, do so many people still believe such obvious nonsense.

Because this scarcity-mindset rules our behavior, we indeed create the scarcity for capitalism to function in the real lifes of real human beings; corporations don't give away the tons of excess food to those who need it to survive, because the cost of giving it away exceeds the cost of just throwing it away or destroying it. In the fake landscape of the capitalist mentality, throwing food away is the RIGHT thing to do. The only reason we don't fight climate change like we should, is because burning fossil fuels is more profitable than using sustainable energy, of which there is more than enough. When politicians and right wingers ask "how are you going to pay for that" whenever a proposition is made that would actually improve the real world and real lifes, they do so "reasoning" within the capitalist framework. There are NO other reasons. But Donald Trump wouldn't know that, or much else for that matter; he is representative of many things, and one of those is the ugly and dangerous nature of anti-intellectualism.

Anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism, commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy and the dismissal of art, literature, and science as impractical, politically motivated, and even contemptible human pursuits.
_{source: Wikipedia}

In his public addresses Trump exhumes disdain toward the experts that surround him, and he consistently refutes scientific evidence when such evidence would compel him to take actions that he THINKS would damage his approval ratings or his chances for re-election. He postures as a champion of common folk and, like many populist demagogues, puts forward simple "solutions" to complex problems, or simply denies those problems altogether; it's noteworthy that he first called climate change a "Chinese hoax", and initially called the current global pandemic a "new hoax" by the Democrats to damage him and his administration. This anti-intellectualism is a feature of our post-truth unreality, and visible everywhere; people are actually proud of being uneducated and ignorant, and accuse those who know better of "over-analyzing" or indecisiveness. They equate the decisiveness that comes along with the simple solutions of their "champion of the people" with strong leadership. They believe, much like in any fascist framework, we need leaders that act, not leaders that think first; a man of action, not of words.

And so we watch the Titanic sink while the band just keeps on playing the tunes that distract us from the apocalypse happening around us. You can not see a red flag when you view the world through rose-tinted glasses. Thanos was wrong. Trump is wrong. Capitalism is wrong. Wouldn't it be nice if we were right for a change? Why not ponder on that possibility while watching the below linked entertaining video about what's going wrong in America, why the "American Dream" is rapidly becoming the "American Nightmare"...

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