Like The Hoarsewhisperer, I have known a narcissist. Not as bad as The Donald, but bad enough. I think it is hard for normal people who have had little or no significant interactions with a narcissist to imagine what it is like inside the mind of a narcissist. It is different in at least two ways. One is that the narcissist thinks that if he has a thought, that thought is a smart thought by virtue of having come from him. Seriously. And if they ever have a thought in contradiction with a previous thought, they don't miss a beat. They've just had another smart thought! And nothing stops them going back to the pervious one if it is ever useful again. A normal, non-narcissist mind cannot do this. We search for a narrative that is logical, consistent.

But I want to talk about the second way the narcissist mind is different.

Trump uses language differently than you or I.

All of us sometimes shade the truth or tell a white lie. We may try to influence someone, but our use of language is fundamentally about signalling. We are transmitting information and part of the structure of the social activity is that it has to do with truth. That it is a good faith excersize in back and forth transmission of information between parties. And when someone lies, they are breaking the rules.

And we tolerate a lot of lieing, of course. We know we are going to get that from crooks and politicians and used car salesmen. And part of the whole language game is constantly assessing your sources for truthfulness among other things.

All that said:

Trump is not doing that. It is NOT a good faith excersize in back and forth transmission of information between parties. Being a narcissist, Trump does not believe anyone acts in good faith. Anyone. He believes we are all like him (selfish, self-important and endlessly scheming for self-advantage), only weaker or stupider.

He uses language only to intimidate, or to project what thoughts he wants the other to think-- offensively projecting thought dart missiles that he wants to lodge in the minds of others.*

There is no issue of information. There is no issue of truth. He does not believe in truth the way normal people do. That's part of the disease. If a thought dart today goes in the opposite direction of a thought dart from yesterday it does not matter in the least. In. The. Least. It's a thought dart based on the here and now, utterly situational, and not an attempt to transmit information per se, accurate or otherwise.

That sounds crazy, doesn't it? It IS crazy. He has a disease.

The good news is that narcissism is not totally debilitating. A narcissist can even become POTUS!

*He thinks this is what others are doing as well. That words are a battleground. The irony, of course, is that we do the same thing-- assuming he uses language the way we do, which isn't right, which is my point.

A human being is walking down the street, trips and falls down.

Old fashioned liberal: Are you okay? Let me help you up. *Extends hand.*

Neoliberal: You need retraining. *Walks on.*

Conservative: *Steps on human being.* Get a job, lowlife!

Neoconservative: *Steps on human being.* Get a job, lowlife! *Starts new war.*

Reagan may have already been partly disable by Alsheimers, but he and the men around him (Attorney General, CIA Chief, Chief of Staff, and Veep) sold weapons to the Iranians as a way to get money to the Contras. This to get around Congressional legislation specifically barring aid to the Contras. These are the Iranians that had held a bunch of Americans hostage, and reportedly financed the bombing that killed hundreds of American Marines in Lebanon in 1983. The Contras were ruthless assassins and drug dealers.

Not to mention trickle down economics, anti-unionism, messing with Social Security, and on and on. Oh, and remember Welfare Queens?

And, now that I think of it: Reagan who launched his campaign in a town famous for the murder of civil rights workers, and layed a wreath at an SS cemetary!

And Tricky Dick? The War on (some) Drugs (and users) was all about putting blacks and protesters in jail. We know that now. And he sabatoged peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968 to bolster his own presidential candidacy. He had a list of Jews in the DOJ. The guy was a piece of work, though I can't think of anything he did that was terribly harmful economically to the masses. (There may be things and I just don't know them.)

Bush The Former? See Reagan, above. Bush the Latter? See the Middle East today. Hundreds of thousands dead. Millions of refugees. That's kind of a big deal.

Obama was a monster, too. He didn't stop droning weddings and funerals. He bailed out the banks and not their victims. The Stock Market thrived, yee-haw. He deported more people than all previous Presidents put together. Etc. He did happen to be the most elegant, the most eloquent President in recent history...

And it's not fair to leave Bill Clinton out of this either. Hello, NAFTA? Hello, Welfare Reform? Hello, Glass-Steagle repeal? Holy crap those thing were awful!

Being unutterably corrupt is not new. Being mean to everybody but the rich is not new.

