"The butt of global jokes": who might this be? (Talk Trump)

[pErvinalia]

He's got an inherent legal brain anyway. He doesn't need lawyers.

[Animavore]

After the Pittsburgh Shooting, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society Receives an Outpouring of Support

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-colu ... zJ-3Vmj60M

A big 'fuck you' to Trump and his Nazi supporters.

[Animavore]

President Scumbag continues inciting. The blood on his hands means nothing to him.

President Trump warned evangelical leaders in a closed-door meeting that there would be “violence” if Republicans lose the House in the November midterm elections.

“You’re one election away from losing everything that you’ve got,” Trump told the gathering, according to recorded excerpts reviewed by NBC News, comparing the GOP’s Democratic opponents to violent anti-fascist protesters.

“They will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There’s violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups — these are violent people,” the president said at the Monday meeting.

“The level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable. Part of it is because of some of the things I’ve done for you and for me and for my family, but I’ve done them,” he continued.

“This Nov. 6th election is very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.”

https://nypost.com/2018/08/28/trump-to- ... rr7q2lvI1o

[Animavore]

The empowerment of Nazis continues.

White Supremacists are Salivating Over Trump’s ‘I’m a Nationalist’ Declaration

https://observer.com/2018/10/white-supr ... 0LoXFlZVIs

[Animavore]

If our local Trump supporting morons seem like they've lost their minds, there's a neurological reason for that.

Do politicians’ words, the president’s especially, matter?

Since he has been in office, President Trump has relentlessly demonized his political opponents as evil and belittled them as stupid. He has called undocumented immigrants animals. His rhetoric has been a powerful contributor to our climate of hate, which is amplified by the right-wing media and virulent online culture.

Of course, it’s difficult to prove that incendiary speech is a direct cause of violent acts. But humans are social creatures — including and perhaps especially the unhinged and misfits among us — who are easily influenced by the rage that is everywhere these days. Could that explain why just in the past two weeks we have seen the horrifying slaughter of 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, with the man arrested described as a rabid anti-Semite, as well as what the authorities say was the attempted bombing of prominent Trump critics by an ardent Trump supporter?

You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand that the kind of hate and fear-mongering that is the stock-in-trade of Mr. Trump and his enablers can goad deranged people to action. But psychology and neuroscience can give us some important insights into the power of powerful people’s words.

We know that repeated exposure to hate speech can increase prejudice, as a series of Polish studies confirmed last year. It can also desensitize individuals to verbal aggression, in part because it normalizes what is usually socially condemned behavior.

At the same time, politicians like Mr. Trump who stoke anger and fear in their supporters provoke a surge of stress hormones, like cortisol and norepinephrine, and engage the amygdala, the brain center for threat. One study, for example, that focused on “the processing of danger” showed that threatening language can directly activate the amygdala. This makes it hard for people to dial down their emotions and think before they act.

Mr. Trump has managed to convince his supporters that America is the victim and that we face an existential threat from imagined dangers like the migrant caravan and the “fake, fake disgusting news.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/opin ... hHCekiOFM8

[Animavore]

I don't think it'll get through to the Trump-supporting sociopaths but for what it's worth, the victims, their names.

Remembering the 11 Slain in Synagogue Massacre: 'We've All Just Been Crying Endlessly'

https://people.com/crime/synagogue-shoo ... zSC-udLoDM

[Brian Peacock]

Branding Trump-supporters as morons, rabid, sociopaths, fascists or whatever is just as dehumanising as branding immigrants animals, rapists, or terrorists etc. The problem is that in an atmosphere of heightened tension, anger and hatred everyone is susceptible because we all share the same evolved neurology, hormones and responses.

My personal theory is that lazy, self-serving politicians without any sense of civic duty or responsibility have learned their lessons from marketing, saying, "Stress, fear, and anger seems to work. Let's do that." - they've just done this without any regard for the wider social consequences because the only consequences that matter are bound up in their personal and political success.

The other aspect of this problem follows from the fact that politicians are no more immune to the petsonal/social effects of their own advertising and rhetoric than anybody else, which we see when they respond to criticisms and challenges to their views as an stress-inducing personal, and therefore a political, attack. This triggers a whole new round of vitriolic rhetoric, hard-lining and doubling-down etc.

The reasons why we express certain kinds of ideas and behaviours in response to particular situations and stimuli are many and various of course, wrapped up as they are in our genetics, neurology, upbringing, social setting and environment, as well as in the specifics of our circumstances in the moment. We like to think that our expressions of dismissal, belittlement, anger, and fear towards those with whom we disagree are primarily reasoned and morally justified, but this presumes that we are entirely reasonable (in both senses) actors making only considered, rational decisions with free will. The lesson from current research in behavioural neurology and psychology appear to show that those presumptions are mostly unfounded and insecure.

