Donald Trump Is On His Way to Second or Third Shortest Presidency in American History

That's cool. Pence would make a great president, too. Bring it.

Lord Independent Thoughts wrote:That's cool. Pence would make a great president, too.  Bring it.

Would he?

The vice president dodges the question of whether he believes in evolution but he has his own version of intelligent design as he rides the wave of a new kind of ignorance.

One of the first priorities of demagoguery is the fostering of ignorance. Lies require collaboration from those who are being lied to, and for a propaganda machine to be effective it needs a special kind of public ignorance.

This can happen in societies that otherwise seem to be sophisticated and highly advanced scientifically. Invariably the case of Germany in the early 1930s is cited as proof. That, however, carries the danger of false analogies and misses what is immediate and novel. Propaganda and the nurturing of ignorance have moved on apace since the Nazis and Joseph Goebbels.

The Trump White House is demonstrating in its own innovative ways just how far habitual lying can clear the way for the triumph of ideology over truth. This can’t be simplified by charging Trump himself with being a pathological liar. His administration has invented a new and distinctly American propaganda machine that is built on lies. But not enough attention has been given to its willing partner in this exercise: a carefully nurtured kind of public ignorance that it can exploit.

One reason this isn’t being discussed is that politicians are rightly wary of insulting any constituency by calling it ignorant. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” was a disastrously patronizing misjudgment. But in the context of the Age of Trump, ignorance is not actually a pejorative term, it’s a description of a set of beliefs in which knowledge and truth are less persuasive than prejudice and fear.

This process began long before Trump decided to run. Years of talk radio diatribes fueled by Obama-phobia and Fox News harangues prepared the soil and then Breitbart, the alt-right, and fake news softened it further. Trump understood this better than anyone and harvested its fruits.

In fact, the bedrock beneath this process was much older and a uniquely American phenomenon, a widespread consensual ignorance. There is a strain of dogmatic religious activism here that does not exist to anything like the same extent in other advanced democracies. It uses religion—or misuses religion—to resist or rollback changes in social behavior and to suggest who the alien “other” should be.

This consensual ignorance involves accepting a set of ordained beliefs while at the same time rejecting others that are not ordained, no matter whether they are based on facts. What begins as a theological system easily slips into a secular one: the habit of denying what is an inconvenient truth or of simplifying a complex exterior world into stereotypical threats.

This is not the ignorance of unlearned knowledge—it’s more potent than that. It’s a tutored ignorance, and in its most basic form it’s anti-scientific.




http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/18/charles-darwin-would-see-right-through-mike-pence.html

Seems like another wackadoodle to me

PENCE'S anti-science, anti-intellectual persona makes him sound a little like Mao Tse Tung, there...


Chairman Mao saw no value in trees, nor wildlife, biodiversity and national parks..

During his reign at the helm of the Peoples' Party, he encouraged the widespread destruction of forests, and allowed mining and other destructive activitiess in national parks.  He also had no interest in population control, decent education standards, or looking after communities in general..  His version of "Revolution at the end of a gun".

A lot of the advances that China has made in recent decades has come about through having to clean up the messes that Mao's mob had left behind --  though, admittedly they do still have a long, long way to go -- especially in the areas of 'Human Rights' and cleaning up pollution..


Maybe that's how Comrade NITwitsky and his Kremlin bosses believe that the Trump/Pence team can "Make 'Merica Gwayt Again !"

Fuck it over big time,  so then the next lot in have that much more repair work to do  !?!

#Dems4Pence {because he may be bad but at least he believes in the American way of life}