#The atlantic

[altamont498]

I swear to God if you wrote something like this into a political satire like Spitting Image, it’d be called too on-the-nose.

[mysharona1987]

[jewelleria]

“But there are nuances to sadistic barbarity against Jews, we are told, and sometimes gang-raping Jewish women is actually a movement for human rights. It hardly seems fair to call people anti-Semitic if they want only half of the world’s Jews to die. The phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” currently chanted at universities across America, perhaps widens the net a tiny bit—but really, who can say? Even the phrase “Gas the Jews,” chanted at a rally organized by NYU students and faculty, is so very ambiguous. How dare those whiny Jews presume to know what’s in other people’s hearts? It remains unclear why anti-Semitism should matter only when it is lethal, or if so, how many unambiguously anti-Semitic murders would be necessary for anti-Semitism to be happening outside whiny Jews’ heads. A realistic estimate might be 6 million. Even then, Jews have had to spend the past 80 years collecting documentation to prove it.”

— Dara Horn, Why the Most Educated People in America Fall For Anti-Semitic Lies

[sher-ee]

He said it. He said all of it.

[soracities]

—Julie Beck, "Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read", pub. The Atlantic [ID'd]

[contemplatingoutlander]

In this article,* a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, Dr. Richard A. Friedman, explains why he believes that during the Sept.10th debate, Trump showed alarming signs of cognitive decline, including incoherent, "repetitive," "circumstantial and tangential speech."

Dr. Friedman is clear that from a distance, he cannot diagnose Trump, but he recommends that Trump go through a full neuropsychiatric evaluation (NOT a brief mental-status exam) as soon as possible, especially given that Trump is running to take on the job of president/ commander in chief of one of the world's major superpowers.

When mainstream psychiatrists like Dr. Friedman start to express concern about Trump's cognitive functioning, it is time that the mainstream media begin to treat this as seriously as they did signs of Biden's cognitive decline.

[edited]

________________ *This is an Internet Archive copy of The Atlantic article, so you can read the entire article, even if you don't subscribe to The Atlantic.

[wastedandbasted]

did...did I really just read the sentence "legally killed children" in The Atlantic with my own two eyeballs??? ?? was that actually a real sentence I read...

[gamer2002]

Out: Black people can act civilized like everyone else

In: Peace and quiet is racist

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger a Trump meltdown.

She succeeded.

Former President Donald Trump had a mission too: control yourself.

He failed.

Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again.

Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues—and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome. He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible.

Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch. Trump’s counterpunches flailed and missed. Harris met them with smiling mockery and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of eyelids: Harris’s opened wide, Trump’s squinting and tightening.

Harris’s debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as on policy. She drove Trump and trapped him and baited him—and it worked every time.

Trump exited the stage leaving uncertain voters still uncertain about whether or not he’d sign a national abortion ban. He left them certain that he did not want Ukraine to win its war of self-defense. He accused Harris of hating Israel but then never bothered to say any words of his own in support of the Jewish state’s war of self-defense against Hamas terrorism. In his confusion and reactiveness, he seemed to have forgotten any debate strategy he might have had.

Something every woman watching the debate probably noticed: Trump could not bring himself to say the name of the serving vice president, his opponent for the presidency. For him, Harris was just a pronoun: a nameless, identity-less “she,” “her,” “you.” It’s said that narcissists cope with ego injury by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the person who inflicted the hurt. If so, that might explain Trump’s behavior. Harris bruised his feelings, and Trump reacted by shutting his eyes and pretending that Harris had no existence of her own independent of President Joe Biden, whose name Trump was somehow able to speak.

Hemmed, harried, and humiliated, Trump lost his footing and his grip. He never got around to making an affirmative case for himself. If any viewer was nostalgic for the early Trump economy before its collapse in his final year in office, that viewer must have been disappointed. If a viewer wanted a conservative policy message, any conservative policy message, that viewer must have been disappointed. When asked whether he had yet developed a health-care plan after a decade in politics, Trump could reply only that he had “concepts of a plan.”

