One of those claims that sounds entirely crafted from whole cloth.
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The “Politifact scorecard” is easily manipulable depending on what quotes the site owner chooses to include or not to include. By selectively removing and adding quotes, I could make Trump out to be more truthful than Clinton.
I don’t think Clinton is a “pathological” liar. Her lies are too selectively applied and too carefully crafted to be the result of a pathology.
Stephensonesque.
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Apparently the real reason, the single main reason why the main stream media onslaught against Trump, he does not want to fund NATO, the North American Territorial Occupation farce and this has resulted in a declaration of war by the war machine and the banks financing it.
Neoliberalism has created this reality (know that’s not what you meant, but I’m going with it 
), the Democrats are just as complicit. This Trump is the first of more Trumps to come, until we reboot or repair. This ‘Trump’ is only here because the anger, hate, and fear created by the insecurity of Neolib policy has primed the system for him. This is an old story, it’s happened before in many other places, we have roadmaps. As Trump-led Reps move further to the right, so will the Dems, continuing to exacerbate the problem and we will continue to see various degrees of confidence- artists selling us a fantasy, each insistent that his predecessor just wasn’t tough enough. This is what ‘Bernie folks’ kinda understood, and what ‘loyal Democrats’ won’t accept. I agree, Trump can’t win. But I am also disheartened, because we can’t all agree (Dems) on the nature of the problem, which is of course a prerequisite for making any progress. Please understand, I am not insulting ‘loyal Democrats’, I think we are all basically on the same team but just at different stages of mourning.
Chris Hedges articulates our plight much more eloquently:
http://m.truthdig.com/report/item/the_1_percents_useful_idiots_20160726
/soapbox
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Considering that Trump has held this belief since the beginning, why did the media give him $3b worth of free airtime in the primaries? Didn’t the media basically create his candidacy?
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Yes, the guy who suggested he will use our nuclear arsenal hates war, that’s got to be it.
Did you seriously think that through?
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You know the answer.
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Of course 
. Just wanted to hear the OP’s theory. Great link though, what a cad.
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FWIW this rumor that Trump is actually on some kind of upper all the time makes a lot of sense when you consider the way he acts; he may not be crazy, he’s just tweaking.
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Yes. While it IS inappropriate for a medical professional to give a remote diagnosis, because the fact that they ARE a professional gives that diagnosis more weight than that of a layperson. And that “weight” is due to their ability to diagnosis and treat people in a clinical setting. I don’t think that it is at all inappropriate however, for a layperson to make the judgement “that person is crazy” and then make some sort of effort to determine just what sort of crazy. The line between “crazy” and “asshole” is a fuzzy one. We draw it in different places for different purposes. The “should get treatment” line is different from the "should be forceably institutionalized line and that is different again from the "is so far around the bend that they are not legally responsible for their actions.
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I generally agree, but I think that we’re seeing the limits of the simplistic categorization of politics into “right” and “left” Many in the Republican party are horrified of Trump, and not just because they think he is going to lose. The more dedicated evangelical, “value” voters don’t like him because they see him as fundamentally a NYC liberal who is only trying to pander to him. And many big business/finance Republicans don’t like him because he inflames large numbers of his base against them and refuses to advocate their neoliberal economic policies like (free trade and free markets are always and everytime a good thing.)
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I’m involved in youtube “debates” about the moon being fake, ATM. Not the moon landing, the moon. I am desperately trying to find ways to reach people who are beyond logic. It’s a psychological puzzle. It’s hard and that’s what makes it fun.
Take a sample from your own life. Look at the people you know. How many have really strong convictions? It can’t be every single one. Some people support Trump because they “want to watch it burn”. It’s crazy that they’ll vote with that motive instead of “throwing away” their vote on a third party, but that’s how people think in this country. Some could be reached. They could be convinced not to vote, at least.
