Friday, June 16, 2023

On Name Recognition and RFK Jr.

 


A certain nepobaby running (at the behest of Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn, because why not?) in the 2024 Democratic primary has insinuated the CIA might kill him.  Me? I think who you hang with matters.  And if you're an anti-vaxx dipshit who hangs with white supremacists, yeah, I have a huge problem with you. But I doubt that the CIA would need to bother, because this man is a danger to himself and others, but not in the way that gets you un-alived by spooks. 

Even though he's a fountain of Russian propaganda about US officials doing bioweapons. He thinks psychiatric drugs are the reason for mass shootings

He was certainly named for his father, but other than my belief his mother was an honest woman, I'd be hard-pressed to see either his father's intelligence oR compassion anywhere in this privileged puffed-up twit. I guess what I'm trying to say is--

He's not offbeat or contrarian or beating his own drum or whatever. He's an idiot. He's an idiot with name recognition because he got named for his dad. It really isn't deeper than that. And that he might get any penetration based on the name recognition from his ancestral betters, gone these many decades, is a thing shocking to contemplate.

And yet, can we doubt that if a certain former president were not part of a successful reality show for several years, he might not have done so well electorally?

(Read my Twitter thread. It has links.)


5 comments:

Ten Bears said...

The Kennedys are dead, and those of popular memory weren't exactly angels ...

Vixen Strangely said...

They were not (the Kennedy hagiography has long bothered me) but they were at least, more self-aware than this tin-foil hatted rodent dildo.

Bazzer said...

He wasn't always an idiot - or at least not an obvious one. I read one of his books, it was on the 2004 election, and it was very cogent and seemingly sane. I think he lost his way as many other people have.

Vixen Strangely said...

Yeah--I think about folks like Lara Logan, Maria Bartiromo, Naomi Wolf, Max Blumenthal, to an extent Sy Hersch--all really competent people at one time, and whose cheese has entirely slipped off their cracker. I actually admired RFk Jr. a time ago because of his environmental activism and promotion--completely sound as a dollar. But I've noticed a handful of things that seem to make formerly capable not-lunatic people into ravers, eventually:

Thinking in absolutes: People get fixed ideas in their heads that poison their ability to see the bigger picture, like "Corporations are always bad", "America is always wrong on foreign policy", "fighting in wars is always wrong", "Liberals are always bad (Communists, Anarchists, and Terrorists)", "the media is always conspiring against conservatives", etc. It's possible that RFK Jr. conceived his weird hatred of pharma from observing the way science is misused by the fossil fuel industry to deceive people--but these businesses have very different models. While Big Pharma does behave in ways that are unethical (price-gouging, the opioid crisis) they are not wholesale benefiting from poisoning their customers or being bad at science. It's a whole different business model. They suck, but in other ways! I like to use the "Sombunal Remedy": Some but not all corporations are bad. Some, but not all politicians are corrupt. Some, but not all American foreign policy choices have been about the military-industrial complex. (I'm even giving some but not all clergy are grifters and some but not all cops are bastards. You gotta be reasonable.)

Feeling things are so and never actually checking: I sure do love a story that confirms my biases. Man, I sure do hate passing on a story that confirms my biases that turns out to be full of shit. But some people just start passing along those full of shit stories because nihilism and the joy of feeling right and never, never look back.

Confusing kneejerk contrarianism with being a whole-ass flipping prophet: If I'm saying something different from the mainstream, look at me, being an independent thinker, unswayed by the trite sayings of those other mentalities. If people are screaming at me from all sides I must be on to something. I'm a voice crying in the wilderness, I am. (Or people are screaming at me because I am hurting people and have stopped listening to reason. cough cough JK Rowling.)

Just wanting to be loved: This one hurts and it's how people end up in cults. They want to be heard, they want to be liked, they found people who seem to listen and like them, and now they are down with whatever those folks are down with. Wi-Fi is mind control. Okay. Human trafficking in pizza restaurants, whatever. Hillary Clinton is the Whore of Babylon. I said it. Somebody love me.

Orwell had it right, it's a constant effort to see what's right in front of your face. But you don't debate two and two equal four. That's letting Big Brother win. Some things are just facts, and some things are just bullshit. And it's a kind of unenlightenment, an unwokening, if you will, to give in to the pull of the bullshit.

Bazzer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.

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