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Memories of the 28th Century

From Ignorance to Insurrection

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While thinking about the insurrection invading the U.S. Capitol, I realized that the underlying reason for it was ignorance; although there may reasons for the ignorance. Most people have very limited contact with state and local government, just paying taxes, voting, building inspections, etc. And many people think that TV cop shows are good sources for legal advice and information about prosecution.

For criminal prosecution, there are many rules for the collection of evidence, and the courts have determined that evidence must follow those rules to be used in a legal action. That means that yelling that there was electoral fraud proves that there was electoral fraud; it is necessary that there is actual evidence, and the evidence must follow the rules. Trump and his minions never offered any evidence of election fraud; they simply asserted that it existed. Well, there was an edited video that showed poll workers pulling boxes from under their work tables and counting this, but that video was inaccurate, see fact check. https://www.gpb.org/news/2020/12/04/...on-fraud-claim And that was some of the only evidence that Giuliani presented anywhere.

It is a pity that the insurrectionists hadn’t worked with local officials and learned how they do things. I worked with local officials for years, and I was pleased to learn that most people in local government, including the ones who run elections, are very nice, honest, dedicated people. They care about what they do. They wouldn't work in that field, if they didn't want to be servants of the people, then they would have chosen jobs that paid better, but they didn't take the job for the money; while they may have been attracted by job security, but they believed in the importance of the work. I brought this up, because of the things that have been said and implied about the people who count votes. The idea that they would report anything other than the actual count is absurd. Counting votes is incredibly boring; people don't do it for the money of glory; they do it, because someone has to.

But Trump seemed to think that the vote counters don’t bother doing the job, but he was judging from how he does things, rather than basing his opinions on actual facts. The fundamental problem is that Trump and his minions never learned the basics about observation and evidence. We have already learned that Trump paid others to take tests, write papers, etc., as a result, he never learned anything, except corruption, and it appears that the people who invaded the Capitol had also neglected their educations.

We can point fingers, but it would be difficult to send them back to finish school from junior high on, but that’s what they need. Although I will admit that some of them couldn’t have learned even if they tried due to having limited intellectual capacity. This is also the reason why conspiracy theories exist. Intelligent and educated people can easily figure out that the reptilians can’t possibly exist. But there are people who claim to believe that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, even with all the evidence that exists. Qanon exists to take advantage of such people. While we can’t send them back to junior high, we have to remember that completely uneducated people are out there trying to impose their preferences on the world.

Over the longer run, I think that school curricula have to be improved so that people will learn how to think, at least a little bit. We also have to rethink how the mentally ill should be treated. It is not desirable to lock people away in custodial hospitals, but we have to recognize that there are seriously mentally ill people in the country, and they are not being treated, and some of them are expressing delusional ideas as if those were actual reality, and that is the origin of some conspiracy theories. And it isn't just insane conspiracy theories that are problems; there are other things that have been taken as fact without actual facts to back them up: the hydration myth was a marketing campaign; The demonizing of cholesterol was poor logic applied to a study; climate change was a job creation project; national healthcare was another marketing campaign; the reptilians was a money making project; Trump's foray into politics was another marketing campaign that was too successful, and there have been others, and many of them a rather amusing. We all know now that Qanon was a money making scheme that had mixed success, and Q is now a pig farmer in the Philippines.

Where they come from isn't all that important, but we have to find a way to send them back there into the minds of the originators. Those marketing schemes wouldn't be as important, if ordinary people were capable of spotting them as false in some way. That might put some advertising agencies out of business, but operations that sell lies as facts should be put out. Then there is the problem of finding teachers who could teach about the lies or marketers; they are out there, but they would have to be attracted. The result is important; we have to put Qanon and other purveyors of lies out of business.

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