Well… yeah. I thonk it’s fairly self-evident that individuals have different threaholds for suspension of disbelief, and that the thresholds even vary between subjects with a given individual (for example, it’s harder to maintain suspension of disbelief relative to an area in which one has expertise).

But that’s not really relevant - I just included “acceptably” to be more precise and accurate.

The relevant part is the core idea that the mechanism by which at least some seemingly rational people support blitheringly insane and factually unsupportable political views is not really some combination of prejudices and biases by which they convince themselves of the nominal truth and correspondence to reality of their beliefs, but by engaging in suspension of disbelief - by entirely switching off the parts of their brain that measure truth and correspondence with reality, just as I do when I read a novel or watch a movie.

I certainly don’t know that to be the case, but it’s a fascinating possibility

…there might well be something to that.

Yes - exactly as you say, research needs to be done on suspension of disbelief.

And thanks for sharing that fascinating idea.

Not quite.

Suspension of disbelief refers to the act of essentially switching off the parts of ones mind that check for truth and reality, and simply following a narrative on its own terms, whatever they might be.

It’s not that truth or reality are unnecessary under suspension of disbelief - they aren’t even relevant.

I think this is a fascinating idea.

And I just tried to explain it to a friend and she didn’t get it, then I came back to the thread to find respondents who didn’t get it in the same way she didn’t.

She kept trying to warp it into something like confirmation bias, even though I kept trying to get her to see that the significant thing about suspension of disbelief is that truth and reality don’t even enter into it - they aren’t even meaningful concepts.

The only thing that’s necessary when disbelief is suspended is that the narrative remain acceptably internally consistent. Whether itt true or not or corresponds with reality or not is entirely irrelevant, since the entire process of expectng and testing for those qualities has been set aside.

Again, that’s a fascinating idea. I’ve long suspected that Trump is unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, but that that was a consequence of his narcissism and egotism - that effectively the only measure he has for truth or falsehood is whether he believes something to be true or not - that the concept of consensual reality isn’t even coherent in his entirely self-absorbed internal reality.

But I’ve long wondered how the at least somewhat more sane people following him manage it. Something like confirmation bias would only work up to a point that Trump has long since gone beyond.

And I think you might be on to something - just as I do when I sit down to read a novel or watch a movie or a series, when they start engaging in politics, they switch the parts of their brains that track truth and reality entirely off and instead just follow along with the narrative, whatever it might be.

Even stronger faith I’d say, since billionaires aren’t actively conspiring with politicians to keep you out of heaven.

It would almost be better of Trump was a conscious agent deliberately working for the benefit of China, but he’s just an angry, petulant, bigoted moron whose rage and greed and stupidity have pretty much guaranteed that China is going to lead the world in pretty much everything in the coming years while the US clings increasingly desperately to a mostly illusory past.

I think we’re approaching a point at which the universal international response to the latest Trump bullshit and bloviations is going to be “Go fuck yourself.”

I’ll go one better - if the DNC hadn’t interfered and fucked us over, the people would have elected Sanders in 2016 and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Actually, we got fascism by constantly moving towards it over a span of at least 60 years, with the only difference being that we sometimes moved more quickly towards it and sometimes more slowly.

We moved towards it under Biden too, and would’ve continued moving towards it under either him or Harris.

The only thing that’s notable about Trump as far as that goes is how much he moved us and how quickly. But this was always the destination.

The only way we could’ve moved away from fascism rather than towards it would’ve been to elect federal politicians who were actually good instead of just less bad. But we not only haven’t been given that choice, but have been indoctrinated into treating less bad as a virtue

And what you just described is the exact process by which governments descend into tyranny.

The much better way to deal with the issue, if you actually do care about your fellow humans, is to refuse to support a toxic candidate even if they are somewhat less toxic than the alternative, and make sure at every single turn that the blame is placed squarely where it should be - on the foul, loathsome, corrupt and compromised scumbags who arranged for the nomination of a toxic piece of shit candidate in the first place.

Less bad is still bad. If you settle for less bad, the best you’ll ever get is that things woll potentially get worse somewhat more slowly than they would otherwise. They’ll still inevitably get worse.

