- American idiocy;
- War images flagged for removal in Pentagon DEI purge;
- Why are conservatives obsessed with the debunked link between vaccines and autism?
- Trump and Musk are ungoverning;
I admit that I follow a Facebook group called America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy. It consists of group members posting examples (by others) of what they take as idiocy, for example someone who did not understand the movie:
I follow the group not so much to enjoy seeing the foolish things people say and believe, as to see examples of how people believe things that reflect intuitive knowledge that comes with base human nature, or how the spelling on roadside signs suggests the sign-maker has only ever heard those words spoken and never seen them written down. (Such a sign: “Groj sale”.) At the same time, it’s amusing that a fair number of posts in this group are challenged by other members who claim the example does make sense in some context, and that the poster claiming idiocy is the real idiot. Anyway.
But here’s an example of idiocy, or naivete, or simply ignorance about how the world works. I’ve seen several items about this in recent days. I’ll quote a Facebook post without attribution.
Madness. And yes, people *are* saying things like “Why do we need a government weather service when we can just watch the TV weather report?” as if individual television stations run their own radar and supercomputer simulations. As Pris said, “We’re stupid and we’ll die.”
Or, why do we need farms when we can just go to the store and buy food?
And the people who say these things vote.
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But some of these people are working for the government.
Associated Press (AP), 7 March 2025: War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon’s DEI purge (click the image right once to see the one linked here)
They want to erase history, erase from collective memory anyone who is not a straight white Christian, yet they’re extraordinarily incompetent at it, taking a wrecking-ball approach that destroys much else, and they don’t care, and none of the MAGAites care. How much of recorded history has been like this?
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Why are they so obsessed with this?
Reuters/StreetInsider, 7 Mar 2025: Exclusive-US CDC plans study into vaccines and autism, sources say (via)
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, despite extensive scientific research that has disproven or failed to find evidence of such links.
The CDC’s move comes amid one of the largest measles outbreaks the U.S. has seen in the past decade, with more than 150 cases and two deaths in Texas and New Mexico. The outbreak has been fueled by declining vaccination rates in parts of the United States where parents have been falsely persuaded that such shots do more harm than good.
Here again, I fall back on long-standing conclusions. Conservatives don’t do evidence; no amount of evidence will persuade them to abandon ideas they’ve acquired for emotional reasons. And those reasons are inherent in base, non-rational human nature (see Haidt), with the fear of contamination, and the social priority for purity. These motivations persist in spite of the modern world of science and proven technology. And if the anti-vaxxers cite instances of deaths due to vaccine (or complaints about mercury) — this is just another example of misunderstanding science, statistics, and risks. Somehow, these visceral fears of things being injected into the body override all sense of reason.
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Analysis.
Slate, David Faris, 7 Mar 2025: What Trump and Musk Are Really Doing to This Country, subtitled “There’s a term for this. It’s ungoverning.”
This is how it happens. Ordinary citizens (like those “good Germans”) don’t notice, or take action.
Tuesday night, President Donald Trump declared that “the American dream is surging bigger and better than ever before” and, with his typical modesty, anointed his 43-day-old presidency as “the most successful in the history of our nation.” He spoke of auto manufacturing plants “opening up all over the place” and how the tariffs currently crashing the stock market “will take in trillions and trillions of dollars that create jobs like we have never seen before.” The president noted that his buddy Elon Musk is cleaning up mythical fraud and waste as the head of DOGE. “He didn’t need this,” Trump said, as if Musk is a selfless aid worker rather than a mind-bogglingly wealthy and self-interested man systematically looting the Treasury to benefit himself and his friends.
It was a painful, offensive inversion of reality.
Because…
Because for the tens of millions of Americans whose jobs and livelihoods are threatened by Trump’s wrecking crew—from farmers getting stiffed by the lawless dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development to scientists whose research money has been vaporized because our addled president doesn’t know the difference between research about transgenic and transgender mice—this project isn’t about a “surge” in the American dream. It’s a demolition of it.
It’s not just that the president has empowered the world’s richest man—an unelected internet troll with a fetish for global reactionaries and autocrats—to illegally and indiscriminately torch the federal government with mass layoffs, unconstitutional funding freezes, and cruel psychological assaults. Or that the abusive effort is already causing markets to wobble, Trump’s approval numbers to list portside, and outraged citizens to swarm town halls with Republican members of Congress to protest what they rightly see as socially and economically destructive power grabs that were not remotely part of Trump’s razor-thin “mandate.”
Later:
If you’re a conservative reading this, you may be thinking to yourself: Yes, great, this is exactly what I voted for. The federal government should no longer prop up hated liberal institutions like lefty nonprofits and universities that brainwash my kids with woke nonsense. The problem, though, is that the work that many of these organizations do fills massive gaps in the health care and social safety nets, addresses market failures like disease research, and powers local economies all over the country—for everyone, regardless of ideology. When they stop doing their work there will be no one to pick it up. Maybe you loathe universities, for example, but when the federal government messes with funding formulas from the National Institutes of Health, it doesn’t just put the squeeze on the gender studies professors and DEI programs that have become the targets du jour of the far right. Turning off the federal-money spigot also shuts down research into Alzheimer’s disease and cancers that are so rare that drug companies will never pour money into developing treatments for them. It halts the pipeline of graduate students training to become the next generation of scientists, biomedical researchers, and doctors.
Concluding:
What Trump and Musk are doing is cutting America’s economy and society off at the knees and telling its inhabitants that the procedure is necessary to make all of us run faster.
