XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.society.liberalism, alt.atheism
XPost: alt.fun, alt.politics.democrats.d
This guy gives a great partial explanation of it:
https://x.com/harari_yuval/status/1877399071100444870
The speaker is Yuval Noah Harari.
Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי ; born 1976) is an Israeli
medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and popular science
writer. He currently serves as professor in the Department of History at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari
Unlike that asswipe Victor Davis Hansen, Harari is a legitimate public intellectual. Here are his three main reasons why people, chiefly (but not exclusively) Trumpswabs, prefer fiction and lies to truth:
1. Fiction and lies are cheap; ascertaining the truth is costly.
2. The truth is complicated, because reality is complicated. Fiction can be as
simple as you like it to be. Most people prefer simple stories, and
Trumpswabs, simpletons one and all, especially prefer them.
3. The truth tends to be painful — not always, but often.
One at a time:
_Cost_
This doesn't refer only to monetary cost, but also to the willingness to expend time and especially effort. Trumpswabs are simply lazy — exceptionally lazy, to
the point at which it is an absolute moral failure. They just aren't willing to spend the effort to get at the complicated and very likely painful truth. They want things handed to them by someone else, and that someone else can hand them emotionally satisfying fiction with far less effort than it takes to furnish the
truth. Additionally, Trumpswabs are downmarket deadbeats and scroungers who don't have the wherewithal to hire someone to undertake the effort that they're too lazy make themselves. This explains Kremlin Girl constantly whingeing about "paywalls." She's just too goddamned cheap to subscribe to any reliable and reputable media. You get what you pay for, and the worthless lies from "gatewaypundit" and other lie sites are free, so she consumes free lies.
_Complication of reality_
This is closely related to the first. Getting a grip on complexity and complication is costly, again both effort and money, and Trumpswabs are downmarket dole scroungers who won't do the former and don't have the latter. And they are simpletons, so they prefer simple, uncomplicated explanations.
_Painfulness of truth_
Harari makes the point that the truth can be painful personally or collectively.
Everyone wants to avoid physical pain, but Trumpswabs especially want to avoid intellectual and moral pain. Trumpswabs want to believe Trump's lies, both about
the larger world and about what Trump has done, because if they believed the truth, they would have to understand that they've been had — they've been Trump's suckers and losers and chumps. Take the insurrection: it's too painful for them to acknowledge the truth of what Trump actually did. He incited an insurrection in order to try *illegally* to hold onto the presidency after losing a free, fair and clean election. By refusing to acknowledge what it was —
an insurrection — Trumpswabs are engaging in pain avoidance.
There's another point that Harari didn't make, because he wasn't talking only about Trumpswabs, and that is their total and abject and *morally revolting* intellectual dishonesty. They have zero integrity. They lie about anything and everything, and then when called on their lies, they lie about the lies. No one exemplifies this here more than Kremlin Girl / Bit of Nothingness, although scooter (the drunken Virginia camper) and AlleyPussyBitch come very close to KG/BoN. Right there with their intellectual dishonesty, or perhaps a subset of it, are their bad faith. Again, KG/BoN is the exemplar of this when she petulantly and shrilly and bitchily demands "evidence," and then when compelling
evidence is presented, she rejects it out of hand: "CNN? <eyeroll>". This takes another form from both KG/BoN and Hartung, when they say something to the effect
of "That's not 'actual' [sic] evidence!" In fact, it "actually" is evidence; they just find it displeasing, and so their intellectual dishonesty and bad faith cause them to reject it.
Here is a great current instance of Trumpswabs preferring pleasing fiction to painful truth: blaming the magnitude of the destruction of the southern California wildfires on L.A. mayor Karen Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom. The truth and the reality of why those water tanks feeding the fire hydrants were depleted to the point of low water pressure is complicated. It was
*not* because Bass cut the fire department budget (she didn't; the budget went up by more than 7%;
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/how-much-did-the-l-a-fire-department-really-cut-its-budget),
and it was *not* because Newsom failed to do something at the state level. But the *fiction* that Bass and Newsom are to blame is cheap and easy to acquire, and simple to understand, so the Trumpswabs latch onto that. The reality, of course, is much more complicated:
* terrain
The Santa Monica mountains to the north and west of Pacific Palisades are
extremely rugged and covered in dense, impenetrable and extremely flammable
chaparral. Firefighting there is extremely difficult even in better
conditions, but winds blowing in the high double digits make it that much
harder. And *no*, you can't just "clear the brush." If you denude the
hillsides, then you get *equally* destructive mudslides when it rains. With
the wind speeds that were occurring, the brush could have conceivably been
cleared for a full mile to the north of Pacific Palisades, and fire *still*
would have got into the residential neighborhoods and burned block after
block of houses. Lack of brush clearance is *not* the cause.
* water management
The water tanks that feed the fire hydrants were *full* when the fire started.
Abnormally high use by the fire department drained them. Due to the winds,
firefighting aircraft were grounded, so all firefighting effort was by ground-
based crews, and they used more water than they otherwise would have used. The
Department of Water and Power pumps were *fully operational*, but they simply
couldn't refill the tanks as fast as the fire crews were draining them.
* wind
The wind speeds in the burn area are the highest ever recorded in that part of
L.A. You could have had 100 times as much water, and you're not going to
prevent this:
https://tinyurl.com/mrxak3cf
But simple-minded and dishonest and bad-faith Trumpswabs have their simple fiction that Bass and Newsom fucked up, and they are not going to be budged from
it by a difficult truth.
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