Yes!!! As someone who's battled ableist bullshit all my life, I endorse this message. The herd instinct is vicious and unrelenting, and it does not need to be encouraged.
Thank you for this. Deaf and dumb tropes exist for a reason, and this Deaf person hasn’t forgotten that, not for a moment. Fascism itself is bad, and that is reason enough to confront it on its own terms.
Sorry. I am a bit of an ablest when it comes to people who we trust to hold nuclear codes. Trump surely gets an instantaneous thumbs down for his fascist ratio.
I would say is the ultimate truth: "If the baseline is lying about rain and injecting bleach, what would decline from that point even mean?"
I used to ask myself how much worse does it need to get before the rest of the GOP walks away... at this point I think we have our answer. There is nothing too low, to depraved, or too malicious.
As you wrote, the main reason(IMHO) that Haley and the GOP are using the ’mental decline’ argument is because it’s efficient — attacks both Trump and Biden in one sound bite. The cruelty is usually the point, but in this case, it’s not necessary...which makes it more ambiguously cruel.
I feel quite sanguine, sleeping soundly at night knowing Brandon holds the nuclear codes. Can’t say I feel nor felt the same about TFG holding them. I imagine TFG would leverage them for personal enrichment if he could.
I think that they can both be true. I don't think Trump is disabled but I do think he's got a mental illness that stems from the way he was raised; his absolute lack of empathy. That being said,, you're right that he's always been this way. And I do believe the lack of empathy is what makes him so evil.
"(Note: Subtitles are good and using them is not a sign of mental unfitness in any way.)"
Damn right. If you have only "X" amount of time and only ONE take to say it in, you HAVE to get it right. Blathering random bullshit on the Sunday shows isnt the same thing as a SOTU address
I think lies are separate to Trump's noticably expanded and more frequent drivel. Yes, this is an extension of who he has always been, but it's not wrong to point out that it's evolved into something worse than it was four years ago, or eight years ago.
I also think that most people don't confuse mental decline and mental illness. They're not fungible concepts. Ditto mental illness and personality disorders.
People have confused bidens stutter with mental illness and decline. A big part of ableism is confusing these.
People may speak differently as they age, but trump has really long spewed complete nonsense; again, he recommended people inj cr bleach. The core issue with him is that he lies constantly and is a fascist. We don’t have a diagnosis of mental decline and really don’t need one to know he’s unfit.
I do think trump is showing increasing mental decline, in that his word salad is getting more and more garbled. He isn't just pausing until a word comes to him. He is spewing non-words. The USE of this observation is as a counter to the Biden is Old trope, not so much a reason, much less "the" reason, for trump's unfitness for office. I'm glad it is a Republican making the argument, of course.
Haley's not using it to counter the "biden is old" argument though. she's using it to smear all old people as mentally unfit so that she can run against Biden and trump both.
She may not be using it for that reason. But pointing out the lapses may give some non-cult-members pause. I'm less than 2 years younger than Biden, and yes, I have to wait for a word to come to me, but I don't take it as in insult to point out the much worse issue with trump. (I'm also almost exactly two years older than Trump. ) There's old and there's senile. What has to be stressed is that Biden is one but not the other. Trump is showing signs of being both. A lot of his earlier idiocies were quite possibly strategic. Not any more.
The other reasons for abhorring trump are legion and much more important. But I don't think she is distracting any Biden supporter or potential supporter, and frankly, anything that causes a wedge with what I think of as "legacy Republicans" is a plus. These are the folks whose families have always voted GOP. I don't care if they don't vote for Biden--I just want them to stay home or not vote for trump.
Absent some terrible medical event, the candidates are going to be Biden and Trump. I don't CARE that Haley is indirectly casting aspersions of Biden's age. She isn't so far being explicit about that--she'd be hard pressed to be so-- and she isn't going to be the candidate.
