An open thread for anyone who wants to talk Trump — to complain about his bullshit, make fun of his hair, strategize about ways to oppose him, whatever. No trolls or Trump fans.
Categories
Trumpocalypse, Week Two Open Thread
Calls to impeach Trump are going to go nowhere as long as Congress is in Republican hands.
Just FYI, y’all. There’s no point in it at all.
It is perhaps noteworthy that the people who have responsibility for the actual launching of nuclear weapons undergo the most vigorous psychological and psychiatric evaluation on a regular basis, but the person who gives the order to launch doesn’t.
I think that’s probably right though.
The election process is all about public scrutiny. In effect the electorate are invited to make an ‘armchair diagnosis’ about the suitabilty of the candidate for office. They can judge the candidate’s words and deeds and form their own assessment to the ultimate question “Do I have confidence in this person?”
It’s therefore irrelevant what factors may feed into a candidate’s demeanour. The distinction between what’s a ‘condition’ and what’s merely an aspect of personality is often an arbitrary one anyway.
So I’m on the side that says ‘no’ to any form of publicly mandated professional evaluation. The 25th amendment provides a mechanism for removing a President from office should it be considered by those around them that they are no longer capable of exercising the responsibilities of the job to the required degree. That might be an imperfect solution but, to me, it’s preferable to being able to trigger an assessment like it was some form of ‘no confidence’ vote.
Just my own view obviously, YMMV.
@Margot : no chance of that in France. A lot of people do their best to ignore that he is strange and say “both part are bad !!!11!!1!1!”, and in addition to that the right is heavily weakened by the Fillon scandal, while center and left is divided between 4 (!) candidate.
@PoM : not entirely sure. Republicans will drop Trump as soon as they will see him as more than a liability than an asset. But he need to actually frighten republicans electors for that.
@EJ : I agree with you, but I would put more emphasis on the fact that, say, the low self-esteem of Trump isn’t actually a mental condition, because his lack of self esteem is far from being crippling or even unusual.
The two root cause of why so many people ask if Trump have a problem is that, on one hand, people think that’s binary “normal” or “disorder”, when about everyone have quirks or minor flaw with a spectrum from average joe to people truly handicaped, and the fact they have much higher standard for president than for their neighbor or family, so they see flaws as full-blown disorder much more easily.
(plus, the problem of people thinking all mental disorders are the same is at work here too. There is some specific mental conditions that make one unfit for presidency, but the merging of all disorder in one in the public opinion make them think that disliking physical contact or having sleep trouble is exactly the same as being an hollywood psychopath that kill for pleasure)
Congress can take away the presidency either for incapacity, or it can take it away via impeachment for bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors.
The latter seems easier to justify in trump’s case.
Either way the process is pretty similar: convince a lot of GOP and Democratic congresscritters and senators that it’s in their interest.
@Alan : I agree with how you put it.
In your analogy, I would remind that the one actually launching the nuke are supposed to obey. A psychological evaluation is a crude tool, but I guess it’s adequate to make sure someone will properly follow order after checking they are actually true and legitimate, but I don’t think any psychologue is able to say whether someone is able to do good judgement call on very complex subjects like international politic.
@ ohlmann
Under certain circumstances our Trident commanders can launch without orders. One of the factors is whether BBC Radio 4’s “Today Programme” has gone off air (which is about as British as it gets). But that level of discretion is one of the reasons they’re so thoroughly vetted.
I’m a little torn when it comes to Mr. Fascist/Nazi President.
On the one hand I want him to continue along doing what he’s doing (which, in my opinion, is just blindly following his handlers orders). I want his followers to get hammered with the consequences.
Maybe when they’ve lost their (ACA) health insurance and the rest have seen their premiums double while their coverage has dropped 80%, maybe when (safety, environmental, labour, banking etc.) regulations have been rolled back causing major safety issues, wage reductions, reduced employee rights, etc., maybe when the banks cause another recession and need another huge bailout..
Maybe when those things happen they’ll get to “enjoy” the feeling of being fucked over. Maybe when they get attacked (by their own ‘side’) for bringing up the things they think are problems, maybe when their precious little bubbles of privilege get popped and reality sucker punches them and they realize that they’re working for less pay and/or longer hours, their wife (or son, or brother or..) desperately needs medical care but they can’t afford insurance or their insurance doesn’t cover it (or the deductible is more than they make in a year).
