I don't think he has any ability to conceptualize "truth" as something that exists outside of his own personal interests.
And all the people who spent years complaining about "moral relativism" are suddenly fine with it so long as it's a doddering white guy.
1: me neither.
He is really one of the cognitively smallest people I've ever witnessed in the public eye.
1,2: Right. I think this is an epistemic problem. (I think pretty much everything nowadays is an epistemic problem.)
5 is a good way to put it. He's not stupid. He just doesn't consider other people as having any moral standing outside of how it helps him and this is a big advantage if you seek wealth and power.
He clearly is stupid, in addition to all the other faults.
I don't think so. Though I'm pretty sure he's already got some dementia going.
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"The Laguna Beach residents appreciate what the goats do to protect their community, and are very supportive of our program"|>
We're talking here about a guy who lost money running casinos.
Lost borrowed money, mostly. Because other people aren't something he cares about, he doesn't notice the effect on them. Thus, he will miss doing very simple things that other people do to avoid making enemies unnecessarily.
Theoretically, somebody should be able to do those basic interpersonal things, like not threatening to send people to assault critics, and still manage to convincingly argue nonsense like the Ukrainian server theory, but fortunately it's not common in practice.
13: Barr manages the balance pretty well.
Trump's lawyers seem to go to prison more often than Trump does. Usually it doesn't work that way.
15: That seems like proof of his intelligence.
Right. I think you can make a case that Trump is evil far more easily than you can make one that he is stupid.
He's not stupid. He just doesn't consider other people as having any moral standing outside of how it helps him and this is a big advantage if you seek wealth and power.
I think he is stupid? He has fewer cognitive resources than others - I'll believe dementia, but still - and he's unusual in being so narrow-mindedly narcissistic in allocating those cognitive resources.
He's only not in prison because he's the president, and when he wasn't the president, his lawyers weren't going to jail either, because white collar crime is largely unpunished.
All kinds of people are narrow-minded about their cognitive resources. People who give all their thought to an academic discipline often look really stupid to outsiders for similar reasons.
He's stupid in a way that our system rewards.
Also, he does seem to have figured out what the tabloids want, and that the NYT etc are no different from tabloids. I'll never understand why they've been so diligent in proving him right.
The Hunter Biden thing is yet another interesting case study in exploitation of systemic flaws in media norms. When Trump is incoherent, his words still need to be reported, and reporters are professionally obliged to make sense.
With H. Biden, as far as I know, no allegation has been made that he broke a law. But plenty of ink is nonetheless spilled on the sleaziness of the arrangement with Burisma Holdings, because that, at least, is a coherent reason to be concerned about him.
I thought this was pretty good: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1186409858817376256 What Trump is "smart" about -- or has stupidly stumbled into -- is finding a way the rally the right while using language the press and center right finds potentially benign. Today's use of the term 'lynching' is another perfect example" his followers understand him to be complaining about justice to one of ours, not about whether the proper procedures are being followed. No amount of telling them that lynching has a specific meaning, and this ain't it, is going to have any impact.
When it comes to explanations of Trump's success, I offered my theory of Trumpian natural selection a couple of years ago. The guy merely exists in an ecosystem that promotes his qualities; he's barely a conscious actor in this at all.
I think, also, that Roberts is way too easy on the Trump movement here. It's not that cosmopolitans ignorantly failed to understand what the tribalists were saying and hearing. There's always been a serious effort on the part of the Trump movement to misled the cosmopolitans on what Trump means, to deny as an uncharitable interpretation exactly the points Roberts say that Trump was making. No one needed (or needs) to fall for it, but this isn't one of those city people don't understand rural people in diners things.
26 and the link therein are exactly right. I think there are some 'smart' people around Trump, or were earlier, steering him towards this and away from that.
Yes. And Trump wouldn't have won without the votes if white, well-off, suburbanite voters who certainly have every opportunity to have known better.
I was saying 24 in March 2017! Certainly not the first but still.
24: Atrios made the same excellent point recently.
Personally, I still think this is the right-wing half of the Baby Boom deliberately shitting on America as they prepare to exit.
Also, I learned a new word today: Corrigendum.
And it has to keep being repeated until everyone gets it Really gets it.
Corrigendum. Corrigendum. Corrigendum.
I really want someone to write a good article about how the Trump movement is about abusive parents using Trump to abuse their children who have moved away. Or more generally taking the lens of a split among rural/small town people between the ones who left and the ones who stayed.
I think it's more the rich suburbanite ones trying to lash out at the kids who won't come back to Rockville. There simply aren't enough rural white people to have driven things by themselves.
You can use Taylor Swift's "Mean" as the hook. You can all move away to the big old city as much as you want, but we'll put an abuser on TV 24-7 so you'll never really be free of us.
26: I think this is the best explanation I've seen. Trump didn't manipulate the political environment to suit him, he was just lucky to come along just when it was ripe for someone like him. We should also remember that trump got to the presidency through an improbable series of events, starting in 1789 with the ridiculous electoral college and extending through all the crazy shit that preceded the 2016 election.