The problem with Trump, like the problem with Hitler, they are losers who mucked up everything in their life. They were (are in Trump's case) unable to win without blaming their loss on someone else. With a megaphone that tells others what they don't have is because x (jew, immigrant, black) is making them lose---all we got to do---you know the rest. Of course the republicans are losing because Ronald Reagan took everything away from them...
The making of a fascist nation...is making its citizens into losers and people who lose too much march in step to win...how can they win. Kill those that made them losers. How did they become losers by following those who turned them who made them losers instead of joining with their brethren (jew, immigrant, black) to make themselves into winners against those who made them into losers. Life is a team sport and the game can't be won when you turn against your teammates.
Cognitive decline and mental illness are two different things. Gaffes and malaprops are yet something else. Trump's cognition has clearly deteriorated over the past decades, which you can clearly see if you look at interviews of him from the '80s. He has been called a malignant sociopath, (very different from depression or schizophrenia) and I see no reason that couldn't be accurate. It's a popular diagnosis for people behind bars, and hopefully there will be one more of them there soon.
Everyone experiences cognitive decline. It starts immediately after your brain stops developing. People are, but that doesn’t mean theyre incompetent to work. The idea that there’s some moment of perfect brain was and ppl are unfit if they make a mistake on live tv is really bad for disabled ppl for pretty obvious reasons.
Trump is unfit morally to be president. That’s what we should focus on, not on amateur diagnosis that harm marginalized ppl more than they harm trump.
Agree, just trying to be semantically correct. There are different degrees of cognitive decline, and Trump is pretty far along, but that does not make him mentally ill or implicate anyone else with respect to their unique cognitive makeup.
Being immoral is pretty much the main symptom of being a sociopath, so, yeah, call him immoral!
There’s a difference between lying which we’ve seen him do, according to WAPO, 35,000+ times and confusing Nicki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. And the many other things he’s confused. And his garbled word salads and made up words. That’s confusion and stumbling, not lying, and that seems likely to be the beginnings of dementia or, perhaps as it’s been alleged, advanced syphilis - although I doubt that.
again, diagnosing people on the fly without expertise or an actual medical exam harms disabled people, and we just shouldn't do that.
as they get older, people can lose words or mess up speeches without it meaning that they're cognitively incapable. the problem with trump is he's a fascist liar. why speculate on other reasons he might or might not be unfit, especially when doing so establishes norms that harm marginalized people?
::Many liberal and left commenters seem to hope that stigmatizing Trump as cognitively unfit will cause his campaign to disintegrate and finally bring him down::
Because Trump's used it against Joe Biden so much that's turning his guns around so they're pointing at HIM is poetic justice...?
it's not really justice though when you're essentially targeting disabled people. and again, Haley is using the argument against trump because she wants to use it against biden too.
I'm not really with you on this, Noah—because it's Donald Trump who's going to go postal, and He Has It Coming:
• Calling him a "Fascist" hasn't worked—the MAGAts just go, "Cool!"
• Calling him a "Liar" hasn't worked, either—the MAGAts just go "No, YOU'RE the liar!"
• Calling him a "Sexual Predator" hasn't worked at All—the MAGAts just go "That's because he's a REAL Man!" 🤮
Joe Biden's gotten snipes about his mental acuity since he was a Senator (including a number from Barack Obama, who made "Malaprop Joe" into his Administration's punchline!), and he's taken them in stride. Like the Emperor Claudius, Biden has managed far better on being called a "half-wit" than most people have with all their wits—so maybe it's a question of quality rather than quantity?
Donald Trump won't handle it because he can't handle anything but being worshipped, and the more he melts down the more voters peel away from him as the menace he clearly is. It's not a clean tactic, but I'll take dirty tactics if they ensure we don't get TRUMP II: THE TRUMPENING! After the election is over, I'll take my lumps for it, as I think will most people who want to get rid of Trump By Any Means Necessary.
