Very well put.
WTF? I didn’t cite InfoWars in the OP. I provided a source of the organization’s own website. What the hell are you talking about “crazy ass info wars shit from HD’s first post”? It seems to me that the only one with “crazy ass shit” in their post is you.
In the OP, I pretty much said I thought it was going to be a non-event too. Like I said, I considered putting it in the schadenfreude thread, because I think it’s an open question whether this effort or the upcoming “Scream at the Sky” event is more futile and pathetic.
Wesley and Spice, I owe you both responses, but they’re going to be lengthier than I am willing to type out on my phone’s keyboard, so they’ll have to wait until later.
Trump is probably not the ultimate nightmare that awaits us; rather he’s a wrecking ball to institutions that will make it possible for the white Christian nationalist predators (barely) hiding in the weeds. Trump is dangerous, but more so in the sense that he is breaking down norms and institutions and will cause Americans to forget what a normal, “presidential” president looks and talks like. Like George W Bush, he represents a perpetual lowering of the bar of what passes for an office holder.
If you’re thinking that a dictator or despot necessarily has to be competent to maintain hold on power, I suggest you take a long, hard look at Venezuela. They went from nutbar to utter fucking clown in Maduro, but they’re living in an authoritarian nightmare with army helicopters firing on protestors just the same. They actually did once have a democracy, just to remind everyone.
Question: What happens when we have a combination of John Kelly and Jerry Falwell in the White House? A white nationalist Christian holy warrior without anyone to check that power. We’re a lot closer than you might think.
How close are we?
And recent gaffes notwithstanding, you’re not going to scare me with “John Kelly”. So tell me about Falwell. How close are we?
Trump is bizarre. But crying wolf or Nazi or racist every 5 seconds about seemingly each and every Republican has diluted your message.
Professionals diagnosing people they’ve never met, let alone treated, is highly unethical.
A medical doctor makes a diagnosis. The rest of us make observations.
If you see a trainwreck, do you need someone from the FRA to make the official declaration before you accept what your eyes see?
“What, “train wreck”, that? That’s just an unscheduled stop due to intense kinetic deceleration!”
I went ahead and asked my husband his take on this, although I pretty much knew the answer, and he said the same. He said the protests by these mental health professionals probably served to delegitimize the profession in the eyes of roughly 1/3 of the electorate, at least; that you can’t diagnose someone you’ve never met; and he was further concerned that the emphasis on personality disorders would further stigmatize that classification of mental illnesses while ignoring that fact that a lot of the way those disorders are defined are inherently culturally biased. That was his off-the-cuff response.
Oh, he also thinks, and I’m not sure that I agree, that having a severely personality disordered Commander in Chief sucks balls but probably doesn’t rise to the level of Constitutional relevance. He believes that the bar for being declared unfit for work based on a mental illness should be really, really high, and I agree with him on that. I also agree that such a determination, if it were to be made, should be made with a team of mental health professionals in a lengthy, in-depth evaluation process that included not only interviews with him but with multiple people he knows.
And no, of course laypeople should not be held to those standards. Most of us know a crazy person when we see one.
That’s probably true, but it excuses nothing on the part of his supporters. I’m less concerned about his supporters not taking liberals seriously and way more concerned about them not taking experts and well-regarded politicians from their own side more seriously. People almost elected McCain President for fuck’s sake and now I’m seeing people say he should have been left to die in that POW camp.
Trump is not an exception. He’s the worst of the lot but the entire lot is bad. (And it’s worth noting that Republican voters picked out the worst of that bad lot.)
Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker - any one of them would have been a bad president.
Here’s where I’m gonna have to disagree. Trump, to me, surpasses any concept of troubling social or economic policy. His badness is in a whole 'nother realm. This is at least in part because, unlike these other folks, Trump is wildly unpredictable and doesn’t seem to have any moral center whatsoever. I doubt he’s a sociopath but there’s clearly some fragmented sense of self there. My grandmother is kind of this way, she isn’t a narcissist but she is so eager to please that she will hold any moral stance whatsoever depending on her company and what she thinks people want her to believe. It’s weird because I don’t think she’s lying. I think her morals just change. I love her, but I would not want her to be President.
I’m surprised Jeb Bush showed up on your list. He’s actually the one I was rooting for most during the primary. I know he doesn’t have much charisma but he had such a ‘‘I can’t believe this shit is happening but I refuse to be degraded by it’’ air about him, I couldn’t help but respect the guy.
And I’m not in love with Marco Rubio or anything but I’m pretty sure he’s been speaking out against Trump from the beginning.
Chris Christie… was my governor. Some things about him I liked a lot, like his openly stating at a press conference that he was ‘‘tired of this Sharia law crap, it’s ridiculous’’ when someone criticized him for appointing a Muslim to an important law office. I thought he handled hurricane Sandy pretty well. But he deep-sixed that goodwill when he sold his soul and endorsed Trump. The thing with Christie is he can’t hide his internal state, it’s written all over his face, and when he made the announcement to endorse Trump, my initial thought judging by the look on his face was that his family was being held hostage in a basement somewhere. While I believe some politicians endorsed Trump with true and real feelings of solidarity, Christie is not one of them.
All this said, what I most hoped would come out of Trump’s incompetence is that he would be so busy dealing with his own self-perpetuated drama that he wouldn’t accomplish much, and that seems to be the case so far. While I still think his temperament is a pretty big national security risk, I’m less nervous than I was when he was first elected. He seems unable to focus on any one issue long enough to really do anything.
And that’s why around 1/2 the country doesn’t care what you say. It’s pure hyperbole.
What he said is technically true even if it is not a valid counterpoint to the crying wolf argument. All of them would have been a bad president (with the possible exception of Kasich and Gilmore which I don’t know enough about one way or the other.) To say otherwise is to renormalize “bad” due to the current shitwreck in charge even if he is an order of magnitude worse than many (but not all) of those on that list.
Also agree here. Well said.
What I think we have to look at is where Trumps supporters get their information. And how they discard anything that does not fit into their view, or support their position.
Just to pick one glaring personality trait of Trump’s, did Trump supporters see him mock the disabled journalist? And if they did, what did they think about that? What does that say about Trump? To me, that speaks volumes. I never had to be taught not to do such a thing. It just isn’t done.
I would like to hear any Trump supporter on this board share their thoughts about mocking and making fun of the disabled.
“Around”, eh? Like “approximately”? Do you include the roughly 20-25% that doesn’t care what you say either, that apathetic lump that doesn’t engage? Does it mean “somewhere between 60% and 40%”? Because seems from here that the polling suggests something close to that lower bar. Or is that “fake news”, and you have more reliable sources that you are reluctant to share?
There’s a difference between someone who panders about issue X and:
Believes the opposite or doesn’t really give a shit about issue X and won’t do anything about advancing action on it
vs.
Someone who completely does not give a shit about issue X either way and won’t bother ***stopping someone else ***from taking action on it.
Say, isn’t today Antifas Apocalypse day? Should we turn on some cable news outlet so we can witness the violent carnage across the land?
If nothing much happens, who do you think will be the first alt-right shit-for-brains to claim that they scared antifas away, and that’s why it seems like nothing happened, but really, it did, and they won? I’m guessing Hannity…
Has the OP any thoughts to offer on this?
Just checked. Faux News is wondering why the Truck Terrorist’s family claims not to know much of anything. Must be taking a break from the massive Antifas carnage…
They deny that he was mocking the disability. What a surprise, huh? I guess Trump just sort of flops his arms around, lolls his head and twists his mouth like that once in a while.