Almost from the start, Harris was in control. She had better moments and worse ones, but she was human where Trump was feral. She had warm words for political opponents such as John McCain and Dick Cheney; Trump had warm words for nobody other than Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian strongman whom Trump praised for praising Trump. It was an all-points beatdown, and no less a beating because Trump inflicted so much of it on himself.

At a minimum, this display will put an end to the Trump claim that Harris is a witless nonentity unqualified to engage in debate. Harris met Trump face-to-face before tens of millions of witnesses. She dominated and crushed him, using as her principal tools her self-command and her shrewd insight into the ex-president’s psychic, moral, and intellectual weaknesses.

Will it matter that Harris so decisively won? How can it not? But it may matter more that Trump so abjectly lost to a competitor for whom he could not utter a syllable of respect.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

[tomorrowusa]

The media double standard which overlooks Trump's deteriorating mental state. (from PBS Washington Week - 8/30/24)

JEFFREY GOLDBERG (host and editor of The Atlantic): Here's the thing. I'll make this observation. I'll own it. If Kamala Harris went from bacon to wind in her interview with Dana Bash, she would, this morning, not be -- the next morning, she would not be the nominee of the Democratic Party. That would have been a very, very strange -- people would have been like, what is going on? Do we just have an absurdly low standard now for the things that Donald Trump says and does? DOMENICO MONTANARO (panelist and senior political correspondent at NPR): I think that there is definitely a double standard, and I think part of it is how each side's voters interpret their candidate. And someone like Donald Trump, Republicans have had the opportunity for years to say this is not the guy we want. Instead, they've continued to get behind him. In every primary that Donald Trump weighs in on, he wins, and then the general election a lot of those candidates tend to lose. I think that from reporter's standpoint, we do have to be careful about how we -- what level we hold both of them to. When I fact-checked Donald Trump's hour press conference, he told 162 lies and distortions within that time period, 2.5 a minute, compared to Kamala Harris' DNC acceptance speech, where she had 12 statements that I found were contextually misleading or needed more.

Here's the entire episode.

The media has mostly shrugged off Weird Donald's unhinged rantings as Trump being Trump while holding Democrats to a higher standard.

We need to be more vocal about the double standard. When Trump has another crazed rant about sharks, windmills, electric batteries, and bacon which gets brushed off by a media provider, ask that provider: What would you be saying if a prominent Democrat conducted a similar unhinged rant?

[mysharona1987]

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Tara Monjazeb, Drinking Coffee in a Church, in The Atlantic

[tlwsarchive]

“Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life” via The Atlantic

[hussyknee]

This is, bar none, the funniest fucking completely unironic shit published by a legitimate news outlet:

In recent months, orcas in the waters off the Iberian Peninsula have taken to ramming boats. The animals have already sunk three this year and damaged several more. After one of the latest incidents, in which a catamaran lost both of its rudders, the boat’s captain suggested that the assailants have grown stealthier and more efficient: “Looks like they knew exactly what they are doing,” he said. Scientists have documented hundreds of orca-boat incidents off the Spanish-Portuguese coast since 2020, but news coverage of these attacks is blowing up right now, thanks in part to a creative new theory about why they’re happening: cetacean vengeance. Now that’s a story! “The orcas are doing this on purpose,” Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, told LiveScience last month. “Of course, we don’t know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day.” López Fernandez, who co-authored a 2022 paper on human-orca interactions in the Strait of Gibraltar, speculates that a specific female, known to scientists as White Gladis, may have suffered a “critical moment of agony” at the hands of humans, attacked a boat in retaliation, and then taught other whales to do the same. Whatever the truth of this assertion, White Gladis and her kin have quickly ascended to folk-heroic status on the internet. “What the marine biologists are framing as revenge based on one traumatic experience may be a piece of a larger mobilization towards balance,” the poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs tweeted before referring to the killer whales as “revolutionary mother teachers.” Media figures and academics are expressing solidarity with their “orca comrades” and support for “orca saboteurs.” One widely circulating graphic shows a pod smashing a boat from below, above the words “JOIN THE ORCA UPRISING.” (You can even purchase it in sparkly sticker form.) Yet all of this fandom and projection tends to overlook important facts: First, these orcas are likely to be playing with the boats rather than attacking them, and second, if one insists on judging killer whales in human terms, it’s plain to see they aren’t heroes but sadistic jerks.

