Look, the focus on personality, character, integrity, behaviour, whatever, is completely trivial. It destroys any attempt to understand why the world is as it is in terms of interests, relations of power, history, economics, and so on - points at which one might actually intervene to make a difference i.e. engage in politics and attempt to excercise agency. The focus on charcater or whatever psychological bullshit is effectively an argument for political impotence and mystification - it says: don't look at the world and try to understand and alter it, just put it down to some ineffable internal psychology.

And once this happens all anyone can talk about is useless shit like affections and feelings: embarrasment, laughter, shame, whatever. The only thing worse than a Trump supporter is a Trump opponent whose political literacy extends as far as 'this is not normal'. They ought to be first against the wall when the shit hits the fan. At least Trump supporters have a keener instinct for things that actually matter.

What matter is electing people that you can actually trust to act in the common interest, rather than their own or that of their party. — Echarmion

What is this, a hallmark card?

Character entails nothing. Character is for gossip magazines, TV reality shows, and children's fairytales. Good Guys and Bad Guys. Only the politically infantilized talk about character as if it meant anything at all.

You're cheerleaders at your own bloody funerals. Character? My God no wonder the world is burning.

It is his character that determines what he does. — Fooloso4

Oh my God please never talk about politics again, people like you are why Trump can get away with what he does.

Rather than getting into the question of what is normal in its various senses I think it is more productive to focus on what is, as a minimum, acceptable behavior for the president.

The character of a person should be given much consideration when deciding who would be a suitable president. When expediency is prized and character ignored we end up with someone like Trump. When public spiritedness is regarded as a quaint notion that plays no part in political realities we end up with someone who is avaricious, self-serving, and vindictive, we end up — Fooloso4

Don't care about any of this, at all, in the slightest. 'Character' is another distraction made for dupes. Consider instead giving a shit about the relaxing of factory line speeds for pig slaughterhouses, put into place just over a week ago. Consider instead the roughly 85 various policy rollbacks on environmental protections undertaken by his administration so far, including the clean water protections just under a month ago. Consider instead the appointment of the roughly 150 lifetime tenure judges that will transform the US judiciary in unfathomable ways. Or consider the relaxation of the Johnston amendments that enabled Churches to play far bigger roles in political life than they could before. Or the relaxation of the Dodd-Frank regulations put in place to stop another financial crisis. Or the concentration camps. And a thousand other things. By comparison, I couldn't give a fuck about Trump's character, and neither should anyone else.

Chew on this shit: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/3/20895389/warrens-plan-for-workers and not Trump's 'behaviour'. Jesus what fucking useless thing to worry oneself about.

---

Perhaps a new rule when talking about Trump might be a good idea: if someone can't talk about Trump without at the same time talking about Muller, Russia, Putin, Ukraine, Biden, 'fascism', Giuliani, Pompeo, Hitler, whistle-blowers, Trump's media gaffes, or his use of language, then one should probably shut the fuck up.

Oh boy, Green.

Can we change the color every day? I think that would be fun.

Yes, it is. The faster people stop pathologizing Trump - and those who support him - the better they will be able to grasp Trump as a political phenomenon requiring political response. Trump is normal. Trump is exactly representative of the American polis. The consistent attempt to see Trump as an aberration is the refusal to recognise how fucked up normal is to begin with. Pathologizing Trump is the lazy response to what is happening right now. It is a political paralytic. Every time people focus on Trump's personality, Trump wins.

Trump is a perfectly normal American person.

Passions, bitches.

This is one of the reasons why anyone who thinks the problem is epistemic ('we just need to know the facts!/we need more information') is deluding themselves.

