Davin News Server

On Sun, 16 Feb 2025 11:08:55 -0800,  Alan says...  

> > 
> >   They weren't fired for being useful, period.
> > 
> > 
> 
> LOL!
> 
> That assumes that Musk is trustworthy.

Show us ANYTHING Musk has done to make you think he's untrustworthy, Pam.

"Elon Derangement Syndrome" Is a Real Mental Condition

All you need to know about "Elon Derangement Syndrome," or EDS.

"Elon Derangement Syndrome (EDS) 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 EDS down into three distinct phases 
or stages:

"In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president's choice to head DOGE's every tweet provokes a firestorm, as 
if 140 characters were all it took to change the world."

"The mid-level stages of EDS have a profound effect on the victim's vocabulary: Sufferers speak a distinctive language consisting solely of 
hyperbole."

"As EDS progresses, the afflicted lose the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality."

The Point here is simple: EDS is, in the eyes of its adherents, the knee-jerk opposition from liberals to anything and everything Elon does. If Elon 
announced he was donating every dollar he's ever made, EDS sufferers would suggest he was up to something nefarious, according to the logic of EDS. 
There's nothing - not. one. thing. - that Elon could do or say that would be received positively by EDSers.

The history of Elon Derangement Syndrome actually goes back to early 2024 - 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 EDS or BDS is - in no small part - meant in a tongue-in-cheek manner then, well, you may well have it.)

Elon allies believe that EDS is worse than ODS or BDS - by a lot. Wrote conservative pundit Bernie Goldberg on Real Clear Politics in early 2024:

"Before the election, the victims of EDS routinely compared Elon Musk 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 EDS is just the preferred nomenclature of Elon 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's choice to head DOGE - and about a country - when the standard response to those with whom you disagree is that 
they must be crazy? Nothing good, for sure. 

=====

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 EDS 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 
"Elon Derangement Syndrome."