Donald Trump Archives - Page 54 of 55

Bernie v. the Donald; To Fall in Love with Anyone

What’s it like to use a scientific formula to fall in love?

Chris asked:

Something I find interesting about both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump – the two most popular candidates that Nate Silver says don’t have a chance in hell – is that their supporters repeatedly cite their authenticity.

Maybe that says something interesting about the American psychology in 2015. What do you think?

Well, I suppose so. And if people actually voted, maybe either one COULD be elected. But Donald’s “authenticity” is ersatz. To that point: Far from destroying our democracy, he’s exposing all its phoniness and corruption in ways as serious as he is not. And changing it in the process. Frank Rich compares him with a couple of fictional characters.

I would suggest another one. In the movie Being There (1979), Peter Sellers, in his last film before his death, played a gardener of limited intellectual ability, but who eventually awes the Shirley MacLaine character and others with his supposedly deft political insight. (That was one of the first three movies I ever bought on VHS tape.)

Erick Erickson, the conservative pundit from redstate.com – hey, I’m using donotlink – may well also be correct:

I think Donald Trump’s success is a reflection of the frustration people have in being told to act like adults. I really do. I think we’ve become such a repressed society in terms of what you can say to people these days (largely due to the damn lawyers like me). You can’t say anything about anyone – either at your workplace or anywhere in public, without being called into the HR office or getting sued or having the government come knocking at your door…

I think we’ve become a nation full of people who are painfully repressed and that there’s a significant part of the population that is sick to death of it. I think that’s why people behave the way they do online. The things people will say through their phones and through email are things you never hear people say real life, and I think that is reflective of the fact people are dying for an outlet to just achieve catharsis sometimes and just let it all out – and Donald Trump is just a personification of that.

I don’t think the Trump support is reflective of any issue at all. I don’t think it’s even reflective of disgust with the GOP. I think it’s reflective of the disgust we have with the new unwritten rules of society…

The reality is that people are excited to see, hey, here’s a guy who goes on TV, and if he wants to pop off at the mouth, he pops off at the mouth, and if this guy can rise to being President of the United States then maybe I don’t have to always shut my mouth and I can sometimes say what I feel and maybe I can call my annoying coworker ugly and not have to risk being sued, too.

Those guys who used to make jokes about women’s periods, or someone’s looks, or whatever, feel oppressed. I believe that they think so. And truth is, being a grown-up is a drag. Popping off and saying whatever crosses one’s mind, with no consequences – hey, wouldn’t that be great?

(This, BTW, is why I don’t tweet anything except news stories and blog posts because I prefer to think before I write, or speak. But maybe that’s just me.)

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has been relatively the same guy his whole political life. He is authentically authentic if one can (or need to) say that. He doesn’t worry that people will discover he’s (HORRORS!) a self-described democratic socialist, which he has not hidden.

He’s appealing to that group of folks that believe the Occupy Wall Street folks were pretty much right, that the 1% are getting richer at working people’s expense.

What Bernie and the Donald DO have in common is that they seem to bug the political parties’ establishments, terrified that if he is nominated, a chance to win the 2016 will have been thrown away. Scott Walker, in his departure from the GOP race, specifically targeted Trump. The Democratic liberal establishment frets that it won’t be Hillary.

Not that anyone asked me, but I can’t help but think Marco Rubio will be on the ticket in 2016, probably as someone’s vice-presidential running mate.
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Chris also noted:

This really interesting TED talk about questions that made me think of Ask Roger Anything. Interested in your thoughts.

The link is to that video, but here’s the background:

What’s it like to use a scientific formula to fall in love, share the tale in the New York Times and then find yourself overwhelmed by a world fascinated with your love life? Hear the story from Mandy Len Catron, whose essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” set hearts and minds aflutter.

Originally from Appalachian Virginia, Mandy Len Catron now lives in Vancouver, B.C., where she teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her New York Times article, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” received more than eight million views and was syndicated all over the world. She’s now working on a book about the dangers of love stories. For more information, visit The Love Story Project

My thoughts:
1) I’ve seen a number of TED talks, and this isn’t my favorite. The presentation style was a bit flat.