Maybe. I have to say maybe because I’ve noticed that there is a very twisted element in American (and sadly, Canada isn’t immune to this either) society. This element is more interested in seeing people knocked down and stomped on and above all, punished. They want women punished for having and/or enjoying sex. They want POC punished for not being white. They want LGBT people punished for not being cishet (i.o.w punished for being other than “normal”). I just hope that this element is smaller than it appears.
On the other hand I know a LOT of very good people are going to get hurt and I’m certain that some will lose their lives. Whether it be from attacks or a total loss of hope, it’ll happen. And while I want those who caused the problem(s) to get their just desserts, I don’t want any ‘collateral damage’ (so to speak).
So..I’m kind of torn.
@Jesalin : remember the nazi. The german *did* get hammered with the consequence. Not only the main victim had been the jewishs (and other scapegoat of the nazis, like homosexuals, communists, etc), but I sincerely think they paid way too big a price for their error, especially in eastern germany.
Personaly, I don’t want to risk being harassed, beaten, maybe even killed, just so that I can smugly declare to the idiots that supported the far right that they had it coming. I don’t want them to get beaten, imprisoned, or the like, either. I want them educated first, and then only punished, and only if it don’t have unforeseen consequences.
@WWTH I love that film Pontypool, I’ve seen it several times, might be good to watch it again.
Elsewhere: I’ve thought about running, too. Getting out. But when I think about it, I always circle back to my heart which says: “They can’t have your country. You can’t leave others here to suffer. You have to stay and fight this.”
I’m middle-aged. I’ve moved across country several times in my life. I’m too tired to start over yet again. For me, this is my (possibly last) stand, and I’m going to make it here, among the people I love.
I’ve never really liked roller-coasters all that much. These past two weeks have been more than enough, thank you world, that’s enough!
I know what you mean, @Jesalin. I feel the same way, but for a different reason. After the Second World War, like @Ohlmann says, the Germans paid an enormous price for what had happened, especially the East Germans. I hate the thought of all that suffering, but if one thing can be said to be true, it’s that the Germans learned. Their repudiation of fascism could scarcely be stronger, and that legacy continues today.
I don’t want the Alt-Right, the Republicans, the Nazis in America to be punished, but I do want them to learn. My biggest fear is that we beat them with protest and with principle – maybe we get the 19 GOP Congresspeople to join with the Democrats to push through an Impeachment through force of protest. Pence becomes President and everyone exhales a shaky sigh, while still keeping both eyes glued to the new Theocrat-In-Chief.
We do this, and Trump is impeached – and the fascists that put him there don’t learn anything. They just feel cheated, outraged, emboldened. They feel like the zionist conspiracy has just ousted their Glorious Leader through betrayal – the indignity and the anger they’ll feel! We’ll have a firestorm of Nazi terrorism in the wake of a Trump impeachment, because they won’t have learned anything.
They need to be beaten, soundly, and I have no idea how to make that happen. Last time it took millions of dead and half the cities in Europe turned to gravel. This is a different conflict, but I worry that it will need a stronger outcome than protest and political proceedings to finish.
This said – don’t ever forget that we’re still on the winning side of this. The demographics of the Nazis and the white supremacists are shrinking by the year, while ours swell. We overwhelmingly have the young and the many; they have the elderly and the few. They’re doing this because they see their own end on the horizon – and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.
Dulce et decorum est
pro patria protestari.
Im tired if explaining this, but my TLDR is:
BIGOTRY IS NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS
Except that’s not true, just a comforting fiction, and one that’s been bandied around long enough for the young to become the elderly. The reality is that most alt-rightists are in their teens or twenties, and their numbers have exploded from a small handful to enough to take over the US in only five short years. They are lashing out in fear after the last 60-ish years of progress, but they won’t be running out of like-minded assholes any time soon; the whole “Extinction burst” narrative is crap.
Huh! I do know that a lot of the alt-right is young (though most Trump voters were older, if I recall properly), but even with that, I had thought they were still dwarfed by young people who consider themselves progressives. My info on the demographics down there is old, I’ll have to go update it.
Frankly, I’ve been super uncomfortable about what the 4chan-demographic would be like. Growing up in the moral null-zone of the chans, now adult and voting – I always knew it’d be ugly. Didn’t recognize how large that demo was, though.
I still think we’re on the winning side – a lot of the power and influence that the assholes enjoy come from baby-boomers desperate to suck up all the wealth they can – but I’ll look into it more deeply.
It’s got sweet fuck all to do with smugness and I don’t take any pleasure from other people’s suffering. However, I believe actions (and inactions for that matter) have consequences and I know that some people just will not learn unless they get the full brunt of those consequences (and sometimes not even then). Whether it was out of ignorance, hate or pure self-interest, these people voted in a Fascist who wasted no time in surrounding himself with bigots and neo-Nazis.