As for Haley? There's no way she'll be the Republican Party nominee—he's a Woman and a Southern Asian in a Major Party of American White Male Christian Nationalists. I'm stunned she's done THIS well so far, honestly.
You don't have to agree with me—in fact, it's better if you don't. SOMEBODY has to steer the country back on track after we've rid ourselves of this Troublesome Mango Messiah....
think about it this way. Is it okay to call Clarence Thomas racist slurs?
No, of course it isn't, because normalizing racist slurs *hurts all Black people.* You can't just use that stigma on your enemies, because it has broader effects and shows a contempt for all Black people, not just for Clarence Thomas.
Would it be okay to call Trump the r-word? again, no, because using that word and normalizing it suggests all disabled people are disgusting and unfit, which is unacceptable. Same thing when you leverage ableist stigma without using the r-word. The main person harmed isn't the rich and powerful trump. It's all the less powerful disabled people who suffer from a norm where people feel comfortable diagnosing them and insulting them.
lots of things work against trump; he's extremely unpopular, and has never won a popular vote.
It's just that partisanship is a very strong force. it feels like he should collapse entirely, but that's just not going to happen as long as Rs back him. but he's not a strong candidate, in large part because of...well, all the things you'd expect.
I think you're too optimistic about how unpopular Trump is, Noah—or perhaps, too optimistic about how Biden is perceived against him. The MSM is so eager for their horserace that if Biden could cure cancer just by touching people, the NY TIMES and WaPo headlines would read "BIDEN DESTROYS HEALTHCARE!, and the editorials would all be demanding to know what he has against chemo treatments and surgery! Between them and the Republicans, there are a LOT of people who aren't paying attention to what a lunatic Trump has become....
Yes!!! As someone who's battled ableist bullshit all my life, I endorse this message. The herd instinct is vicious and unrelenting, and it does not need to be encouraged.
Thank you for this. Deaf and dumb tropes exist for a reason, and this Deaf person hasn’t forgotten that, not for a moment. Fascism itself is bad, and that is reason enough to confront it on its own terms.
Sorry. I am a bit of an ablest when it comes to people who we trust to hold nuclear codes. Trump surely gets an instantaneous thumbs down for his fascist ratio.
In the spirit of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, we need a folksinger to pen the tongue-in-cheek parody “Dictator on Day-One,” please.
I would say is the ultimate truth: "If the baseline is lying about rain and injecting bleach, what would decline from that point even mean?"
I used to ask myself how much worse does it need to get before the rest of the GOP walks away... at this point I think we have our answer. There is nothing too low, to depraved, or too malicious.
As you wrote, the main reason(IMHO) that Haley and the GOP are using the ’mental decline’ argument is because it’s efficient — attacks both Trump and Biden in one sound bite. The cruelty is usually the point, but in this case, it’s not necessary...which makes it more ambiguously cruel.
I feel quite sanguine, sleeping soundly at night knowing Brandon holds the nuclear codes. Can’t say I feel nor felt the same about TFG holding them. I imagine TFG would leverage them for personal enrichment if he could.
I think that they can both be true. I don't think Trump is disabled but I do think he's got a mental illness that stems from the way he was raised; his absolute lack of empathy. That being said,, you're right that he's always been this way. And I do believe the lack of empathy is what makes him so evil.
I don’t think we’re in a position to diagnose him. And I think it’s important to remember that mental illness doesn’t cause ppl to be evil.
"(Note: Subtitles are good and using them is not a sign of mental unfitness in any way.)"
Damn right. If you have only "X" amount of time and only ONE take to say it in, you HAVE to get it right. Blathering random bullshit on the Sunday shows isnt the same thing as a SOTU address
I think lies are separate to Trump's noticably expanded and more frequent drivel. Yes, this is an extension of who he has always been, but it's not wrong to point out that it's evolved into something worse than it was four years ago, or eight years ago.
I also think that most people don't confuse mental decline and mental illness. They're not fungible concepts. Ditto mental illness and personality disorders.
