Re: idiots walk among us

On 3/10/2025 10:39 AM, Don wrote:

Associated annotations appended.
 Charles Packer wrote:

WolfFan wrote:
>

<https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/marjorie-taylor-greene-promotes-measles-parties-for-kids-amid-deadly-outbreaks/ar-AA1At4JL>
>
you can’t make this up. If someone tried to put this into the plot of a
work of SF, any competent editor would reject it as too stupid to allow
suspension of disbelief.

>
There is an SF story about that, sort of. It's called "The
Waveries" by Frederick Brown. It's about a deluge of radio signals
that turn out to be early earthly radio broadcasts that have been
bounced back at us. What we're seeing in the public sphere
currently is something analagous: a whole bunch of century-old
cultural memes being bounced back at us. Allusion to real early
20th century medical practices is just one of them. Think about
it: tariffs, immigration, a war (Ukraine) full of imagery
resembling World War II. So it goes. The parsimonious interpretation
of all this is that the nation has been rented out to some sort of
theatrical production.

 It's a septical spectacle (so to speak) to witness the Anglosphere
desperately cling to its glorious past. Last week theatrocratical [1]
Trump took the cake with Zelensky, no? What would Plato say?
 Followup:
 When the West weaponizes drama it becomes political theater. In answer
to the question rhetorical regarding rule of a democracy by drama (a
theatrocracy, in other words), Plato says:
      Exposure to dramatic poetry nurtures and waters the passions
     instead of drying them up; it sets them up as rulers in us
     when they ought to be subjects. ...
      The tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other
     imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and the truth. ...
      Imitative art is far removed from truth and leads the soul
     away from the rational to the emotional.
 Philip K Dick's stories commonly contain counterfeit reality. AI's
aggressive avatars in THE GOLDEN AGE by Wright remind me of the
screaming salesmen in SALES PITCH by Dick:
      When they noticed Phaethon staring (perhaps they had
     registers to note his eye movements and pupil dilation
     (such information was, after all, in the public domain)
     they folded and swooped, clamoring, pressing around him,
     squawking, urging him to try, just once, free trial offer,
     their profferred stimulants and additions, false memories,
     compositions, and thought schemes. They swarmed like angry
     sea gulls or hungry children from some historical drama.
      The music was, if anything, worse. A group from the Red
     Manorial School on one hillside in the distance were having
     a combination scream-feast, Bacchanalia, and composition-
     symphony analogue. Emancipated partials of the Psycho-asymmetric
     Insulae-Composition were on the other hillside, having a noise
     duel. Their experimental 36-and 108-tone scale music, subsonic
     and hypersonic, trembled in Phaethon’s teeth. They made no effort
     to muffle the sound for the sake of those who did not share their
     extensive ear/auditory lobe modifications, their peculiar
     subjective time-scale alterations, or their even more peculiar
     aesthetic theories. Why should they? Every civilized person was
     assumed to have access to some sort of sense-filter to allow them
     to block or to tolerate the noise.
 Note.
 [1] Think theatrocracy not theocracy.
 Danke,

You are using an idiosyncratic definition.
" government by the people assembled in their theater (as in the Athenian democracy) "
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theatrocracy
Not very Trumpian. Dramatocracy might do.
--
Kevin R
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