Tag: homophobia

The fallacy of civility, or why it’s OK to be rude to racists and Nazis

There has been much discussion lately about whether or not the left should try to maintain some level of civility in these difficult times.  I can’t speak for everyone, but in my own mind, I don’t think there is any point to trying to be civil to a bunch of people who themselves stopped being civil long ago.  The editorial board of the Washington Post does not agree, and they are apparently clutching their pearls so tightly that they have cut off circulation to their brain.

“We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?”

I would laugh, except this level of stupidity in one of the supposed flagship newspapers of our era actually makes me want to sob uncontrollably.  Um… news flash, geniuses: those people have not been left in peace for, let’s see, several decades.  In fact, they have been bombed and shot and stabbed and otherwise terrorized in every meaning of that word.  John Salvi killed two people and wounded five right here in the Boston area back in 1994.

It’s like with Trump supporters.  When have they ever been civil, honestly?  They relish being offensive.  It’s one of the things they LOVE about Trump.

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In case you can’t read it, that woman’s shirt says “Fuck your feelings”.  Because civility.

There are times when you can have a reasoned discussion with people who disagree with you.  But we are talking about white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers here.  Oh, sure, maybe there are some Trump supporters who say they aren’t racist.  Maybe, but racism is definitely present in spades among Trumpers, and they are more than willing to put up with a lot of open racism in their ranks, not to mention all the racist garbage spewing from Trump himself and the White House.  And that makes them complicit, or indifferent to evil at best.

Clearly, not all journalists agree with the WaPo editors.  Charlie Pierce had some choice things to say, as did Michelle Goldberg.  She gets it.

But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.

Yes, exactly.  This is NOT a case of “both sides do it.” The right’s criticism that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats are secretly running a pedophile sex ring out of a pizza place IS NOT the same as the belief that Democrats have about President Trump using his office to enrich his family and himself, or that the Russians helped Trump get elected.  So trying to pretend that “both sides do it” is a big reason why we are in this awful place to begin with.  As screwed up as they are, the Democrats don’t hold a candle to the vicious insanity of the Republican party these days.  It’s like trying to point out that both sides are bad because one was caught jaywalking and shoplifting and the other has a basement full of human skins.  Um, no, one is WAY worse than the other, and anyone with more than a handful of brain cells to rub together should be able to see that.  I saw the writing on the wall years ago.  It’s why I left the GOP more than 20 years ago and haven’t looked back.  It’s only gotten worse since then.

So no, I am not going to be civil to these people, not as long as they continue to disregard the essential humanity of immigrants, and gays, and Muslims, and Jews, and everyone else they hate.  I will treat them with the contempt they richly deserve.  It’s far better than the treatment we can expect from them, at any rate.  A lot of them want a second Civil War, or at least a chance to use those guns they have been hoarding.  All we want is equality and justice.

~Geoff

Malignant Narcissism and Subjective Reality: a primer

For several years now I’ve seen people wringing their hands about Donald Trump over one specific thing that I intrinsically understand about him but that most people seem unable to.  It was evident in his campaign and has only become more evident since his sham of an election: Trump lives in his own extremely subjective reality.  If you’re on Twitter and you read @docrocktex26 then you know what I’m talking about.

Donald Trump is a raging, decompensating, malignant narcissist.  It was obvious during his campaign and it has become so obvious now that it would be painful to watch if he wasn’t also such a horror of a human being and in a position to destroy so many lives as his own falls apart around him.

I’ll go ahead a put the disclaimer here now: I’m not a doctor, psychologist, social worker, or other medical or mental health professional.  I am someone who’s had 25 years of experience dealing in my own life with a malignant narcissist.  I can spot them quickly now and I have seen what they’re like, especially when they have a secondary diagnosis which aggravates the first.  In Trump’s case that appears to be Alzheimer’s or a form of dementia.

Here’s why all of this is important.  The media, the general public, and lots of folks in the government keep asking the same questions over and over again.  “Why does he lie so obviously?  Doesn’t he know we can fact check him?  Why does he say outlandish and patently, provably wrong things?  Who does that?  When will it stop?”  Pro Tip: It won’t.

The answer is not that Donald Trump has some special disregard for the truth or the rules.  The answer is not that he’s extra stupid (he’s just garden variety stupid, folks).  The answer is that someone who is that serious a narcissist constructs a world view in which the only thing that matters is what they think, say, and do.  That means that his entire reality is subjective and fluid.  If he says that he talked to the Boy Scouts, then he did so.  If he says that Heather Heyer’s mother loved what he said, in his mind she did.  Even if the call never really happened.  When lies are pointed out to him he simply waves them away.  We are in the wrong, you see.

It’s hard to explain this to neuro-normative folks and those who haven’t seen a narcissist up close in person and in action, but these people are so good at manipulation that they believe their own lies to the exclusion of all else.  Because deep down their own psychological injury and ego steers everything they do, they fit the world around them to to their own narrative.  Most importantly, narcissists are completely devoid of empathy.  While some of you may have heard that said, the ramifications of what it means regarding subjective reality are incredibly important.