2) Given the fact that this story went viral, I was oddly unaware of it.

3) That said, she was absolutely right not to put her boyfriend out there in the spotlight. They would become that couple on the cover of US Weekly, where every aspect of their relationship would be under scrutiny. That might well have crushed it.

4) To the primary question: sure, having a conversation can create intimacy (and by intimacy, I don’t necessarily mean sex). Intimacy could create that feeling of “in love.” But that phase almost never survives. Once the spark is lit, a couple must keep stoking the fire.

Political correctness, and Donald Trump

“When people say things that are non-normative, unexpected, or non-self-serving, those things are seen as more likely to be true.”

It has occurred to me that I don’t know what the term “politically correct” really means. Of course, I’m aware of the dictionary definition: “Conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” That’s pretty vague.

Thus I was excited by the prospect of reading a three-part series in the Scientific American Blog Network called Decoding Trump-Mania: The Psychological Allure of Hating Political Correctness, by Melanie Tannenbaum.

In Part 1, posted August 14, 2015, she posits: “The research showing that people high in ambiguity intolerance feel so profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of uncertainty, they will often prefer a slightly negative yet certain outcome to a potentially-more-positive, uncertain one. In other words, people may find Donald Trump to be disagreeable, abrasive, or downright unlikeable. But because of his reputation for ‘telling it like it is’ and ‘being honest to a fault,’ they also feel certain that they can believe Trump when he says he’s telling the truth.”

In Part 2, posted August 15, 2015, she asks, “Given obvious flip-flops like Trump’s shifting stance on abortion” and taxing the rich, why does he still resonate? “When people say things that are non-normative, unexpected, or non-self-serving, those things are seen as more likely to be true, and outside observers are more likely to think they have a good chance of really knowing the authentic, deep-down, true personality of the person saying them. It doesn’t matter what those statements objectively are.”

In other words, if he insults Hispanics, blacks, John McCain and veterans, and Carly Fiorina and other women, and suggests he’d marry his daughter if she weren’t, well, his daughter, NO ONE would say these outrageous things if he didn’t believe them to be true.

Part 3 was supposed to come out the following day, but didn’t appear until September 8. Tannenbaum gets to the heart of my question: “When something [such as being PC] is this ambiguous, it leaves a lot of room for different subjective interpretations — what social psychologists refer to as construals. Construals, broadly, are the different ways that people perceive and understand the world around them — and these interpretations are subject to bias from anything ranging from the stimulus’s local context and environment to personal ideological biases and political affiliations.”

For instance, what is the character to the right? Seen with other letters, it’s the letter B. In a roster of numbers, it’s the number 13.

Tannenbaum takes on the conservative and liberal biases of the term, and if you read nothing else, peruse those sections. She concludes:

In the end, the fervor over political correctness seems to stem from the fact that we’re all using this phrase completely differently. But hopefully, with a little more understanding of where the “other side” is coming from — and with a little more insight into the flaws in our own logic — we can start to figure out a way to move forwards.

Which I can only hope involves removing the phrase “politically correct” from our vocabularies forever. I’m just about sick to death of it, and now we have all the proof we need that it’s too vague and subject-to-interpretation to be helpful anyway. Who’s with me?

I’m not sure she’s “proved” it, but I DO agree with her conclusion that it’s a meaningless term.
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Back in June, Bill Maher predicted Donald Trump’s success.

The Gospel according to Bernie, and Colbert

We commit to the mental gymnastics necessary that allows us to abandon the least of these, to abandon the poor, to abandon the immigrants, to abandon those who are in prison.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is running for the Democratic nomination for President, recently spoke at Liberty University, “the very conservative, very Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia,” once the headquarters for the very outspoken Rev. Jerry Falwell.

An evangelical responds to his speech, a graduate of Liberty University, who worked on the presidential campaign for George W. Bush in 2004. He compares Bernie to John the Baptist.

