Honestly I think this stuff goes very under-reported. The world has become so used to anti-intellectualism that simple ignorance in the highest office(s) is now excusable, and criticising it is implicitly cast as political. Which is a state of affairs that can be weaponised.
(Lest people think I am sniping at the USA from the UK, I'd observe that we as a nation were bounced into a monumental decision by a series of politicians who flatly refused to make their numbers add up when challenged)
> Honestly I think this stuff goes very under-reported.
It's not under-reported generally, it's that a large portion of the population only watches certain news channels that do not report what's going on. That's why the Epstein case is such a big issue for Trump, because it's been pushed so hard by the news his supporters watch. They don't care about the blatant corruption on a scale never seen because they don't know about it. But Epstein is a foundational MAGA conspiracy.
By underreported, I don't mean "nobody mentions it when it happens" in the sense of news reporting.
What I mean is, there is no really deep reporting on what it means in terms of long-form journalism.
And I mean this internationally and apolitically. There is very little serious discussion about what scientific, technological and economic illiteracy means when it is found in positions of power, and why it is that the new orthodoxy is simply to resist correction.
We have these discussions (belatedly) about judges and lawyers, especially in the light of the Post Office scandal in the UK (and in relation to the Lucy Letby trial, where there appears to have been a simple, astonishing agreement between the prosecution and the defence to not use statistics).
But we do not talk enough about how leaders on all sides are content to keep pushing the same uncorrected points, again and again, and it's not disqualifying. Politicians can simply choose not to "recognise" the correction, to use the parliamentary term, and that is sort of where it stops.
I do think the Epstein story is interesting because it is one of those things where perhaps the base understands that someone in office has lied to them, regardless, because the story directly contradicts itself now.
But I think it's survivable. If he doesn't complete this term it won't be the reason given, at any rate; his very obvious cognitive and physical decline will be.
Damn, I forgot about that one. There should be a page with a collection of the most egregious stupidities he said, that you could just link to whenever someone is still arguing in his favor.
We really should have understood what was going to happen in the world when someone else tweeted:
"Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April"
Many things make me think Elon Musk uniquely benefits from Gell-Mann amnesia but the idea that anyone should have listened to him about anything other than rockets or cars should have been jettisoned right then and there. Because what he was saying was unsupportable by evidence right at the moment he said it.
