We Need To Talk About Donald

[pErvinalia]

Why does 42 do anything he does? It's like the tides. You can't explain that...

[Scot Dutchy]

What has 45 achieved? He cant do anything but all the time he is ripping off the country with his family and "Southern" White House. When is enough enough?

[Tero]

He's saved rich folks lots of money. And more to come as ACA is repealed. It's based on subsidies funded by tax. Tax on the high end.

But we will have the last laugh as stocks plummet. They will have to sell stock and buy up Trump real estate.

[Forty Two]

Why does 42 do anything he does? It's like the tides. You can't explain that...

Somewhere out there is a tree, tirelessly producing oxygen so you can breathe. I think you owe it an apology.

[Forty Two]

What has 45 achieved? He cant do anything but all the time he is ripping off the country with his family and "Southern" White House. When is enough enough?

Indeed, he's been President for 2 1/2 months. He's had plenty of time to solve all the country's problems. Obama was half way through his second term, and folks like you were still blaming George...

[Forty Two]

He's saved rich folks lots of money. And more to come as ACA is repealed. It's based on subsidies funded by tax. Tax on the high end.

Not just on the high end. That's a big lie. Most of us got fucked by Obamacare. Not only did the premiums go through the roof, but taxes were through the roof.

[Hermit]

The Coming Incompetence Crisis
David Brooks APRIL 7, 2017

I just read that the Trump administration has filled only 22 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation. This makes me worry that the administration will not have enough manpower to produce the same volume and standard of incompetence that we’ve come to expect so far.

Granted, in its first few months the administration has produced an impressive amount of ineptitude with very few people.

On his worst days Sean Spicer can produce more errors than 10 normal men on their best days. Kellyanne Conway can flail her way through television confrontations 24/7 and still have the stamina to lose to the Teletubbies on Saturday morning.

The White House staffing system is successfully answering the question, How many scorpions can you fit in a bottle? And in general, the personnel process has been so rigorous in its selection of inexperience that those who were hired on the basis of mere nepotism look like Dean Acheson by comparison.

But still, I worry that at the current pace the Trump administration is going to run out of failure. So far, we’ve lived in a golden age of malfunction. Every major Trump initiative has been blocked or has collapsed, relationships with Congress are disastrous, the president’s approval ratings are at cataclysmic lows.

But can this last? By midsummer, during the high vacation and indictment season, we could see empty hallways in the West Wing and a disorienting incompetence shortage emanating from Washington.

The executive branch could simply go dark. CNN’s ratings will plummet. Columnists will wither and die. Liberals will have to go without the delicious current of schadenfreude and their daily ritual baths of moral superiority.

Now I’m not underestimating the president’s own capacity for carrying on in an incompetent manner almost indefinitely. I don’t think we’ve reached peak Trump.

The normal incompetent person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at incompetence like our president flails and founders and is too incompetent to recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it.

Trump’s greatest achievements are in the field of ignorance. Up until this period I had always thought of ignorance as a void, as an absence of knowledge. But Trump’s ignorance is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own gravitational pull.

It’s not so much that he isn’t well informed; it’s that he is prodigiously learned in the sort of knowledge that doesn’t accord with the facts of our current dimension.

It is in its own way a privilege to be alive at the same time as a man who is the Albert Einstein of confirmation bias, a man whose most impressive wall is the one between himself and evidence, a man who doesn’t need to go off in search of enemies because he is already his own worst one.

But even Trump will eventually hit the limits of human endurance. I know what it is like to be profoundly incompetent, and it is exhausting.

Just to take a small example by way of illustration, in the days before GPS I was (and remain) profoundly incompetent at comprehending driving directions. I would ask for directions and all would start off normally: “Go down Fourth Street and take a right on Poplar.”

But then all would slide into a fog of incomprehensibility and I would keep nodding furiously to try to persuade the person that I could follow what was being said: “Then you toggle over that spur of the thruway that goes under the overpass before the six roundabouts of the gargle.”

By this time entire hemispheres of my brain had shut down, and as the person kept talking, my entire existence slipped into a catatonic mist: “After that it’s just six wheedles up the perplex and after a quick stop at the bolint it’s the 27th driveway on the right.”

The incompetent person in the Trump administration has to live in that stupor shroud every day.

