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A comment on ‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing This Country Today?’. Parent comment

Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by x0x0 on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @02:38AM (#13752037)
There's blame to go around. First, certain people, predominantly conservative, realized they could monetize stupidity. That saying outrageous lies would create great wealth for them, and they gleefully jumped in. Look how wealthy Rush Limbaugh became, or how Michael Flynn, an advisor to the president, was involved in pushing Pizzagate, a theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a pizza shop [0]. This man was briefly our national security advisor.

   Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a 
   fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had 
   found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to 
   pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies.
I also blame the institutions themselves.

The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]:

   Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was 
   sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to 
   criminal or civil authorities.
Or remember when George Bush promised there were WMD in Iraq, and fired Larry Lindsey for saying the costs of the Iraq war might reach $100B [2], and fired General Shinseki for correctly estimating how many troops would be required [3]? Right before we proceeded to kill a half million Iraqis and 5k+ Americans for what?

Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up?

Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency?

Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ...

Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn...

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by veidr on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @03:48AM (#13752322)
I upvoted you because it's disheartening, especially in the context of this thread, to see your mini-rant downvoted when it's mostly just a bunch of easily-verifiable facts that may make some people uncomfortable.

One quibble: are those people really "conservative"? Even if so, is that the attribute that is most relevant to this discussion?

Flynn is a perfect example: he's ostensibly "conservative" but he's also a pretty twisted combination of a gullible rube, a liar, and a batshit-crazy whack job.

I don't quite have a word for that combinational trait, but I think that's the key attribute.

There are quite a few people who self-identify as "conservative" but don't fall into this additional category of truth-impervious objective-reality-deniers.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by x0x0 on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @04:19AM (#13752448)
I assume you believe Republicans are conservative? Trump is a Republican, as is Flynn. Senate Majority Leader McConnell: "[...] proceeding with [the Republican] agenda which is exactly the same as the Trump agenda" [1].

I challenge you to find anything similar to Pizzagate, or Obama is a gay Kenyan, or denial of anthropogenic global warming, or similar that is widely believed and publicly supported by Democrats elected to national office. I'll admit some wackos on the left are vaccine truthers, but again: they do not hold national elective office. It's really all conservatives, and there aren't Democrats in national office speaking in glossolalia.

[1] http://www.voanews.com/a/trump-budget-priorities-speech-cong...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by veidr on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @04:57AM (#13752588)
Yes, but most Republicans I actually know (granted, definitely not a representative sample) were aghast that Trump won their party's nomination, and didn't vote for him (thought most made it a protest vote of some kind, not voting for Clinton either).

They are "conservative" but they assumed that Trump's continuous barrage of easily-debunked lies and blatant disrespect for the intelligence of his audience would prevent his victory.

Still, I will concede your point that the "conservative" population in the USA seems to be more greatly affected by this kind of "reality rejection syndrome". I don't think Trump really has any coherent political ideology; I think he just chose to pwn the Republican party because they had the most rubes susceptible to his brand of snake oil.

(I feel like that might just be because a big segment of that population is angrier than most people, but who knows.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing T... by croon on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @04:28AM (#13752489)
Sure, but Flynn was plenty defended and people calling it a "hitjob" getting him resigned.

At some point you need to start including Pence, Preibus, Chaffetz, Mcconnnell, etc. While I fully agree that the Venn diagram doesn't include all conservatives in the reality-rejecting circle, there is a too large of an overlap to ignore.

I'm not including Miller and Bannon in conservatives, because they're clearly motivated by something else/worse.

But it's like Christians in America, or radical Muslims. Terrible things are neither inherently Christian nor Muslim, but it's not too difficult for atheists to lump those traits to bad actors.

TL;DR: I agree, to a point.

[ Parent | on HN ]