Their Fevered Brows
Meanwhile, over at Salon, where the delusional hyperventilate, Mr Chauncey DeVega once again rails against Donald Trump. Today we’re being warned of his “political thuggery and mobster-style behaviour.” The current President is, we’re told, a “dictator.”
The question is… whether anything or anyone is capable of stopping him.
To embellish this tale of impending doom, Mr DeVega turns to academia. Specifically,
I recently spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat in an effort to better understand where America is on its road to fascism and authoritarianism in this fourth year of Trump’s regime.
It’s a regime, you see. Mr DeVega likes this word and uses it no fewer than nine times, as when telling us, confidently, that,
The American people are in a manic state because of Trump’s regime.
Not just Salon columnists, then, but the entire population. Apparently, 300 million people are teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode.
Dr Ben-Ghiat, a lecturer in Italian Studies, is of course on-message:
I’m very upset that there are in fact Trump supporters and I have zero sympathy towards them.
This is followed by pointed references to Hitler and Mussolini – because hey, why not? – and whisperings of a cowed and fearful media:
Many people in the news media are afraid to really engage the fact that Trump is an authoritarian because if they do so then reality becomes too threatening, and therefore they would have to take a different stance publicly.
Readers are invited to take a moment to reflect on Mr Trump’s famously warm and not at all fractious relationship with the mainstream media, which never, ever calls him names. Like “proto-fascist,” for instance. Or when MSNBC’s Niccole Wallace breathlessly announced that the President was genocidal and, for reasons left to the imagination, clearly bent on “exterminating Latinos.” Or when the same broadcaster’s Frank Figliuzzi suggested that Trump’s lowering of flags following a shooting tragedy was actually a coded salute to Adolf Hitler.
Apparently, these things never happened, are not in fact bizarrely routine, and the pundits at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, NBC, Salon, etc., are just too terrified and deferential to admit, as Dr Ben-Ghiat puts it, that “they are living in the middle of a fascist, authoritarian takeover.”
At which point Mr DeVega interjects with more of his own signature understatement:
The end goal is for Trump, Barr, the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally to have their own secret police.
To do away with all those fearlessly subversive and in no way unhinged Salon columnists, one assumes. Such is their immense importance. Dr Ben-Ghiat then warns us that prolonged exposure to Mr Trump will cause the entire country to “lose all sense of reality.” A process seemingly well underway, at least in the pages of Salon.
Mr DeVega’s unhappy mental processes have entertained us before, as when informing the world that, “Donald Trump leads a political cult whose members want to literally be inside of him, to become him, to have a libidinal relationship with the Great Leader.”
What, you didn’t know?
Who reads Salon anyway?
Likewise, a post on DeVega’s piece over at Metafilter from a day or so ago, and where, again, there was an eerie uniformity and absence of criticism or even mild equivocation. I scrolled through 70 or so comments and no-one seemed to find the claims and language even slightly hyperbolical or absurd. Instead, there were pretentious rumblings about emigrating to somewhere “safer,” because being a middle-class lefty who reads Metafilter is just so dangerous, apparently. Naturally, the word “resistance” cropped up quite a lot.
One commenter asked how to persuade The Unsophisticated Others to become enlightened and vote Democrat, thereby saving the world from The Imminent Nazi Apocalypse. All while endorsing a piece in which Trump and his supporters are demonised as mindless fascistic monsters bent on the oppression and enslavement of all and sundry, but especially middle-class lefties, using their secret police. Obliviously, he added “my friends are mostly liberals.”
If Dunning Kruger wasn’t invented already, we’d have to invent it for him.
I’m afraid I have some bad news that may explain much of this…Can’t find the specifics now as Google has gotten all Trumpety-Trump-Orange-Man-Bad with any search with T’s name in it, but a year or so ago I ran across an interview with either Dunning or Kruger and whichever one seemed quite confident that Trump and his supporters were victims of the D-K effect. Of course with Trump and really any celebrity, including themselves on a much smaller scale, he’s more right than wrong.
Per a comment I made elsewhere, the humble don’t aspire to run the things or to be seen and admired by people that they don’t know. They’re too humble to take on what they understand as a great effort because the ego reward factor that would drive such an ambition is not incredibly strong. Because, um…humble. It takes a significant ego (and to some degree an ignorance/lack of self-awareness) to do so. Significantly intelligent people are constantly self doubting and second guessing. It’s what enables them to learn. People with exceptional confidence rarely question themselves or ignore contradictory information.
I have a theory that we are led by stupid people who by blind luck just happen to possess the right kind of stupid for the moment which enables them to rise to the occasion. I mean, there’s like 7 billion of us stumbling around the planet. Nuts, blind squirrels, some serendipity required. It’s more complicated than that but that’s the Cliff’s Notes version.
“I have a theory that we are led by stupid people…”
I suspect it’s even simpler – smart people aren’t dumb enough to stick their heads in that noose; they can use their brain power to make mucho dinero and retire to their own Caribbean island while still young enough to enjoy it, so why would they want to put-up with all the $hit politicians routinely do?
And why do the politicians put-up with it, for the remote spectre of maybe a bit of power? – stupidity.
…- stupidity. From one of Salon’s rivals in the same.
Say, all you cats and kittens over in the UK, did you know that every time you selfish SOBs see a private doc because you can’t get in to the NHS, it is actually you who are killing the NHS ?
Because there can only be a finite number of docs & nurses in the UK, I guess, speaking of fallacies. But wait, on that very same page we learn the real crisis a “shortfall” of 580,000
straphangerssocial workers.580,000 social workers, vs. 50,000 nurses, or X number of docs. I am just blue skying here, but maybe the problem isn’t not wanting to wait till it ruptures to get your appendix taken out.
“I implore people to stop using private healthcare: it’s killing the NHS”
“When the State has no more use for you, you should go quietly to your death.”
“did you know that every time you selfish SOBs see a private doc because you can’t get in to the NHS, it is actually you who are killing the NHS?”
Similarly, when a Soviet citizen buys food that was privately grown, that “kills” the collective farms. And so on.
Another fevered brow
Another fevered brow
Mental health professional. Let that sink in. Typical, though. Like I was saying above regarding Messrs. Dunning / Krueger.
Another fevered brow…white men marching in straight-pride parades, wielding swastikas, guns and Confederate flags.
So this would be a psychiatrist who strongly believes that it’s not okay to be white.
My mind floods with images…
That sure is a self-flattering way of saying, “I retreat to IMAGINATION LAND.”
Karl Popper saith:
“You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.“
It would be interesting to see how many people who consider Trump a tyrant would scoff at the same title applied to Ursula Von Der Leyen.
I personally call the type of persons who prefer tyranny “vermin”.
I admit that I live in a progressive bubble. I’ve never met a Trump supporter in the flesh and the psychiatrist in me is curious: What puzzle pieces of life experience could come together to produce a world-view so opposite to mine? I hope to chat with a Trump voter to try to understand.
He lives in such a bubble, he can’t even find friends that can *pretend* to take the Trump line.
I don’t like Trump — I think he’s a pretty vile as a human being. But I can understand why people do like him, and I can see that he is doing some things well, all without me having to like him. I don’t think that is particularly unusual either. Yet these people cannot even find a person who is in that position? Not one?
Mind you, my latest prized possession is a set of “Trump 2020” socks. I intend to share them out so my group at work are all wearing them on the same day, to freak out my rabidly orangemanbad friend. (He’s not a progressive, nor a liberal — he has just truly got a bad case of TDS and I enjoy giving him shit about it.)