Day 97: The Suckers Wise Up
>10 Print "I am a sucker"
Things are not going well in Trump land. Like with any grift, eventually, the mark's patience wears thin and begins to demand results. That is usually when the grift starts to crumble, forcing the conman to fall back from prevarication to prevarication until, ultimately, he is forced to take the money and run. Such is the case with Trump.
Have you seen Trump's recent polling? It is awful and reflects a wholesale rejection of the first one hundred days of this regime. When looking at these numbers, remember that this is supposed to be the "honeymoon" period for a new administration when the American people are most tolerant.
Here are some snapshots from today's New Zork Times:
Again, this is happening during the honeymoon period of Trump 2.0. What are these numbers going to look like after a year? Two? Or by 2028?
These numbers aren't unique to this poll as multiple pollsters show similar results.
Now you know why GOP congressmen are avoiding town hall meetings.
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It is gratifying to know that the American voter is alert and sober, but it's infuriating that we are in this situation. I suspect that many of the poll respondents who are now critical of Trump 2.0 are also the same voters who put him in office in the first place. As I am fond of saying, anger at Trump is fine and good, but he is merely a symptom of a deeper rot in the American populace itself. I am too lazy today to go looking for the quote, but I believe it was Plato who warned that when a people lose their political virtue, it is exceedingly difficult to get it back. I believe the 2024 re-election of Trump is indicative of that loss, and it won't be easy to set things right. This might well be the start of America's death spiral.
These days I am reminded of an episode of Phineas and Ferb in which Lawrence Fletcher, the UK-import dad of the titular boys, remarks that what he loves about Americans is that we are like "big, fun children."
There is a lot of truth in that, especially in how we vote. Like children, 49% of us (apparently) view politics with the naivety of a child who has yet to come to grips with the law of causation.
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It has been observed that one of the most common denominators of Trump's base is that they watch a lot of television. I mean, a lot. This is why I often refer to MAGA as the "couch potato party." Indeed, this idea has been observed by pollsters:
HarrisX founder and CEO Dritan Nesho explained that while the race is incredibly close both nationally and within battleground states, Trump’s strength with “couch potato voters” could win him the election should he mobilize them to show up to the polls.
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Nesho explained that this demographic helped put Trump over the top in 2016, and brought him close to victory in 2020. “These people are generally representative of the country, but they tend to be lower income voters. They tend to skew fairly heavily male and they tend to skew white,” he said.
Not mentioned is the fact that they are also poorly educated, something Trump himself crowed about in the 2016 campaign when he said, "We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” He certainly does, and for good reason. My point here is that a nation can survive an invasion from without or even treachery from within. But can it survive when the people are dangerously ignorant and gullible? What is the cure for that?
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I was reminded of this idea of a nation mired in stupidity when I saw that Bethesda Game Studios, makers of beloved, all-time-classic video game franchises such as Fallout (yes, as seen in the Amazon show based on the game), has released a nearly two-decade-old video game, Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion and "remastered" it with enhanced graphics and gameplay tweaks. That sounds great, right? Sure! Great games, like great movies, should be preserved. But what isn't great is that this new edition has seen a 233% price increase.
And many gamers are snapping it up.
As with the facile Trump voter, the gullibility of gamers is yet another sign of a nation in deep intellectual decline. This is painfully obvious just by perusing the top shows on Netflix, but still. It has to be remembered that a big chunk of the gaming audience is of a young demographic, one that isn't particularly smart with money (hence, why "pre-orders" are popular despite the term being synonymous with a "blind gamble" where the house always wins, but I digress). But I am also seeing older gamers who should know better jumping on the bandwagon. It is stunning to me.
Selling a nearly twenty-year-old game for the price of a new game is no different than, say, when Disney repackages an old classic, like Star Wars or Alien, and sells it again as The Force Awakens or Alien Romulus. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the studio is out of original ideas and/or the inability to execute those original ideas and is being forced to repackage old hits as new products. And people are lining up for it.
As I wrote in a previous post, I've been enjoying my time in the free-to-play Warzone. Now, when I have fun in a free game, I like to kick back to the developer as a way of saying, "Yeah! You did good!" With that in mind, I decided to buy a skin for the game. Before perusing the store, I expected to be able to get one for, say, $10 or so. I was shocked to see that, quite to the contrary, I would needed to have forked over $20 to $30, depending if I wanted a single skin or a bundle! That's the price of an entire game! I thought. Keep in mind that such a purchase would only be good for the life of the game, however long that might be. It wouldn't be like I would own a physical product, one that I could display on a shelf long after the servers go dark. Who would spend that kind of money? Well, it turns out a lot of gamers. Such purchases make up almost 60% of all gaming revenue, some $80 billion in 2024 alone.
Apparently, gaming, like politics, is often divorced from common sense.
>20 Goto 10
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I think I'll end with this apropos short, produced by the War Department in 1945, warning people not to be suckers. It should be played on every TV station today and for the next four years.
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