Someone like Trump understands himself to be the center to his own universe.  His family, children, wife and ex-wives, and grandchildren are, at best, extensions of his own ego.  They are trophies to be held up and stared at and to be shoved aside and ignored when inconvenient.  He is not capable of actually loving them and they are a means to an end to be used when he needs them, ignored or worse when he doesn’t.

Putin, on the other hand, is a goal.  Putin himself could be anyone in the world, who he is as a person doesn’t really matter.  What he represents is everything.  He is a crime kingpin, the leader of a massive country that he controls with iron grip, and he is the wealthiest man on the planet.  For Trump, attaining the presidency of the United States was really a booby prize by comparison.  What he wants, more than he’s ever wanted anything, is to be the richest, sexiest, baddest, blondest, strongest, most terrifying man in the entire world.  His continued relationship with Putin proves that he is willing to do anything to get to where he perceives Putin to be.

Do I agree that Putin is “richest, sexiest, baddest, blondest, strongest, most terrifying man in the entire world?”  While it’s more than probable that he’s the richest man in the world, I don’t agree with the rest.  Most westerners won’t.  But Putin projects the exact image that Trump has created in his own mind about himself.  So he’ll stop at nothing to achieve and reinforce that goal (especially as he ages and his Alzheimer’s makes it more difficult to sustain his own self image).  This includes treason, sedition, and more prosaic things like joining forces with white supremacists, Nazis, and neo-Confederates.

At his core is this malignant narcissist a racist and bigot?  Yes.  And no.  Oh, I’m quite sure he was gleefully taught racism, sexism, homophobia, and hatred at his father’s knee.  There are reports going back to his elementary school days of Trump being a bully.  But we have to remember that with someone who is a narcissist we’re working with more than a learned behavior.  There was more going on when he was finally forced by his staff to read his too late, too short condemnation of what happened in Charlottesville last weekend, and that’s this: he fundamentally doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.  He can’t, he lacks the basic programming to do so and doesn’t care to try to learn how.

Bigotry is a super convenient vehicle for a narcissist to express a general disdain for anyone who isn’t them.  A narcissist on the level of Trump is so emotionally stunted and isolated from the rest of us that hate is easy.  Hate is a tool.  Choosing to “other” the rest of us and make us the enemy, use us as tools to achieve a particular goal, or simply destroy us for fun isn’t a hard decision to make.  For Trump, deciding to allow or encourage the deaths of peaceful protesters, students, bystanders, or anyone else not integral to his need to become Putin 2.0 is simpler than choosing which tie to wear.

If my experience is any indication, he’s only going to get worse.  He’s only going to get less in touch with objective reality and he’ll isolate himself more by tossing more and more members of his inner circle under the proverbial bus.  While I’d be happy to see Bannon, Miller, and the Gorkas without the protections afforded by their jobs, the only way we get Trump out of the White House is legally.  His frothing Nazi base has been given the green light and they will continue to show up in parks across America to preach hate until we stop them, one rally at a time.

Our job is to keep our eyes on the ball, remembering that sometimes this game has more than one ball in the air at a time.  We need to fight the Nazis while calling them what they are.  We need to follow the Russia scandal and keep it in the news, this is what will get him.  We need to support each other, none of us can be on all the time, this is exhausting.  And, most importantly, we need to keep the pressure on.  While Trump is the head of the snake, this is a long snake with deep roots in American history.  We need to pull the whole thing out before we can begin to heal and fix this country.

~Kelly

The 2016 election takes a turn for the surreal

This would be a noteworthy and historic election in any circumstances because of the selection of Hillary Rodham Clinton as the first woman to be nominated for President of the United States by a major political party.  And as much as I have problems with many of Clinton’s policy choices over the years, generally speaking I would consider her to be a highly experienced politician and quite well qualified.

Then there’s the other party and their nominee.  If someone had written this story ten years ago as fiction, people would have thought it was totally over-the top.  An egomaniacal reality TV star has gained the party’s nomination for President, and in the meantime, has also pretty much wrenched control of the party away from the establishment.  And to top it all off, there are now questions as to the exact nature of the relationship between Trump and Russia, for God’s sake.

Continue reading “The 2016 election takes a turn for the surreal”

That horrific crime in Orlando and two heroes

Kelly and I have both been shocked, horrified, and angry over what happened in Orlando.  Truly, it is stunning to me that such a thing could happen, and even more stunning that we as a society could keep allowing these events to happen over and over and over again.

Kelly vented a lot of anger in her earlier post, and there’s nothing more I can say about how we feel about this.  But I want to be a little specific about some of the intellectually dishonest arguments being made by people around the country trying to explain all this away.  I also want to talk about two people who were there, and who did everything they could to save people’s lives, and still couldn’t save everyone.  They are still heroes, even if they themselves probably don’t feel that way, and probably wouldn’t use that word.

Continue reading “That horrific crime in Orlando and two heroes”