From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.trump,alt.politics.liberalism,alt.politics.democrats,alt.politics.usa.republican,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,can.politics
Subject: Re: Grinning Joe Biden Addresses Trump's Landslide Win
Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2024 01:10:49 -0600
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
On Fri, 8 Nov 2024 18:38:02 -0000 (UTC), pothead says...
> In response to your statements get ready for snit to do one of two things.
>
> 1. Run away.
> 2. Overload the thread with links and MSG-ID which have nothing to do with the
> topic in the hope that people will not actually check them for accuracy.
He'll be as good as gone (PLONKED!) if he can't come up with anything resembling a refutation or the truth.
He seems to be one of those who just talks gibberish with a strong smell of TDS, like some idiot I filtered out long ago, who uses Xnews
for a reader.
These idiots are simply fucked in the head. They're so full of hate it's hard to imagine ANY of them having the social skills and graces
God gave an Earthworm, to be able to live and cope in the REAL world.
I guess, that's why they're here on Usenet. The last bastion of totally free speech, that I've been using since '93. I always thought
Usenet was a realm of nothing but nerds, but now, I see it's for the crazy.
I'd love for someone to ask me "why are YOU here, then?"
Like i said, dumb asses... I've been here since LONG before you fucked-in-the-head weirdos arrived.
Trump WINS!
Donald Trump is the 47th U.S. president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris.
Republican Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in the 2024 election, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump, 78, will begin his second term early next year after losing his first reelection bid to President Joe Biden back in 2020.
Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the U.S. President on Monday, January 20, 2025, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington,
D.C.
A Second Trump Administration - LOL
===============================================================================
"Trump Derangement Syndrome" Is a Real Mental Condition
All you need to know about "Trump Derangement Syndrome," or TDS.
"Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike of Donald
Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason."
Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times in 2016 that broke TDS down into three
distinct phases or stages:
"In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president-elect's every tweet provokes a firestorm, as if 140
characters were all it took to change the world."
"The mid-level stages of TDS have a profound effect on the victim's vocabulary: Sufferers speak a distinctive language consisting solely of
hyperbole."
"As TDS progresses, the afflicted lose the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality."
The Point here is simple: TDS is, in the eyes of its adherents, the knee-jerk opposition from liberals to anything and everything Trump
does. If Trump announced he was donating every dollar he's ever made, TDS sufferers would suggest he was up to something nefarious,
according to the logic of TDS. There's nothing - not. one. thing. - that Trump could do or say that would be received positively by TDSers.
The history of Trump Derangement Syndrome actually goes back to the early 2000s - a time when the idea of Trump as president was a punch
line for late-night comics and nothing more.
Wikipedia traces its roots to "Bush Derangement Syndrome" - a term first coined by the late conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer back
in 2003. The condition, as Krauthammer defined it, was "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies,
the presidency - nay - the very existence of George W. Bush."
Added Krauthammer:
"Some clinicians consider this delusion - that Americans can only get their news from one part of the political spectrum - the gravest of
all. They report that no matter how many times sufferers in padded cells are presented with flash cards with the symbols ABC, NBC, CBS,
CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times - they remain unresponsive, some in a terrifying near-
catatonic torpor."
(If you don't realize the idea of TDS or BDS is - in no small part - meant in a tongue-in-cheek manner then, well, you may well have it.)
Trump allies believe that TDS is worse than ODS or BDS - by a lot. Wrote conservative pundit Bernie Goldberg on Real Clear Politics in
early 2017:
"Before the election, the victims of TDS routinely compared Donald Trump to Hitler. Guess what. They're still doing it. Articles in
respectable publications written by professors at elite universities are warning us to be on guard, that a Trump presidency could imperil
democracy-as-we-know-it and may very well spell doom for American civilization.
"On election night, as it became obvious that their worst nightmare was about to come true, some libs fainted. Some vomited. Many more
threatened to leave the country, but I'm pretty sure none actually did. As Donald Trump might say in a tweet: so sad!"
The truth is that TDS is just the preferred nomenclature of Trump defenders who view those who oppose him and his policies as nothing more
than the blind hatred of those who preach tolerance and free speech. Viewed more broadly, the rise of presidential derangement syndromes is
a function of increased polarization - not to mention our national self-sorting - at work in the country today.
We no longer live around, work around or pal around with people who think any differently than us. We watch cable news that affirms what we
already think. We read ideological "news" sites that tell us how good our side is and how bad the other one is. And on and on and on.
