Category: Merde

Psychology Today: Trump Is a Four-Year-Old

Looking for the source of Trump’s appeal.

It’s quite impossible to watch president Trump for any length of time and remain unperturbed. He possesses what psychoanalysts call “high transference valence.” The ability to provoke strong reactions in others. In fact, this appears to be a big part of his appeal. Love him or hate him, you have to look.

You may argue that Trump elicits such strong reactions because he embodies a great threat in the mind of some and an attractive promise in the minds of others. We respond strongly to both threatening and attractive objects. Yet, given the basic ideological divide in contemporary American politics, this duality holds true for practically every president. Nothing there to explain the unique reaction Trump generates.

 

A better guess is that it’s the high degree of Donald Trump’s novelty that attracts attention across the board. Novelty is innately arousing to us regardless of its valence. People who slow down on the highway to rubberneck at the scene of an accident do not enjoy seeing mutilated bodies. They are compelled to look at something not ordinary.

 

But what is it that’s truly novel about Trump? Some argue that his uniqueness resides in his ‘outsider’ status as a novice politician, a businessman who has beaten the professional politicos at their own game. But this argument is weak. After all, we’ve seen political novices win elections before, and we’ve seen businesspeople succeed in politics, both in the US and abroad.

Moreover, the concepts of “business leader” and “political leader” are not that far apart in the cultural imagination. The fact that a rich, white Chief Executive Officer becomes Commander in Chief does not violate cultural expectations. There’s no genuine surprise in this narrative twist, other than, perhaps, that it took so long to materialize. Continue reading “Psychology Today: Trump Is a Four-Year-Old” →

Watch the ad Trump doesn’t want you to see

Resurrection and Our Coronavirus Times

Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox

Recently, in response to my DM’s on resurrection, Easter, and our current coronavirus emergency, I received a tweet from a reader in the UK who asked  “Why the current situation does indeed bring a resurrection?”   I believe it brings resurrection if it wakes people up to:

Father and daughter washing hands. Photo by CDC on Unsplash

1) Our interdependence–which is much deeper than our apartness or differences;

2) Learning not to take basics for granted such as good health–and the health of our planet;

3) Honoring the good work that people do and can do when they get themselves trained to serve;

4) The holes in our so-called ‘safety-nets’ and how to remedy them;

5) Getting out of denial about climate change, which will make this pandemic seem like  a picnic compared to the changes to come if we don’t change deeply in the next 9 years;

6) How we can all live more simply on this planet;

7) How we ought to celebrate more deeply while we are healthy;

8) How we can–when we have to–take radical life-changing decisions as a group and must do re. climate change bearing down on us;

9) How much generosity and willingness to sacrifice resides in the human heart–a lot more than we are often aware of;

10) Lessons in how precious life and existence are for all of us born of the 13.8 billion years of the Universe’s unfolding;

Continue reading “Resurrection and Our Coronavirus Times” →

Merde: 4/24/2020

 According to Worldometer, a site that tracks coronavirus data by country, the US has, in fact, done more testing than any other individual country that reports data — the number of tests conducted in China, for instance, isn’t available — but the US is nowhere close to doing more testing than all other countries combined. Well over 20 million tests have been conducted across the world, and just over 4 million have been done in the United States.

France Reports Heart Incidents Linked to Drug Promoted by Trump

France reported 43 cases of heart incidents linked to treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential “game changer.”

As the U.S. stockpiles as many as 29 million doses of the drug, which is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the data on adverse reactions from France’s drug safety agency highlights the risk of using unproven treatments to stem a pandemic that’s killed more than 100,000 people worldwide.

Source: France Reports Heart Incidents Linked to Drug Promoted by Trump – Bloomberg