I simply want his followers to reap what they have sown. My sympathy and empathy is for those targeted by his hateful policies and followers. The Muslims (and others) who get shot just for existing. The LGBT people who get tortured, attacked and/or suicide because they’ve lost all hope of ever having a life. And all the decent people who just want to live their lives in some sort of peace and believe everyone else should be able to do the same regardless of their skin colour, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.
You can’t fight hate by tolerating it or ignoring it, and you can only educate those who want to learn.
@Scildfreja
That’s it in a nutshell! I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I just think that many people won’t learn until they have to ‘face the music’ (so to speak).
I still disagree.
My first problem is that I am pretty sure that suffering don’t make anyone learn. Remember the world war 1, where the french basically created the Nazi and the WW2 out of their desire to make the german learn by suffering. There are other example ; I am not sure we can say the russian learned anything about authoritarism from the bloody reign of Stalin, and in America a lot of people did not learn the lesson of Vietnam, nor the lessons of Irak and Afghanistan, even tho it’s exactly the same cause leading to the same effects.
My second problem is that I still feel like you feel that they deserve to be punished. That’s a very human feeling, but that’s also extremely dangerous. As Scildfreja said, suffering may just make them stronger and more entrenched in their belief.
It is somewhat similar to conspirationists : we don’t actually know how to make them snap out of it, even if there is plenty of example of people snapping out of it. I don’t know if the suffering of the german was responsible for their lesson ; it might just as well be the mediatization of the death camps, or the disappearance of the nazi party and their charismatic leaders.
@kale : true, but if the only thing that Trump had bad was being a bigot, I would not be worried. He is an easily manipulated, easily goaded, selfish bigot that desesperatly want to prove him manliness. Every part of that description is problematic, not just the bigotry. To be honest, I don’t actually think that Trump is a bigot, because I don’t think he have any convictions, conservative or not.
Towards a non-ableist critique of Lord Dampnut:
(Robyn Hitchcock, “Uncorrected Personality Traits“, I Often Dream of Trains [1984])
kale:
This is related:
A former colleague of my sister’s, a neonazi who snapped out of it and now works on preventing radicalization. Very interesting interview (I say, having heard it all before from a trusted source, so it agrees with all my biases).
But why are we focused on mental health for incapacity with trump?
The constitution doesn’t say you need a diagnosis in the DSM to declare a president incapacitated.
It says the cabinet and congress must agree the president is incapacitated. If the president says he’s not dead yet & he’s getting better, then cabinet and congress must declare it again.
It would be a crisis if he were in his present state, not actually incapacitated.
I think the fact that Trump can’t stop lying and insulting foreign nations for no fucking reason at all should make him unfit for office, but apparently that’s acceptable these days. (But having blood come out of your wherever is certainly not.)
Is anyone else feeling the need to do something positive for the world in response to this? I’ve been donating to orgs but also recently took studying bioinformatics back up. I might apply to a non-profit near me to put it to use if I get confident enough in it. The commute would be about 3x as long but I could be helping find new breakthroughs in dna research instead of making enterprise software that just feeds capitalism.
Yeah, likewise. Ironically, I’ve been looking at leaving research for the same reason, and going to do something useful in the world.
Re: how do you solve a problem like fascismo
Fascists don’t need punishment, that’ll just embolden them. They don’t need education, you can’t reason with the unreasonable. They need to be made powerless. As powerless as the people they hate currently are. The political power of fascists is entirely artificial. Voter ID, gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc. It’s all there to prop up white supremacy. But that just means white supremacy needs to be propped up in order to stick
Re: Trump and mental illness
Hey, people, stop it. That is all…
Re: the demographics of hate
@Scild is right. Yes, the altright is mostly 20something edgelords. But they’re almost invariably white. White children are a plurality. Not majority, plurality. Their white parents gave Trump 58% of their votes. The parents of their brown peers? 21%. Their 20something older siblings (white and brown)? 37%. We are winning the demos. It’s just happening slower than it needs to
Also, just cos it’s interesting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/feminism-project/poll/
@ Scildfreja, re Canada’s refugee criteria: thanks for putting that up. I was wondering whether Americans from vulnerable groups would be able to head north and stay there. Now I wonder if other countries might follow Canada’s possible example. (I suppose it would depend on their resources, economies, and leaders.)
@ Ray of Rays: thanks for the encouragement.
I still think ol’Woody had Trump and his ilk nailed. He’s just plain mean, that’s the problem: