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    Quote Originally Posted by InsaneApache View Post
    Is Warren the one who pretended to be a red indian to get into college?

    Why would you vote for a cheat like that?
    The salient quality of this post is not its mere wrongness, but its premise that cheats are not worthy of votes - yet the poster would characterize Donald Trump, one of the most voracious fraudsters in American history (to say nothing of all the other violations), as a god-emperor. Hypocrisy in its original sense was understood to arise in professing a belief or persona that one did not hold: a kind of play-acting, really a subset of the lie. But the poster probably can't even be said to be deceiving us about a belief in the wrongness of cheating. It's worse than that.

    The poster appears to engage in a sort of doublethink where their enemies are naturally cheaters and therefore cheating is bad, while at the same should their friends cheat it is a show of strength and prowess and therefore cheating is good. There could well genuinely be no psychological contradiction between these beliefs, because they are deployed serially in a goal-oriented fashion; they will not conflict except when the object is an ambivalent one in categorization. In other words, this type of person operates according to a principle of tribal aggression, which precludes normal human communication. When the aggression principle is active typical limits on the incoherence of a belief set may be exceeded. So what should we do with them, eh? Shave them with a rusty razor?

    @CrossLOPER Innuendo Studies has a video series about the alt-right playbook.

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    I am not sure that I agree with the imbecile label. I concur with odious, and I would probably add bombastic, crapulous, obstreperous, narcissistic, demagogic, and quasi-sociopathic, but he is not as stupid as he is ignorant and unethical.
    However one defines stupidity, Trump evinces it. At the very minimum a politician should be concerned for their political survival, yet Trump frequently acts against even his own (electoral) interests. A smarter politician would be shoring up his support while committing his crimes quietly, not the other way around - for three years straight.

    No, the shoe fits. Moreover, I hope you don't defend Trump from charges of stupidity on the basis of his high status. A lot of powerful men throughout history have been plain fools. I know there's a kind of instinctive tendency to impute cleverness and ability to high-status men, but it's unwarranted deferential bias. Wishful thinking about the distribution of merit. The one exacerbating element would be that having power and wealth tends to damage good judgement all on its own because of insulation from criticism and consequences, but I would call that another component of stupidity all the same.


    Unrelatedly, a review of James Comey's new memoir.

    If you read Comey’s memoir, the story that he doesn’t realize he’s telling you is a story about a man so convinced of his own heroism that he constantly searches for opportunities to intervene and ends up making things worse. An extremely American story.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 10-14-2019 at 11:46.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 



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