Kakistocracy

Kakistocracy: a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.

The word was coined by English author Thomas Love Peacock in 1829, but has since fallen out of use. In 2017, the situation in the United States has given us a reason to revive it.

So far, the Trump administration has accomplished nothing more than dividing the USA more than ever, creating discord, confusion and mistrust. Demonstrating an unprecedented combination of utter ineptitude, dark and destructive malice and a level of corruption that makes the rest of the world watch in horror and disbelief, the first month of President* Trump has been nothing short of a scary freak show.

Yesterday, the delusional, narcissist clown-in-chief demonstrated beyond doubt that he has absolutely no clue to what he is doing by saying that the US should increase its nuclear weapons capacity to make it remain "top of the pack". (He don't talk so good.) For me, who grew up with the distant but constantly looming threat of the Cold War and the insane nuclear arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union, and knowing that Donald Trump lived through even more of that period in history, this quote in itself is proof beyond doubt that the United States is led by a person who is either a madman or an idiot - quite possibly both. Malice alone fails to explain it. Only stupidity and insanity remain.

For the sake of the planet - literally, in several different ways - President* Trump needs to resign immediately, take the Dark Emperor Steve Bannon and his crooked chief of staff Reince Priebus with him into oblivion, and let Congress decide which ones of his largely dubious appointments for cabinet who are fit to remain. While Vice President Mike Pence comes across as a right-wing creationist science-denial monster from my perspective, at least he seems like a reasonably normal human being with a functioning brain. The only way of dealing with a raving lunatic like Trump, living in a bubble of alternate reality of his own creation, is to remove him from office.

*: I honestly think history will include an asterisk next to Donald Trump's name, naming him "President (but not really)", and I sincerely hope his term will be listed as "2017-2017" with the added note "impeached and removed on grounds of corruption and collusion with a hostile foreign power".

It's official: Trump-speak channels Fox News

"You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They're having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what's happening in Brussels, you look at what's happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice, take a look at Paris."

This was a message sent across the world by President Donald Trump during his campaign rally in Florida on February 18, 2017. (Campaign rally? Mr. President, the election is over. You won. The next election is not until 2020. You need to stop seeking constant validation from your most loyal supporters, get a grip on reality and start doing your job! Mass meetings with cheering crowds glorifying a leader sends chills down the spine of most people with any grasp of history.)

As it turns out, this particular section of the strange word salad that tends to come out of the President's mouth whenever he speaks was not actually meant to suggest that Sweden had suffered a terrorist attack the day before. Mentioning Brussels, Nice and Paris, cities which actually suffered terrorist attacks, immediately afterwards was misleading and ugly rhetoric, but let's cut the President some slack and attribute that to a short-circuit in a disorganised mind. What he meant to say was not literally "you look at what's happening last night in Sweden" but rather "yesterday, I looked at what's happening in Sweden".

The official explanation, given through (what else?) a tweet sent out on Sunday, made it clear that his statement was based on a Fox News interview, in the the Friday episode of "Tucker Carlson Tonight", with filmmaker Ami Horowitz, who made a film called "Stockholm Syndrome" about the alleged problem with rising crime in Sweden. According to the filmmaker, a sharp rise in rape and violent crime in Sweden should be attributed to the large number of Muslim immigrants that have been admitted into the country in recent years.

First, the film in question is strongly biased, clearly designed to make a political point, and many of the claims in the "documentary" by Horowitz have been contested and called out as falsehoods. Even its fundamental premise, that the crime rate in Sweden is increasing, is false. I live in Sweden, and I can tell you it's still a very peaceful country compared to most others. Statistics show a slight increase in computer fraud in recent years, but the rates of other types of crime, including violence and rape, have remained more or less steady (and low) over the past decade, despite a sharp increase in the number of refugees who have been admitted into the country. What small crime rate increases you can find are not linked to immigrants. There has been a recent and problematic increase in gun-related violence and homicide in specific neighborhoods of a handful of cities, but while that is troublesome for those particular regions, it amounts to little more than glitches in the national statistics. Besides, the problems in those regions are definitely not caused by Muslim terrorists, nor by recently arrived refugees. Most of it can be attributed to organized gang-related crime without any particular political or religious ties. But let's not dwell on the abundance of errors in the film by Horowitz. It is a matter of debate to contest its claims, and that is what politics is about.

