American Politics Thread: Orange is the new POTUS

[MRCboicgy]

Originally Posted by photon

I dunno, if he's lasted till now the way he is he's just one of those people who have really good genes.

EDIT: Has there ever been a fat president before?

[Party Elephant]

Originally Posted by photon

I dunno, if he's lasted till now the way he is he's just one of those people who have really good genes.

EDIT: Has there ever been a fat president before?

William Howard Taft was pretty large:

Spoiler!

[photon]

Oh yeah, Taft.

[GreenLantern2814]

Originally Posted by photon

Oh yeah, Taft.

Not the President, but Churchill wouldn't be called a svelte man.

Look, I think we can all agree, the last thing any of us need is for Donald Trump to start taking his health seriously.

In fact, on his next visit to Calgary, I'd like to present him with a family size bucket from our city's favorite swinger's club - Chicken on the Way.

[Julio]

Originally Posted by photon

I dunno, if he's lasted till now the way he is he's just one of those people who have really good genes.

EDIT: Has there ever been a fat president before?

Well Taft wasn't exactly skinny.

[Barnes]

Originally Posted by photon

I dunno, if he's lasted till now the way he is he's just one of those people who have really good genes.

EDIT: Has there ever been a fat president before?

Taft was a lard ass.



Edit: Lol beaten a few times.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Donald getting stuck in a bathtub sounds like a thing that could reasonably happen.

[KootenayFlamesFan]

So he obviously realizes he screwed up with the Jackson thing after being called a moron by everyone, but now he's being a moron again. Does he not realize Jackson owned slaves? Is he really this stupid?

Donald J. Trump‏@realDonaldTrump
President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen!

[direwolf]

Originally Posted by KootenayFlamesFan

So he obviously realizes he screwed up with the Jackson thing after being called a moron by everyone, but now he's being a moron again. Does he not realize Jackson owned slaves? Is he really this stupid?

Donald J. Trump‏@realDonaldTrump
President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen!

[direwolf]

Dan Rather's Facebook post on Trump's Andrew Jackson fetish:

https://www.facebook.com/theDanRathe...58607919485716

I wanted to let this story go. I really did. I don't want to be distracted from all the important things taking place. Where are we on the Russia investigation again?

But the sheer craziness of this obsession by Donald Trump with Andrew Jackson and the Civil War is a carnival act unlike anything I have ever seen at the White House. And not to let something drop, there is Mr. Trump on Twitter just recently pouring gasoline on the fires of his ignorance.

Nevermind that Mr. Trump's knowledge of American history seems below that of most gradeschoolers. Nevermind that Jackson is not exactly the kind of president, or man, you would want to hold up as an example. And nevermind that there is an implicit criticism of arguably our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. (It reminds me of his slam against John McCain and how war heroes aren't captured. Apparently great presidents don't wage a war to keep the Union together).

These are the rantings of someone who really should be focused on the job of governing. Should we not conclude that he approaches policy decisions with the same half-baked conspiracies with which he apparently approaches history?

To be President of the United States is to part of the great American story. To not understand that story is to not understand the presidency. Maybe Frederick Douglass can give Mr. Trump some advice. Apparently, he's "an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more."

[nik-]

FDR was fat too, at least until the end.

Dude never exercised.

[DuffMan]

Unbelievably, Trump convinces me more, everyday, that he is more moronic, than I thought yesterday. I can't even believe it.

[Mr.Coffee]

uhhhhh guys, Trump's doctor gave him a stamp of approval for his health.

He's one of the healthiest guys around. Case closed.

[KevanGuy]

Originally Posted by DuffMan

Unbelievably, Trump convinces me more, everyday, that he is more moronic, than I thought yesterday. I can't even believe it.

He's the Benjamin Buttons of logic.

[Senator Clay Davis]

So much w(h)inning

[DuffMan]

what a buffoon.
Must be tough having Dictator needs, but being a President in America

[ernie]

Or, you know, instead of the GOP always just trying to get their way and only their way they could try reaching across the aisle? Though, after the last 4 years I wouldn't expect the Dems to accept the gesture. And who am I kidding the GOP can't even remotely get on the same page as a party.

The GOP has made their bed and now they need to lie in it.

[Red Ice Player]

Trump is basically threatening a government shutdown in September. Now every government employee will fear a layoff at the end of summer. Things will come to a head when a big health insurer pulls out of the ACA due to funding uncertainty, and I could see that happening before September.

[troutman]

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...ange-our-minds

The cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

[The Gormans] cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by direwolf

So what's it going to take for his brainwashed supporters to actually start getting angry, or even mildly disappointed? Or is that just impossible at this point? At his rally in Pennsylvania on the weekend, they were actually holding signs that said "Promises made, promises kept."

You can't get any more delusional than that. We're talking rock bottom levels of intelligence and reasoning here. It's quite fascinating.

Deluding yourself like that doesn't have anything to do with a persons intelligence or ability to reason. Even extremely smart people are perfectly capable of believing in the most incredibly obvious nonsense when they want to believe it badly enough.

These people are clearly truly desperate in their need to believe in their saviour president, and that speaks of really high levels of anxiety, fear, frustration and/or desperation.

That's what makes this whole Trump fiasco so extremely sad. To me it's less a case of a great con by Trump, and more a case of a nation imploding under it's inability to discuss its problems in a reasonable way, creating a desperate need to believe in saviour figures.

What they need are skilled, intelligent professional politicians who can handle the extreme complexity of leading a world superpower. What they have is the worlds biggest Dunning-Kruger show.