CSotD: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
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Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
I’ve used the White Queen’s quote before and it is impossible for me to believe I won’t be using it again.
We live in a world in which we’re surrounded by people who cheerfully believe impossible things, or pretend to, and who insist that we believe them as well. Or pretend to.
Anderson isn’t making anything up. Looking into the shooter’s background makes it hard to understand how he was able to have a gun, unless he stole it and did so immediately before the shootings. Otherwise, it defies all logic.
That above-linked report says that he had an extensive criminal record, which should have been enough to disarm him in a sane society, but it’s instructive to see that the things he was charged with seem to have come from a deeply disturbed psyche. Can’t take his guns for that.
There aren’t many countries in which a mentally disturbed person who has had several brushes with the law would be allowed to have a gun, but, like the White Queen, we’ve practiced a lot and believe all sorts of impossible things.
The trick is to believe what you believe and avoid things that might shake your faith.
Here, Allie uses the “I know you are, but what am I?” defense to insist that people who believe in math and statistics are blinded by their hatred of a leader who does not.
Varvel goes into more detail arguing that because there is any crime at all, statistics indicating that there is less than there used to be are clearly wrong.
Nobody has claimed that there is no crime in Washington DC or anywhere else on the planet, but that’s not the point.
Banx’s illustration laying out what would appear to be plain facts is deceptive, because Dear Leader wiped the slate clean of any alleged crimes allegedly occurring on January 6, despite courts and juries having declared that they did. Obviously, they were mistaken.
Pardoning felons is only one way of bringing facts in line with beliefs. There are many ways of twisting and turning the stats to make DC look like the hell-hole it is accused of being.
The relevant term is casuistry, the employment of false logic to misdirect what people believe. It’s being deployed these days to explain away those unacceptable statistics. It’s similar to saying that rhinoceroses are not endangered because there are far more rhinos in Africa than you would find in South America. Therefore they are plentiful!
Dear Leader explained the facts of the matter:
D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety. This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing! Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe “city” in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour! People are flocking to D.C. again, and soon, the beautification will begin!
I’m hesitant to comment on his promise of beautification, given the changes that have taken place in the Oval Office under this administration, but I’m more concerned with the changes that have taken place at the FBI since they compiled the statistics the president now dismisses as fake.
Trump’s view of statistics, and of beauty, align with his overall belief that those things he wants to believe are true and the things he doesn’t want to believe are hoaxes and fake. It is a worldview shared by his cabinet members, including his attorney general and the head of Homeland Security, both of whom clearly believe that their job is to align everyone with Dear Leader’s values, regardless of how those values match the laws and traditions of the nation.
And so, Bagley points out, Dear Leader’s solution to the homeless problem is to drive them away so they are not seen in Washington, a goal that he will, no doubt, want to expand to other cities once he has brought them, too, under military occupation.
It does not comport with the values taught by Jesus of Nazareth, but it must be remembered that, as a boy, Trump and his family attended church at Norman Vincent Peale’s church, where the Gospel of Prosperity was preached and any difference between “God makes those He loves wealthy” and “God loves the wealthy” was tenuous at best.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Trump has announced his intentions of bringing museums and classrooms into line with his views of American History, though presumably not the part about George Washington’s troops taking over British airports during the Revolution.
He seems intent on approaching this vast task with the fervor suggested in Wuerker’s piece, but we shouldn’t assume he’ll go to the half-vast extent Stahler pictures.
A totally asinine self-celebration would be easy for people to deny, but it’s more likely we’ll go back to a 1950s view of history as something shaped by Great Men, all of them white.
That plausible, sexist, racist, elitist view has been accepted before and will be hard to correct all over again, particularly if future generations are being programmed by Prager U curricula in their schools.
After all, it took several decades for the country to acknowledge what was done to Japanese-Americans during WWII, and, as if to drive those ghosts back into the shadows, Trump’s secret police have made a presence at a memorial to the victims of Japanese internment, a reminder to Latinos, and to those who do not hate them, of Faulkner’s observation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The past is present in Donald Trump’s America, where blue cities are listed for beautification, pacification and conquest.
A nation where “Love it or leave it” is enforced by violent masked men under laws we are required to believe in.
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