demagogue on 17/9/2024 at 02:52

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The point is that he's a cluster b malignant narcissist, which means a whole host of things like he's entirely transactional, his identity literally doesn't exist outside self-aggrandizing transactions, he's blind to what's happening in the world outside the 2-degree field of view of how it directly affects him, he lacks the ability to empathize with other people, he can't cope with any reality that challenges him as the greatest ever, and if you try to force him to, you're either going to get a blank stare that doesn't comprehend what you're saying or a total narcissist collapse, raging, sobbing, blubbering breakdown, every private and state interest knows how vulnerable he is to flattery, he's such an open book, which makes probably the official most vulnerable to influence ever, he has a very well known NPD cycle of idealization, exploitation, devalue, discard for every transactional-relationship in his life from his wife and family to the guy that gets his burgers, and the list goes on...

The hair stitches and orange skin are two red flags pointing to the narcissism -- the other example like this that I know that you'll see sometimes is BPD girls constantly changing their hair length and color -- but anyway, it's not the grooming per se anybody cares about, it's the NPD.

heywood on 17/9/2024 at 12:07

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Normally I try not to get into mocking politicians for silly things like bad comb overs and spray tans, but I admit to enjoying a few eye-rolling laughs over John Boehner's fake tan (the original orange man in Washington) and a few of Kirsten Synema's wardrobe choices. This time, I wanted to use the word idol, because his supporters are becoming like cultists worshiping a false god. I added the word orange to emphasize how clown-like he is, and I guess mxleader thought it was offensive. I don't know why anyone would think I was referring to his skin color. I also don't know what this has to do with race. Race isn't determined by skin color, it's determined by ancestry. And Trump is undisputedly white.



Show me a Trump supporter focusing on factual information and I might agree.

Discendo Vox on 17/9/2024 at 14:42

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I agree, there's little to no facts there. But the focus from all parties on these weird sniping shibboleths just makes the possibility of discussing facts almost impossible. Directly correcting and pointing out the falsehoods, and getting into the details of them, is way, way more productive, and healthier. Regardless of position, the seeming reliance on, the substitution of, this stuff for actual discussion or thought is a bad look.

Discendo Vox on 17/9/2024 at 18:31

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The goal of the discussion is not persuasion of those already committed to separation from reality- it's building a shared understanding of how and why that separation from reality occurs, and ensuring that we don't fall prey to the same issues or patterns of conduct.

demagogue on 17/9/2024 at 19:19

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To begin with, TTLG is a forum for video games, and this is CommChat, half of the whole point of which is to crack juvenile jokes and zings. It's not a political or policy forum. But in the big picture, there are lots of posts that go into a lot of depth too.

I'm small-d democratic in the sense that I think it's good to have a mix of all types, high minded political treatises alongside cheap zings, and ideally from every position, basically anything as long as nobody is calling for actual violence or dehumanizing their opponents and calling them cockroaches or whatever. And I think we mostly hit that target.

I can usually tolerate our own rightwing kooks because they usually have good things to say about gaming, Thief FMs in particular, which gives me faith they're not entirely detached from reality and I can trust their opinions and intentions talking about that topic, and then they just let paranoia and propaganda take over on politics I think. You could show statistics, e.g., migrant crime rates are lower than that of citizens; but they're in the realm of emotional truth and identity politics anyway, which isn't about statistics or wonk talk anymore, and I think cheap jokes and zings are more fitting if anything.

I mean if we were really going to talk about the gravest threat to the US and world, and what's at stake in the election, for starters we'd be talking about the vibrational quantum scattering of radiated IR light with CO2 and other greenhouse gasses that drives the earth's climate system in a billion different ways in different regions, which then drives a billion different socio-economic changes at every level of scale from the individual to the global economy; and I don't think you'd make it far because that topic gets very deep in to the weeds very fast. If you ranked actual threats by scale, illegal US migration would probably not be in the top 50, if that. You could say that until you're blue in the face and show the data to back it up, or you could just match a cheap claim with a cheap zing, which would at least be an actual exchange of rhetoric everybody follows and not talking at a blank stare of incomprehension. It's a discussion forum at the end of the day.