He was convicting the Christian leaders and the religious leaders in that university, and calling us out for being complicit in the abandonment of those who suffer, the least of these, and siding with the powerful and rich, the masters of this world. And he was convicting us and calling us out, and we scorned him, and we stared him down; and, with sour faces, we thought, “Who is this wacko, and why do all these people seem to follow him, seem to like him – this wild-haired Jew, crying out from the wilderness of the political left, in his hoarse voice?”…

And lightning hit my heart at that moment. And I realized that we are evangelical Christians. We believe the Bible. We believe in Jesus. We absolutely shun those who would attempt to find nuance and twisted and tortured interpretations of scripture that they would use to master all other broader interpretations, to find some kind of big message that they want to flout. We absolutely scorn such things, and yet somehow we commit to the mental gymnastics necessary that allows us to abandon the least of these, to abandon the poor, to abandon the immigrants, to abandon those who are in prison.

The very idea of evangelical Christians realizing that income inequality, for instance, is not a liberal position or a conservative position, but a fundamental Christian one, pleases me greatly. Perhaps Bernie Sanders IS the Christian candidate.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade had degrading words for Pope Francis while talking with Chris Wallace. “Yeah, I’m Catholic and he could stay home. Some of his comments just have no place. He’s in the wrong country…” The part that is on the audio, but not quoted in print is this sentence: “Capitalism is our savior.” Or should it be “Capitalism is our Savior”?

While never a great fan of Stephen Colbert – the “conservative pundit” shtick bored me sooner than it did my friend Alan David Doane – I was interested in the cultural folderol around the late-night programs in general, and specifically, him taking over the CBS Late Night Show for David Letterman. I did think the Joe Biden interview from the third show was more satisfying than the uncut version online.

The recent item I found most interesting about Colbert, though is Stephen Colbert – Witness. “In this rare, personal interview with Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, Stephen Colbert tells all” about his Catholic faith. It’s cued to his observations about Communion, at about 35 minutes. Earlier, c. 22 minutes in, he explains why he believes Jesus must have laughed; Wile E. Coyote is namechecked. I found the whole piece surprisingly moving, as it shows the depth of Colbert’s theological knowledge.
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Donald Trump Makes Up Bogus Bible Quote To Impress Gullible Christians.

The unfortunate case of Kim Davis

The attacks on Kim Davis because of her hair or clothing are just sexist, classist, and mean-spirited .

Fame is a fascinating thing to me. In August 2015, three Americans received France’s top honor for stopping an armed attacker on a train. In September 2015, Alek Skarlatos, one of those three men, is slated to be a contestant on ABC-TV’s Dancing with the Stars.

In June 2015, Kimberly Jean Bailey Davis was an obscure elected county clerk for little Rowan County, Kentucky, population of less than 24,000. Now she’s a lightning rod in the culture wars. She “defied a U.S. Federal Court order requiring that she issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States.”

Kim Davis has been criticized for not doing her job.

From Snopes:

Four couples [have] sued Rowan County and its clerk, Kim Davis, for refusing to issue marriage licenses because of Davis’ religious objections to the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

Davis is obligated by law to issue a marriage license to all qualified applicants, which now includes same-sex couples, the plaintiffs said. By “promoting a particular religious belief” at the Rowan County courthouse, Davis has “acted maliciously, with callous disregard for, or with reckless indifference to, the clearly established rights” of the plaintiffs, they said.

The argument that an elected official could not be allowed to ban the registration of a gun because weapons are against his or her religion, or keep women from driving on the same grounds, is a compelling point. This great West Wing clip frames the argument well. That she’s been married four times – she remarried husband #2 – and therefore is a hypocrite, is true – as the evil Westboro Baptist church has pointed out – though it is rather beside the point, as a matter of law.

But the attacks on Kim Davis because of her hair or clothing or weight or looking marginally like Dick Cheney are just sexist, classist, and mean-spirited, and lowers the tenor of the conversation. We need to be able to call out her bigotry without slut-shaming or hillbilly-shaming.

