Common sense is sound, practical judgment concerning everyday matters, or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge in a manner that is shared by (i.e. common to) nearly all people.[1]
My common sense tells me after four years under an absolutely bankrupt morally & mentally Trump administration that common sense can no longer be trusted. Critical & analytical thinking must become our goal, or we are truly doomed.
Common sense tells anyone who possesses it that a supposed billionaire doesn’t have anything in common with me or anyone else in the working class & doesn’t give a shit whether we live or die. How do you think people who are that obscenely wealthy made all that money? By playing fair in their business dealings or treating their customers fairly? Duh! How can so many millions of Americans who have lost their once decent paying jobs, had their homes foreclosed on, had their pensions stolen by the Super banks, you know, the ones too big to fail or jail, believe Trump is their champion?
Common sense also tells me that “Reality T.V. shows” aren’t real & the term is an oxymoron i.e., T.V. is an artificial construct & medium for entertaining people. But thanks to the long & steady decline of intelligence in America by the immoral C.E.O.s of many, if not most, of those corporations who profit from a dumbed-down workforce & citizenry, we find ourselves in this Mad Hatter state of being.
Every day of Trump’s presidency defied common sense, yet his believers chose to close their eyes, their ears, their minds, & their hearts to his daily displays of an absolutely heartless & self-centered psychopath. And like those millions of so-called Christians who have completely abandoned Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount & his principles for living the Christian faith, the rest of his cult of greed are blind to their hypocrisy.
The most destructive result of the four years we experienced under Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan is that we have devolved to a nation where truth is now whatever any moron with a megaphone says it is. Facts are ignored that are inconvenient to whatever absurdity the imbeciles claim to be truth.
Trump owes a large measure of his “success,” to Facebook & Twitter and the “mainstream media,” who gave him tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of free advertisement when he was running for the presidency. Don’t forget Fox “news,” the National Enquirer of today which also played a significant role in dumbing the U.S. public down.
And no, I’m not another Alex Jones conspiracy-nut or fan. But many of the institutions & individuals who find that an uninformed public makes their goal of robbing the U.S. Federal Treasury that much easier to accomplish. Why would Trump appoint Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education when she hasn’t spent a day of her life in a public classroom & wants Charter Schools to completely take over our public education system? And Betsy’s family fortune came from that legal Ponzi scheme known as Amway.
For as long as I can remember, lawyers, politicians, & used car salesmen have been considered the lowest of the low in American society. And most Americans know that Jeff Bezos didn’t become the wealthiest man on the planet by treating his employees anywhere near fairly. Yet when it comes to the uber-wealthy CEOs of corporations, many of which are more powerful than nations, the mountains of evidence that they screwed their employees & consumers and made their surrounding environments toxic doesn’t seem to bother people?
Trump apologists believe that because he wasn’t a politician but is supposedly a billionaire means he gets a free pass & can be trusted. Does this represent common sense to you?
I must be from some lost world because if someone or some corporation poisoned my loved ones with their toxic products, etc., not only would I not trust them or believe a word out of their mouths, I would be as Mad as Hell & seek justice. And it’s quite remarkable that Trump supporters can block so much about Trump’s past from their minds & actually believe that the liberal democrats, the mass media, etc. etc. etc. are one vast conspiracy united in an agenda of hate toward their leader.
My common sense tells me how utterly absurd a theory like that is. As most people know who have ever tried to organize even their own local PTA board, there are going to be those who aren’t in agreement & who will try to undermine the organizing. Yet we’re asked to believe that this vast, liberal conspiracy is 100% united & working together to tear down poor daddy Donald?
Reflect for a moment on how disorganized the liberals & the democrats are & have been throughout their history. Then recall that the so-called “Conservatives,” have always been far more unified in their agenda, policies, & practices. Why? It’s quite simple actually, that’s because the G.O.P. has only one constant agenda/goal & that is greed, power, & profit!
My common sense tells me that any politician who works at getting rid of food stamps, housing assistance, unemployment, public welfare, voters rights, health care for the 99%, and on & on & on is my enemy!
Why is it that so many of these common sense champions barely utter a word of criticism towards the “Defense industry” which takes over half our tax dollars for tanks the Pentagon doesn’t even want, $900 toilet seats, planes, weapons, etc. that don’t even work, etc. but go ballistic when some greedy & immoral politician claims that the liberals are the ones bankrupting America?
It couldn’t be the fact that the G.O.P. & its perverted propaganda agenda from the moment FDR passed the New Deal has been to utterly destroy every vestige of humane concern listed in the New Deal, could it? You see, anything that takes a penny of profit out of the corporate cockroaches’ pockets is seen as immoral, obscene, & theft.
