French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

Big head political pundits literally go on Fox News and blame a Democrat President for Epstein's death, and you have to tell them "Uh, no, Trump was president then, and it was his administration in control" and they have this insane double take look like they can't possibly remember that.

Blaming Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response wasn't a fluke.

My father is a general contractor and viscerally experienced Trump's first term stupidity tripling his material costs. He still voted for him again, as "good for the economy", or "the democrats have gone too far". He blames democrats for the regional grocery chain hiring gay people as managers, which is funny, because they hire those people because they are the right kind of MBA types. He literally can't recognize the problem when it's in his very face.

My father has never been outwardly sexist and always demonstrated respect for strong women and their ability to participate in normal society. He still was convinced by right wing media that he should be afraid of women in the cockpit.

The soybean farmers were fucked by Trump's first term, and he gave them over $10 billion dollars. They all voted for him again, and it happened the exact same way.

Like, at this point, how do you convince people who change their memory of reality to fit their ideology?

I also think there's a kind of fascinating meta question about how the nature of conspiracy theorizing itself response to challenges. I think fact checking is a perfectly legitimate institutional response to it and in a healthy culture it would be appreciated and valued and utilized and would play a role. But the conspiracy ecosystem writ large has had to think of a systematic response to the phenomenon of fact checking and like evolve its way out of vulnerability to it.

One is to dismiss correction for any number of reasons, another is to kind of cultivate a mindset and attitude of frenzied emotional subject shifting that kind of exists and sustains itself in a way that's detached from the habit of factual investigation. But I also think there are such things as like experimenting with principled philosophical stances like relativism or disputing baseline concepts like burden of proof or especially fascinating in the flat Earth corner of the internet are philosophical positions about the relativity of knowledge and extreme subjective and skeptical orientations towards the world and the possibility of data and knowledge.

So even though I actually personally believe in the importance and significance of isolating out and emphasizing specific clear and short criticisms such as conspiracy theorists can't remember the past. I do think they have processes to metabolize and respond to those criticisms and I'm fascinated to learn to what extent they might try to articulate a principle in defense of not remembering the past. Because surely some will give it the college try.