What is new is The Donald says the quiet parts out loud. Not that it isn't horrible that he does so, it is. It coarsens the culture. But the others act the part of President while they do horrible things. Donald acts the same as he always has (when we weren't watching his show). Especially juxtaposed with Obama the Elagant, he does not act like a President. He acts like a thug, a baby, a buffoon.

And it's torture. He triggers people. That's the thing. He is the kind of person that many of us hate on sight because we've met the type-- or near enough-- before. And that visceral reaction-- not the outrages themselves-- drives the "latest outrage" merry-go-round that so many are on.

The point is: activism is good. It always was. But the idea that it is uniquely called for right now because this President is worse than all the others-- well, he's only worse in that he's a buffoon. And that buffoonery should not make us unhappy day after day.

I was too young to hate Nixon very much. I wasn't paying attention yet. But I spent years of my life organizing against Nukes and against the U.S. in Central America. And, of course, I spent years in depression and paranoia when Bush II reigned. Looking back, the activism was good and the depression and paranoia was useless.

The other point, though: It's absolutely glorious that people are motivated by The Donald to vote and to vote Democratic. I'm hoping he has set the stage for the next President to be the leftest in decades. I think GOTV and unhackable Paper Ballots are the two most important activities going forward.

Dear Democratic Party of the USA,

I give you the winning Democratic strategy for 2018. Just say things like this over and over again:

"The Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress. They have had control all through 2017 and 2018. Whatever didn't pass is on them. Whatever did pass is on them, too.

"Republicans don't get to blame the Democrats this time around. They don't get to call, "Hey! Obstruction by Democrats!" There was no obstruction. The Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress. Whatever didn't pass is on them. Whatever did pass is on them, too.

"They don't even get to say Democrats were unhelpful. They don't have to be helpful! The Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress. Whatever didn't pass is on them. Whatever did pass is on them, too.

"2018 isn't a referendum on Trump. He's not running. 2018 is a referendum on the Republican Congress in the first two years of Trump. Do you like what they've delivered and not delivered over the last two years while they have had majorities in both houses of Congress? If not, then elect Democrats!"

Whatever the other issues, come back to this one again and again.

"What has this Congressman or Senator /and his Republican colleagues/ with majorities in both houses done for you? Have they used those two years well? If not, then elect Democrats!"

There. If you use that strategy, you'll win.

You're welcome.

Oh, and at least in red states, I'd suggest running candidates who support concrete universal benefits expansion, and other measures that benefit wage earners. Just stand for "Everyone Gets Truly Affordable Health Care" even if you can't deliver it. We like that. And maybe some day you even can deliver. Stand for a Living Wage. I mean, come on. These are not far left ideas, and they never were, even if they were treated as such. No, they are standard demands of people in a civilzed country, and you'd do well to start wising up about that, because the people are wising up about it.

Sincerely,

dilemmanade

Health Care:

Socialize it. Once and for all. Like they do in civilized countries.

I go to a lot of sites every day for news and the rantings of political junkies and interesting people who write.

At one site you have to hit the back button twice instead of once.

At one site you have to click on a blank space in the body before you can move around the page. Another where doing the same thing activates a link to an enlarged version of a nearby picture.

At one site the up and down keyboard arrows and the mouse wheel don't work no matter what you do, and you can only move up and down the site by clicking on the right side navigation bar.

The HTML mark up is done by machines, without human intervention. Humans only drag and drop, cut and paste. And monstrosities are created. The simplest little bit of web real estate has thousands of lines of HTML where dozens could create the same look.

And that's massive unnecessary overhead. And it causes stupid effects like those mentioned above.

And you kids get off my lawn

  Prologue:

  After an early presentation by PeopleSoft, I told everyone around me, including my Supervisor and her Supervisor, I've seen this before: heavyweight private industry software player moves in on the University, promising the moon: Oh, our program does everything. Believe me. We've been doing this for many years. Millions of people are employed by companies using our software. A University is just like any other business when it comes to this stuff. (It's not.) And we can make enhancements in our software, if we do find incompatabilities. (They won't.)

  Management swoons. The Magical Market Faeries are here! We'll save money! There's no down side!

  But sooner or later it is revealed that the fit is not perfect, there are conversion problems, and the University is going to have to change their procedures to fit the software, not the other way around.