So I hope the Trump team learns to delegate — carelessness in one office, backbiting in another. I hope the president continues to play golf (I don’t get those progressive critics who say Trump is ruining the world and then they complain because he takes time off). I hope his team continues to take advantage of the fact that it takes only one inexperienced stooge to undo the accomplishments of 100 normal workers.

And I hope it continues to negatively surpass all expectations. I remain a full-fledged member in the community of the agog.

One of the things I’ve learned about incompetence over the past few months is that it is radically nonlinear. Competent people go in one of a few directions. But incompetence is infinite.

The human imagination is not capacious enough to comprehend all the many ways the Trumpians can find to screw this thing up.

[pErvinalia]

[Brian Peacock]

...
Reporting from the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhun by the Guardian’s Kareem Shaheen [read it. BP] allows for little doubt as to both the human calamity of the chemical attack that befell that place on 4 April and where culpability lies. Shaheen’s eye-witness account leaves the Russian claim – that sarin was released into the air accidentally when Russian jets bombed a rebel-run chemical weapons plant – in shreds. There are some who still doubt that Bashar al-Assad’s forces were behind the sarin attack: they include US-based conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich, backed in the UK by Katie Hopkins, who uses the hashtag #Syriahoax. But their numbers are dwindling. The evidence points to Assad.

That still leaves a legal question. Trump acted alone; he did not have UN authorisation or even try to get it. Which means he might have been breaking international law in order to enforce international law. But that’s not the prime source of my discomfort. What troubles me more is that this necessary act was performed by someone who, in the words of radio host James O’Brien, you wouldn’t trust with scissors.

On Syria, Donald Trump has performed a U-turn so screeching, so dizzying, you can smell the burned rubber from here. Just 72 hours before these airstrikes, his administration was all but flashing a green light at Assad, hinting that he could do what he liked. Pull back further, and the volte-face is even more stunning. For years, Trump was adamant that he would stay out of Syria. Even when chemical weapons were used in August 2013, killing an estimated 1,300 people in Ghouta, Trump was firm: “What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long-term conflict?” he tweeted. It’s the abandonment of that stance that has so disappointed Trumpists such as Hopkins, Nigel Farage and the neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer. They thought they were getting a true isolationist in the Oval Office.

Their mistake was to think Trump had a consistent foreign policy, rather than just a series of wildly contradictory impulses that can vary from day to day. Trump might well see this unpredictability as an asset. Recall how Richard Nixon encouraged Henry Kissinger to travel to foreign capitals, whispering to foreign leaders that the US president was unhinged. Nixon believed that if he were seen as a madman, capable of anything, it could only increase his leverage. He would be feared.

It’s not reassuring to think that the American president only acts when a tragedy hits primetime

In this context, North Korea and Iran may both be adjusting their calculus of risk. Now they know that Trump is willing to strike, with little warning. That he authorised the operation while at his Florida resort, where he was hosting the Chinese president, may have been an accident of timing, but it will please Trump. Think of it as a dominance display in front of a rival....

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... be-trusted

[Sean Hayden]

But I cannot applaud the man who did it.

Who gives a shit? This kind of speculation is asinine, witch hunter type stuff.

[pErvinalia]

Two articles popped up on my Facebook this morning with racist wankers unleashing a tirade against a minority and invoking Trump's name while doing it. But we've got to give him a chance. He's really a liberal, after all...

[Galaxian]

... Reporting from the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhun by the Guardian’s Kareem Shaheen [read it. BP] allows for little doubt as to both the human calamity of the chemical attack that befell that place on 4 April and where culpability lies. Shaheen’s eye-witness account leaves the Russian claim – that sarin was released into the air accidentally when Russian jets bombed a rebel-run chemical weapons plant – in shreds. There are some who still doubt that Bashar al-Assad’s forces were behind the sarin attack: they include US-based conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich, backed in the UK by Katie Hopkins, who uses the hashtag #Syriahoax. But their numbers are dwindling. The evidence points to Assad.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... be-trusted

Yes... The Guardian...nowadays a famed neocon propaganda rag, since when MI5 took hammers to their hard drives.

Trump now has the celebrity status of having joined the gang of war criminals. We avoided a major war crime by a few months; Hillary would have done this crime in the first few weeks. She's now gloating that Trump has followed her orders.

