I think you’re right, and the same goes for a lot of the people in that scam, including Turmp himself. It’s like you’re on a beach, and a group of homeless people keep crawling right inside the rotting carcass of a whale and pulling out slimy trash bags full of cash, and a bunch of puzzled tourists in chinos with sweaters knotted around their necks are like “why would they want to climb in there? It’s gross and unhygienic!”
This is a recurring theme with the whole Turmp debacle: people just cannot process the real motives involved, and so trip over themselves trying to explain it in terms of a normal presidency, as if it were driven by political goals (rather than a hunger for attention and cash), and as if people had voted for a candidate (rather than against the concept of government).
Anyway, I like to hope Parscale at least spent every lunch break for the last 4 years crying in a bathroom stall, and spends the rest of his life as a broken husk staring at the wall whispering “it wasn’t worth it”.
Am I the only one that is reminded of Christopher Lloyd in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when looking at that picture of Parscale?
I would say competent as in it is far more difficult to sell a turd than it is to simply point out the fact that the turd is indeed a turd.
This is how I feel all the time when people talk about Trump. They just 100% don’t get Trump. They see only a tiny sliver of the range of human motivations.
tldr
For many of the people actually involved in the campaign I think they see people pretty much through dominance relationships - there are the masters and there are the servants (the servants being stupid and easily manipulated, the masters being greedy and self-interested). That’s almost like a grifter worldview - there are the people in the know and there are the rubes, again,the rubes being characterized by being easily manipulated.
I think of Bob Altemeyer’s “The Authoritarians” and how Altemeyer talked about people who were social dominance oriented and people who were authoritarian followers and there horrible parasitic relationship between them. But Altemeyer also talked about rare people who are both. Most authoritarian followers don’t want to be dominant, they want to be part of a group - the whole reason they act the way they act is because they are afraid of making their own decisions. So it sounds like a paradox, but Trump clearly fits that category (To be clear, I am not saying that there is some simple rubric which allows us to easily understand the totality of a human being. I’m saying that there is a truth in this analysis and that truth cleaves very close to Trump; and that in Trump’s case Trump is so simple that descriptions like Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Authoritarian Follower and Social Dominance Oriented feel like near-perfect fits).
But this inability to really see that people are super different from one another (and thus other people can be very different than ourselves) just feels like it’s this top-to-bottom problem. I saw a Democratic politician saying something about McConnell blocking funding intended to support fair elections in the fall and they were really going in circles trying to appeal to McConnell, trying to think of any explanation for this other than: Mitch McConnell doesn’t want there to be fair elections.
I think part of the problem is that people place boxes around what it means to be human. There is something in their mind that is too far. Most of us would describe someone who killed other people for fun as “inhuman”. I think where we see inhumanity begin can prevent us from seeing that other people really think that way. Like, most people think that trying to end fair elections so that you can maintain power is something a “fascist” (or some other bad word) would do. Their minds connect it to the Nazis, which connects it to genocide, which they think is inhuman, so they don’t really consider that as part of the possible values of a person who they have interacted with and seen for themselves to be human. To see the truth of McConnell’s motivation would be to dehumanize McConnell and most of us find that unsettling.
I get it, I get how well meaning people who just want to live and love and be loved can’t really understand psychos who just want to dominate other people, just as the dominance oriented psychos can’t really understand well-meaning people (they imagine that the masses who oppose them are being successfully manipulated by people like themselves, because it threatens them to think that people are something other than mindless, and it threatens them to think they could lose to a group acting in good faith in a way that losing to another manipulative mastermind doesn’t).
But I think in your example the thing is that people would understand crawling into a whale carcass for a bag of money if the person doing it was destitute and it was that or starve. I don’t think Parscale was in materially desperate circumstances when taking that job. We understand people doing terrible things in actually desperate circumstances. What people have a lot more trouble understanding is people who do terrible things because of entirely manufactured desperation, Or without any desperation, but simply because they judge the rewards for doing those terrible things as worth it to them…
You are not alone.
