The Sorites paradox (Trump's news cycle)
How many times have you heard someone say:
"Every day I say to myself that I never thought that I would say...that the President has gotten lower than he was when he ____________".
We say this because we are trapped in Trump's news cycle. This daily barrage of news that nobody ever expects to hear, combined with gaslighting, is how Trump conditions his base to accept the unacceptable. After being reconditioned, their natural reaction to people who point this out to them is to claim the person speaking truthfully is hysterical.
Gaslighting is the systematic attempt to destroy another's perception of reality and originated from a 1938 stage play, "Gas Light" called "Angel Street" in the US. Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically also are convincing liars, sometimes charming ones, who consistently deny wrongdoing.
Trump gets his supporters to voluntarily surrender their moral courage every time they accept "something lower". They are moved to surrender and rationalize their previous moral stance when instilled with shame, guilt, fear, or doubt.
The Sorites paradox is informally known as the "boiling frog" metaphor and best be visually shown using a color gradient composed of discrete color bands that such that two adjacent bands vary in color too little for human eyesight to be able to distinguish between them.
The Sorites paradox is also called the paradox of the heap. Picture a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider is what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?
When did it become OK for a US President to get daily orders from TASS because he met privately with the Russian president so that the US can't deny what TASS says Trump agreed to?
The correct answer is that it never has and never will. Just because some say it is, or at best mutely accept it, doesn't matter in the slightest.
The best defense for us is to first recognize what Trump is doing and then become and remain defiant. Accept that every day Trump will be worse than before and keep fighting.
Thanks Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
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