Is it any wonder then that we are increasingly willing to lump those who disagree with us into the "deranged" category? To say that those
who don't share our views are mentally deficient in some way?
What does it say about a President - and about a country - when the standard response to those with whom you disagree is that they must be
crazy? Nothing good, for sure.
=====
Many clinicians, political commentators, and members of the public have speculated upon the mental health of President Donald Trump.
Indeed, over 70,000 people self-identifying as "mental health professionals" have signed a petition declaring that "Trump is mentally ill
and must be removed." In sociological terms, the "medical gaze" has been hitherto focused on President Trump, and to a lesser extent his
ardent supporters.
However, in recent months, many have been questioning the direction of this "medical gaze." In fact, more and more people are suggesting
that this "medical gaze" should be reversed and refocused on President Trump's most embittered and partisan opponents. Some have even
suggested that these opponents are experiencing a specific mental condition-a condition which has been labelled "Trump Derangement
Syndrome" (TDS).
What does DSM-5 say about "Trump Derangement Syndrome"?
Mental illnesses are officially classified in a dense and dry book published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) known as the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). This book contains 947 pages and lists hundreds of mental
disorders; TDS is nowhere to be seen. Similarly, a review of scholarly databases such as MEDLINE and Google Scholar reveal no academic
papers on this alleged syndrome. Officially at least, TDS is not a real, diagnosable, or treatable mental disorder.
That said, medical anthropologists and critical sociologists have convincingly argued that DSM-5 is a flawed document. Indeed, social
scientists have long recognized that there are numerous "folk categories" of mental disorders that are considered real conditions by the
general public, even though they are not recognized as such in the DSM. These include categories such as "burnout" or "nervous breakdown."
As such, lack of official recognition does not mean that TDS is not a real mental condition.
Lay Understandings of "Trump Derangement Syndrome"
There is no shared lay understanding of TDS, mainly because it is a folk category rather than a professional category. As such, there is
currently much armchair speculation about the nature and existence of TDS, without consensus.
The name itself explicitly suggests a "syndrome," which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a characteristic combination of opinions,
emotions, or behavior." Several commentators have run with this, putting forth suggestions about opinions, emotions and behaviors
characterizing TDS.
Shared amongst these is a notion that the everyday activities of President Trump trigger some people into distorted opinions, extreme
emotions and hysterical behaviors. Well-known writer Bernard Goldberg gives supposed behavioral examples of TDS among Trump's political
opponents, including fainting, vomiting, students retreating to "safe spaces" and others demanding "therapy dogs." Political commentator
Justin Raimondo focuses on opinions, language and cognition, writing in the LA Times that "sufferers speak a distinctive language
consisting of hyperbole [leading to] a constant state of hysteria... the afflicted lose touch with reality."
Such forms of highly emotional reaction could be something akin to the fainting and screaming characterizing American Beatlemania in the
1960s. Unlike the Beatles, however, the extreme emotional reaction alleged to characterize TDS is not based on adoration and admiration,
but on fear and loathing.
Contrariwise, many others ridicule the notion that TDS is anything but a malicious slur term used to discredit and delegitimize criticism
of President Trump. For example, CNN's Chris Cillizza may speak for many when he stated: "The truth is that TDS is just the preferred
nomenclature of Trump defenders who view those who oppose him and his policies as nothing more than blind hatred." Likewise, Adam Gopnik
writes that "our problem is not TDS; our problem is Deranged Trump Self-Delusion."
In other words, there are polarized opinions about the nature, reality and existence of TDS.
Conclusion
The wider public may be unaware that psychiatrists and social scientists spend considerable time and energy behind closed doors pondering
over the existence and reality of mental conditions. This has led the APA to revise the DSM five times since 1952, considerably expanding
the list of official mental disorders with each revision. As far as I am aware, few psychiatrists are currently arguing that DSM-6 should
contain TDS as a mental disorder.
That said, in its official definition of mental disorder, the DSM-5 states that "a mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by
clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior... mental disorders are usually associated
with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities."
Many have argued that some people have been seriously disturbed and distressed by the policies, speech, behavior, and tweets of President
Trump, so much so that it has affected their cognitive, affective, and behavioral functioning. Such people may need mental health support.
As such, further research is necessary to investigate the extreme reactions toward President Trump, in the same way that researchers
investigate other extreme social phenomena, such as Beatlemania or the like. This will shed light on the reality of this emerging folk
category that has been labelled by many as "Trump Derangement Syndrome."