Watching the debate? Why?

[Tiger337]

2 hours ago, Motor City Sonics said:

 

He doesn't believe it though.  He just says what is to his advantage at the time.  Trump does not distinguish between truth and reality.  He's a psychopath.  If we are talking about Vance, I am not sure whether he is quite at that level.  He is probably lying.  

[ewsieg]

6 hours ago, Hongbit said:

If they were running a real campaign they would pull him off the road for a week and send him to training. Every day he says something off script that makes things worse.    

I’ve got to keep reminding myself this isn’t a real campaign and only a grift to suck as much money as possible from the Maga idiots and Sheldon Adelson’s trust fund.    

So, my hope this whole time was that Trump loses badly, GOP is gutted, and eventually a better version of the traditional GOP eventually comes out of this.   While JD has been an absolute joke, I feel like Trump thinks he's doing a good job and even if they lose, I fear JD is able to take Trumps spot.  I'd like to hope JD just doesn't have that 'it' factor to be able to do it, but man it's scary.

13 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

He doesn't believe it though.  He just says what is to his advantage at the time.  Trump does not distinguish between truth and reality.  He's a psychopath.  If we are talking about Vance, I am not sure whether he is quite at that level.  He is probably lying.  

So, he definitely has no problem lying, but there was something telling in the debate when he basically said the entire premise that the election was stolen was that his pollsters got it wrong and he so badly wants to believe they couldn't make a mistake.  It was actually kind of sad if not for the bull**** he put the country through because of it.

[smr-nj]

Lawrence Mc Donnell just referred to the debate as the human being versus the mug shot. 😂

[gehringer_2]

47 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

He is probably lying.  

Neither he nor Trump place any value in truth but for somewhat different reasons. Trump has psychological pathologies. He only processes reality through the filter of his narcissism. For Vance, whatever ethics he may have actually held in his Hillbilly Elegy days or before have been subsumed under the needs of his ambition. So for him it's more like game play, it's cynical, nihilistic. He's clever enough to formulate the inventions that serve his purposes into the form of arguments and he thinks that makes him persuasive. A sophist, if you take the classic definition of one who argues professionally to make the worse appear the better cause. In the CNN clip where he is defending spreading the Springfield stories you could see it was all just a game for him. I would have thought any other human with functional antenna should be able to see that and dismiss him out of hand. But for enough people, if they are being told what they want to hear, they turn off their brains.

Edited September 12 by gehringer_2

[Mr.TaterSalad]

Musk is really a repugnant human being. Elmo suggesting he wants to impregnate Taylor Swift and be her daddy is really gross and disgusting. This is a new low even for Elmo.

[RatkoVarda]

his daughter described it as "heinous incel nonsense"

[chasfh]

11 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

He doesn't believe it though.  He just says what is to his advantage at the time.  Trump does not distinguish between truth and reality.  He's a psychopath.  If we are talking about Vance, I am not sure whether he is quite at that level.  He is probably lying.  

Not to get all psychobabble on you, but mental health experts have established that compulsive, pathological liars do tend to believe the stories that they tell, which is what makes them so effective at lying, at least when it comes to bamboozling their disciples. They don't hold two opposite thoughts in their head—as in, (1) I'm saying something I know is wrong, and (2) I know the truth in my head is different from what I'm saying—because it creates all kinds of mental stress from which they would eventually break down before long as a result. On the other hand, they have no trouble replacing an old inconvenient truth with a new convenient truth, and then discarding the old one while embracing the new one completely. The key is having only one story, one "truth", in their head a a time. Calling it a form of task-switching, I suppose. But I have no doubt that Trump believes whatever truth he has in his head at any given time, and that he couldn't reason or logic his way out of it even if he wanted to, which he doesn't, because he's mentally ill rather than evil.

[Tiger337]

1 minute ago, chasfh said:

Not to get all psychobabble on you, but mental health experts have established that compulsive, pathological liars do tend to believe the stories that they tell, which is what makes them so effective at lying, at least when it comes to bamboozling their disciples. They don't hold two opposite thoughts in their head—as in, (1) I'm saying something I know is wrong, and (2) I know the truth in my head is different from what I'm saying—because it creates all kinds of mental stress from which they would eventually break down before long as a result. On the other hand, they have no trouble replacing an old inconvenient truth with a new convenient truth, and then discarding the old one while embracing the new one completely. The key is having only one story, one "truth", in their head a a time. Calling it a form of task-switching, I suppose. But I have no doubt that Trump believes whatever truth he has in his head at any given time, and that he couldn't reason or logic his way out of it even if he wanted to, which he doesn't, because he's mentally ill rather than evil.

I don't believe he is simply a pathological liar though.  I do not think he has morals or ethics.  I believe his entire life centers around self promotion and preservation and that he will say whatever achieves those ends at the moment regardless of whether or not it is true or not.  

[Motown Bombers]

 

[chasfh]

8 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I don't believe he is simply a pathological liar though.  I do not think he has morals or ethics.  I believe his entire life centers around self promotion and preservation and that he will say whatever achieves those ends at the moment regardless of whether or not it is true or not.  

I agree that Trump is a pathological liar, that he is fundamentally amoral and unethical, that his entire life revolves around himself to the exclusion of everyone else, and that he will say anything, true or untrue, to further his ends. I also believe it's likely that he truly believes whatever lie he is telling at any given moment, as opposed to holding both true thoughts and the lies based on them in his head at the same time. I think it's likely that he holds a single thought, true or not, in his head, and that this thought can be discarded and replaced with a different, opposing thought when it's convenient at the time. And further to this, I don't believe he deserves any kind of pass at any level for his behavior simply because he might actually believe the nonsense he spews.

[Tigermojo]

He's a narcissist. His self esteem is so extremely low that he can't admit people leave his rallies out of boredom. He can't admit to ever being wrong about anything or his fears about himself would be true. He will lie, make excuses, blame others, rant and rave in rage, anything but admit he's wrong. Much scarier than a pathological liar. The way his brain works, he's closer to a serial killer.

[chasfh]

4 minutes ago, Tigermojo said:

He's a narcissist. His self esteem is so extremely low that he can't admit people leave his rallies out of boredom. He can't admit to ever being wrong about anything or his fears about himself would be true. He will lie, make excuses, blame others, rant and rave in rage, anything but admit he's wrong. Much scarier than a pathological liar. The way his brain works, he's closer to a serial killer.

Yes, in addition to being a pathological lair, he is also a narcissist, as well as a sociopath. It all works to come together in one package that's horrifying almost beyond belief.

 

Edited September 12 by chasfh

[Motown Bombers]

[CMRivdogs]

Carl Rove checks in...

 

[gehringer_2]

4 hours ago, chasfh said:

because he's mentally ill rather than evil.

why not both? I've known gentle, sweet, mentally ill people. 

[Motown Bombers]

 

[chasfh]

15 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

why not both? I've known gentle, sweet, mentally ill people. 

Well, I don’t really buy into the concept of “good” and “evil”. Those are religious concepts that suggests some otherworldly spirit is involved. I think people’s behavior have more prosaic explanations than that. Trump is a ****ed-up person not because God or Satan caused that in him, but because of his upbringing and his experiences as they relate to whatever physiological issues he has in his brain. Whatever it is, he is constitutionally unable to change or otherwise control it, so he has to be dealt with as a bad actor based on his track record.

[Motown Bombers]

 

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

Well, I don’t really buy into the concept of “good” and “evil”. Those are religious concepts that suggests some otherworldly spirit is involved. I think people’s behavior have more prosaic explanations than that. Trump is a ****ed-up person not because God or Satan caused that in him, but because of his upbringing and his experiences as they relate to whatever physiological issues he has in his brain. Whatever it is, he is constitutionally unable to change or otherwise control it, so he has to be dealt with as a bad actor based on his track record.

Good and evil can be defined from a non-religious standpoint, altruism and sadism exist in the world even if God doesn't and by common secular definition most people would call the 1st good and the latter evil. Even if you want to argue that its all operant conditioning, at the end of the day the result is still individuals that exhibit behaviors that will be judged as good and bad by the general culture. I grant "evil" does  carry more religious semantic baggage than "bad", but practically speaking I don't know how much difference that word choice makes to how people evaluate the actions of others. 

Stepping back, It's attractive but in the end difficult to assign environmental blame for every screwed up person. Trump's older sister was a respected Federal Judge. It's true even siblings in the same home do not have the same experiences, but if the same parent has to be defined as a good parent to one child and a bad one to another in so many cases you're almost left with the outcome being randomly determined, which practically speaking is indistinguishable from saying the personality outcome was latent in the individual maybe subject to some combination of particular environmental triggers - which sounds close to how you frame it above. And absolutely everything we know about genetics and the brain argues there must some spectrum of genetic traits that affect personality but as a culture we still hold each person responsible for themselves in all cases short of a diagnosis of clinical incapacity. We don't have much choice because law as the organizing principle of society collapses if we ever accept a general proposition that people cannot overcome the environment they developed in, even if we sort of nod to the idea informally.

Edited September 12 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

48 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Good and evil can be defined from a non-religious standpoint, altruism and sadism exist in the world even if God doesn't and by common secular definition most people would call the 1st good and the latter evil. Even if you want to argue that its all operant conditioning, at the end of the day the result is still individuals that exhibit behaviors that will be judged as good and bad by the general culture. I grant "evil" does  carry more religious semantic baggage than "bad", but practically speaking I don't know how much difference that word choice makes to how people evaluate the actions of others. 

I understand what people do and how they define things. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just saying, I don't believe the idea of people being inherently "good" or inherently "evil" really holds water.

I agree with you there are people we refer to as "evil", and they can probably be fairly characterized as acting without consideration or regret. That's undeniable, and it's perfectly reasonable to refer to their behavior, their acts, as being evil.