Antitrumpism is a wholly reactionary movement in the sense that it defends the established order. I can imagine a time when the so-called “left” might have championed the president taking on the CIA, but now it’s the other way about. — NOS4A2

Oh make no mistake. Trump is an abomination, but he is an abomination birthed by an equally abominable system. The only relevant question is how to be smart in dismantling his agenda and putting a stop to its perpetuation. You're right though that to see some elements of the left pin their hopes on the CIA was (is?) an incredibly bizarre spectacle. That said, what passes for alot of the American left is simply alot of limp liberalism, whom one suspects would have little problem with Trump if only he was more polite and 'presidential' about it all. Always worth remembering that Barack "drone strike" Obama had a far more effective deportation regime than anything Trump has managed to muster up so far.

It's not the language that makes it so, it's the people using it. — Isaac

Then to hell with those people.

What concerns me when I hear, for example, about trans people wanting to change the wording on their birth certificate, wanting to enter the toilet room of their chosen gender etc is that we're losing this variety. — Isaac

I don't care about 'variety' of words. I care about people. If words are getting in the way of treating human beings decently, then so much the worse for words.

No doubt. But then, what you buy into is of no consequence.

Oh no it won't lead to the end of the world. The world will go on spinning quite nicely without us. It will just lead to the end of any habitable world.

I believe that your point was that climate catastrophism was unwarranted, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Important to note that individualistic actions (as has been promoted for the last twenty years by neoliberal agendas) that places the onus solely on the individual (like turning off the lights!) is not only ineffective but false, and hides the true evils responsible at the centre of our economic and cultural systems, not just ~capitalism~ as it contemporarily it is, but the Judeo-Christian concepts of environmental domination, extractivism, and accumulation of resources beyond that merely needed for sustenance...culminating in modern day consumerism — Grre

Yep. I despise the way in which individuals are made to bear the brunt of climate change when the biggest polluters and the worst offenders are cooperations and factories. The little micro efforts - take a shorter shower, use less plastic bags, use the recycling bin - are so many distractions from the real locus of environmental destruction. That it disproportionally hurts the underprivileged and the disabled by driving up prices and making unavailable useful goods is environmental injustice in the extreme.

Given that the general scientific consensus (>97%) is that man made climate change is a real phenomenon quite apart from the natural cycles of climate fluctuation, the attempt to collapse the one into the other and conclude that ‘there is nothing we can do’ is just trash.

I don't owe you shit. You tried to use a graph of limited usefulness in order to make a bigger point to which it was not suited. I pointed that out. I’m not here to change your mind, I’m here to point out misinformation and dissimulation where I see it.

I didn't call the data faulty. I said it was shitty corroborating data: it is not data that can be used to draw the conclusions you would like.

You missed the very next paragraph: "Unless greenhouse gas emissions cease in the near future, warming will continue and, by the middle of the 21st century, Greenland – and the world as a whole – will likely experience temperatures that are unprecedented at least since the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago."

But of course you know you did.

Funny how climate flat-earthers always like to speak of ‘healthy doses of skepticism’ right before citing incredibly shitty corroborating data.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-greenland-ice-cores-say-about-past-and-present-climate-change

Your response seems contradictory - on the one hand you want to affirm the flexibility of language in responding to different contexts, yet on the other hand you want to affirm the utter inflexibility of language as tether to certain context and not others. But if you admit the former, I don’t see how you can hold the latter. You say that genitalia is ‘hugely important’ for nothing rooms - why? There’s nothing, literally nothing, about language that makes this so.

Language does not proscribe how we act: we, in our actions, proscribe how language is used. Linguistic use is an action. Reversing the relation to perversive some imaginary ‘markers of progress’ (what ‘progress?’ Toward what? Some ideal? Of what? But language does not mirror any ideal, not even provisionally, as Wittgenstein pointed out over and over) is nothing other than arbitrarily reifying some uses of language because - what? - that’s how we currently use words? But who cares? The point is to change the use. If you or anyone else is so threatened by gender unintelligibility that others must pay the price for your intellectual confusion speaks not to the problems of others, but to problems that are yours and yours alone.

One ought to treat all reports of American intervention into HK with suspicion: not only because it partakes of the shitty trope of Western saviours swooping in from without, but also because it denies the agency of the Hong Kong people as acting on their own behalf. Given what the HK people have been through and continue to go through, it's almost insulting.