People have confused bidens stutter with mental illness and decline. A big part of ableism is confusing these.
People may speak differently as they age, but trump has really long spewed complete nonsense; again, he recommended people inj cr bleach. The core issue with him is that he lies constantly and is a fascist. We don’t have a diagnosis of mental decline and really don’t need one to know he’s unfit.
Indeed, vigorously agree.
Even comparing Biden and Trump, or any older person with Trump, is something of an absurdity, an asinine exercise.
I do think trump is showing increasing mental decline, in that his word salad is getting more and more garbled. He isn't just pausing until a word comes to him. He is spewing non-words. The USE of this observation is as a counter to the Biden is Old trope, not so much a reason, much less "the" reason, for trump's unfitness for office. I'm glad it is a Republican making the argument, of course.
Haley's not using it to counter the "biden is old" argument though. she's using it to smear all old people as mentally unfit so that she can run against Biden and trump both.
She may not be using it for that reason. But pointing out the lapses may give some non-cult-members pause. I'm less than 2 years younger than Biden, and yes, I have to wait for a word to come to me, but I don't take it as in insult to point out the much worse issue with trump. (I'm also almost exactly two years older than Trump. ) There's old and there's senile. What has to be stressed is that Biden is one but not the other. Trump is showing signs of being both. A lot of his earlier idiocies were quite possibly strategic. Not any more.
The other reasons for abhorring trump are legion and much more important. But I don't think she is distracting any Biden supporter or potential supporter, and frankly, anything that causes a wedge with what I think of as "legacy Republicans" is a plus. These are the folks whose families have always voted GOP. I don't care if they don't vote for Biden--I just want them to stay home or not vote for trump.
Absent some terrible medical event, the candidates are going to be Biden and Trump. I don't CARE that Haley is indirectly casting aspersions of Biden's age. She isn't so far being explicit about that--she'd be hard pressed to be so-- and she isn't going to be the candidate.
The problem with Trump, like the problem with Hitler, they are losers who mucked up everything in their life. They were (are in Trump's case) unable to win without blaming their loss on someone else. With a megaphone that tells others what they don't have is because x (jew, immigrant, black) is making them lose---all we got to do---you know the rest. Of course the republicans are losing because Ronald Reagan took everything away from them...
The making of a fascist nation...is making its citizens into losers and people who lose too much march in step to win...how can they win. Kill those that made them losers. How did they become losers by following those who turned them who made them losers instead of joining with their brethren (jew, immigrant, black) to make themselves into winners against those who made them into losers. Life is a team sport and the game can't be won when you turn against your teammates.
Cognitive decline and mental illness are two different things. Gaffes and malaprops are yet something else. Trump's cognition has clearly deteriorated over the past decades, which you can clearly see if you look at interviews of him from the '80s. He has been called a malignant sociopath, (very different from depression or schizophrenia) and I see no reason that couldn't be accurate. It's a popular diagnosis for people behind bars, and hopefully there will be one more of them there soon.
Everyone experiences cognitive decline. It starts immediately after your brain stops developing. People are, but that doesn’t mean theyre incompetent to work. The idea that there’s some moment of perfect brain was and ppl are unfit if they make a mistake on live tv is really bad for disabled ppl for pretty obvious reasons.
Trump is unfit morally to be president. That’s what we should focus on, not on amateur diagnosis that harm marginalized ppl more than they harm trump.
Agree, just trying to be semantically correct. There are different degrees of cognitive decline, and Trump is pretty far along, but that does not make him mentally ill or implicate anyone else with respect to their unique cognitive makeup.
Being immoral is pretty much the main symptom of being a sociopath, so, yeah, call him immoral!