Is "corrigendum" just a euphemism for people who don't want to say "erratum"?
It's when the publisher wants to blame the author, says the internet.
40:. This isn't that different from the evangelicals saying he won because it was God's Will.
26 et seq: US History people: anti-intellectualism is nothing new in American politics, right? What previous politicians were as proudly incompetent as Trump? How much of an aberration was the technocracy of c.1940-80? What caused that aberration, and why did it not fortify itself against a relapse?
Right. Too many to name but Jackson was the only president on the same level, way more so than I thought, I think the Great Depression and World War II, it didn't know it failed.
40, 26 -- That was Jerry Garcia's theory of the Grateful Dead as well. Is there a niche for this sort of thing? Turns out there is.
Michaelangelo didn't carve Trump. He was given a lump of shit and removed everything that wasn't Trump.
And used the removed part to make Alex Jones.
46 Well, you certainly wouldn't put Taft or Hoover in that boat Wilson was a stone cold racist, I think, but not a celebrator of ignorance. Cleveland neither. I haven't really spent any time thinking about Harding, and don't know enough about McKinley. Trump is exceptional, though, even in a set that includes Jackson -- who seems at least to have been motivated by the interests of his voters, while Trump just thinks they're suckers to be bilked.
That's true. When Jackson sent poor non-white people marching to their deaths, poor white people really did benefit. That's why he's on the twenty.
Jackson has been mentioned before as the Trumpiest pre-Trump. Someone elaborate so I don't have to read stuff?
When the Supreme Court said the Cherokee were legally entitled to the land they owned, he told the court to go fuck itself and force marched the Cherokee into Oklahoma/death. But he was also a real war hero.
Everyone did that. I mean populism and wilful idiocy and stuff.
That was his populist campaign promise.
He shot several people in duals. Does that count?
DUAL IS NOT SEVERAL
40: It astonishes me that anyone can thoughtfully believe Trump is an anomaly rather than a symptom
Andrew Jackson would have been fine with my spelling of duel.
60 Well, he really is unique in, say, the 2016 Republican primary field. If he'd found some other marketing gimmick and sat the thing out, maybe we'd have Rubio or Cruz, possibly even J Bush. They'd have been the same wrt tax cuts, and possibly health care, but definitely not the same in pandering to Fox News and the various conspiracy theories. Less overtly racist, I'm guessing.
The way he killed the national bank is probably the best illustration of Jackson's populism and wilful idiocy. It was due to be rechartered, and Jackson vetoed the recharter bill, won reelection on his anti-bank record, then pulled all federal deposits from the bank causing it to collapse. The US went on to have frequent economic crises for the rest of the nineteenth century.
63 last: From whence Jennings Bryan, populist? And anti-intellectual?
He wasn't really anti-intellectual so much as anti-science. I never heard of him having anything against literature or the humanities or whatever.
66: Anti-science will do for me.
I was thinking of Wilson earlier, because stone racist, but also an intellectual who oversaw a massive expansion of (technocratic?) government. Which suggests to me anti-intellectualism, like racism, is a free pole in the US, not necessarily attached to any other program.
Probably. I'm pretty sure Bryan would have said he was an intellectual and not in a "very stable genius" way.
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I am helping write the application for a particular census outreach effort (that prompted the ill-advised post a week or two ago.)
This particular organization is awarding four grants for the entire state of Texas, and each one is for $5k.
It's such peanuts.
(I'm not saying the funding organization is bad for having so little money. Just that these are such tiny sums of money compared to the vast amount that gets wasted on the laziest shit. And the primary application writer is intending to do so much work in order to stretch the $5k, should they get it.
|>
You know who would have wanted you to get more money for this? William Jennings Bryan.
I'm thinking >$5k in silver would be a bit of a drag.
68: What animated him from end to end of his
grotesque career was simply ambition - the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the
collar of his superiors, or failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring
voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those
half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine.
https://history.msu.edu/hst203/files/2011/02/Mencken-In-Memoriam-WJB.pdf?mod=article_inline
He wasn't opposed to gold, just didn't want gold only. Mainly, he wanted inflation.
72: Farmers were being kept poor by large corporations (railroads mostly) with monopoly power. Bryan very correctly inflamed them about this. The shareholder in a railroad isn't the better of a working farmer.
Let's not get excited, now.
I gather that through most of American history there has been a ladder of respectability, where hatred and rapacity was absorbed into the party system and filtered into successively more euphemistic forms of rhetoric the closer to the federal level you went. So you could have your well-known politicians all have personas as intelligent, perceptive, and kind, while most of them, most of the time, were still benefiting from and perpetuating all kinds of bigotry and thefts: against Native Americans, Blacks, immigrants, poor people, etc.
Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, and perhaps William Jennings Bryan have been minor top-level exceptions.
anti-intellectualism, like racism, is a free pole in the US, not necessarily attached to any other program.
