monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

No reputable psychologist or psychiatrist would diagnose someone without meeting him.

It was the summer of 1919 that I began to feel more and more dissatisfied with these three theories—the Marxist theory of history, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology; and I began to feel dubious about their claims to scientific status. ...

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, to open your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated.

Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see manifest truth; who refuse to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still "un-analyzed" and crying aloud for treatment...

[Sound familiar at all, so far? This is just prelude to Popper's comments about the famous Freudian psychiatrist, Adolph Adler, which are the point of this post]

The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which "verified" the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasize by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation — which revealed the class bias of the paper — and especially of course what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their "clinical observations."

As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, Although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. "Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: "And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold."

This Week in Hate tracks hate crimes and harassment around the country since the election of Donald Trump. While we can’t list every incident, we will regularly present a selection of incidents reported in news media. This article, the first in the series, includes incidents reported in the last two weeks.

• In the last week, three mosques in California and one in Georgia have received letters threatening that Donald Trump “is going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.” The letters were signed “Americans for a Better Way.”

• Last week, a passenger on a Delta flight began shouting, “Donald Trump” and asked, “We got some Hillary bitches on here?”

• In Astoria, Queens, on Nov. 17, an Arab-American Uber driver recorded a video of another driver shouting at him that “Trump is president” and “they’ll deport you soon.”

• At a Smith’s supermarket in Albuquerque, N.M., on Nov. 23, a woman began shouting Islamophobic abuse at a shopper wearing a hijab. Employees removed the shouting woman from the store, but she waited in the parking lot for the woman in the hijab to emerge. Eventually, employees escorted the woman in the hijab to her car.

• At Collins Hill High School in Gwinnett County, Ga., swastikas, racist slurs, the name “Trump” and the message “build a wall” were spray-painted on school buildings and sidewalks. The vandalism was discovered on Nov. 22.

• Also on Nov. 22, employees at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, Conn., found swastikas and references to Mr. Trump spray-painted on the school’s athletic complex.

• In Bangor, Me., on Nov. 18, an African-American man was punched and pushed to the ground. Afterward, his attacker said he should watch out, because Mr. Trump could deport him. Police have arrested a suspect in the case.

• In Denver, on Nov. 16, a transgender woman discovered that her car had been vandalized with slurs, a swastika and the word “die.” She had previously written the messages “#NotMyPresident” and “Love Trumps Hate” on the windows.

• Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn was vandalized with swastikas and the words “Go Trump” on Nov. 18. The park was named for a member of the band the Beastie Boys who died of cancer in 2012.

• On Nov. 17, a New York subway rider noticed a swastika drawn inside a B train car. Riders have also seen swastikas on the 1 train.

If you have experienced harassment, these resources may be helpful. If you witness harassment, here are some tips for responding.

On Sunday, President-elect Trump unleashed a barrage of tweets complaining about calls for recounts or vote audits in several closely contested states, and culminating in this message: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Quote:

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
12:30 PM - 27 Nov 2016
52,334 Retweets 154,837 likes

This is a lie, part of Mr. Trump’s pattern, stretching back many years, of disregard for indisputable facts. There is no evidence of illegal voting on even a small scale anywhere in the country, let alone a systematic conspiracy involving “millions.” But this is the message that gets hammered relentlessly by right-wing propaganda sites like InfoWars, which is run by a conspiracy theorist who claims the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax — and whose absurdities Mr. Trump has often shouted through his megaphone, which will shortly bear the presidential seal. Mr. Trump added more fuel to the fire with the false claim of “serious voter fraud” in California, Virginia and New Hampshire — all states that went for Hillary Clinton.

In addition to insulting law-abiding voters everywhere, these lies about fraud threaten the foundations of American democracy. They have provided the justification for state voter-suppression laws around the country, and they could give the Trump administration a pretext to roll back voting rights on a national scale.

...maybe his touchiness is understandable. Like most people, Mr. Trump senses the fundamental unfairness of awarding the presidency to the loser of the popular vote. In fact, he made that argument himself, back on election night in 2012, calling the Electoral College “a disaster for democracy” when he believed, incorrectly, that President Obama would lose the popular vote and still win re-election. (In recent weeks he’s changed his tune, calling it a “genius” idea.) What Mr. Trump may not know, given his lack of interest in American history, is that the Electoral College was designed specifically to enhance the influence of white voters in Southern states, which were allowed to factor in their large slave populations.