Educated people can see some major problems with Trump*. You’re dehumanizing his supporters, though. You’re making them one-dimensional and you’re assuming they’re all raving idiots who are 100% behind him. That can’t be true. Some can be reached, but they’ll have to hear something more convincing than “he’s crazy”.
* some still support him
If we can’t convince anybody who has considered voting for him, then spending the time to dis him is just self-congratulatory masturbation. I’ve seen meaningful pieces on this site that even changed my worldview. I didn’t like the sneering headline on this article, and nothing meaningful was added. The linked article probably had a point, but I was put off of it immediately. This way of thinking is genuinely counter-productive.
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While id be confident at a NPD diagnosis, I don’t think “crazy” is useful beyond the “this guy isn’t fit to be president” argument. Is it really convincing to anyone who thinks his outbursts are life-affirming and chest-swelling?
Besides, as stated plenty of times, “crazy” disrespects all other persons who may be working through some other illness that don’t happen to be a hairdryer filed up with dogshit and turned up to maximum heat.
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I agree, but what do you think would reach these possibly mythical “rational trump voters”? The ones that don’t do hit and run account creations on these threads
I feel like my efforts are better spent on stuff closer to the election, like GOTV efforts.
Granted, I don’t feel much more optimistic about “convincing” Stein voters.
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I think the layperson is perfectly qualified to diagnose the screaming homeless man that’s wearing 14 layers of clothes and cardboard and piss with “crazy”. They could probably get more specific, even. Schizophrenia, depression (absolutely - though that’s not a type of crazy), psychoaffective. Also, I took one semester of psychology and I believe I can authoritatively state that Bernie Madoff is a sociopath (I may be stretching my credibility).
The problem with mental illnesses with no traceable genetic cause is that they usually involve some sort of spectrum. If we get even more vague and say “mentally ill”, we’re essentially just applying a bullshit label to a person. If you’re not talking about that homeless guy I mentioned, then opinions start to differ. “In MY opinion, he’s crazy”, is what that title means. It’s soft science at best. It’s not fact or law. Honestly, I expected a fairer headline from NYT, but I guess even they are getting hit hard by the end times for print journalism. Clickbait…
My bullshit label > your bullshit label. Why use either to “convince” versus cathartically (as these clicky stories are intended)?
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I think we agree completely actually. Let’s not accidentally have an argument. I’ve read some of your older comments (just now), and it seems that I just rephrased them to an extent. We arrived at the ideas separately. I’ll bet you’re pretty smart. 
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It seems we’re in agreement about the opinionistic nature of these declarations. That’s totally something an asshole would say and I like myself less for it, but those were the best words for the thing I was trying to get across (I have the best words).
If he’s judging from TV appearances, then I would say his remote diagnosis carries about 1.2 cotton candys’ worth of weight. It sounds like bullshit to me. I don’t like Trump, but that’s not a good enough reason for me to swallow bad science.
In my own opinion, the man clearly isn’t crazy in any meaninful sense. He sounds like a narcissistic bully, but I’ve known plenty. He’s intelligent in a narrow way. He’s fantastic at politics on his first try, certainly. We should be cautious about lowering the bar too far when we call people mentally ill.
I’ve known people who were widely regarded as mentally healthy and damn were they boring. Once a new DSM adds “social disengagement affecting syndrome” or whatever they call it, then we can all be crazy.
I am somebody who is actually kinda batshit and could benefit from having my bad behavior explained away by some diagnosis, but I reject that. The classifications keep getting wider and I think they’ve expanded into meaning very little. Psychologists occasionally publish really important, interesting studies, but the field in general is mostly filled with broken people who didn’t want to work to be a real doctor. I’ve known great psychologists and professors, but they were a minority. I want to stress that almost all were kind, compassionate people. Smart people. Good people, doing a job.
This field is the softest of the soft sciences. That makes it hard to treat even journal articles as fact and makes it very hard to believe a remote diagnosis in some editorial with a click-baity headline, even from the New York Times. I respect that paper less for publishing this.
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It’s easy to get oversensitized on these topics!
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