As mentioned before, and covered up by the dumb-fuck ignorant & partisan mass media, and dutifully followed by some on this forum: it was unlikely to be sarin gas, because, as mentioned before, the white-helmets (as in Hollywood 'good-guys') so-called medics were happily 'treating' the victims without protection & wearing sandels, which means that they would die of contamination from the residues. It was probably a chlorine based gas, such as phosgene.

Here's one of the best analyses of the claimed gas attack. That proves this was a total hoax, false flag. But the gung ho gang are praying that they themselves & their families & friends will be exterminated in a nuclear exchange. Yankees have a death-wish, and their wish shall be fulfilled. Even as the skin is peeling off their back & they retch bloody vomit from both ends, they will keep on ranting: USA! USA! USA!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTZI2lS6MYo

Do yourselves a favor & listen to all of it.

[pErvinalia]

Nah, I don't think I'll listen to any of it. You're a false flag.

[pErvinalia]

Trump and his Narcissistic Personality Disorder

At 6:35 a.m. on the morning of March 4th, President Donald Trump did what no U.S. president has ever done: He accused his predecessor of spying on him. He did so over Twitter, providing no evidence and – lest anyone miss the point – doubling down on his accusation in tweets at 6:49, 6:52 and 7:02, the last of which referred to Obama as a "Bad (or sick) guy!" Six weeks into his presidency, these unsubstantiated tweets were just one of many times the sitting president had rashly made claims that were (as we soon learned) categorically untrue, but it was the first time since his inauguration that he had so starkly drawn America's integrity into the fray. And he had done it not behind closed doors with a swift call to the Department of Justice, but instead over social media in a frenzy of ire and grammatical errors. If one hadn't been asking the question before, it was hard not to wonder: Is the president mentally ill?

It's now abundantly clear that Trump's behavior on the campaign trail was not just a "persona" he used to get elected – that he would not, in fact, turn out to be, as he put it, "the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, all right?" It took all of 24 hours to show us that the Trump we elected was the Trump we would get when, despite the fact that he was president, that he had won, he spent that first full day in office focused not on the problems facing our country but on the problems facing him: his lackluster inauguration attendance and his inability to win the popular vote.

Since Trump first announced his candidacy, his extreme disagreeableness, his loose relationship with the truth and his trigger-happy attacks on those who threatened his dominance were the worrisome qualities that launched a thousand op-eds calling him "unfit for office," and led to ubiquitous armchair diagnoses of "crazy." We had never seen a presidential candidate behave in such a way, and his behavior was so abnormal that one couldn't help but try to fit it into some sort of rubric that would help us understand. "Crazy" kind of did the trick.

And yet, the one group that could weigh in on Trump's sanity, or possible lack thereof, was sitting the debate out – for an ostensibly good reason. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson had foreshadowed the 2016 presidential election by suggesting his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was 
too unstable to be in control of 
the nuclear codes, even running 
an ad to that effect that remains 
one of the most controversial in 
the history of American poli
tics. In a survey for Fact magazine, more than 2,000 psychiatrists weighed in, many of them 
seeing pathology in Goldwater's supposed potty-training woes, 
in his supposed latent homosexuality and in his Cold War paranoia. This was back in the Freudian days of psychiatry,
 when any odd-duck characteristic was fair game for psychiatric dissection, before the Diagnostic and Statistical Man
ual of Mental Disorders cleaned 
house and gave a clear set of 
criteria (none of which includes 
potty training, by the way) for a 
limited number of possible dis
orders. Goldwater lost the election, sued Fact and won his suit.
 The American Psychiatric Asso
ciation was so embarrassed that 
it instituted the so-called Goldwater Rule, stating that it is "un
ethical for a psychiatrist to offer 
a professional opinion unless he 
or she has conducted an examination" of the person under question.

All the same, as Trump's candidacy snowballed, many in the mental-health community, observing what they believed to be clear signs of pathology, bristled at the limitations of the Goldwater guidelines. "It seems to function as a gag rule," says Claire Pouncey, a psychiatrist who co-authored a paper in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, which argued that upholding Goldwater "inhibits potentially valuable educational efforts and psychiatric opinions about potentially dangerous public figures." Many called on the organizations that traffic in the psychological well-being of Americans – like the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers and the American Psychoanalytic Association – to sound an alarm. "A lot of us were working as hard as we could to try to get organizations to speak out during the campaign," says Lance Dodes, a psychoanalyst and former professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "I mean, there was certainly a sense that somebody had to speak up." But none of the organizations wanted to violate the Goldwater Rule. And anyway, Dodes continues, "Most of the pollsters said he would not be elected. So even though there was a lot of worry, people reassured themselves that nothing would come of this."