We are not going to address the consequences of those dealing in anger by allowing ourselves to become angry, or by promoting fears about those who promote fear - none of which fosters or bolsters empathy and a sense of common, shared experience and humanity in either us or others. Without empathy we're doomed: doomed I tell you, doomed!

[Tero]

My son is going into a career of counceling. He’s noted that young men seem to be stuck in expressing a small number of emotions. Anger being the most common. Because it’s ”unmanly” to express others. Also, the jobs are so boring now that they have to play videogames to act in heroic physical roles.

[Animavore]

More reaping what is sown.

Three Kansas militia members who were convicted of plotting to bomb the mosque and homes of Somali immigrants should be granted leniency in their sentencing because they were inspired by President Donald Trump’s rhetoric encouraging violence, lawyers for the men said in court documents.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-kansa ... rJ5n9HKCJI

[Animavore]

President Scumbag.

Trump shocks with racist new ad days before midterms

In the most racially charged national political ad in 30 years, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party accuse Democrats of plotting to help people they depict as Central American invaders overrun the nation with cop killers.

The new web video, tweeted by the President five days before the midterm elections, is the most extreme step yet in the most inflammatory closing argument of any campaign in recent memory.

The Trump campaign ad is the latest example of the President's willingness to lie and fear-monger in order to tear at racial and societal divides; to embrace demagoguery to bolster his own political power and the cause of the Republican midterm campaign.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/31/poli ... RIs0PnWaGQ

There's only one way this goes.




Learn. Your. History.

[Seabass]

Branding Trump-supporters as morons, rabid, sociopaths, fascists or whatever is just as dehumanising as branding immigrants animals, rapists, or terrorists etc. The problem is that in an atmosphere of heightened tension, anger and hatred everyone is susceptible because we all share the same evolved neurology, hormones and responses.

My personal theory is that lazy, self-serving politicians without any sense of civic duty or responsibility have learned their lessons from marketing, saying, "Stress, fear, and anger seems to work. Let's do that." - they've just done this without any regard for the wider social consequences because the only consequences that matter are bound up in their personal and political success.

The other aspect of this problem follows from the fact that politicians are no more immune to the petsonal/social effects of their own advertising and rhetoric than anybody else, which we see when they respond to criticisms and challenges to their views as an stress-inducing personal, and therefore a political, attack. This triggers a whole new round of vitriolic rhetoric, hard-lining and doubling-down etc.

The reasons why we express certain kinds of ideas and behaviours in response to particular situations and stimuli are many and various of course, wrapped up as they are in our genetics, neurology, upbringing, social setting and environment, as well as in the specifics of our circumstances in the moment. We like to think that our expressions of dismissal, belittlement, anger, and fear towards those with whom we disagree are primarily reasoned and morally justified, but this presumes that we are entirely reasonable (in both senses) actors making only considered, rational decisions with free will. The lesson from current research in behavioural neurology and psychology appear to show that those presumptions are mostly unfounded and insecure.

We are not going to address the consequences of those dealing in anger by allowing ourselves to become angry, or by promoting fears about those who promote fear - none of which fosters or bolsters empathy and a sense of common, shared experience and humanity in either us or others. Without empathy we're doomed: doomed I tell you, doomed!

Your first paragraph is a balance fallacy. Those migrants are poor, desperate people fleeing unspeakable violence and misery, whereas Trump supporters put a bigoted, fascistic, hateful, narcissistic, divisive, pathologically dishonest, ignorant, anti-science, anti-intellectual, climate denying, psychotic clown in a position of immense power from where he can do great damage to a great number of people. And many of them voted for him not in spite of these traits, but because of them.

Regarding reasonableness—there is simply nothing reasonable about a person being more concerned with SJWs than climate change and a resurgence of violent white supremacy.

[JimC]

There seems no possible end to the increasingly bitter and emotionally charged divisions within the American body politic. In saying that, I'm not equating the ethical position of both sides - I think folk here recognise that I think Trump's policies are stupid and morally bankrupt.

However, to continually indulge in emotional rhetoric about the other side simply leaves nowhere to go except more and more anger and violence. I'm worried that there are people on both sides of the divide who literally can see no other future possibility than armed struggle and civil war.

[Animavore]

When Trump and the Republicans start putting people into concentration camps and indulging in ethnic cleansing violence will be the only solution. It's a pipe dream to hope you can reason with white supremacy.

[tattuchu]

When Trump and the Republicans start putting people into concentration camps and indulging in ethnic cleansing violence will be the only solution. It's a pipe dream to hope you can reason with white supremacy.

But... but... the economy! Look at the state of the economy! I mean, sure, Trump may be a cad, but, all things considered... look at the economy!

[Animavore]

I don't think it will get that far, of course. But more bodies will pile up due to right-wing terrorism due to Trump and as long as his supporters refuse to call it what it is the US has a problem.