It also plays right into the hands of PRC propagandists who would write off the protests as nothing more than an American neoimperialist plot. It is one of the single best ways to discredit the entire movement. This isn't to say that the US isn't probably poking their filthy fingers into Hong Kong pies, only that those issues should be side stories of auxiliary interest at best.

Great OP! Always a good philosophical move to make a well thought out distinction. Still, I don’t find myself convinced by it because it disconnects ‘feeling’ from, shall we say, lived reality in a way I think is too artificial or ideational. In other words, I don’t think it’s all that simple to distinguish what you call bearing from gender.

For it makes it seem like as though bearing - feeling - arises ex nihilo, in a vacuum, or at least in the mode of a kind of natural spontaneity uninfluenced or uninflected by environment. But to want to feel like a woman (say), is at least in part to want to be treated like a woman, or aspire to ‘womanly’ things (dress, affection, sensibility), to be able partake in the gendering process which exists only at the level of the social and not at all wholly at the level of the psychological.

To decouple psychology from lived reality seems to me to make psychology poorer and not richer: feelings are as much ‘lived’ - acknowledged, celebrated, denied, hurt - as they are ‘merely’ felt. There are those who do not have - if I can use this loaded word - the privilege of being able to so easily say that they don’t care what others call them (sociology): their bearing may well depend entirely if not in large measure, on exactly that (passing, etc). So while I really like the introduction of the distinction, I’m not convinced it can do the work you’d like it to.

It's worth noting, speaking of 'normalcy', that some of Trump's most insidious policies were enacted precisely through the institutions that liberals like to hold as an apparent bulwark against Trump:

"Many of the worst things Trump will do and has done are not through norm erosion but through the normal operations and institutions, even constitutional values, that liberals hold dear. So, for example, it's not by Trump intimidating or assaulting the courts and the rule of law (as many have feared) that the travel ban is being upheld and legitimized; it's through the Court doing what the Court does—interpreting the Constitution, applying precedent (including a precedent about executive power that the Obama administration, represented by none other than Elena Kagan, argued for in Court), and the rest—that the travel ban has been consolidated." (via Corey Robin).

It's like people like to portray Trump as norm eroding so as to better hide just how fucked up 'normal' is from the very beginning. Everytime someone talks about Trump's latest media gaffe and not his latest court appointment, they're part of the problem.

Continued struggle, strife, and eternal mobilization really come to mind. — Wallows

If you want a democracy you'd better get used to it.

It was beneath response.

Now the debate is what is "right destruction" of course. — schopenhauer1

That would be a start.

Man, I know I'm coming off as iconoclastic but I literally could not care less about 'normality' (or the discourse of 'norm erosion', also so popular among liberal critics of Trump). I don't care about politeness, mores, sensitivities, 'polarization', any of it. Politics isn't there so we can be nice to people, it's there so people can change the world, ideally for the better. As one of my favourite political commentators put it: democracy is norm erosion:

"If your highest value is the preservation of American institutions, the avoidance of “dysfunction,” the discourse of norm erosion makes sense. If it’s democracy, not so much. Sometimes democracy requires the shattering of norms and institutions. Democracy, we might even say, is a permanent project of norm erosion, forever shattering the norms of hierarchy and domination and the political forms that aid and abet them."

What we need is the right destruction of normality, not a preservation of it.

I don't think we need any of this speculative philosophy. We know that Trump is a fuckhead, and we know he does awful shit. We don't need to mediate this through some high theory of affect and volition.

affect that becomes a volition — Wallows

I don't know what this means.