A shark wrote this.

The recent incidents, none of which has resulted in any injuries to humans, are simply the result of curiosity, Monika Wieland Shields, the co-director of the Orca Behavior Institute in Washington, told me. A juvenile may have started interacting in this way with boats, she said, and then its habit spread through the local community of killer whales. Such cultural trends have been observed before: In the Pacific Northwest, orcas have been playing with buoys and crab pots for years; in the late 1980s, one group of orcas there famously took to wearing salmon hats. Is ramming boats the new donning fish? Shields believes that theory makes more sense than López Fernandez’s appeal to orca trauma. White Gladis shows no physical evidence of injury or trauma, Shields told me, so any “critical moment of agony” is purely speculative. Also, humans have given orcas ample reason to retaliate for hundreds of years. We’ve invaded their waters, kidnapped their young, and murdered them in droves. And yet, there is not a single documented instance of orcas killing humans in the wild. Why would they react only now? And though recent events may fit the story of these orcas’ being anti-colonial warriors, you can’t just anthropomorphize animals selectively. What about all the other “evidence” we have of orcas’ cruelty, or even wickedness? Scientists say they hunt and slaughter sharks by the dozen, picking out the liver from each one and leaving the rest of the carcasses to rot uneaten. Orcas kill for sport. They push, drag, and spin around live prey, including sea turtles, seabirds, and sea lions. Some go so far as to risk beaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal—not to consume, but simply to torture it to death. Once you start applying human ethical standards to apex predators, things turn dark fast.

Oh no, they gleefully torment other animals for sport!! Does this species deserve to have any redeeming qualities???

Perhaps #orcauprising was inevitable. Humanity does have, after all, a long history of freighting cetaceans with higher meaning. Moby Dick is, among other things, a symbol of the sublime. The biblical whale—or is it a large fish?—that swallows Jonah is an instrument of divine retribution, a means of punishing the wicked in much the same way some have framed the boat-wrecking orcas. The whale 52 Blue, known as the loneliest whale in the world because she speaks in a frequency inaudible, or at least incomprehensible, to her brethren, has become a canvas for all shades of human sorrow and angst. Orcas in particular have long been objects of both fear and sympathy, in some cases with an explicitly anti-capitalist tint. The 1993 classic Free Willy centers on a conniving park owner’s scheme to profit off of the bond between a child and a young killer whale. And more recently, the 2013 documentary Blackfish chronicles SeaWorld’s real-life exploitation of captive orcas. The “orca uprising” narrative fits neatly into this lineage. In our present era of environmental catastrophe, Shields told me, it’s appealing to think that nature might fight back, that the villains get their just deserts. But projection and anthropomorphization are only shortcuts to a shallow sympathy. Orcas really are capable of intense grief; they are also capable of tormenting seal pups as a hobby. They are intelligent, emotionally complex creatures. But they are not us.

Someone paid this dude actual money to conclude that Orcas aren't human.

In conclusion:

[woman-for-women]

[contemplatingoutlander]

“A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.” --ALEXANDER HAMILTON, in a letter to New Jersey Governor Morris, 1777

This article* by George Thomas, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, provides a rebuttal to the MAGA Republicans who claim that the U.S. "is a republic, not a democracy," as if the two were mutually exclusive, and as if that were an excuse for minority party rule and/or the establishment of an autocracy. Below are some excerpts:

Dependent on a minority of the population to hold national power, Republicans such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president* who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule. The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today. When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “Federalist No. 14”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” Both a democracy and a republic were 'popular' forms of government: Each drew its legitimacy from the people and depended on rule by the people. The crucial difference was that a republic relied on representation, while in a “pure” democracy, the people represented themselves. [color/ emphasis added]

I strongly encourage people to read the entire article. The link above is from the Internet Archive and is accessible to all.

______________ *Note that this article was written in November 2020, when Trump was still president.