DB Roy wrote:The thing I'll never figure out is why Trump refused to take the lead on covid. What was he thinking???

Saw an interesting article today that suggests political ideology is one of the strongest predictors of consumers' perceptions of the coronavirus' threat. In short, conservatives tend to feel more threatened by enemies with agency. For example, communism and socialism would be perceived as a real threat because they are engineered by foreigners with hostile intentions towards the United States. Whereas, a virus doesn't have agency; it just spreads indiscriminately from human to human.

This would explain why conservatives tend to see social distancing and wearing masks as more threatening than the coronavirus.

"In the context of the pandemic, you have these players -- the policymakers, the American public, media organizations, your neighbors - that, at least relative to the unobservable virus, have more agency," says Zane, "whereas this virus has less agency."

https://www.sciencecodex.com/heres-why- ... -19-661055

I've never seen Trump as a traditional sort of conservative. But clearly he does share a few traits. And his instincts with regard to the pandemic are obviously not great. What makes it worse is that he refuses to listen to scientists and other experts because he thinks he knows more than anyone. His base only reinforces this detachment from reality.

I've been thinking all along that Trump has a large segment of the populace absolutely under his thumb, master of a zombie brigade. But listening to the never-die followers who "know" the election was stolen, I realized that there's a two-way street here: they will feel Trump failed them if he gives in, because their admiration is based on Trump as a no-holds-barred fighter. Losing the affection of these people would be devastating for someone who must have adulation, so Trump is in a bind. He needs to go out, if go out he must, with guns blazing. As in war, if you have to abandon your position, you make sure the enemy will have a hard time taking over, so you blow things up. He has altogether too much time left in office for sabotage and score-settling. Joe Biden must pay the price of deposing the best president the nation ever had.

DB Roy wrote:The thing I'll never figure out is why Trump refused to take the lead on covid. What was he thinking??? It was the chance for him to shine and he just blew it. Covid lost him this election. There can be no argument of that. He had no policy, no plan, no nothing on how to battle the disease. So he denied it was deadly, denied it was getting worse when there could be no doubt of it. Then all this idiotic resistance to mask-wearing and social distancing. Turning it into politics. That made no sense. He had to try and look like he was doing SOMETHING. But, no, he didn't try. He didn't care at all.

I don't think the main issue is that he didn't care. I think it was the fragile ego thing again. If you take on a task, then you might end up looking bad. Caring makes you vulnerable. Building buildings offers him the chance to make choices without exercising judgment about anything more important than how things look, and as we know he just went with ostentatious and let that carry him where it would. I think he was just a coward about engaging on covid and every time someone came to him and said "we have to do something!" his inner Donald Trump just told him only suckers get dragged into a mess like that.

DB Roy wrote: He lied and said the disease was "totally under control" when his regime had done nothing whatsoever to contain the virus. That was a total lie. As a result, we may have half a million dead by January. He's going to pay for that. Once this disease is truly behind us and the vaccines handed out, the American people are going to demand a reckoning.

I would not count on that reckoning. I know fairly intelligent people who think we can't bear the economic cost of actually shutting down covid. And once they have decided, "He's right" they are not going to be swayed by numbers on a graph. I think Trump took the path of least resistance, and told himself a lot of people would agree with him, and sure enough, a lot did.

DB Roy wrote:Then he savaged the idea of mail-in voting. Why?
Trump screwed himself on that. Absolute botch!

I kind of agree, though I go with the theory that he just saw it as an opportunity to create accusations, leaning on his cult's opposition to masks and taking responsibility, as well as their eagerness to criticize "urban" people and "Big cities run by Democrats" and "Blue States" which are dog whistles for the same things.

DB Roy wrote:Now, they say that Trump will likely resign the presidency and let Pence pardon him.

First I've heard that. I rather think he believes his lawyers can get him out of anything. Denial works that way, until it doesn't.

DB Roy wrote:Maybe I'm wrong and Trump does resign to Pence but---can you actually see him doing that? I can't.

No, I can't either. I think to him it would be like admitting having done something wrong. For a similar reason I can't see him coming up with an innocent enough way to pardon himself.

Interbane wrote: It's disturbing how many people still can't see.

Well, at least I'm disturbed. I know some of these people, and ideology really matters to them. Law and order, yes, but also self-reliance (including the group favoring itself, which is just obvious to them and let other groups look after themselves), and kids having clear expectations made vividly obvious to them, and the appropriateness of wives' dependence on, and submission to, husbands, and quite a few more big items along those lines. So, since they have chosen up sides and Trump appears to agree with them, and has certainly put in place many judges who agree with them, then any criticism of him must be an unjust attack.

I think what disturbs me the most about all this is the racism submerged in willingness to see Communism in any social safety net. They won't, in general, admit it. I don't think they admit it even to themselves, so it is useless to accuse them. But a big part of Trump's appeal is that he is obnoxious enough to "call a spade a spade" (sorry, that's rude, but it also gets the point across) and they see that kind of "honesty" as something that's been missing from American politics.

It is not going to be easy to get past that. Ghettoization has created a traumatized culture among many people of color, and most pale people don't want to be part of the solution if it might cost them anything. So joblessness and low educational standards and poverty and crime are going to go on perpetuating until America is willing to see that this is us suffering from these patterns, not "them".