I don't think it's an important question - sensitivity. We live in an outrage economy in which affect is just another commodity working to de-politicize issues. I posted this recently in the quote cabinet, but I'll do so here again because it's relevant; A quote from a recent interview with philosopher Alenka Zupancic:

"Social valorization of affects basically means that we pay the plaintiff with her own money: oh, but your feelings are so precious, you are so precious! The more you feel, the more precious you are. This is a typical neoliberal maneuver, which transforms even our traumatic experiences into possible social capital. If we can capitalize on our affects, we will limit out protests to declarations of these affects — say, declarations of suffering — rather than becoming active agents of social change. I’m of course not saying that suffering shouldn’t be expressed and talked about, but that this should not “freeze” the subject into the figure of the victim. The revolt should be precisely about refusing to be a victim, rejecting the position of the victim on all possible levels.

Valorization of affectivity and feelings appears at the precise point when some problem — injustice, say — would demand a more radical systemic revision as to its causes and perpetuation. This would also involve naming — not only some people but also social and economic inequalities that we long stopped naming and questioning"

No.

True, but even electoral politics is - or ought to be seen as - a very narrow slice of political life which should be regarded with suspicion. Politicians will not save us.

What do you mean 'only appropriate response'? Insofar as one can identify cases of dehumanizing 'people of color', then that right there is a pretty good case for an argument to... not do that. Emotions, like salivating over impeachment trails, are just more anti-political bullshit.

Further, a failure to move forward with an impeachment inquiry signals to Trump that he can make additional attempts to illegally undermine political rivals and Democratic candidates potentially shaping the outcome of the election. The failure of the Democrats to start an impeachment inquiry against Trump after the Mueller report was a signal that he could continue to abuse the power of the office for self-gain. — Maw

To be clear, I'm not specifically against the impeachment proceedings as such. I'm against the fascinated glare that it holds for so many, I'm against the celebratory note that accompanies the many discussions around it, and I'm against the wholesale substitution of legal mechanisms for the democratic exercise of power(s) as a primary mechanism for political change.

I don't foresee StreetlightX's appeal to (essentially an appeal to humanism) emotions, as ever bringing about foreseeable change, a much-needed change I should add. — Wallows

Oh fuck off Wallows, this is not about an 'appeal to emotions', this is about watching supposedly intelligent people delight having politics play out like a real-life Game of Thrones episode, while being contemptuous of the kind of everyday politics of coalition building, cultural change, and idea spreading. Instead, we watch agape as the rich and powerful make moves across a miniature political chess-board while we cheer on the sidelines like the utterly ineffectual political non-players that we are.

Yes, who will eternally stoke the flames against the 'right' elite targets while playing the anti-elitist game. Witness Tucker Carlson.

Really, those who see impeachment as anything other than as an absolute disaster - a disaster made even more disasterous because of its quasi-necessity, forced by the hand of an utter imbicile - are in for a bad time. Any feeling of schadenfreude ought to be tempered by the realization that this will probably make things even worse in the long run.

The anti-elite rhetoric has played itself out. — Fooloso4

What evidence is there of this? Like, show me the right-leaning think tank peice that says 'maybe we should put our trust back in the elites'. Trump is still the 'their man' of the anti-elites, and the effort to downplay this would be a massive political miscalculation.

If it's illegal then it's illegal and ought be punished, if not by indictment then by impeachment (and then indictment). I think it's crazy to suggest that the powerful shouldn't be held accountable for their crimes just because – what – it might be more prudential, politically speaking, to let it go and focus on other things? — Michael

Political reality is not so lofty. Efforts to remove Trump like this are far more likely to fan the flames of 'anti-elite' sentiment than quell them - a bunch of law-wonks removing an elected president like Trump right at the moment when people have less trust in institutions than ever? That strikes me as madness. Anyone who thinks politics needs to be played by principles at this particular time is complaining about a leaky tap in a burning building. Trump ought to be destroyed by political mobalization and bold, creative, and daring ideas - not this tinker-toy legal grace.

Everyone knows Trump is a corrupt, bumbling idiot. "More information" is the liberal technocrat's fantasy of political motivation. As if we just need one more effort because the last ones worked out so well. Russia, Corruption, Collusion - all these are excuses to not do things, not motivations to begin them. America needs chemotherapy - long, protracted, and painful, and not this deus ex machina nonsense that no one cares about.