My question is: are these people actually "evil"? I mean, constitutionally, at their core. If so, then where does this evil actually come from? Why are these people evil, and what makes them like that? What is the nature of evil? I think it makes a great deal of difference which words we use to describe this and how we use them.

A lot of people believe that "good" and "evil" come from supernatural beings that control our behavior. God makes us do good; Satan makes us do evil. Or maybe some people don't label it as "God" and "Satan", but at the same time, they still believe there's something inherent in a person's spirit, rather than their mind, that leads them to behave in a persistently good or evil fashion. But if that's the case, wouldn't such "evil" have to come from somewhere? Something must be leading people to this behavior, mustn't it? Because we can all see that the behavior is undeniably there. There must be something behind it—something in them is failing. My question is, what is the nature of the failure? Is it a spiritual failure, or a physical failure?

You may not think it matters even a little. Most people don't. They just label people as "good" or "evil", mainly because it's simple and direct and then they don't have to think too deeply about it anymore. But I think it does matter a great deal, because this question affects the policies our society undertakes to deal with people who behave in dangerous and/or violent antisocial ways. And which policies get implemented depends a great deal on what policymakers believe about people, and that belief is almost certainly rooted in their childhood and what they were taught at home and in school.

Here's why I think it's a policy consideration:

If we believe in "evil"—if we believe that there is some supernatural being who is the source of all evil, a being that influences evil, and whose mission is to lead people to act in an evil manner—well, then, there's nothing we can do to stop it, is there? Our power as mere human beings pales against the power of this supernatural being, so all we can do to react to it is wait for the evil to happen, lock up the people influenced or otherwise overtaken by the evil, and trust that those people will eventually receive their true cosmic punishment after they die. That is, in fact, the exact policy that civilizations have been following for centuries, and that many—too many, I think—still employ today.

On the other hand, if we believe that people act in a certain way for a reason—whether due to a systemic failure that creates an incentive to behave badly, or a learning at the knee of an authority figure where they learned an entire framework of bad behavior, or a physical problem such as brain damage or mental illness that leads people to do really bad things for no apparent reason—then we can embrace the idea that we can do something to stop this behavior, to change the systems, to undo damaged learning, to provide proper health services, and to undertake efforts to do so.

The key difference is that in the former case, the only way to combat the "evil" is to petition really hard to the Supernatural Being of Good to defeat the Supernatural Being of Bad and touch the hearts of people to become "good". In the latter case, the way to combat it would be to apply scientific rigor and analysis to understand the systemic problems that lead to warped incentives, or to understand the physical problems that lead to inexplicable bad behavior, and then test and improve the methods to combat the factors leading to the behavior.

In the former case, we push off the responsibility of change to beings we trust but cannot interact with, and simply wait and hope for results. In the latter case, we take on the responsibility for change unto ourselves and undertake the hard work to make results happen.

That's the policy consideration at hand. And this is why I see it as a religious issue, or, if you prefer, an existential question, although that doesn't preclude it from being a practical consideration as well.

So what is the problem? Is it that people who do bad things are simply evil? Or is it that people who do bad things are badly incentivized or poorly taught or mentally damaged?

[Tiger337]

8 hours ago, chasfh said:

I agree that Trump is a pathological liar, that he is fundamentally amoral and unethical, that his entire life revolves around himself to the exclusion of everyone else, and that he will say anything, true or untrue, to further his ends. I also believe it's likely that he truly believes whatever lie he is telling at any given moment, as opposed to holding both true thoughts and the lies based on them in his head at the same time. I think it's likely that he holds a single thought, true or not, in his head, and that this thought can be discarded and replaced with a different, opposing thought when it's convenient at the time. And further to this, I don't believe he deserves any kind of pass at any level for his behavior simply because he might actually believe the nonsense he spews.

He may believe that the lie is true, but since he does not value the truth, how do you distinguish between lying and not lying?  

[Tiger337]

I don't view Trump as evil.  I view him as having severe mental health problems, the results of which is often cruelty.  I do not believe he tries to hurt people indiscriminately.  Everything he does or says is about HIM and only HIM. He doesn't hurt people because he hates them.  He hurts people because he needs to make himself feel better or get revenge on people who he perceives have done him wrong.  He is really a sick person.    

[chasfh]

11 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

He may believe that the lie is true, but since he does not value the truth, how do you distinguish between lying and not lying?  

I'm not sure I understand the nature of the question.

[Tiger337]

6 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I'm not sure I understand the nature of the question.

If someone does not value the true, does he ever knowingly lie?

[chasfh]

1 minute ago, Tiger337 said:

If someone does not value the true, does he ever knowingly lie?

"It's not a lie if you believe it."

By that definition, I think Trump himself believes he does not lie, because I think he believes the untruths he spouts. But it doesn't matter either way, because whether he is technically lying or technically making an honest misstatement, what he says is just as untrue either way.