05-14-2021, 12:20 AM
(05-13-2021, 11:43 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 13-May-2021 World View: Sociopaths
(05-13-2021, 11:10 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: > Donald Trump may not be culpable in all the death, but he is
> clearly one of the worst killers in human history... if one refers
> to negligent homicide and not outright murder.
Even by your extremely low and almost nonexistent standards of
honesty, this reaches a new level of idiocy.
I wish that what I posted were either wrong, dishonest, or hysterical. In any event, some of the greatest tragedies of lethal incompetence come from post-seasonal behavior. Donald Trump makes the assumption that all human concerns boil down to hedonism, the sex drive, and material gain, which is a thoroughly Third-Turning world-view In a Fourth Turning (Crisis) such an assumption colors policy, then the resulting policy can be consummately tragic even without malign intent. Malign intent, as with extremists of Right and Left intent on reshaping the world permanently without concern for the destructive cost, leads to deep tragedy in mass death from wars, revolutions, massacres, mutinies, famines, and purges. One need not have evil intent to get horrific results (Nicholas II of Russia). It is often enough to be shielded from the consequences of one's choices.
Donald Trump is a vile person. I start with his mockery of a handicapped person. I took a college-level course on human development whose focus was the predictable changes in human behavior in a lifetime. Intellectual development (mental age) was one aspect, but emotional development is another. Emotional maturity does not ensure that one will be factually right, but it does ensure that one will be more able to change behavior when confronted with undeniable facts, including consequences to others. People of limited intellect can be protected from the consequences of incompetence beyond narrow roles in life; these are the people whom society limits to work with rigid rules so that they can make slight contributions (as in repetitive tasks in factories and shops) without being exploited or conned. Such people are vulnerable and they deserve protection; if they do not get protection and are exploited or tricked, then others end up paying.
Emotional immaturity is much more dangerous. Emotional maturity and intellectual maturity usually go together, but when they do not, the lack of emotional maturity does far more harm. Someone of low IQ but average EQ can do servile or menial work without creating too many problems. Such a person may need more protection and guidance, but rigorous faith and a watchful family may solve that. The person of average-to-high IQ but low EQ is the sort who thinks that something is illegal only if one gets caught or immoral if it causes harm to oneself. Thus at the extreme Ted "Unabom" Kaczynski, a brilliant scholar of mathematics who could not cope with normal expectations of personal behavior. Such people have no personal or institutional loyalties, and if things go wrong for them they lead any personal following into ruin. Think of cult leaders like Osama bin Laden, David Koresh, Charles Manson, Marshall Applewhite, Ervil LeBaron, Shoko Asahara, and of course the bulk of political despots whose names I need not mention.
Donald Trump gave plenty of warning signals starting in his ruthless techniques in business, his sexual depravity, his marital infidelity, and his mockery of the handicapped. Before I was ten I noticed that people my age were rarely making "handicap" jokes. At some point one says of the blind, deaf, or crippled, "There but for the Grace of God go I".
Quote:It's worthy of note that in the five paragraphs of garbage that you
just posted, you never once mentioned Biden's name or his repeated
crises.
Donald Trump left behind a giant mess in his Presidency, including a cult of personality that can induce people to do horrible things (like the Capitol Putsch) in his name. To be sure we have fewer diplomatic disasters because foreign leaders not complicit with him chose to wait him out (See Donald Trump. See Angela Merkel. Watch sparks fly). Maybe because we have gotten past the financial depravities of the last completed 3T (the Texas real-estate/lending fraud of the 1980's, the dot.com implosion and the madness of Enron, and finally the housing and lending fraud of the Double-Zero Decade) America is now inoculated from speculative bubbles of the sort that hollow leaders promote and excuse, so we are fairly safe from a financial panic. Administrative chaos is exactly what one get with a leader who butters people up and then stabs them in the back.
OK, so Joe Biden isn't Francis of Assisi. Who is?
Quote:It's clear to me that, like all people on the far left, you're still
addicted to Trump, and can barely function without him. Watching
MSNBC today, it's clear that the Trump addiction is morphing into a
Liz Cheney addiction. That should fill your addiction until Trump
comes back.
I have no delusion that Representative Cheney is a neoliberal reactionary who still truly believes in the Reagan ideology as does her father. But when Trump's followers can cast her to the wolves because she tells some undeniable truths about a despicable person and the cause around him, we Democrats can rightly see something terribly wrong with the purge within the GOP. We have the example of Weimar Germany to demonstrate the consequences of the absence of conservatism with moral principle. Class interest, the cornerstone of the DNVP, is not enough. The industrial magnates and big landowners found their way to Adolf Hitler when he promised to eviscerate trade unions and restore master-serf conditions on the landed estates of the Junkers while butchering Communists. Class interest is a very low standard of morality. But flawed as Representative Cheney is she is far better than skirt-chasing Donald Trump, the Q-anon cult, and the racists and religious bigots. Ronald Reagan left no doubt of his contempt for the neo-Nazi and KKK pigs when they showed signs of violence; Trump has excused such.
You may accuse me rightly of moral relativism on people with whom I generally disagree (yes, I see a huge difference between Schuschnigg and Metaxas on the one side and Hitler on the other, or Kadar and Jaruzelski on the one side of the Commie perversion and Pol Pot) but not on my own side. I want Andrew Cuomo... to vacate the Governorship of New York.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