She has been held up as some sort of martyr for “oppressed” Christians, more so since she was temporarily sent to jail. Judge David Bunning, son of baseball Hall of Fame pitcher and former US Senator Jim Bunning, explained why he rejected her argument. “The [marriage license] form does not require the county clerk to condone or endorse same-sex marriage on religious or moral grounds. It simply asks the county clerk to certify that the information provided is accurate and that the couple is qualified to marry under Kentucky law. Davis’ religious convictions have no bearing on this purely legal inquiry.”

(Yeesh, Kim Davis supporters gather outside the judge’s home to hold him ‘in contempt of God’s court’. Whatever THAT means.)

Moreover, “While religious institutions are guaranteed protections against any government regulation or involvement in their religious life, the government is also protected from religious institutions attempt to garner political power over the nation. What this means is that anyone who functions as an agent of the state must remain religiously neutral, providing equal service, treatment, and rights to all people of all religious, ethical, social, and cultural backgrounds.”

Kim Davis and others have compared her stance to that of black civil rights icon Rosa Parks. I would argue she is the bus driver who refused to restart the bus until Rosa gave up her seat to a white man. Many gay rights advocates believe Davis has done the gay rights movement a huge favor by laying “bare the prejudiced, discriminatory beliefs that fuel the ‘religious liberty’ fire.”

Theoretically, there should be a compromise. Under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act, “both public and private employers have a duty to exempt religious employees from generally applicable work rules, so long as this won’t create an ‘undue hardship’.”

This is a very important principle, which would allow a Muslim woman to wear a hijab or a Sikh man to wear a dastaar, if it didn’t interfere with the task. As an elected official, it wouldn’t apply to Kim Davis, though Kentucky’s religious freedom law might come into play.

If she is objecting to “issuing licenses with her name on them, because she believes (rightly or wrongly) that having her name on them is an endorsement of same-sex marriage,” there may be a mechanism “modifying the prescribed Kentucky marriage license form to remove the multiple references to Davis’ name,” – assuming it hasn’t already been done – “and thus to remove the personal nature of the authorization that Davis must provide on the current form.”

Just yesterday, her lawyer repeated the assertion that those licenses issued by her deputy clerks were invalid, and “those responsible for issuing the licenses without authorization could face ‘criminal penalties.'” After giving her every scintilla of the benefit of the doubt, this position proves to me, without question, that the issue is not really about the religious freedom of Kim Davis, but rather the religious tyranny of her and her followers.

The larger point is that the system, as it has, must continue to allow couples in Rowan County, KY the opportunity to marry, which the Supreme Court declared is a fundamental right as early as 1888.

Related: this pictured quote attributed to Donald Trump about Kim Davis is untrue. HE DIDN’T SAY IT, and in fact, was largely unaware of the issue until very recently. The Donald makes many inflammatory statements but does not need to be defamed by Facebook pranks.

The Lydster, Part 137: The GOP debates

Larry Wilmore, on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, asked if he had to explain to Trump Prejudice 101.

"I really don't know if Obama was born in the US" — “I really don’t know if Obama was born in the US”

The morning after the list of candidates who would appear on the Republic Presidential primetime debate on August 6, the Daughter wanted to stop the news broadcast so she could get the names.

I told her she had to get ready for camp, and that I would print out the roster of 10 who made the main stage (Trump, Bush, Walker, Huckabee, Carson, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Christie, Kasich) and the seven who were relegated to an earlier event (Perry, Santorum, Jindal, Fiorina, Graham, Pataki, Gilmore).

Of course, she didn’t actually WATCH the debates – heck, neither did I – because sanity. Still, of the 17 candidates running, she can name more than half of them, which is more than most people. She’s particularly irritated by three:

3) Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana for his debacle of an announcement for President. (No, this is NOT faked.) “He can’t even win his own household!”

2) Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, who is a bully, and who she believes is more culpable for Bridgegate than he’s acknowledged.

1) Donald Trump, real estate guy, NOT because he said that President Obama was the worst President in history, but because Trump suggested that, as a result, there wouldn’t be another black president for generations.

Larry Wilmore, on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, asked if he had to explain to Trump Prejudice 101. Now, The Daughter doesn’t actually watch The Nightly Show, which is on at 11:30 p.m., but she saw the clip on CBS News This Morning.

Still, she has the makings of a political junkie.