Foggy-moist this near-noon Friday on California’s north coast, another episode in the life-files of late.
Supposedly, after today clear skies, sunshine and probably no rainbows, too — educated estimate anybody’s guess.
Uneducated, though, and with a nasty, deliberate grace is the presidential campaign of The Donald — last week, a Burlingame High School junior voiced the horrific motif (via the Guardian): ‘“Trump has this profound intentional ignorance…”‘
And he don’t give a shit. Bullshit bluster his only real characteristic. Now the science in bullshit understanding — found via the ear of the listener…
(Illustration: Donald Trump, ‘Basic Shapes,‘ by caricaturist/illustrator Chong Jit Leong, found here).
Rise of The Donald can be directly attributed to the appeal of that mass of people already smitten by ‘profound intentional ignorance,’ but the effect is more than intense — the asshole could wind-up the next president of the US.
The Donald walks the talk, though, and it’s pure, 100-percent bullshit. New research indicates bullshit floats in bullshit waters.
Via PlosOne and from the abstract: ‘In this contribution, bullshit is used as a technical term which is defined as communicative expression that lacks content, logic, or truth from the perspective of natural science. We used the Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR) to measure seeing profoundness in bullshit statements.’
Key points to the study:
Results revealed that favorable views of all three Republican candidates were positively related to judging bullshit statements as profound.
The smallest correlation was found for Donald Trump.
Although we observe a positive association between bullshit and support for the three Democrat candidates, this relationship is both substantively small and statistically insignificant.
The research of bullshit ends: The BSR includes 10 sentences that have a correct syntactic structure and seem to be profound and meaningful on first reading but are actually vacuous.
A word which actually means ‘having or showing a lack of intelligence or serious thought: lacking meaning, importance, or substance,’ and there’s the ignorance.
The horror of ‘vacuous‘ compounded immeasurably if The Donald makes it to the Oval Office.
This election cycle will be rotten to the core — the media, the butcher.
From Vox yesterday:
Just as the media will need to elevate Trump, it will need to bring Clinton down. Going after Clinton will be journalists’ default strategy for proving that they’re not biased.
They will need opportunities to be “tough” toward Clinton, or at least to engage in the kind of performative toughness valued in campaign journalism, to demonstrate their continued independence.
Trump will give them opportunities.
And it’s not going to be through policy critique, a domain in which Clinton towers over him.
It’s going to be through tawdry, nasty shit.
Consider the attacks Trump has used to triumph in the primary: Cruz’s father helped kill JFK; Cruz is not eligible to be president; Rubio is an effete liar who sweats too much; Kasich is a disgusting eater; Jeb Bush has low testosterone; Fiorina has an unpleasant face.
His nickname for Clinton is already “crooked Hillary.” He’s already dredged up her husband’s affairs and her alleged role in them.
Consider what Trump will do when he’s behind, being bested by a woman, at risk of national humiliation, struggling to unite a party that is connected to him only through a shared hatred of Clinton.
The mind boggles.
As bullshit supposedly walks, ignorance crawls…