they think he will tackle all the problems they think are the most important.
Why? Why do they think that? They have to know he lies to them virtually non-stop.
DON'T THEY?
They wish they had the power he has
I believe that's a factor - Trump as a proxy for exercising their own psychoses.
Every criticizism of him is a criticism of them.
NOT so sure about that.
Do they consider themselves liars, dishonest con artists, wannabe mob bosses... what?? I do think that in general they have very low self esteem. The bravado most of them flaunt is transparently superficial. But -
There is a very real sickness going around, manifesting itself as support for
whatever this most damaged of humans says or does.
Are trumpsuckers going to go to their graves thinking he was their "retribution", and everything he fucked up only hurt other people? Even as they die drowning in their own phlegm in the next pandemic, in the parking lot of a hospital that is full-up?
I think it is because honesty doesn't really matter to them except as a talking point "gotcha", a key into an emotional lock against the opponent.
I really don't think that the truth matters at all to such people, or rather they have a distorted idea of what even has "truth value".
I think about this, probably more than I should, but it comes down to this concept in information science about "table vs function".
So, tables can be really useful, such as when you have a function but it's slow, and the table is fast; you just populate the table with "null" and then every time you miss on the table and read a null, you hit the function and send the result to the table.
It ends up being WAY faster, at the expense of WAY more memory being used (potentially infinite).
The problem is that tables can be wrong.
This fact ends up influencing all kinds of outcomes:
why is rote memorization worse than understanding, when done absent understanding? Tables can be wrong and memorization is table building.
Tables are often used when developing an understanding: comparing all the values so far in a line or graph arrangement can tell you the shape of a growth rate, for example, and then it's just a matter of seeing if there is a known curve that matches. This is seen in every process from biological to machine learning: one group first generating a table and the other trying to fit a curve to it,
usually.
But some systems never actually gravitate towards curve matching... Some systems are built with the fundamental assumption that there is no curve to match against, no idea of truth; it's all just "tables" or mostly so.
This is itself an organizing principle and one every individual human varies on. I put myself out at the extremes of "curve fitting"; I have a sort of "table sense" within my own mind and when it goes off, I go on a tear and try to eliminate the table, or at least make a "closed" form, if possible.
But to that extent I would pose that such people as are on the extreme other end are akin to this concept of the "philosophical zombie". I'm a monist, apparently, so I don't think it's possible for consciousness to truly be absent anywhere or in anything... But I do think it can be very
trivial. And for someone whose entire existence is based on doing whatever satisfies the condition no matter how absurd or ignorant they are of why, I think would fall into this "trivial" group, and it is this independence of function from any need for "truth" beyond "what works for me" that I find to ultimately be the, or at least a primary, driver of evil in the world.
It also drives a lot of conservatism: when your existence is built on a table of fixed responses, it's really hard to adjust to a world where the underlying functions have one of their weirder parameters get changed. Instead of just adding a parameter here and there to handle shifts, the whole table will have to be relearned.
So, it's no surprise to me when someone has a just-so table of concepts they use that divide the world into highschool-level buckets, and someone else comes along that reveals this structure to be incomplete and fragile, they would rather rage at the world that violates their expectations than accept that they were doing it wrong this whole time by wasting their brain on "tables" and stopping there.
To that extent, anything that validates the correctness of their table and plays to their expectations rather than introducing troublesome data and an expectation of "curve fitting" is going to be preferred.
