Did you see that one of his ghostwriters thinks he’ll resign before the end of the year?
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If Bannon starts attacking Trump via Breitbart, is that punching down or…?
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It’s unilateral punching, if we’re just talking about mindless bigotry and hateful ignorance.
If we’re talking about power and influence, it’s ‘punching up.’
Office of POTUS > Editor/Owner of Incendiary Website
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Is that Back-Stabbing, or Front-Stabbing? I think its Front-Stabbing.
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Live by the racist, die by the racist.
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[quote]After his ouster from the West Wing on Friday, ex-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon declared the Trump presidency that his brand of populist, right-wing conservatives helped make a reality is “over.”
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said in an interview with The Weekly Standard.
“We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else.”
“There’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over,” he added, according to the Weekly Standard.[/quote]
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What a world.
Just exactly what the fuck did he think was going to happen? Maybe Bannon’s not as smart as he thinks he is?
Oh… those sweet salty tears as he considers this more and more until the dumb fuck keels over.
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No, it’s the White Queen. Part of the point is that Alice is the only sensible person in Wonderland. All of the adult characters are quite, quite bonkers. (The White Queen also may be Alice’s obnoxious mother.)
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“Sanity is only the form of madness most favored by the majority.”
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I’m not a relativist, and I’m definitely not post-modern. The company I was working for at the time acquired a president who announced that “perception is the only reality”. I very politely suggested he try that one on the International Electrotechnical Committee and Underwriters Laboratories. It did not go down well, and soon after I decided to leave.
I mention this solely because at some point people like Trump and Bannon are going to come up against the laws of physics, and they will lose. A few days working as a volunteer in a mental hospital will soon persuade anyone that insanity is hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
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I don’t know.
The presidency still seems destructive and pretty terrible. Isn’t that what he wanted?
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I think that societies themselves can be reasonably described as insane or neurotic. For example, most people who believe in American exceptionalism are not narcissists, but America is a narcissist because it views itself as exceptional.
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Auden would agree with you. (1st September 1939) But it is a fact that mentally ill people tend to reflect the less sane aspects of their society - Victorians went in for religious obsession, post Freud sexual obsession became popular and now we have jihadis and right wing extremists - though Breivik seems not to be mentally ill but to have a brain malfunction, it has manifested itself in far right politics.
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There is not going to be enough popcorn in the world to fuel the audience for this upcoming shit storm.
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I have long since framed bigotry as being a cognitive defect/impairment. To my surprise, those who approach bigotry in terms of purely soft/social framings are generally hostile to this perspective. They tend to worry more about it being an excuse to “give attention” to those who are already narcissistic, rather than the strategy of finding a way to inoculate people and groups against it.
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I agree, sort of.
The human brain will (without extensive training) always find someone to be the enemy. There’s an “us vs. them” mentality hardwired in that needs to be intentionally bypassed. Bigotry piggy-backs onto that.
So, it is an impairment/defect in the sense that it’s an irrational cognitive shortcut that probably helped our distant ancestors survive in a hunter/gatherer lifestyle but does more harm than good in modern times.
However, it’s not a defect, if you consider a defect to be something that is in the final product that wasn’t on the blueprints. The overwhelming majority of humanity has the “us vs. them” defect that serves as the basis for bigotry; if there are any exceptional people who don’t, they’re few and far-between.
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I agree, 100%, BUT the same could be said of other things, such as (the over-used analogy for many societal ills) cancer. It is built into us that our cells can copy only so many times, and that if we live long enough, that will cause us to fall apart on our own. Yet the fact that this problem is nearly universal to people does not cause it to be accepted as a necessary evil. Probably trillions of dollars worth of research into repairs and therapies is done. Probably because it is recognized as a medical, rather than purely social problem.
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