DB Roy wrote:The thing I'll never figure out is why Trump refused to take the lead on covid. What was he thinking???

Part of the answer is mental illness. Remember the malignant narcissistic personality disorder you've heard about. In the vernacular Trump is like a sadistic 14 year old bully. That's why he thought slowing the testing actually reduced the spread of covid. That's why he thought lying about the availability of tests and PPE actually solved those problems. Sort of like cheating your way into passing a freshman final exam (the election).

Yes Trump was aware of the dangers, but remember early on the worst problems were in Washington and NY. The Trump admin thought they could spin the pandemic as a crisis only for blue States while taking credit for any successes. They were stealing PPE to reward their friends. Remember the image of Larry Hogan, the Governor of Maryland present on the tarmac as a large shipment of PPE landed. They would have to arrest the Governor to confiscate that equipment. Once they started on the path of pitting different areas of the country against each other - Liberate Michigan! - they could not change course.

As psychiatrist Dr. Bandi Lee has pointed out, mental illness can be contagious for the followers of powerful leaders. Like a widespread Stockholm Syndrome, many of his followers are responding to Trump's complete lack of empathy, barely regarding adversaries as human. They could not understand taking covid precautions would help Trump and open the economy! Now that Biden stands to benefit from efforts to slow the spread, compliance could decline further and I shudder to think what a few could do, perhaps even believing a painful covid death is appropriate for the 78 million voters who attacked their leader.

It's not surprising how much theorizing is going on about his behavior and motives for it. When faced with the inexplicable, it's what happens. I still gravitate to the kinds of actions that he would need to have taken, which involve both close cooperation and edicts that he would have known would not play well with his base. We know he dislikes cooperating; it's why he prefers "America alone." He hates any sharing of credit as well. He could not ask of his core voters anything that would smack of weakness or fear, so brazening it out was the road he chose. His administration did do a good thing in funding vaccine development, but even in that we see the kind of grand, showy goal that he latches on to. He staked his entire presidency, really, on a vaccine emerging, rather than mitigate the damage of the disease. Now, he harbors deep resentment against the medical deep state for "withholding" the announcement of a potential vaccine until after the election.

What does everyone think of Iran's secret nuclear program? Some of what I read suggested that Trump dropped out of the agreement back in 2018 simply to spite Obama. Then when the US left, it fueled a conservative shift in the country, which in turn lead to the current situation.

Rather than assume Trump's plan was stupid, I decided to dig into his reasoning. Then I found this, and realize we might be fucked:

Trump in 2018 on the Iran Nuclear Deal:
“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”



How do you get Trump to change a lightbulb?

Tell him Obama installed it.

Biden officially wins the completed sentences race in a landslide.

Interbane wrote:What does everyone think of Iran's secret nuclear program?

I think the more it remains secret, the better. In the days when Iran committed themselves to an aggressive policy of fomenting influence through violence, nukes represented a serious threat to world peace. But that program got them nowhere with anyone, except, by the grace of Bush, in Iraq, and I rather suspect they are now focused more on finding their way to some normalcy and modus vivendi with their neighbors. Nukes are a difficult sword to brandish, and it might be best for all of us if they just had that sense of security in their back pocket so they would not have to worry about invasion (again).

On the other hand, their leanings and ambitions could change again. These things are hardly predictable. If, at some point, they decided to be aggressive and to use nuclear weapons as an explicit threat, it could drag the world into a mess none of us wants to see.

The problem for them is that the U.S., the world's dominant power, has shown that it can shift leanings and ambitions also. Once Trump won they may have been almost relieved to have the treaty abrogated, sanctions and all, so they could go ahead with their "peaceful" program. Iran is currently run by some very messed-up people, but I am still more worried about Putin than anyone in Tehran.

Here's a question. What does the gradual decline of fossil fuel power mean for power dynamics in the Middle East? Will it make the crazies even crazier? or will they start to pay attention to more modest and accessible goals, like large-scale desalination?

The back and forth about certifying Wayne County's election results has me feeling paranoid again. Racism in high places is extremely toxic. The Republican commissioners who objected to certification based on a more-or-less routine number of discrepancies (the New York Times explained the discrepancies as the type of thing you get when someone gets tired of waiting for their turn to vote after they have already signed in) between number of ballots and number of names counted as present. Nobody has any reason to think either that they signified some larger phenomenon going on in secret or that the number of discrepancies could conceivably overturn the state result.

But the motivated reasoning of partisanship, combined with the projections and demonizations which have been gaining momentum in America for 10 years, lead these commissioners to conclude that a familiar degree of discrepancies really represents a nefarious plot by "those people".

It seems to me that this is the force behind the record turnout for the Orange One. Tribalism generating conspiracy thinking. Refusal to credit facts if they are reported in the "Main Stream Media". The Red Team members I know are quite willing to believe that liberalism is a plot to take their money and give it to people who simply don't want to work. They are quite unwilling to believe that the fates of all Americans, and for that matter all humans, are intertwined to such a degree that refusing to support those in need and refusing to respond to slow crises are just indirect modes of self-sabotage.

And there it is - people who have been charged with maintaining the mechanisms of democracy have gone so far into tribalism that they are threatening democracy itself. God help us.