Selling Delusion

Sarah Palin, the American Republican vice presidential nominee has proven to be a real dead duck - dumb as a brick, shrill as a whistle, incapable of coherent thought, and absolutely awful at displaying intelligence. It is almost as if intelligence is an extra terrestrial precious metal with this woman. And yet, she has had her impact on this campaign, proving once again that there will always be someone willing to buy into delusion.

It is also the revenge of morons on intelligent people, when they support a candidate who is more "like them" instead of being able to acknowledge there are others who are more capable and definitely better. But for this, delusion has to be bought into, and Sarah Palin is an expert at selling delusion. After being hammered with the simplest of questions in interviews, she went on to criticize the interviewers for being mean, and losing out on opportunities to ask her things she wanted to talk about! The plain and obvious truth is, she doesn't have much to say that is so important, or even coherent.

But the people buying into the delusion couldn't be happier, because it takes effort to acknowledge, discern, recognize and support the more substantial candidates. This kind of candidate is the perfect cheap chocolate that is always going to be sold at a discount.

There is no winning against people who are delusional. That is a hard one for intelligent people to digest. It is a fact that humanity is based on a system where the right to survive and be represented in the collective has nothing to do with intelligence. If the majority of our road users break the rules and make it dangerous for those of us who do follow the rules, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, except formally complain to equally incompetent and status quo loving nincompoops, who are indeed happy to see things stay the same.

Delusional people are also selectively blind, selectively deaf, and ready to selectively apply value systems to the things they subscribe to. It is a character trait, and it is highly noticeable! The unfailing occasion when this trait screams for attention is when an illusion is being smashed, like a celebrity who turns out to be a little less than the image. The delusional fan has a hard time accepting it not because it would fundamentally change anything, but because the delusion has been fed for too long to kill so ruthlessly!

If you know someone who is delusional, what can you do to help? The best strategy would be for you to insulate yourself from the madness first. A frontal attack on a delusion has virtually no chance - it only helps to strengthen its own defence - you are playing right into the delusion artist's premise - you are attacking the delusion precisely because there is some value to it! This is how people who first subscribed to the round earth theory must have felt when they refused to accept the earth was flat!

When you talk to delusional people, you need only prod a little for intelligence to get a really defensive answer like - "That is not something I am interested in", or a fight-for-personal-rights answer like "Why're you telling me this? I don't need to know!" At this point, you better know your time's up. If you are in an even more persuasive mood, you will get "I don't care. I like it!" Now, it really is time to back off!

The Communist Party of India is now famous for being deliriously delusional. Remember the recent attack on the UPA government that our nation's sovereignty has been compromised and India sold out to American interests and so on? I thought for a while that there was probably no delusion involved, but finally, it didn't take much for me to realize that this was what was at play - simple delusion, and a hard sell to us poor believing Indian public that there was an occasion to celebrate a "black day" when India signed an agreement for nuclear co-operation with the USA. There is not one mention of any real disadvantage to India yet! Good old delusion from that idiot Prakash Karat.

It goes beyond blindly applying our value systems to other people. It isn't as if Karat cannot understand in a cerebral kind of way that India is merely engaging in business with another country. It has to do with being delusional about sticking to who he likes and who he doesn't. Very childish, but true of most politicians, particularly the communists, who shot themselves in the foot by subscribing to a no-money-making lifestyle, and cannot even enjoy the material benefits of an emergent India. They want to keep India in the stone age, and be patrons to a foreign ideology, no matter how unsuitable it is to us!

I dare say people who serve in the armed forces are delusional to some extent, when they take this patriotism stuff a little too seriously. It helps of course, to somehow feel that what you are doing is morally on the higher ground, and "serving the country" somehow has a nice ring to it. The delusion of course is that being in the armed forces is somehow superior to other professions, while the truth is that it is just another job opportunity, with its own unique set of benefits, however deserving those may be. But the delusion has been sold brilliantly down the years - if you are a member of the armed forces, you do get some respect, even if you happen to be the biggest moron simply willing to follow orders. It isn't as if we wouldn't defend ourselves if we didn't have uniforms.

It isn't always fun questioning people's delusions. Sometimes it is amusing to just run with it - observe and laugh. There is plenty of supply and apparently, plenty of demand too!

Bewitched by Sarah Palin?

I've been watching this woman - Sarah Palin. She's definitely conservative, definitely manipulative, definitely confident, definitely a bit retarded, and definitively the perfect Republican candidate to follow in the rich tradition of GW Bush. She looks better than Bush, but she's by no means as capable of making us laugh. In fact, she gives me the shivers.

Just when I was wondering where I should start about this creature that the Republicans have unearthed and unleashed on the American people as their probable next Vice President, this article came today on Yahoo! news.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080925/ap_on_el_ge/palin_witchcraft_blessing

According to this article, Sarah Palin is receiving some kind of holy protection from witchcraft! I have always believed that religion is a personal thing, but if people are using their religious beliefs to ask for votes, I don't think they can hope to be immune to their faith being questioned in more ways than one. But to believe in the power of witchcraft is simply... priceless!

Can you imagine if you were one of the geniuses on the cutting edge of America's science and technology and you are about to join hands with ten other countries in sending a manned mission to one of the moons of Jupiter and your Vice President comes running in with her witch hunter and wants you to form a ring around the launch pad to pray for the mission to ward off a curse? Now, maybe hanging the head of a moose on the windshield (facing outward of course) of the spacecraft would help scare away some of the evil spirits on the way!?

This is who the Republicans have signed on to represent you, America! I haven't even got to the scary thoughts yet. So, what's the big deal - believing in God, believing in witchcraft, what's all the noise about? True, it all comes down to some things we believe in that scientific reasoning cannot agree with. Like creationism that Sarah Palin wants included in school curriculae. That can be argued against and any rational mind will tell you that you cannot "educate" someone in something that has to be "accepted" at face value. The counter argument will always be that since you cannot conclusively prove that there is no God, you cannot say creationism is invalid. This is not even the cycle of debate I am about to engage in.

The most important characteristics of leadership are the ability to understand information, process it efficiently, and be able to take decisions based on the merits of "knowledge" not "belief". So, when you have a leadership that is more based in belief than in knowledge, you are bound to have an inability to assimilate information, an inability to process it without dogma, and the decisions and actions that result from these inabilities are bound to be ineffective. Sarah Palin is a candidate for precisely those kinds of misjudgements, decisions and actions.

The biggest danger of belief systems is that it provides the framework to shift responsibility on elements beyond human control. If an oil tanker hits a rocky reef and leaks thousands of gallons of oil and causes an awful amount of environmental damage, it would be very hard to assure the insurance company that witchcraft could be one of the reasons for the mishap. Sarah Palin must believe that every oil tanker that makes it safely to port is because of some prayer that warded off "all sorts of witchcraft"!

America, please don't slide to such low levels. The laugh has lasted long enough. When we hear about your private entrepreneurs making it to space on their own, it makes us happy. When we hear of one of you in a San Francisco garage making a plug in hybrid car go 200 miles in one charge - That is the America that we'd like to see more of. If that's what you want, what witchcraft can possibly stand in the way?