@ #1880791: one of my fundie coworkers is a major Mental Ben fan. Really wants the guy as prez, with maybe the Huckster as Veep.
She's been complaining about the media "lying" about the things Ben says. "Lies," apparently, can consist of accurately and faithfully quoting what someone says in context and making sure that someone's words are fully attributed to them. Specifically, for the last two days she's been upset that the news media has gotten hold of his pyramid theory and ran with it. She sees nothing at all wrong with the idea, you see, since her church teaches the same thing and she believes them.
When I mentioned yesterday that most archaeologists believe that the pharaohs built them as monuments and tombs, she cut me off. Nobody builds something that big just to store a dead body, she said. Nobody builds something that big just to look at, even if they think their God told them. There had to be a better reason, she said.
When I said that the pyramids were almost solid stones and would have made piss-poor grain silos because they had virtually no room for grain, she shook her head and said that, according to her pastor, they were built hollow originally. When they emptied out the grain they filled the hollow spaces with stone blocks. They were built big because they were only meant to be used once and then filled with rock. Because, you know, that's what you do with huge projects that take decades and enormous resources and manpower--you use them once and destroy them in the process, I guess. Once they were full, she said, that's when they started keeping dead bodies in them.
"Why are you laughing? What's so funny?" she asked me.
I gave up. Because...the kind of people who would vote for Carson or Huckabee can listen to this stuff pour out of their mouths, and they honestly have no idea why the rest of us are pointing at them and laughing. They really don't get the joke. This sounds completely sane and rational to them. Their world view is so distorted, so warped, that simple cause and effect are utterly beyond their comprehension, and WE sound like the lunatics. The same exact people will tell you that seatbelts are the cause of crash deaths and motorcycle helmets cause head injuries--the same lady told me that motorcycles are safer than cars because, in a motorcycle accident, you're flung safely away from the site of the crash. My wingnut uncle made the exact same claim. They believe that flu vaccines make you more vulnerable to the flu, or that people get plastic surgery because they have higher self-esteem and better self-image than people who don't. They believe that women have one more rib than men even if you show them the skeletons and have them count the ribs themselves, by hand. They believe that more efficient cars are bad, and that climate isn't changing because snow still falls somewhere. The idea that thousands of workers would toil for decades to pile up rock blocks just to create a granary that was only ever meant to be used once sounds reasonable to them. They lack even the most basic rudimentary self-awareness or introspective ability to analyze their ideas and compare them to observable reality. As a result, they literally do not dwell in the same universe the rest of us do.
At this point, I honestly almost WANT him to become president. At last count, Carson was trying to defend himself from allegations that he did NOT, in fact, repeatedly try to inflict bodily harm on, and/or attempt to kill, friends and family when he was younger, and his fans are ardently supporting him because of, and not in spite of, it. Let that trickle through your gray matter. His supporters are actually arguing that a man who is verifiable delusional and severely mentally unstable with a history of extreme anger management issues and scores of explosive incidents in his past is a qualified, desirable presidential candidate precisely BECAUSE of these factors. But don't think TOO long, or your brains will dribble out of your ears. He's a verifiable pathological liar who lies about easily verified things, hard to verify things, even things that it makes no sense for anyone remotely sane to lie ABOUT. He lies as casually, unthinkingly and automatically as other people breathe, and his supporters are so utterly deranged, so divorced from reality, that even when you point them out, and walk them through it so they can see it, they love him all the more because of it. Carson could come on television tomorrow and tell America that he enjoyed killing parakeets with a clawhammer as a teenager or that Karl Marx started the Crusades when he invaded Europe in 1776 with an army of Nazi Muslim dinosaurs and not only would they not call him on it, they would support him BECAUSE of it. There is literally nothing so insane, so false, so deranged that he can say that they won't enthusiastically cheer. Their world view is THAT broken--they would drop him ONLY if he began saying things that were sane, rational and verifiable, factually correct. And there are tens of million of people like them in this country alone. And they vote.
It's so insane, so hilariously, ludicrously insane, that I almost want him as president for the sheer entertainment value alone. Just to see what he would do.
Almost.
I HAVE to laugh. Otherwise I would be pissing myself in terror.