Well, they're usually attached to each other.
Mencken was funny and all, and a believer in science, but he was both clever and reactionary at a time when those two qualities weren't mutually exclusive. In a more debauched age, PJ O'Rourke tried to mine a similar vein with less to show for it.
O'Rourke was followed by Rush Limbaugh, and the slide to Idiocracy became undeniable.
I feel like some people here didn't pay enough attention in Nebraska History class.
There's a coherent racist/anti-intellectual worldview that's been very persistent in American society through time but rarely fits easily into the structure of party politics. Hence the filtering process described in 76.
So, back to the OP: The freaking Ukrainian server thing drives me absolutely nuts !!!! Seriously, jesus christ, there is no such physical server that is somehow missing, stolen by the DNC's contractor (Crowdstrike) and never given to the FBI !! Gah! Gah!
Ahem - see, it's just that while I understand that the right-wing media and fever crowds of Breitbart et al. have been peddling this hogwash, and Rudy Giuliani and friends have been insisting on virtuously "investigating" this mysterious state of affairs, with even Atty. General William Barr getting in on the game ... I have not been hearing plain-spoken debunkings on *main stream media*. On the teevee. There are explainers and clarifications all over the place online and here and there in the print media, but I was absolutely astonished to hear on NPR at some point in the last couple of days a reporter say: "Well, this is all about that server that the DNC lost."
What? (I'm afraid I failed to note who exactly, which NPR reporter, said that.)
The DNC did not lose any server! Crowdstrike did not lose some server! The FBI was indeed given copies of the contents of the multiple servers involved in the 2016 hacking events. I know you all know this, but jesus christ, I just can't believe the extent to which the notion that there's a missing server is passed over by journalists (no doubt letting themselves conflate this with Hillary Clinton's private email server - but still, are people that simple?)
Andrew Johnson was a minor exception to the pattern, and a weird fluke in general, but I think Jackson was something different: the only time prior to Trump that the racist anti-intellectual strain broke through and took over one of the major parties (at that time actually the only one). That takeover, and the reaction to it, cause a huge realignment and a whole new party system.
82: Another bursting-through at the same time as Jackson was the Anti-Masonic Party, right? Jackson being one of many Masons at the time.
I think it's more the rich suburbanite ones trying to lash out at the kids who won't come back to Rockville.
Hey now, Rockville is blue. Don't be shitting on Rockville like that.
83: I think that was a little bit later, but yeah, roughly the same time. The Know-Nothings were another minor party coming out of the same tendency.
I am not a Know-Nothing--that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
That's Abraham Lincoln.
I can hear Trump responding, "Yeah, that's what I love about Russia, too."
I think it's more the rich suburbanite ones trying to lash out at the kids who won't come back to Rockville
Is that an REM reference?
Don't go back to Rockville
And waste another year
</StandPipe>
It's a Monkees referenc, you philistines.
I took the 'e' from 'reference' so I could spell 'Monkees.'
I may be misremembering "Last Train to Clarksville."
Clarksville's under 20 miles from Rockville, but you can't take the train there.
86: Well, that's what Lincoln wrote in a letter to his close friend Joshua Speed. When he argued for legal equality in public debates he wrapped it in a whole lot of provisos, although he did end strong.
...anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
Clarksville is a suburbanized shithole. You can trash on Clarksville all you want.
Andrew Jackson's duels were the American-style two people in a circle with a single knife kind, not the the gun kind, right? That is he stabbed several people to death in duels, he didn't shoot them.
Andrew Jackson is basically what stupid Trump voters *think* Trump is, right? That is, he's evil and racist, but also a self-made man who can kill people with his bare hands. RWM has said that if we could just get video footage of Trump trying to throw a football his political career would be over in a second.
No, Andrew Jackson's duels were gun duels like Hamilton-Burr
And, Trump could try to pass a football and have it fall out of his hands and his supporters would go on an on about how great he did, and that he could have been the greatest quarterback since Johnny Unitas.
Except the person who didn't die got put on the money.
95: Sadly, no. https://youtu.be/PCnJyyVp8Ik
I remember reading the bulk of the American dueling tradition was imported from France wholesale, so it makes sense that it might have been guns from the beginning.
I vaguely remember something else, maybe in the same book, about a Southern tradition where two men had their arms tied together and kicked each other's shins until one fell down.
You people should just do that instead of elections. Equally arbitrary but more efficient. Also the Dems probably have more Thai kickboxers.
"Albion's Seed" has a description of bare-handed fighting in Kentucky which ends with one contestant "Abelarded".
I was reading an article on how It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the most left-wing show on TV, which, okay, fine -- until I got to the point where the writer insisted the characters aren't monsters. Which... Uh... I would say... Guys, we had high hopes, but I don't think this Internet thing has worked out.
I'm only going to read Unfogged from now on. Everyone will have to step up their posting/commenting schedule.
92: "Can't Get There From Here" is a different REM song.