I dunno about “in the back” at this point; I think it’s more like a shiv in the eye. Anyone could see it coming.
“I’m too busy to deal with this today, so I’m going to need you to stab yourself a few times on the way out. Be sure to twist the knife as much as possible. Goodbye and fuck you for your service. …NEXT!!”
I read that the campaign was ultimately being run by Jared. LOL.
Turns out there’s a list of people making that kind of money:
Yeah, it’ll be sheer dumb luck, like the first time.
Yeah, he’s essentially laundering campaign funds to pay the Trump gang.
Well, there’s the rub. Since we’re all hardwired to dehumanise those who bug us, and the nicer among us know we’re prone to do that, we go out of our way to guard against it. But sometimes the tides acting on someone are so enormous that for practical purposes, it is just overcomplicating things to consider anything else about them.
If you know someone is on fire, they might take a nap or write a challenging play about rural poverty – they’re not a robot – but if you only had one guess, the smart money says they’re just going to do more of the rolling around and screaming. It’s not far different with Turmp; as you say, he’s actively scrubbed every part of his outward persona that isn’t the tattling school bully, He clings to it. You can give him the benefit of the doubt for the sake of your own integrity, but the cartoon picture always ends up being the right one.
The problem with a lot of piously even-handed commentators is they’re so busy seeing every angle that they’ve forgotten how to acknowledge when the crudest, most obvious angle is consistently the correct one. The whale metaphor was a dud, but what I was driving at was of course people see the motive, only they’re too fancy to admit of such vulgar considerations.
Which I guess is just a cynical version of your diagnosis. You’re saying people don’t see criminal and sociopathic motives because they’re too nice, and I’m saying it’s because they want to be seen as too nice. Perhaps it is a mix.
Santa definitely isn’t real though.
Yet, what makes Trump evil is that he lacks empathy. Everything else can be forgiven.
I don’t think so, I think, again, people are more varied than we imagine. I think there is a strong cultural component in this, and it’s possible for a culture to have an actual open attitude towards things they disagree with.
I guess I agree. I don’t really mean to say people are too nice, just that they are too likely to see others are being basically like them. People have a range of motives that are nice and not nice, but they tend to think other people do bad things for the sorts of reasons they would do bad things.
But I do think (and I think I’m agreeing with you here) there is a culture where showing your “even-handededness” is a way of gaining social status, and that culture is present in a lot of news media. So when “one side” says it matters if black people die the media goes out and finds an “opinion” from the “other side”.
And I don’t think that’s a very genuine viewpoint. At this point you kind of have to be obtuse to not understand how always defaulting to the middle is a very easy position to manipulate. The public displays of even-handedness are more about building social status in a community where that is the norm, and arguments about how important it is to do so are about trying to maintain the social status of that community.
That’s the thing. If you take that job, then you know who you’re working for:
I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t think we’re born with it, I think we learn to dehumanize our enemies. This is done through a constant barrage of propaganda. Goebbels messages eventually got enough Germans to look the other way while they murdered their Jewish neighbors.
For a more direct and recent example, the racist Hutus who took power in Rwanda founded a radio station, RTLMC, that incited so much hatred towards Tutsis, Pygmys, and others that after about a year they had people butchering their neighbors with machetes. This is in no way normal — people simply don’t wake up in the morning with so much hatred in their hearts they are able to hack someone apart with a knife. Yet the government was able to orchestrate the genocide, and with the aid of propaganda (primarily sent via radio) was able to convince tens of thousands of citizens to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
And America is getting dangerously close. We’ve already seen an unhinged moron who listened to Fox’s Hate-at-8 program take his AR-15 to a pizza store to free Hillary’s child sex slaves from the basement. Don’t kid yourself into thinking he was an aberration — there are a million more listeners who have been prepped just like him.
I disagree. Who is the greater monster?
- A person who commits acts of unspeakable cruelty because they are incapable of human empathy, or
- A person who DOES understand the pain they are inflicting and continues to commit acts of cruelty anyway
His company already got millions in bailouts so he’s fine.
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