Of course, the 1% aren’t worried because they know how short the average person’s attention span is i.e., eight seconds, just behind that of the goldfish. And forget about history, most students hated history in high school & thanks to all the bells & whistles and bright, shiny objects that our “social media,” distracts them with, they have nothing to worry about.
Yep, it’s pretty amazing to think that this vast, liberal conspiracy is so technologically-sophisticated that they can instantaneously alter what Trump says & does to make him look bad. We can offer video clips, sound bites, etc. of Trump’s lies & crimes until the cows come home but those commie liberals are able to create all their lies because they hate Trump and all he has done for America.
What scares me most profoundly is that this lowest of human scum, Trump, has created such a Svengali spell over his followers that millions of Americans have died from the COVID virus & many are taking the horse & cattle deworming treatment and are being rushed to emergency for self-poisoning. That’s some special kind of stupid along with Donnie’s suggestion that they drink bleach or inject it. Wouldn’t a true leader lead by example i.e., inject some bleach into his arm, take the horse/cattle dewormer, etc. to prove to his followers how safe it is & how much he believes his own counsel to his fans?
Trump is obviously an imbecile & a grifter (to engage in swindling or cheating) to all but the happily ignorant. He pretends to be a successful businessman & lest we forget it, he reminds us at every opportunity. And I seriously doubt that were it not for “reality T.V.” and the “social media,” we would’ve ever allowed such a contemptible person to become president let alone dog catcher.
“Reality T.V.” is actors pretending to not be actors & it reflects how desperately dependent we have become on entertaining ourselves. Here’s a brief introduction to a book published by Neil Postman in 1985 which we should seriously reflect on,
“Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book’s origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell’s work, where they were oppressed by state control.
Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television‘s entertainment value as a present-day “soma“, the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens’ rights are exchanged for consumers’ entertainment.
The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that “form excludes the content”, that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and “news of the day” becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.”
I think the first “reality t.v.” show I ever watched & the last one I ever watched was, “Survivor.” People on an island divided up into teams with the goal of being the first to win whatever the prize was. And at the end of that first “reality” show, I said to my beloved wife who is no longer alive, this is total crap! They’re telling people that winning is everything & lying, cheating, backstabbing or whatever you need to do in order to win is okay.
Isn’t it strange or is it merely coincidental that this “win at all costs,” is also the business ethos of corporate America though few will admit to it? So, it’s not surprising that Trump should be selected to play the “Reality T.V. star” of the series, “The Apprentice.”
Unfortunately, the millions of Americans who fell in love with Trump didn’t make this connection. He didn’t have to act, he only had to be himself. And the fact that not only was he a lousy actor, he was also a lousy businessman, didn’t matter to Trump’s “Walking Dead” because many, if not most of them are probably of about the same I.Q. level as Trump i.e., about fifth grade.
You are probably aware of how great, wonderful, spectacular, etc. Trump is at just about everything he attempts in life because he never ceases to remind his loyal base at every opportunity. So, why has he threatened to sue any school or college he ever attended if they dare to release transcripts of his grades?
Our national obsession with entertainment or amusement, our intellectual laziness, our distaste for reading anything even remotely mentally challenging, & our general apathy has all contributed to the zombification of America, the supposedly most powerful nation on Earth.
We have clearly entered the new, “Post literate” world & in my not so humble opinion, we are in a death spiral! When we can no longer distinguish between truth, facts, & reality amidst this sea of amusement nor even care that we have, we’re closer than ever to the edge of that cliff overlooking the abyss.
We have become a nation of infants like babies in their cribs reaching upward to grab those bright, shiny, colorful shapes in the mobiles just out of reach. And this is the business model that Facebook & many of the other “Social media” use to seduce & distract us while they become ever more obscenely wealthy & we become homeless and die needlessly because of the corporate cockroach’s insistence on medical care as a profit-making system.
The “social media” giants like Facebook & Twitter employ “likes,” “shares,” etc. like slot machines with their bells & whistles to keep people coming back & ever more addicted. And Trump knows only too well what Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels knew i.e., the bigger the lie & the more often you repeat it, the “truer” it becomes. In other words, the more the public will believe it. So, grab your popcorn & other goodies and don’t miss a single episode of your “reality T.V.” before the Trumpsters of this land of the free & home of the brave kick you out into the overflowing gutters of America like Donny’s Secretary of the Treasury who was nicknamed the foreclosure king of California.
Have you about had your fill of all this “Common Sense?” Don’t be a fool like all those Americans who fought against fascism in WWII, instead, join the fascist army that Trump has inspired & keep patting yourselves on the back knowing that you are the true patriots, not the liberals who believe in sharing & caring about all of humanity & the environment.
Yep! Global warming is just another hoax. Don’t worry, Be Happy all you “Christian soldiers.”