Starting in 2006, a consortium of 39 universities came together to create the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the first truly large-scale academic survey project aimed at studying the midterm Congressional elections.

The data used for this paper is from the 2008 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies...Our exploration of non-citizen voting in the 2008 presidential election found that most non-citizens did not register or vote in 2008, but some did. The proportion of noncitizens who voted was less than fifteen percent, but significantly greater than zero.

“Pizzagate Is Real: Something Is Going On, But What?” Infowars reports, asserting that “high-level Washington D.C. predatory pedophiles” are communicating via “symbols” on the menu of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place in Northwest Washington. “Notice the symbol of the ping-pong paddles and its clever resemblance to the FBI documents’ symbol for child love,” Infowars reports.

“Was Florida Fireball a UFO?” Infowars asks, noting, “A fireball shot through the Earth’s atmosphere at 11pm on Nov. 23” and citing “social media” for the UFO bit.

The well-informed consumers of Infowars also know that at the moment the “Whereabouts of Julian Assange Remain a Mystery” since the election and WikiLeaks wants people “to stop requesting proof of life.”

On his June 30 show, Jones had former Secret Service agent Gary Byrne on to promote his (discredited) book about the Clintons. In introducing Byrne, Jones said:

“Mr. Byrne, I hope you don’t have any car accidents or airplane accidents or anything because the Clintons are organized criminals in my view and there’s a lot of death around them. But I’m going to stop right there. Mr. Byrne, thank you so much for coming on. CrisisofCharacterbook.com, let’s go to the waterfront here. Tell us -- I mean, you’re putting your life on the line here. I think that goes unsaid.”

Later in the broadcast, Jones suggested he didn’t “want to get into speculation areas here” before speculating that Byrne would do well to prepare for his inevitable murder. “I really hope you’ve got a big insurance policy taken out for your family,” Jones said,

ALEX JONES (HOST): I'm never a lesser of two evils person, but with Hillary, there's not even the same universe. She is an abject, psychopathic, demon from Hell that as soon as she gets into power is going to try to destroy the planet. I'm sure of that, and people around her say she's so dark now, and so evil, and so possessed that they are having nightmares, they're freaking out. Folks let me just tell you something, and if media wants to go with this, that's fine. There are dozens of videos and photos of Obama having flies land on him, indoors, at all times of year, and he'll be next to a hundred people and no one has flies on them. Hillary, reportedly, I mean, I was told by people around her that they think she's demon-possessed, okay? I'm just going to go ahead and say it, okay?

“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

reasoning logic wrote:

Donald trump has been diagnosed by many in the field of psychology!

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HucsIsKdNa8[/youtube]

No reputable psychologist or psychiatrist would diagnose someone without meeting him.

This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections...

Validation of registration and voting was performed by the CCES research team in collaboration with the firm Catalyst. Of 339 non-citizens identified in the 2008 survey, Catalyst matched 140 to a commercial (e.g. credit card) and/or voter database. The vote validation procedures are described in detail by Ansolabehere and Hersh (2012). The verification effort means that for a bit more than 40 percent of the 2008 sample, we are able to verify whether non-citizens voted when they said they did, or didn't vote when they said they didn't. For the remaining non-citizens, we have only the respondent's word to go on concerning electoral participation, although we do attempt to make inferences about their true participation rate based upon the verified portion of the sample....Given this evidence, we think that the vast majority of those who said they were non-citizens were in fact non-citizens....

Non-citizen voter registration is a violation of election law in almost all U.S. jurisdictions, the lone exceptions are for residents of a few localities in Maryland....Among the 337 immigrant non-citizens who responded to the CCES, 50 (14.8%) indicated in the survey that they were registered. An additional 17 non-citizens had their voter registration status verified through record matches even though they claimed not to be registered. Perhaps the legal risks of non-citizen registration led some of these individuals to claim not to be registered...

...another barrier to voting by non-citizens might come in the form of the credential checking that occurs before individuals are permitted to
vote on Election Day....Nonetheless, identification requirements blocked ballot access for only a small portion of non-citizens...

These results allow us to estimate the impact of noncitizen voting on election outcomes. We find that there is reason to believe non citizen voting changed one state's Electoral College votes in 2008, delivering North Carolina to Obama, and that non-citizen votes have also led to Democratic victories in congressional races including a critical 2008 Senate race that delivered for Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate....