But of course, something did come of it, and so on February 13th, Dodes and 34 other psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers published a letter in The New York Times stating that "Mr. Trump's speech and actions make him incapable of safely serving as president." As Dodes tells me, "This is not a policy matter at all. It is continuous behavior that the whole country can see that indicates specific kinds of limitations, or problems in his mind. So to say that those people who are most expert in human psychology can't comment on it is nonsensical." In their letter, the mental health experts did not go so far as to proffer a diagnosis, but the affliction that has gotten the most play in the days since is a form of narcissism so extreme that it affects a person's ability to function: narcissistic personality disorder.

The most current iteration of the DSM classifies narcissistic personality disorder as: "A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts." A diagnosis would also require five or more of the following traits:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., "Nobody builds walls better than me"; "There's nobody that respects women more than I do"; "There's nobody who's done so much for equality as I have").

2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love ("I alone can fix it"; "It's very hard for them to attack me on looks, because I'm so good-looking").
3. Believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions ("Part of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich").
4. Requires excessive admiration ("They said it was the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl").

5. Has a sense of entitlement ("When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy").
6. Is interpersonally exploitative (see above).

7. Lacks empathy, is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings
and needs of others ("He's not a war hero . . . he was captured. I like people that weren't captured").

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her ("I'm the president, and you're not").

9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes ("I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters").

NPD was first introduced as a personality disorder by the DSM in 1980 and affects up to six percent of the U.S. population. It is not a mood state but rather an ingrained set of traits, a programming of the brain that is thought to arise in childhood as a result of parenting that either puts a child on a pedestal and superficially inflates the ego or, conversely, withholds approval and requires the child to single-handedly build up his or her own ego to survive. Either way, this impedes the development of a realistic sense of self and instead fosters a "false self," a grandiose narrative of one's own importance that needs constant support and affirmation – or "narcissistic supply" – to ward off an otherwise prevailing sense of emptiness. Of all personality disorders, NPD is among the least responsive to treatment for the obvious reason that narcissists typically do not, or cannot, admit that they are flawed.

............

This makes narcissists particularly vulnerable to sycophants, or at least those who feed their narcissistic supply by telling them what they want to hear. Whether Steve Bannon actually is the evil mastermind he's been made out to be doesn't change the fact that even Republicans seem wary of Trump's susceptibility to him. Unelected officials gaining power through a destabilizing characteristic of a mental disorder is the sort of thing our political system was set up to combat. "It's a sign, actually, of how severely we need functioning parties," Wilentz says. "Because when they work, they are in fact a check on the emergence of this kind of character. You can't get where Trump is now in a functioning party system. It took this particular political crisis, which was a political crisis, to produce a president who has this trait. Normally, we can weed them out."

{cont}

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fe ... sm-w474896

[Animavore]

I'm suffering from depression since Trump. That and a serious case of misanthropy.

I honestly thought we were on the right track and people weren't that bad. I can see now that that was a faith view as faithy as any religion. The truth is that many people are basically callous, selfish, and self-serving idiots who are too narrow-minded to see broader pictures. Even people I thought were intelligent, like 42, I can see would rather use that intelligence to bury themselves behind loquacious walls of ignorance than face facts and accept personal responsibility.

I'm starting to wonder why I should bother living green and saving for an electric vehicle. Maybe I should just join everyone else in this self-destructive enterprise called "humanity". Perhaps I should embrace nihilism and drink, fuck, and drug my way into an early grave. Without a belief in humanity I now literally have nothing. I just can't see good in people any more and have no faith that people can come together and do the right thing. Right now it feels like people are actively, and obnoxiously, doing all kinds of the wrong thing - often out of sheer spite! And then revelling in it, gloating about it, and deliberately trolling those who seek to make the World a better place.

Fuck 'em. Fuck humans. Extinction will be our greatest achievement.