....lunch AND dinner. I'm beginning to think this must have been what it was like to live in the days of the Weimar Republic. Everything these days, and I do mean everything, is not just politicized, it is linked to specific forms of political action in such a way that once the table has been set nothing can shift it; not facts, not reason, not reality itself. As a result every meme is clung onto with ferocious tenacity, not matter how ridiculous it may turn out to be or how divorced from reality we later discover it is.
Once something has been viewed as a useful political tool it will not be discarded, even if reality itself (or one's perception of it) has to be altered. In the name of political expediency everything is fair game, and dishonesty is something only the "other guy" does.
It doesn't even matter what we are talking about here. I can speak generically because this pattern fits just about every political topic one wants to talk about. That is the point. The content of political discourse isn't important anymore. Political discourse, as such, simply doesn't exist in this society. What passes for such discourse is merely the tribal identifiers we use to differentiate "Us" from "Them." The scariest part of it is the more one is afflicted with this pathology the more likely it is you will selected by the media as the ones to set the terms of the "debate."
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