Dedication
Trump has had a busy day not believing things he hasn’t read.
President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed a study produced by his own administration, involving 13 federal agencies and more than 300 leading climate scientists, warning of the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change.
Why, you ask?
“I don’t believe it,” Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read “some” of the report.
The cover, maybe?
Anyway. There is more than one kind of not believing. There’s the kind that involves knowledge of the thing to be believed or not believed, and then there’s the other kind. You can count on Trump to practice always the other kind.
If you missed the study’s release, well, that was the point. It was originally slated to be made public next month but was suddenly released on the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, when the country shops, eats, hangs with family and pays a total of zero attention to what’s going on in politics. Outside of Christmas and the actual day of Thanksgiving, there’s no better day to drop bad news that you don’t want people to see.
…
Trump’s willingness to ignore the conclusions of experts because it doesn’t jibe with what he wants the truth to be isn’t isolated to just the climate. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the unanimous conclusion of the country’s intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help him and hurt Hillary Clinton. And of late, he has chosen to ignore the CIA’s conclusion that Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.
He makes it easy for himself to ignore the conclusions of experts by not finding out anything about them.
Well, when you’ve got the best brain, why should you rely on experts? How can they possibly know as much as the best brain, the one who knows things that other people don’t know? And he has the best words, so he can say it so much better than any old expert report.
Trump is a little kid with his fingers in his ears going “Nuh uh!”.
The ontology and epistemology of Trump.
There’s a PhD in that for someone.
But not me. I’ve done my bit. I’m just the innocent bystander who suggested it.
Omar, do they give PhDs for the study of fuck-all?
Actually, scrap that. Theology!
AofS:
I will accept that amendment.
The theology, ontology and epistemology of Trump.
The theology is easy. He is his own god.
“There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t disbelieve real things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Drumpf. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve disbelieved as many as six real things before breakfast.”
WaM, I would love Lewis (you were quoting Lewis, right?) to have lived long enough to have co-written a book with Douglas Adams.
AoS,
Yes, that’s adapted from Lewis.
And I agree about that collaboration.