The Country is Held Hostage By the Fifth Dentist

 

Whenever I think about the 27% crazification factor (as an old-head blogger), I think about the vintage commercials about "four out of five dentists" thing when I was a kid. You don't know that fifth dentist in the survey. Maybe he just doesn't endorse products. Maybe he thinks chewing gum at all is a disgusting habit. Survey questions don't actually tell the whole tale of what the respondents believe, and that's a large part of why I feel like making a big deal out of polling can be kind of stupid. 

You can get poll numbers for people who blame Obama for the Katrina response. You aren't getting a snapshot of what people know. You are getting a snapshot of what they don't know but definitely feel. You are learning where the public messaging needs to concentrate and do better at factual/useful information. This is why polling about whether Biden could do more about fuel prices is stupid. You aren't gauging a fact--but the degree to which people understand the facts that we are not a socialist economy, and Biden doesn't control fuel prices. 

It would be great, I think, if actual journalists who cared whether they were doing a good job or not, actually used these polls as a yardstick to whether they were doing a great job of getting facts out there. Maybe poll numbers that deviate from reality aren't a partisan problem, so much as a failure to break out of "both-sidesing" stories to play pretend impartiality as opposed to the real thing of exposing absolute partisan shitbaggery. Maybe truth is the job of journalists to promote, not the job of partisans to correct the record. 

And yeah, I'd like it if Democrats could message better to overcome this shit, But I get why they haven't. It's so pervasive.

I don't have to tell you about my output for free vs. the well-paid columnists.  I try to self-factcheck. I try to be best blogger practices compliant. So let's talk about the fifth dentist who is a QAnon-believing SOB, because that is the crazification factor out loud and in public. That's nuts, right? How can so many people side with QAnon Satanic panic/blood libel bullshit? 

I would presume in part it is ignorance. Not everyone is like me and read Robert Anton Wilson at age 14 and learned to read in toddlerhood from the Bible and a 1970 Guiness World Book of Records. I'm stooled for the bizarre. I cut my baby teeth on human exceptions and the idea that religion is literary criticism made moral law. I am roundly familiar with conspiracy theory and stay skeptical about all supposedly dictated reality. I believe in empiricism.  I don't know unless I know. 

So maybe I have a "little" sympathy for Ginni Thomas and her probable white racist family and her susceptibility to Qanon because she was in a cult previously. Because she is definitely red-pilled and in thrall to QAnon, even if she thought NLP and other break-down processes were no longer were fucking her up. They were. But she also thought she could use that shit. And for that I have no sympathy. 

I mean, one of the gurus she cited also claimed to have arrested the Pope.  That's clearly something that could be checked against reality, right? A normal person could determine that was wrong? 

But the problem with conspiracy theory is that the person believing doesn't want the lie to fail. And they will believe increasingly weird things in the hopes that the belief becomes the reality. Like being "digitiled". 

This person believes that someone wants to put a chip in her to make her do things whether she wants to or not, and is going to drive in circles because the little people in her tv tell her to prove it. This sounds so incredibly stupid, until you realize Trump's former NSA, who was definitely working for Turkey if not also Russia when he was going to be a US cabinet member, said this exact thing out loud. And so many true believers were driving in circles and peeing their pants over exactly this level of confused signifying bullshit. 

The failure of critical thinking here, and the willingness to commit to utter nonsense, tells us what we're looking at. Cult shit. Pure Aum Shinriko endtimes setting the eschaton off type stuff. 

I could not tell you how many people on the political right in this country are associated with any cult, whether Moonies or whatever else. But some significant portion of the right is definitely all in on cult shit, and that is some very bad juju. Because that means they aren't persuaded by reality anymore. They are self-proving based on their own bullshit. And you can't reckon with red pilled self-devouring Ouroborous killer cultists. 

But very explicitly. And by calling out the lies, and deprogramming. But the leaders have a very different fate.