Gern Blansten said:

They are doing this on all gov't websites...

Gern Blansten said:

They are doing this on all gov't websites...

gimmesometruth27 said:

josevolution said:

Gern Blansten said:

They are doing this on all gov't websites...

Dumb ass Democrats should be doing the same it’s embarrassing they get beat to the punch daily by this administration! Knowing him and GOP was not going to negotiate in good faith they come up with nothing to push back! 

to be fair, the dems probably thought they were dealing with serious people and adults, instead of these unserious children.

William Davies

Stupidology

The outsourcing of judgment

The first and second Trump Administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the United States but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal.” The scourge of “fake news,” pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the new hegemony of social media. And when presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.

The truth panic had the unwelcome side effect of emboldening those it sought to oppose. “Fake” was one of Trump’s favorite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming MAGA media further amplified the President’s lies and denials. The tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was Hannah Arendt, who observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . no longer exists.”

In 2025, the denunciations have a different flavor. To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies, as one of stupidity. This diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum. In January, the sinister David Brooks wrote a column for the Times titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity.” The new administration, he wrote, was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?” In March, Hillary Clinton — not, perhaps, ideal counsel — weighed in with an op-ed in the same paper, with the headline “How Much Dumber Will This Get?” “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me,” Clinton wrote, “it’s the stupidity.” And in April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour posted an essay on “Stupidity as Historical Force.” In place of Arendt, Seymour quoted Trotsky: “When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking.”

Trump’s lying is no less constant or blatant than in 2016, but by now it feels familiar, already priced in. What more is there to say about the “war on truth,” a decade into Trump’s political career? Still, at least two aspects of his second administration are newly and undoubtedly “stupid.” One is shambolic incompetence of a degree that led an Atlantic journalist to be accidentally added to a Signal group chat about US military operations, a group whose other members included the vice president and the secretary of defense (it was this debacle that prompted Clinton’s op-ed). A second is an incomprehensible determination to press ahead with policies — such as tariffs and the defunding of medical research — that will do deep harm without any apparent gain, even for Trump’s backers and clients, still less his voters. The spectacle of a prominent vaccine skeptic and wellness crank as secretary of health and human services goes beyond an abandonment of truth; it feels like an assault on human progress. Bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah and Florida at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s behest, mark a new hostility to the very concept of public use values. The escalation from Trump One to Trump Two has seen irrationality spread from the deliberative public sphere to flood the veins of government.

When we interpret the actions of others, a basic methodological principle is to assume that people have reasons for behaving as they do, even if those reasons may be emotional, fleeting, shortsighted, or cynical. In the wake of the group chat fiasco and the tariffs upheaval, social media posters made a kind of parlor game of cramming the Trump Administration’s actions into their favored explanatory paradigm. Signalgate must have been deliberate; tariffs must be a grand plan to crash the dollar in the interest of one economic faction or another. The risk is that ever more elaborate explanations for stupid actions end up wrongly according those actions a kind of intelligence — rather confirming the insight of political scientist Robyn Marasco that “conspiracy theory is a love affair with power that poses as its critique.”

Such speculations are often met with a common retort that leans even harder into the stupidity allegation. No, Trump and his people are not playing four-dimensional chess, the response goes — we are simply witnessing the consequences of allowing a deranged man into the highest office, backed by a coterie of dim and unqualified cronies. When political sociology falls short, medical psychiatry and an unspoken social Darwinism fill the void. The literal sense of stupidity — being in a “stupor” — is to lack basic mental faculties and awareness, almost to the point of unconsciousness. Trump’s unique and oddly mesmerizing verbal intonation, lacking any crescendo or change in pace, or any of the polish of normal political rhetoric, lulls the listener into a kind of daze, like a racist ASMR audio track.

The early months of the second Trump Administration drew comparisons to Mike Judge’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, in which a soldier of average intelligence wakes up five hundred years into the future to discover an America governed by idiocy. Culturally, technologically, and ecologically, the depiction feels grimly prophetic. Waste and pollution are out of control. The President is a TV celebrity with the manner and style of a pro wrestling star. Doctors have been replaced by clunky diagnostic machines. Consumers sit in front of screens flooded with ads and slogans that they repeat like memes. When the soldier advises people to stop trying to irrigate their failing crops using a Gatorade-like drink, and to use water instead, they swiftly abandon this practical suggestion when the drink manufacturer’s profits collapse. “Do you really want to live in a world where you’re trying to blow up the one person who is trying to help you?” the soldier asks in desperation, after people turn on him. And, yes, it turns out they do.