The troubling issue is that the President of the United States is now openly admitting to getting his information straight from Fox News, and apparently believes everything he watches on that channel without questioning it. This, when you think about it, is very, very frightening. Fox News, like many other news outlets, has a clear political agenda, and some of their reporting is strongly biased to the right, but the really scary part is that President Trump uses one random TV interview as his only source, without even naming it, and goes all-in on its possibly (in this case definitely) biased message in a public address. This kind of behavior is reckless, dangerous and unacceptable.

Dear President Trump: Stop lying! You are the President, and while I understand you want to be a different kind of president than tradition dictates, you need to grow up. Please learn to check your often dubious and incorrect sources before you embarrass yourself in public. It would be best if you learned to use written sources, but I realize it might be a stretch to change your habits and learn new skills at your age. However, you can still ask your advisers to check your facts and let them suggest what might or might not be appropriate to say as the President of the United States of America. When you say these silly things, these pathetic and transparent lies that simply don't make any sense at all to anyone but your most loyal domestic followers, the world laughs at you and regards you with disrespect as a stupid, scary clown. You need to bring yourself to watching at least some of the news channels you are dismissing as "fake news" and "enemies of the American people" (in your most disturbing scary clown tweet so far), because you desperately need to learn to get the big picture. If you keep letting only a few right-leaning news channels determine your view on reality, and dismiss out of hand all sources that disagree with your much too narrow and uneducated world view, you will never be fit to rule.

In Trump-land, up is down, and down is up

In a meeting with law enforcement officials on February 7, 2017, President Trump once again spouted his unsupported claim that the murder rate in the US is ”higher than in 45 or 47 years”, and that ”the media won’t report on it, because it doesn’t suit them”. This claim of his, like so many other claims he has made and keeps making, is not only false, it is preposterous, and it has been debunked before, during his campaign. The simple explanation to why media doesn’t report on it is that it simply isn’t true.

Then why does he keep saying this? It suits his agenda, of course, because fear-mongering makes people ask for more security at the expense of liberty. But how did he even arrive at such a conclu­sion? The lie is very easily disproven. Even a cursory Google search will lead to official govern­ment publications which contain very comprehensive FBI statistics over the past decades for various US crime rates, of which homicide is one of the most widely published and quoted. Looking closely at the statistics for 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, it can be argued that the slight increase from 2014 to 2015 is the largest for quite some time. However, the overall rate has actually been dropping significantly for the past decades, and the homicide rate today is much, much lower than what it was in the 1990s. In fact, the rate of homicides was lower in 2015 than any historic year since 1970, despite the slight increase from 2014.

Was this simply an error in the President’s grasp of numbers? Did he conflate the rate of increase with the absolute number? It seems a bit far-fetched to assume that one of his advisors would make a big point of a small increase from a historically low level, and invite to this fatal and embarrassing misinterpretation. If we don’t look at numbers in a table, but at a graph, we clearly see that the murder rate has gone down, not up, for several decades.

However, the graph offers a different explanation for the error.

The murder rate in the US is now at the level it was back in 1970. Hence, it can be truthfully said that ”the murder rate is now back at the level it was 47 years ago”. If that statement from someone ana­lyzing the graph reaches the deluded mind of a person with a short attention span who very clearly needs to believe that there is ”carnage in the inner cities” and that USA is on the brink of collapse from rampant crime, it can easily be mis­interpreted as ”the murder rate hasn’t been this high for 47 years”. The actual fact is the opposite: the murder rate hasn’t been this low for 47 years.

The graph above shows the facts, as presen­ted by official FBI statistics. The blue curve is the actual facts. The red curve, which is flipped and has absolutely no relation whatsoever to reality, is President Trump’s personal upside-down version. It would be presumptuos to think that even Presi­dent Trump could literally make himself believe that ”up is down and down is up”, or to push such an obvious lie to the public, but a statement made in passing in a situation where he didn’t actually look at the graph himself could have been fatally misinterpreted and inextricably etched itself into his deeply prejudiced mind.

Whatever reason he may have to keep claiming this, it’s an untruth of Orwellian proportions.
The murder rate in the US is at its lowest for the past 47 years. Claiming the exact opposite is a lie.


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