The fact that non-citizen voting is illegal in most parts of the United States means that those who voted were potentially violating the law. The decision to participate in spite of de-jure barriers may at times be an intentional act of protest against the failure to enfranchise non-citizen residents. On the other hand, some may have violated election laws accidentally because they were unaware of legal barriers to electoral participation.

Our results also suggest that photo-identification requirements are unlikely to be effective at preventing electoral participation by non-citizen immigrants: In 2008, more than two thirds of non-citizen immigrants who indicated that they were asked to show photo identification reported that they went on to cast a vote.

Quote:

Remind me, which position in government does Roger Stone hold? Who cares what he says.

Good point. Unimportant and irrelevant person. I suppose an analogue would be William Ayers or Jeremiah Wright.

But aside from such obvious snark, let's just quote Jim Geraghty from the National Review:

Quote:

It’s hard to overstate just how close Trump and Stone have been over the years. Their professional and personal relationship goes back more than three decades. Trump without Stone is akin to George W. Bush without Karl Rove or Barack Obama without David Axelrod.

http://bit.ly/2gBt2Xi

They have provided the justification for state voter-suppression laws around the country, and they could give the Trump administration a pretext to roll back voting rights on a national scale.

Stop paying attention to his crazy tweets.


Media: Look! Trump settled the Trump University suits!

Trump: Quick! Tweet something crazy about Hamilton!

Media: Ooooh! Look at the shiny, deliciously crazy tweets!



Media: Look at all the ways Trump is poised to profit from the presidency!

Trump: Quick! Tweet something crazy about election fraud!

Media: Ooooh! Look at the shiny, deliciously crazy tweets!

"I was dumb enough to think I would be able to talk people out of voting for Donald Trump by detailing what I thought were his weaknesses," he continued. "The Trump campaign had to be laughing at me and thanking me at the same time. I approached my choice of candidates by consuming information literally. That was my hammer and I tried to use it to make everything else look like a nail. I obviously was wrong."

Trump's strategy of riling up the mainstream media and using that coverage to in turn rile up his support base has not changed since he took office, Cuban said. He pointed to his nominations or appointments of Lt. General Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as attorney general, and Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon as chief strategist as examples.

"They knew exactly how the MSM would react," Cuban wrote. "They knew every single past issue each faced would surface. From tweets to not being confirmed to Breitbart News. They could have picked any number of qualified candidates that didn't carry that 'baggage.' But they chose them precisely because they had that baggage and of course because they were loyal to President-elect Trump."

He added that the mainstream media...would make Trump "stronger than he was the day he was elected."

The meetings with "non-supporters," like former Republican nominee and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, were examples of "kiss the ring and kiss my a-- meetings," Cuban wrote.

He added: "More importantly, they give President-elect Trump the satisfaction of watching those like me who campaigned vocally against him, bend over, and kiss his ring. Touche, President-elect Trump. Touche."

A few days after the post was published, Cuban was spotted with Bannon in New York City. Cuban declined to comment on their meeting when asked by CNBC.

I did something today that I've never done in my life. I actually subscribed to a newspaper. I figure they'll be the ones to do the investigative work that is going to be needed during this administration, and that the best way to support that, is to actually financially support them.

This is an unusual “issue” for the president-elect to highlight, given the dire conditions he claims the country faces. The odd protester has torched the odd flag every so often for decades. The Supreme Court in 1989 held that burning the flag constitutes political speech, and thus cannot be banned. Republicans have occasionally used the issue as a cheap political stunt, since a majority of the public viscerally opposes flag-burning. To that standard tactic, Trump added the new Trumpian touch of proposing to revoke citizenship for violators, which would make his unconstitutional proposal even more unconstitutional, and also more attention-getting. And he did not send this one in the middle of the night, as he often does, but at 6:55 a.m., a moment probably calculated to seize the morning news cycle.

But why would he choose to pick this strange fight? Here is a case where the common complaint that he is distracting the public from unflattering stories rings true. Proposing a flag-burning ban is a classic right-wing nationalist distraction, and Trump has a number of ugly stories from which to distract: his plan for massive, unprecedented corruption, the extreme beliefs of his appointees, a controversy over a recount that highlights his clear defeat in the national vote.

Trump does not want coverage of his plans to enrich himself and his family or to strip the safety net. A fight over patriotism and citizenship frames the president-elect as the champion of American nationalism — giving a kind of legitimacy that overcomes his defeat in the national vote