We might recognize stupefying consumerism and profit maximization as symptoms of our own age of idiocy, but the premise of Judge’s satire is a politically ugly one. The reason America has descended into this abyss over the centuries is that smart people (depicted as neurotic professionals) have stopped reproducing, while dumb people (depicted as violent trailer-park trash) can’t stop, eventually overwhelming the gene pool with stupidity. At a time when racial eugenics, natalist policy, and IQ fixation are ascendant once more, as illuminated by Quinn Slobodian’s recent Hayek’s Bastards, this is scarcely a mode of social critique that many liberals or leftists can endorse. Then again, who can be sure that opponents of reactionary stupidity don’t sometimes harbor eugenicist fantasies of their own? The aftermath of the Brexit vote — like tariffs, a seemingly senseless act of economic self-harm — witnessed liberal mutterings that typical Leave voters were so elderly that by the time Brexit finally came into effect, many had already died.

One needn’t indulge in biopolitical fantasies to assume, or hope, that official stupidity eventually meets its comeuppance. Surely stupid economic policies must issue into stupid political strategy, resulting in the loss of power. Again, Britain’s recent experience offers a precedent: when Prime Minister Liz Truss put her own fiscal dogmas above the judgments of the bond markets in September 2022, she was swiftly ejected from office (with the help of the Bank of England) a mere forty-nine days after entering it. With Trump, many have looked to the bond markets as the final backstop of intelligence in a stupid world, the power that eventually forces idiots to confront consequences. This works up to a point, especially when financial pain is visited personally upon corporate executives who have the President’s ear — but it only trims away at the stupidity, warding off its worst excesses. Trump’s lack of basic causal understanding, of how policy A leads to outcome B, is not limited to economic policy, nor to Trump himself.

The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn’t an emergent side effect of smart people’s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced. This needs to be confronted politically and sociologically, without falling into the opposite trap of “sanewashing” or inflating strategic cunning to the point of conspiracy theory.

Continued next post

Trumpian stupidity is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.

Yet the technological quest to “go meta” on the rest of society, thus reducing the role of human judgment, predates neoliberalism. In The Human Condition, Arendt identified the launch of Sputnik in 1957 as a historical turning point, offering the possibility of an unworldly perspective on worldly affairs, downgrading the latter in the process. The cold war, which gave birth to the internet and myriad tools of control and surveillance, was a battle to achieve the most complete global viewpoint. No behavior or movement was deemed irrelevant to uncovering the enemy’s intentions — a vision of what the historian of science Paul Edwards terms a “closed world.” Musk’s fixation on space (Starlink now has almost eight thousand satellites in orbit) is of a piece with his flippant approach to human judgment. Pressed on why he falsely claimed, as a pretext for slashing its budget, that USAID spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza, Musk casually responded, “Some of the things I say will be incorrect.”

The platformization of human life means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumor, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators. One morning in April, the S&P 500 jumped 6 percent after a viral rumor claimed that Trump’s tariff policy was being paused — a rumor the Financial Times traced back to a pseudonymous X user named Walter Bloomberg, based in Switzerland, with no offline credentials whatsoever. A Hayekian might point out that the error was quickly corrected — the market dropped 6 percent again within the hour — but this was a manifestly stupid turn of events.

In a fully platformized world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviors and patterns; meaning, intention, and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from the political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the “new conspiracism.” Classic conspiracy theory (regarding, say, the JFK assassination, or September 11) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies, and alliances. Its demands for coherence and meaning are excessive, while its tolerance for contingency is stunted. By contrast,

The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture . . . not evidence but repetition. . . . 

The new conspiracism — all accusation, no evidence — substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.

There are complex ideological drivers at work here — Rosenblum and Muirhead view the new conspiracism as an effort to delegitimize democracy tout court — but the new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs.” Outlandish and pointless fantasies, like the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared, and repeated. Engagement — and revenue — is all.

