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> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls

I feel this is largely a consequence of decades of overwrought hyperventilating about all things politics and a lot of crying wolf. Every republican candidate has been the next Hitler, every democratic candidate has been the next anti-christ. Every 4 years we go through this song and dance predicting the end of the world and untold human suffering and every 4 years life went on with barely a change. Why would people expect this time to actually be different? Why would they expect that this time the stories of corruption and abuse of power are actually true and being reported without ridiculous embellishment? Why would anyone who voted for Trump in the first place think that reports of abuse of power from the side of American politics that coined “chimpler” as a nickname for W. Bush would be sincere about Trump?

I agree with you that I think more people should be more concerned than they are. I just don’t think it’s all that surprising either. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” is that when the wolf finally comes, no one will believe you. Of course the other lesson is that eventually the wolf does come. It didn’t work out so well for the village, and it might not work out so well for us either.

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alabastervlog a day ago | parent [-]

The thing is, there has been a wolf. It's now eating us, and the time to stop it is gone. But sure, it's the fault of the people who correctly told you there was a wolf, and that it's been coming closer and looking hungrier and hungrier since the '70s.

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tpmoney a day ago | parent [-]

You seem to have missed the point. For one, I’m not telling you this is a good thing or that this is how it ought to be. For two, even in the fable the wolf was real in the end. The problem is, the wolf wasn’t real the last time, or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. You can quibble over whether prior politicians were heralds of the wolf or not, but that wasn’t the message. The message was that the wolf was at the gates. And when no wolf materialized, people grew resistant to the idea of the cries ever having meaning. So now we have a wolf, and the problem we are facing is that the people who we need to convince that the wolf is real have no reason at all to believe us until their sheep are being eaten by a wolf in front of them. So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth? That’s the problem to be solved. Everything else is just a side show.

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yellowdrone a day ago | parent | next [-]

I think you misunderstood the prior poster. In the story the boy just made the wolf up the first couple of times, there were no signs beforehand. The prior poster seems to believe that the republicans were doing something bad beforehand, which is now escalating and thus a direct consequence of what came before. That would be more like if the boy found wolf droppings and pointed to those, which would not make him a liar anymore.

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alabastervlog a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth?

Irrelevant, it's too late. We can only hope for enough economic turmoil, fast enough, that it triggers mass riots.

	▲	tpmoney a day ago \| parent [-]
		So then like I said, the sheep will be eaten. One then must hope they aren’t on the menu, and suddenly the “deafening silence” of various people makes a lot of sense. If the only answer is to wait until enough sheep are eaten for the village to finally get its act together, most people aren’t going to volunteer to be one of the sheep sacrificed.