amor mundi: Trumpproval

Monday, October 09, 2017

Trumpproval

3 comments:

jimf said...: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/corker-trump-truth-.html
-----------------
Corker Told the Truth About Trump. Now He Should Act on It.
Michelle Goldberg
OCT. 10, 2017

. . .

On Sunday evening, after a Twitter feud with Trump,
[Senator Bob] Corker[, Republican of Tennessee] gave an
interview to The New York Times in which he said publicly
what Republican officeholders usually say only privately.
Trump, Corker told the reporters. . ., is treating
the presidency like “a reality show” and could
be setting the nation “on the path to World War III.”
Corker has previously said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,
Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly
“help separate our country from chaos.” On Sunday, he identified
the agent of that chaos. “I know for a fact that every single day
at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,”
Corker said of Trump. . .

Corker’s expression of alarm is a reminder that we are teetering
on the cusp of horror. He made it clear that Trump’s tweeted
provocations of North Korea are impulsive rather than strategic.
“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop,
bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” he said.
We need to take seriously the possibility that Trump might
cavalierly start a war that could kill millions of people.
It would be a human calamity of inconceivable, history-bending
scale, and it would leave America as a hated global pariah. . .

[Jerry] Taylor, of the Niskanen Center[, a libertarian think tank],
is in frequent contact with anti-Trump Republicans, and he
senses a growing sense of urgency among them. “Having an
unstable narcissist who is ignorant of politics, policy and
foreign affairs with the nuclear codes has probably turned
them white as a sheet,” he said. “There is some degree of
serious responsibility that they fully realize that they hold.”. . .
====; 6:33 PM
jimf said...: There was another opinion article in today's NY Times that
caught my eye:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/the-art-of-thinking-well.html
-----------------
The Art of Thinking Well
David Brooks
OCT. 10, 2017

Richard Thaler has just won an extremely well deserved Nobel Prize
in economics. Thaler took an obvious point, that people don’t always
behave rationally, and showed the ways we are **systematically**
irrational. . .

Jacobs nicely shows how our thinking processes emerge from emotional
life and moral character. If your heart and soul are twisted,
your response to the world will be, too. He argues that by diagnosing
our own ills, we can begin to combat them. And certainly I can think
of individual beacons of intellectual honesty today: George Packer,
Tyler Cowen, Scott Alexander and Caitlin Flanagan, among many. . .
====

Scott Alexander! Is Brooks actually talking about the LessWrong contributor,
MIRI supporter (unFriendly AI worrier), and SlateStarCodex blogger "Scott Alexander"?
( https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander )

The Scott Alexander, that is, who (apropos Trump) was quoted approvingly
in the following article:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/stop-it-fellow-lefties-youre-making-us-crazy/
-----------------
‘Stop It, Lefties, You’re Making Us Crazy’
By Rod Dreher
November 17, 2016

. . .

Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes the
Slate Star Codex blog, has won the Internet for the week with his long,
magnificently well researched post telling the anti-Trump left to
quit scaring people with their ridiculous propaganda. Alexander
is not a Trump supporter, so why does he feel so strongly about this?
This is why:

> Why am I harping on this?
>
> I am a psychiatrist. So far I have had two patients express
> Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the
> emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe
> and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.
>
> … Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like
> three or four people who believe the media, and those people are
> cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

I am not going to quote Alexander’s blog post at length, because if I
got started, it would be hard to stop. What he does is go through most
of the allegations against Trump (e.g., that he’s anti-Semitic, that he’s
a white supremacist fellow traveler, that he hates gays, etc.), and
demolishes them with factual analysis. . .

Read the whole thing. . .
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
====

Well golly, Batman!; 6:57 PM
jimf said...: > Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes the
> Slate Star Codex blog, has won the Internet for the week with
> his long, magnificently well researched post telling the anti-Trump
> left to quit scaring people with their ridiculous propaganda.

Meanwhile, other psychiatrists are "scaring people with their ridiculous
propaganda":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nhoGIvOKJU
----------------
'The Dangerous Case Of Donald Trump': 27 Psychiatrists Assess
The Last Word
MSNBC
Published on Oct 5, 2017

In a new book, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess
President Donald Trump's behavior. Do his impulses explain his decisions?
The book's editor Dr. Brandy Lee and Tony Schwartz, co-author of Trump's
"The Art of the Deal," join Lawrence O'Donnell.
====

Aww, they're just Fake Psychiatrists.

(Or maybe some a them psychiatrists who are out to destroy the
world, like L. Ron Hubbard was always warning us about.); 7:00 AM

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