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I bet her finances could use some looking into.
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Someone do a safety check on George Will.
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CPAC
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Her bizarness it really on an elite level…
Suspect that she holds the
Sante Kimes Chair of Grift and Fraud.
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I’ve written some really good satire. People like Ballarin are satirical characters who have come to real life.
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Well, at least she wasn’t holding a wedding.
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I’m fascinated by this. I’m pretty much persuaded that a lot of them simply don’t have any clinical form of mental illness that makes them delusional. But something—identity fusion comes to mind—makes it possible for them to easily believe stuff we normies think of that way. The idea that Trump in particular and the hard right in general must be right about everything and can never be at fault requires them to grasp at any straw, no matter how absurd. It’s preferable to facing what they’ve done to themselves and the society. We view them with a contempt we might not feel for a mother who can’t believe her child committed a heinous crime that he or she obviously did commit, but the mechanism is the same. The reality is too painful, so you leave it behind. Don’t take that as sympathy, by the way. They can all go fuck themselves.
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who says she didn’t ?
just like …
is there anyway to be sure that it was also not used as the location for “BOOGIE NIGHTS II”?
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My son and DIL wrote a great twist on “The Wedding Crashers” by crashing their wedding in four unauthorized public venues in one day including an art museum and a bowling alley.
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“High Bob!”
Drink!
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Perhaps but I tend to think of the mechanism as more dissociative, a detachment from the consequences of reality but more for emotional release than self-defense: like the fans at a wrestling match, yelling at the heel while belief is suspended and reflection minimized so the actual consequences in policy and lives are effectively ignored rather than actively denied.
They are (mostly) clinically sane I suppose but what gets me as much as their indifference to the suffering of people-not-like-them is the utter vulgarity of their beliefs. My reaction to them as much as anything is sheer astonishment that an adult could not only find but give public credence to the idiocies of a Trump or Q and not be institutionalized.
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I loved Enola Holmes, and thought Millie Bobby Brown was brilliant. Helena Bonham Carter is a goddess.
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There are a number of interesting points in that comment but for myself I’m just trying to figure out a way that lots of people can believe absurd stuff when clearly they aren’t all suffering from schizophrenia or some other obvious mental disorder. Proper social scientists and other professionals will be grappling with this for several decades, so I’m not going to insist on any answer I can cobble together here in my own amateur armchair, that’s for sure. But there has to be something there. This didn’t occur for random and varying reasons among millions of people. I’m going to keep learning about this relatively little-discussed concept of “identity fusion” because I just have an intuitive sense it can help explain this craziness.
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The tribalism or team mentality fits the bill for me. Just convince these low-info and low-effort people into thinking they are on one team (or like FOX, that YOU are on THEIR team), and all these “others” are on a different team from yours. I don’t think I know a single person who ‘used’ to be a true-blue fan of one team and then gave up and switched to be a true-blue fan of their rivals. And showing them that their team is a bunch of cheating criminals doesn’t make any difference. They might become indifferent and fade away from the sport (unlikely)…but they aren’t going to join the rivals.
So instead they just get more rabid, more confrontational, more belligerent, and find ways to justify it all. They certainly don’t admit they are wrong or re-examine their motives and the last thing on earth they want to do is face their social network and tell them all they are ‘defecting’ or turning traitor.
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Fusion seems a reasonable framework to understand this but I see too much evidence of incoherence and delusion to find it really persuasive; e.g., to the degree most of these folk have an image of their group or themselves it seems more based on illusion than reality, on a mythology of the individual in particular. A book that developed a thesis around the cultural force of this notion in the United States is Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland (2017), a 500-year history of America’s love of the fantastic; e.g., contesting objective reality and ‘fake news’ are nothing new. But this may be splitting hairs: the ‘fusion’ of individuals and a cultural mythology is certainly akin even if it doesn’t really explain the unwillingness to tolerate alternative visions and those adhering to them.
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Well, again, you’re considering it from very broad perspective and I’m coming at it very narrowly: Why is being a wingnut so important to these people? If you take away the militia types, most of the rest of the Capitol attackers are in serious legal trouble for the first time in their lives. Why? What made it seem so utterly vital that they do this? They’re not hitting business rivals with fire extinguishers; they’re not attacking Chevy dealerships because they prefer Fords. I see one possible explanation but again again, I’m not going to stake my own life and liberty on it. 
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It doesn’t answer the question but a lot of these folks including some of the militia types seem rather naive, as if a penchant for conspiracy theory also made one more gullible; prone to trusting unworthy authority. I listen to some of their tales of perceived victim-hood in the newscasts and in many cases can’t help agreeing in part: victims alright but of their own folly and an affinity fraud that spiraled out of control.
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It’s like a blind clown picked out her clothes.
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