So there’s been discussion here of the many signs of the lack of the necessary reasoning capacity in US voters to support a healthy functioning democracy from the ease with which the innumerable lies of Trump and the GOP are believed, through the swift negative judgement of Biden for many things he can’t control, through misunderstandings, idiocy and outright dumbfuckery on COVID, masks, vaccinations, etc., through the nigh-infinite zombie tropes on climate change, etc., to the way so many voters appear to be ready to overlook the manifest unfitness of the GOP and turn on the Dems this year, etc. ad nauseum.
For most of my life I had this belief that ultimately rationality would prevail, you can’t fool most of the people all of the time, etc.
But I have to tell you guys, I’ve lost those complacent expectations. We humans, including in particular at this moment in time, the US electorate, are fully capable of being such monumental dumbasses that we completely and utterly fuck ourselves. That doesn’t mean we are D0med inherently but rather that my view that we are smarter than that and “in the long run, things will work out” were false.
Basically, we’re at the mercy of random events, a worthless media, political opportunists, nationalists, racists and the luck of the draw if we get through the next few decades.
As evidence of this, I present the following CAPS poll which says:
“62 percent of those polled believed Putin would not be moving against Ukraine if Trump had been president.”
I mean, how do we overcome this? Not this specific point, but the reality that 62% of Americans are capable of reaching that conclusion? That the reasoning processes of so many Americans (and probably most humans) is just not what we secular humanist Roddenberry-hyped folks believed? That, in fact, a majority of voters are feckless idiots?
What the fuck are we gonna do now?