There’s a difference between lying which we’ve seen him do, according to WAPO, 35,000+ times and confusing Nicki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. And the many other things he’s confused. And his garbled word salads and made up words. That’s confusion and stumbling, not lying, and that seems likely to be the beginnings of dementia or, perhaps as it’s been alleged, advanced syphilis - although I doubt that.
again, diagnosing people on the fly without expertise or an actual medical exam harms disabled people, and we just shouldn't do that.
as they get older, people can lose words or mess up speeches without it meaning that they're cognitively incapable. the problem with trump is he's a fascist liar. why speculate on other reasons he might or might not be unfit, especially when doing so establishes norms that harm marginalized people?
::Many liberal and left commenters seem to hope that stigmatizing Trump as cognitively unfit will cause his campaign to disintegrate and finally bring him down::
Because Trump's used it against Joe Biden so much that's turning his guns around so they're pointing at HIM is poetic justice...?
it's not really justice though when you're essentially targeting disabled people. and again, Haley is using the argument against trump because she wants to use it against biden too.
I'm not really with you on this, Noah—because it's Donald Trump who's going to go postal, and He Has It Coming:
• Calling him a "Fascist" hasn't worked—the MAGAts just go, "Cool!"
• Calling him a "Liar" hasn't worked, either—the MAGAts just go "No, YOU'RE the liar!"
• Calling him a "Sexual Predator" hasn't worked at All—the MAGAts just go "That's because he's a REAL Man!" 🤮
Joe Biden's gotten snipes about his mental acuity since he was a Senator (including a number from Barack Obama, who made "Malaprop Joe" into his Administration's punchline!), and he's taken them in stride. Like the Emperor Claudius, Biden has managed far better on being called a "half-wit" than most people have with all their wits—so maybe it's a question of quality rather than quantity?
Donald Trump won't handle it because he can't handle anything but being worshipped, and the more he melts down the more voters peel away from him as the menace he clearly is. It's not a clean tactic, but I'll take dirty tactics if they ensure we don't get TRUMP II: THE TRUMPENING! After the election is over, I'll take my lumps for it, as I think will most people who want to get rid of Trump By Any Means Necessary.
As for Haley? There's no way she'll be the Republican Party nominee—he's a Woman and a Southern Asian in a Major Party of American White Male Christian Nationalists. I'm stunned she's done THIS well so far, honestly.
You don't have to agree with me—in fact, it's better if you don't. SOMEBODY has to steer the country back on track after we've rid ourselves of this Troublesome Mango Messiah....
think about it this way. Is it okay to call Clarence Thomas racist slurs?
No, of course it isn't, because normalizing racist slurs *hurts all Black people.* You can't just use that stigma on your enemies, because it has broader effects and shows a contempt for all Black people, not just for Clarence Thomas.
Would it be okay to call Trump the r-word? again, no, because using that word and normalizing it suggests all disabled people are disgusting and unfit, which is unacceptable. Same thing when you leverage ableist stigma without using the r-word. The main person harmed isn't the rich and powerful trump. It's all the less powerful disabled people who suffer from a norm where people feel comfortable diagnosing them and insulting them.
Hmph—well, that's a fair cop.
Still, nothing else seems to work against Trump, and turn the country against him like deserves.
Can't even have him shot for treason because that'll make a martyr out of him.
What a clusterfuck this all is.....
lots of things work against trump; he's extremely unpopular, and has never won a popular vote.
It's just that partisanship is a very strong force. it feels like he should collapse entirely, but that's just not going to happen as long as Rs back him. but he's not a strong candidate, in large part because of...well, all the things you'd expect.
I think you're too optimistic about how unpopular Trump is, Noah—or perhaps, too optimistic about how Biden is perceived against him. The MSM is so eager for their horserace that if Biden could cure cancer just by touching people, the NY TIMES and WaPo headlines would read "BIDEN DESTROYS HEALTHCARE!, and the editorials would all be demanding to know what he has against chemo treatments and surgery! Between them and the Republicans, there are a LOT of people who aren't paying attention to what a lunatic Trump has become....