The Dupes Leading the Dopes

 

Greene: I have never seen the CDC coming out and saying you’ve got to get your second Polio shot, you gotta get your third.. pic.twitter.com/KqXjvZpBFt

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 17, 2022

The actual protocol for polio shorts is four. Four polio shots. She has children. If she takes them to the pediatrician, she should be aware about the cycle of vaccinations recommended by doctors. She should have literally seen this in action. I really hope her kids are fully vaccinated for all the things. But I'm using this foolishness as an obvious example for her other foolishness: her disgraceful support of Putin's war, and literal regurgitation of Russian talking points. And there is a relationship between being antivax and pro-Putin. 

I don't think she has the critical thinking capacity to actually ever do a basic fact-check to understand whether her assumptions make any damn sense in the world, and there enlies (as her good friend Lauren Boebert might say) the problem. She doesn't know she's wrong, doesn't care she's wrong, won't even check if she might be.  So if a possibly incendiary viewpoint that will get eyeballs on her exists, she'll perform. And if this seems like I'm denying her having the agency to do any better, what the hell--I am. 

Murc's Law appears to assume that the idea that conservatives lack agency is a frame, but for some of these hopeless assholes, it might actually be a fact. I can't assume that Margarine Tater Grease has a better than potato level of consciousness because she certainly never displays it. She's a potato where every eye is blind. 

And let's look at Candace Owens. 

Candace Owens: “Ukraine wasn't a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians”https://t.co/q7oaHcNGrl pic.twitter.com/dQ0bfLUvnX

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 16, 2022

Holy shit. Everything about that is 100% Russian talking point, with no pause for thought at all in between. And her level of absolute unthinking talking point regurgitation was utterly by plan. This young woman never graduated college. She is compensated for her fuckery. She smiles as she says things any fool would know was entirely horseshit with the certainty of a person with a paycheck that says its fine to lie her ass off. In her Cosby sweater and smugness. She hasn't the faintest idea whether what she's saying is right. I hope. Because if she did understand, the weight of the maternity hospital, the theater, carefully marked to say children where sheltering there. Herself a mother. Could she bring herself to think of the children of Ukraine? 

Ukraine existed before Russia and has been consistently a place with a sense of nationhood, whether recognized as a nation or not. It was certainly not created in 1989, but even if it was, let's say 30-something years after the US was created, we were invaded and told not to be the USA--are new nations not supposed to count? Is the ownership of yesterday supposed to exist forever? Can Russia take back Alaska because of "used to be?" 

What she's positing is not a valid argument based on anything at all--it isn't supposed to be an opener of a good discussion, but a bad faith farrago of lies to shut a conversation down. 

The dynamic we are seeing here is people raised to some level of public trust (through a wonky permission structure based on popularity, not trustworthiness) who are disseminating disinfo because it matches their biases, not because they vetted it for factual content.  And that leads to mistaken conclusions, because bad information does not get you good results. There's a reason that being anti-vax makes you more likely to be pro Trump and pro Russia. It's not just an algorithm or an association of contagious thought from various contacts--but a lassitude of mind that can't actually refrain from embracing the most pre-chewed and gently spit out version of reality. The Pre-Thought. The Post-Cogitation. The Concluded without doing the work. The Branding and the excitation of Libido. 

Eh, What I am saying is we have a bad case out here of dumb people telling lies whether knowingly or not to what they hope are still dumber people. If you would rather not be dumb, figure out who the dupes are and refrain from listening to them.