  I suspect it's not just the UCs that are engaging in this folly.

  ***

  It was billed as a workshop. It wasn't one. It was a meeting. Why call it a workshop? So we'd be receptive, and not expecting bad news or orders.

  Donna: We're so glad you're all here. The "go live" date is being moved back (again) from August to December. (1)

  Everyone is happy about that. More breathing room.

  Next: General introduction by Troy-- what is UCPath? (2)

  The PowerPoint slide shows how it all starts with people. It says "PEOPLE" right there in the middle. Aw.

  We've all seen this PowerPoint slide before. Repeatedly. "Comprehensive", "integrated", and other words like those are uttered. Yawn.

  More Donna: We love you, really love you and you're wonderful and smart and good. And we're all part of the team.

  (A person might have wondered at this point, "Just what are you planning to do with all that lube?")

  They have us raise hands for "novice" and "experienced" users of our current Cognos canned reports. About half and half.

  (But they know that perfectly well from analytics and word of mouth. They are telling us in the form of asking us. Why? See below.)

  Hilda shows a schematic of the PeopleSoft tables. There are hundreds, yes hundreds of them. She assures us there is no way we will ever master the data in that form. (3)

  With that Hilda lowers the boom: despite previous representations, employees will not be able to use Excel, SQL, MS Access, Hummingbird, or Crystal Reports to access data as we always have. We will use canned Cognos reports. End of story.

  Those of you ("experienced") who've already made peace with canned reports? Look, you'll be right at home! (Oh, that's why. Divide and conquer. See above.)

  Get used to it: PeopleSoft methods, PeopleSoft nomenclature, and Cognos canned reports.

  This, then, was the purpose of workshop that wasn't a workshop: to tell us where we stand.

  Hilda assures us she will take all our queries from the old system and design canned reports that'll be just as good! Okay, then.

  tl;dr Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.

  ***

  Epilogue: We are looking into new financial system software, too. And we're going to go down the same road. Management is excited by the words "cloud computing." (Sigh. I don't want my or our financial data in the cloud, for crying out loud.)

  ***

  1) They don't tell us why, but likely data conversion problems. Likely the data will never convert properly, and there will be a massive clean up operation after we go live. This despite original blithe assurances of a smooth transition.

  2) UCPath is a way of not saying PeopleSoft.

  3) Why is the table structure impenetrable? At first I thought it was a legacy problem-- you can only add tables, and can never re-engineer, because everything must be backwards compatible forever.

  But it's not just that. For instance, the basic "person" table does not have a field for a person's name. You'd have to link to another table to get that. This is beyond efficient into needlessly complex. It is absurd.

  I have to conclude that they want the table structure to be inpenetrable. It means PeopleSoft now and PeopleSoft forever, because we won't be able to do anything with the data if we ever wanted to walk away. It will be harder to change systems in the future than it is now.

  So... Stock value has doubled in the last eight years. (But the value of my labor has not.) Rich folks who had 10 million in stocks now have 20 million. I'm so happy for them!

  ETA: I know, I know: lots of people have money in the stock market, not just rich people. (I even do myself, in the sense that my pension plan invests in it. Exciting!) But the vast majority of stocks are owned by the ultra wealthy, even if a lot of people have a teeny tiny bit each.

  The Neighborhood Council system was set up precisely to diffuse the power that created it. That is why they have no actual authority, that is why the voting rules make it impossible to coordinate NC elections with City elections. The Council had to do something because there was a lot of grumbling, so they came up with a way to tie up activists with meetings and debates and elections of no import.

  The Mayor and Council will no way voluntarily cede any more power or influence to the NCs. It's not in their interest.

  What is needed is a petition drive to increase the number of council districts to 96 or 99, matching the borders of the NCs (or not if they are not of near enough population size). The language would be easy to draft-- just change a couple of lines in the Charter.

  (Does that sound like too many? Not at all. Many smaller cities have much bigger councils than we do. Having "local" districts as large as ours distorts democracy-- money plays too big of a role.)

  The new Council would have to better reflect the wishes of their constituents-- they would be easier to run against, but of course they will have a conflict of interest then, too, and also not want to give more power to the NCs until sufficient force is brought to bear. But it would be easier.