If you want things to actually get better, then you have to hold the scumbags’ feet to the fire. You have to make sure that it’s widely understood that they and they alone are the reason that the best we can hope for is somewhat less bad and things getting worse somewhat more slowly. And you can’t do that by meekly going along with them.

Oh and…

The fact that this whole norion of a lack of lefty unity is complete bullshit was neatly demonstrated by leftist voters coming together to overwhelmingly support Zohran Mamdani.

And who didn’t support him? The fucking establishment neolib hacks - the exact same people who keep fucking us over by putting up shitty candidates then trying to guilt trip leftists into voting for them. We finally got a candidate we wanted and they couldn’t even be arsed to endorse him.

Supporting genocide is not fucking “minutia.”

I’m old. My first awareness of the world of politics was the Watergate hearings, so I actually lived through most of the run-up to this.

It’s certainly the case that the US has been moving more or less steadily toward plutocratic oligarchy since at least Nixon, and progress has definitely accelerated (though it really started accelerating with the Wall Street bailouts in the wake of the 2008 real estate bubble collapse and hasn’t really let up since), but that’s not really what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the literal insanity of Trump and his sycophants. They aren’t merely corrupt tools of the plutocrats like so many past politicians - they’re deranged lunatics. That’s not hyperbole - it’s simple fact, plainly obvious to anyone who takes a step back and honestly looks at what they do and say.

It’s not that the US has accelerated toward autocracy in less than a year (though it has), because yes - that’s the direction it’s been headed for decades. The astonishing thing to me is that the US has effectively gone insane in less than a year.

If the US was a person, it’d be on a psych hold. And that’s something I wasn’t prepared for, even as cynical as I’ve always been.

Oh look - it’s the DNC Defense Force, here to get an early start on guilt-tripping leftists who won’t vote for whichever shitty center right neolib hack the DNC will likely end up trying to foist on the voters at the behest of their corporate donors.

Fuck that. It’s not the voters’ responsibility to vote for a piece of shit just because they stink a little bit less than the other piece of shit - it’s the DNC’s responsibility to run candidates people actually want to vote for. And when they can’t (or more accurately won’t) even do that, then they and nobody else are responsible for the consequences.

That’s the most astonishing part of it to me.

Reality has gone completely off the rails. Virtually every day, I read another account of blithering insanity, and painfully obviously dangerous and destructive insanity, from this administration, and then I watch as all of the official entities that are meant to check that sort of insanity just treat it as another day and another press release from another President’s office.

It’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes, only far far worse.

And all in less than a year…

At this point though, that’s just noise.

Unfortunately, the mass media is complicit in the insanity - they’ve abandoned principles, integrity, honesty and accuracy in pursuit of profit and/or the owners’ agenda, whichever might be deemed more important in a given organization.

That’s not to say that that story is necessarily false. It’s simply that if it’s a spin that serves someone’s agenda, as this obviously is, then it will be published somewhere, entirely regardless of whether it’s true or not, so the fact that it has been published means nothing at all.

I know things were pretty fucked - I haven’t been a lifelong cynic for no reason - but still, it’s amazing how quickly snd completely the US has descended into screeching insanity.

And all at the hands of this demented lunatic, his psychopathic enablers and his legions of angry and stupid followers.

What a world…

A “physical property”, in this context, may be a metaphysical or logical combination of properties which are not physical in the ordinary sense.

lol

I’ve been watching as ontology has gone sideways since the new generation of blinkered STEMites decided they were qualified to weigh in on it, but this goes even beyond what I cynically expected.

Sorry, but no. Yours is the misunderstanding.

You’re conflating physicalism and materialism.

For context:

Libre is a third party that was formed in 2011. They’re a coalition of leftist groups, and are democratic socialists.

In 2012 and 2013, at least 18 of their pre-candidates, candidates and staff were murdered.

In 2013, they lost the almost certainly fraudulent presidential election to the right-wing National Party candidate - Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, the narcotics trafficker who was just pardoned by Trump.