This analysis takes us beyond the 2016-era panic over “truth” to help us chart the current political floodwaters of “stupidity.” When Republican politicians go on TV and make absurd claims about tariffs, vaccines, or immigration, is it best understood as “lying,” or as something else altogether? Often they are simply repeating lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes — Trump and RFK Jr. especially — in the conspiracist network. Some claims act as loyalty oaths (affirmations that the 2020 election was stolen) but more are just deranged and bizarre, not to mention sick, such as the claim that DEI hiring policies were responsible for the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January, and the fatal aircraft collision that killed sixty-seven people that same month. Taken as judgments or explanations, they raise questions about the cognitive faculties or mental health of the speaker, but perhaps they are better seen as memes. The individuals might sound stupid, but they are not the architects of a media sphere in which causal explanation has been sacrificed for symbolic mimicry, to fill time and generate content.

Stupidity grates when it is as egregious and unapologetic as Trumpism. In Arendt’s words, it becomes “unbearably offensive among ‘intelligent’ people,” such as those members of the GOP who stand idly by as national and global interests are wrecked. But in the economic realm, acts of wanton self-destruction did not suddenly begin with tariffs. The Whiggish notion that managers and leaders abide by some inbuilt self-interest to deliver ever greater efficiency, productivity, and prosperity, for fear that doing otherwise might result in their downfall, has been falsified time and again. Thorstein Veblen’s 1919 pamphlet “On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage” suggests that we have acquired a warped view of sabotage as something exceptional and violent. If we return to the term’s central meaning — derived from the French sabot, a kind of wooden clog that slows the wearer down — we might understand that the deliberate withdrawal of efficiency is a frequent and constituent part of capitalism. Corporations depend on blocking societal efficiency for profit, constraining nimbler rivals using law (such as patents) or even acquiring them in order to shut them down, as Facebook/Meta has done repeatedly. Tariffs have served as a useful and profitable form of economic sabotage in the past (as Trump seems vaguely aware), though typically to nurture economies at a much earlier stage of industrial development than the present-day United States.

The bond markets look very favorably on economic sabotage, as long as it is the right kind. Economic growth tends to make government debt less attractive to traders, while economic stagnation and austerity are welcomed. Bond prices rise and yields fall when governments engage in stupid acts of social sabotage, such as defunding public services, slashing welfare and pension budgets, and privatizing public goods, most of which have negative long-term fiscal consequences. Yanis Varoufakis’s memorable description of the Troika-mandated austerity measures imposed on Greece in 2015 as “fiscal waterboarding” points to how the “rational” behavior of creditors can destroy the capacity of borrowers to ever recover or develop. Prospects for a successful, productive capitalism were systematically destroyed by one narrow faction and rationality of capital. The techno-libertarian fiscal vandalism pursued by Musk and DOGE may lack such financial justification, but it would be a mistake to assume that the capitalist class has no tolerance for sabotage or stupidity.

In the same essay reflecting on stupidity, Arendt distinguished between “preliminary” and “true” understanding. The kind of judgment that concerned Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (absence of which constituted “stupidity”) was, for Arendt, necessary but only “preliminary.” Because it involves applying existing concepts and rules to particular situations, preliminary understanding has a kind of circularity. It can be extremely clever and correct, but it falls short when confronting the genuine novelty of human actions. One can escape the most brute form of stupidity, yet not truly understand the significance of the political and historical moment. Just as actuaries and statisticians struggle to compute unprecedented, world-historical change in the climate, because their data is all drawn from the past, so even the cleverest person or system can get trapped in a “preliminary” understanding of events.

Arendt argued that there was a second human faculty, in addition to judgment, that allowed understanding to progress to a truer grasp of meaning: imagination. Politics requires us to navigate situations which are incomparable and immeasurable, because they are genuinely new. This in turn requires something closer to aesthetic judgment (as examined in Kant’s third Critique) than to scientific judgment (as studied in his first). “Imagination alone,” Arendt wrote,

enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair. (Italics mine for emphasis)

Continued next post.

Bentleyspop said:

Gern Blansten said:

Tldr 

ETLDR