Droppie [infosec] 🐨
BY:
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist:
"Can IQ tests settle whether Trump is a moron or not?"
This unkind heading appeared above a recent article concluding that, no, Trump's moronity is too elusive for IQ tests alone to capture.
This Trump era is a time of Trump-triggered crimes and evils. But as well as all the obvious, daily life and death and human misery evils, this Trump era has also brought us an accompanying, related, galaxy of absurdities and weirdnesses.
One recurring absurdity is the way in which commentators with minds 100 times more healthy and knowledge-wealthy and wise than Trump's sick and impoverished and ignorant one are, now, so demeaningly reduced to endlessly analysing Trump's thoughts and actions. Fine minds really should have finer work than this to do. It is a kind of cruel shame, as if our Mozarts and Shakespeares squandered their talents on writing jingles for gambling ads and speeches for shifty politicians.
This particular absurdity loomed especially large for me last Sunday morning. First I spent an intellectually engaging 50 minutes with an Iran war session of Private Eye magazine's Page 94 podcast panel discussion program.
This session (wittily-titled "War On Iran: Aya-Tollad You So") featured four fiendishly witty but also fiendishly bright and well-informed commentators. They wrestled with the question "Why did Trump declare his latest perfect, 'very complete', already-won war?"
Then when these worthies were done I tuned to ABC Radio National's The Minefield. There, the healthy, knowledge-wealthy and wise minds of public intellectuals Scott Stephens, Waleed Aly and scholarly international law guru Dr Tamer Morris addressed the theme "Can illegal wars [like Trump's war against Iran) still be legitimate wars?"
Their discussion became, really, a sometimes pained, despairing, baffled attempt to understand what on Earth goes through Trump-like American presidential minds when those minds turn to might-makes-right ideas of invasion and of regime-changing.
Following the seven participants in the two programs (let us call them the Intelligent Seven) one wondered if they were even to be of the same species as the creature, Trump, they were wasting their good hearts and fine minds on trying to fathom.
They were examples of Homo sapiens (sapiens means wise) but were painstakingly analysing a creature, Trump, at best only a human subspecies. Perhaps he is of Homo stupidus, or Homo narcissus-cosmeticus or, thinking of his total inability to feel any empathy for others (for example the 170 Iranian schoolgirls killed by US bombing of their school) Homo sociopathus.
The sheer futility of what the Intelligent Seven were trying to do reminded one of the wisdom of the sardonic US commentator/public speaker Fran Lebowitz.
"Echoing the opinion of former US secretary of state Rex Tillerson, Lebowitz thinks the biggest danger of Trump is that he is a moron," The Guardian has noted, going on to reported her diagnosis that "Everyone says he is crazy - which maybe he is - but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't."
Yes, it seemed to me that the Intelligent Seven discussants of Trump were, in trying to understand him, up against the problem that, living and moving among people like themselves, they have no experience of pure, deep, human stupidity.
All seven will have read but have probably temporarily forgotten the message of American philosopher Thomas Nagel's immortally brilliant 1974 paper and ensuing book What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Nagel explains, at scholarly length, why no human can ever truly know what it is like to be a bat, or any other non-human species.
Nagel's methodologies and his analyses apply, too, to all my attempts to imagine what it is like to be any of the humans who are radically unlike me.
I struggle to imagine what it is like to be the kind of Australian who votes "no" to the Voice referendum, or who votes for One Nation, or who thrills to every episode of Married At First Sight.
These people are mysteries to me. I have more in common with bats, and with platypuses, than I have with them.
Don't think that I am scoffing at the Intelligent Seven. I am caught up in the very same Trump-era absurdity syndrome that they are.
Here I am, fiendishly intelligent and poetically sensitive, writing a column about fiendishly stupid Trump. This Saturday's column was going to be an arts-focused poetic meditation on the beauty and the wonder of clouds, predicated on the news that celebrations are under way to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of John Constable, the famed painter of the beauty and the wonder of clouds. A genius.
That intended column would have been an uplifting and sincere read for you all. I am an enthusiastic member of the Cloud Appreciation Society and care deeply about clouds (Australia's are unique and the best in the world and have been beautifully painted by Australia's Constable-influenced artists) and would have written about them with feeling.
But instead of writing about meteorological and painterly loveliness here I am instead, depraved and debauched by this Trump era, down in journalism's gutters, scribbling about human ugliness.
#USPol #TuckFrump #FuckRWNJs #magamorons #FuckChristoFascists #FuckAllReligion #OrangeOaf #HeyFascistCatch
#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead
Sue Cohen
Kodiakj
MJ Muse