[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You came up with a really great phrase right before recording and it was the triumph of make-believe and I was talking about some personalities which is part of a larger phenomena of people who live in a self-made world of make-believe and so my question to you is what happens when a large percentage of people live in their own self-made world and make believe project that out into social media space and that becomes kind of the world?
Rick Rosner: All right, so last week we talked about how your picture of the world is formed by the messages you get from the world and also from yourself from your memories and the attitudes formed over time and in the good old days you’ve got your messages about what to think and believe from your neighbors, from your community, from books, from TV but the density of messages was lower and now we’re flooded with information and if you’re plugged into the wrong sources you can get barraged with enough information that you believe in bullshit. It takes some collaboration with the outside world like if you’re married to a big trumper, odds are you’ll get trumpy if you already because you’re getting a bunch of messages from your spouse and they’re having you watch the same so-called news sources they watch and you’re going to get brainwashed. You’re getting all these messages and you’re not getting, unless you start it off highly skeptical and keep feeding yourself contrary messages from other sources, you’re going to get overwhelmed with bullshit.
Right now we’re in an era where bullshit is triumphing for a third of the population and much of it is fucking coming from Russia. A lot of the bullshit that hits America is right-wing media with a little bit of a boost from Russian trolls. Today’s February 11th 2022 and the U.S state Department announced today that Russia’s on the verge of invading Ukraine not necessarily that they’ll do it but that they have all their forces in place to mount of an invasion. They’ve got 1,30,000 troops along various borders of Ukraine along in Belarus and in Russia itself. We’ve been aware of the threat but now he’s got all his forces in place.
Putin’s a big time imperialist; he wants to bring back the Imperial reach of the Soviet Union and he took Crimea from Ukraine. Crimea is this part of or used to be a part of Ukraine and a few years ago he went ahead and he took it. So it’s not unheard of that he would take part or all of Ukraine including the capital key. One consequence of this whole thing, this ongoing crisis is we’ve learned that it’s Kyiv and not Kiev which is annoying. This will be the biggest imperialist Invasion/land grab if he goes ahead and does it in Eurasia since World War II. America is very divided about you know the miracle of America is distracted from it and very politically divided because of Russian make-believe over the past five years that Russia and right-wing media have combined to fill tens of millions of Americans heads with alternative facts make believe bullshit and the non-bull shitted segments of society have been lousy at countering it. It’s not easily addressable using normal governmental and journalistic methods. And so shit feels more fucked up now than even when Trump was President.
I mean the people who believe in make-believe like Biden’s approval. Now Trump was the worst president since James Buchanan whose shitty presidency made the Civil War happen. It’s being generous to Trump to say he’s not the worst president ever which he might be but he’s at least the worst president since 1860. And then Biden is a perfectly adequate president and maybe better than that. He’s got more experience national government than any other president ever by 15 years. He’s been in national government for something like 47 years and nobody else comes close and he built alliances, he knows pretty much how to govern and he’s accomplished quite a bit yet his approval is almost as low as Trump’s; the shittiest president in history and a man who’s complicit in the deaths of a million Americans because he politicized Covid. But America is sufficiently bullshitted, filled with make-believe that a huge segment of the population thinks Biden is a more disastrous president than Trump which is just fucking make-believe and is very concerning because the Republicans in government and the Republicans as a party the people who aren’t a-holes have been stripped away from the Republican party and the modern Republican party doesn’t follow normal democratic, well believes less in democracy than ever before and if their bullshit works and they take back the House and the Senate in the elections that are now is less than nine months away, then they will… they’ve been doing a bunch of shitty shit and they will do even more shitty shit and it’s the triumph of the people who’ve been successfully bullshitted.
And you guys up in Canada have gotten a little less of it than we have the bullshitting but you’re in the middle of one of the biggest bullshitting incidents in your recent history; this anti-vax truckers’ protests on the streets of Ottawa where your capital is, fucking up transportation of goods across the International bridge where 25% of the goods that go back and forth between the US and Canada go, that bridge is fucked up and mostly shut down. These assholes are honking 24 hours a day, I read. But just life in Ottawa is all fucked up because of the fucking truckers and it’s an astroturfed operation.
A grassroots movement is regular people having had enough and banding together to form a movement and so contrary to that an Astroturf, a fake grass movement is something that looks like a grassroots movement that has been created by not regular people but outside motherfuckers. And this trucker thing is the product of a bunch of gullible idiots or not even that many gullible idiots, something like 200 gullible idiots fucking up Ottawa and manipulated by Rich anti-vaxxers who can manipulate them via social media and trolls for money out of the parts of the world where it’s cheap to hire trolls which is Asia, Thailand and all those East Asian…. I used to buy fake followers because that’s where they’re cheap out of East Asia. It’s not exactly East Asia but South Asia, Pakistan. I didn’t like doing business with Pakistan because that’s too fucking sinister and I didn’t want to but Pakistan you could buy fake followers out of and India and I don’t think India is doing the trucker shit but who knows. Like all these Indonesia, where these people make money riling up gullible Americans and now I guess gullible Canadians.
And then whatever grievances came naturally were amplified and shitheads like Rand Paul said we should have trucker protests here and shut down America. Rand Paul’s a fucking asshole. Another asshole is Ted Cruz who’s also in favor of these protests. The protests make America look dysfunctional and make it more likely that Republicans will get elected. That’s been the Republican model in the new fleece the rubes era is break the government, get people pissed at the government, and get Republican lunatics who are in favor of scuttling the government elected.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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