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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 25 of 27. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by beckett2 on September 21, 2017, at 17:37:44
This was interesting. The Brian Lerher Show talks about diagnosing our president, and why that doesn't work. Regardless of political belief, there are interesting ideas on what a diagnoses of selfish or criminal behaviors does a disservice to the mentally ill.
Posted by beckett2 on September 21, 2017, at 17:39:12
In reply to Politics meets mental health, posted by beckett2 on September 21, 2017, at 17:37:44
eek. poor grammar above ^
Posted by alexandra_k on September 28, 2017, at 14:39:16
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » beckett2, posted by beckett2 on September 21, 2017, at 17:39:12
I listened to the start of it and it seemed very interesting - but I need to be studying for biochemistry...
I remember that in at least one of the US elections people were upset that they thought the votes hadn't been counted properly.
Is anybody querying that, anymore?
I wonder about that. With all this electronic this and electronic that. How much software engineers are running everything, really...
I have come around to agree mostly with Szasz when it comes to mental illness and law. He thinks that we need to do away with the insanity defence / do away with insanity / dx of mental illness as (in itself) grounds for ruling someone to be legally incompetent.
Otherwise it's just too easy to find some psychiatrist or other who will rationalise / justify a label of one kind or another and then attempt to use that label as reason / grounds for dismissing what the person has to say / for detaining the person against their will / for seizing and or reallocating their assets.
Posted by alexandra_k on October 1, 2017, at 2:57:45
In reply to Politics meets mental health, posted by beckett2 on September 21, 2017, at 17:37:44
> there are interesting ideas on what a diagnoses of selfish or criminal behaviors does a disservice to the mentally ill.
what do you think?
Posted by beckett2 on October 4, 2017, at 5:20:58
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » beckett2, posted by alexandra_k on October 1, 2017, at 2:57:45
> > there are interesting ideas on what a diagnoses of selfish or criminal behaviors does a disservice to the mentally ill.
>
> what do you think?
>
>I think Trump is an immoral, unethical man, and whatever personality disorder he may have, I found the speaker's reasoning really clarifying.
What do you think of this theory, not lumping in bad behavior with mental illness?
Posted by sigismund on October 4, 2017, at 21:24:11
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » alexandra_k, posted by beckett2 on October 4, 2017, at 5:20:58
> bad behavior
It is not just individuals, it can be groups. Corporate money in politics can be corrupting. The Hearing Protection Act deserves a mention in this respect.
We can understand (rather than excuse) bad behaviour when we know how it makes sense to the perpetrator. The Seven Deadly Sins (eg. greed) are not signs of mental illness, but they are pathological.
idk, Erich Fromm wrote a book called "The Sane Society" I read a long time ago. From the Amazon description......
'In so doing, he counters the profound pessimism for our future that Freud expressed and sets forth the goals of a society in which the emphasis is on each person and on the social measures designed to further function as a responsible individual.'
My sympathies are with Freud.
There are many instances of group behaviours difficult to understand as being in anyone's interest. We are a very imaginative species......sometimes it runs away with us.
Posted by beckett2 on October 9, 2017, at 17:00:14
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on October 4, 2017, at 21:24:11
>The Hearing Protection Act deserves a mention in this respect
I don't know about this.
The word shame comes to mind. As in lack of. I think it can be a valuable force which has mostly been eroded.
Posted by beckett2 on October 9, 2017, at 18:44:31
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on October 4, 2017, at 21:24:11
>groups
A journalist who embedded on those chan boards and stormfront, etc said that after Charlottesville, the chatter died down-- went dark she said. Her speculation was that their talk had become real and caused many of them to walk back.
As far as groups working against self-interest, I don't know.
I do find the idea of pathology outside of mental illness interesting.
Posted by sigismund on October 9, 2017, at 23:00:05
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on October 9, 2017, at 17:00:14
When I think of Trump and his policies or what he stands for, the thing that comes to mind is the nature of his relation to shame.
Isn't that one of the things people voted for?
I should read "What's the Matter with Kansas" but I might start on "Listen Liberal".
Posted by sigismund on November 18, 2017, at 7:22:44
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on October 9, 2017, at 23:00:05
Nah, it's not just shamelessness, but rather as Pope Francis has been pointing out, perversity (and the abandoning of the idea of the common good), which is quite a bit worse.
Posted by beckett2 on November 19, 2017, at 12:43:51
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on November 18, 2017, at 7:22:44
>and the abandoning of the idea of the common good)
yes-- this equally disheartens and frightens me. I grew up thinking the common good was what everyone wanted to strive for. I can't see how we'll turn course, like an ocean tanker so large turning requires a great amount of time. If there was the will.
My husband is more optimistic.
Posted by beckett2 on November 19, 2017, at 13:47:16
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on November 19, 2017, at 12:43:51
Then, there are these NYC firemen who save a little dog from a building and her owner is crying and jumping, and the fire fighters were all like 'forget about it' and smiling.
We're such a weird species.
Posted by sigismund on November 19, 2017, at 15:38:26
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by beckett2 on November 19, 2017, at 13:47:16
>My husband is more optimistic.
I'm not. Obama had it all in his hands and blew it because he was (shall we say) selected by Wall St. I am thinking of FDR in 1936..........
"For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peacebusiness and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for meand I welcome their hatred."
But with Trump the mask is off and it could go either way. If the Democrats can face reality it might be OK. But they show no signs of it. This is the Gramsci period.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Posted by beckett2 on November 23, 2017, at 1:29:37
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » beckett2, posted by sigismund on November 19, 2017, at 15:38:26
What is the Gramsci period?
Yeah, I guess he did blow it. Maybe he was too young? I don't know. Age isn't a guarantor.
That Cohen song, Everybody Knows. My mood is gloomy this evening.
Posted by sigismund on November 23, 2017, at 3:33:44
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on November 23, 2017, at 1:29:37
I have not read Gramsci. He was an Italian communist philosopher and politician imprisoned by Mussolini and died around 1937. Hegemony was an idea of his, useful enough in the West now. I was amused to hear John Ralston Saul describe Rupert Murdoch as 'an Australian fascist'. My feelings about Murdoch are unprintable. Even Elizabeth II when asking about James Murdoch was overheard saying 'But the father is dreadful'. Specialist in culture wars. I have been listening to Chris Hedges. I like long interviews with writers. There was a thoughtful Hedges one talking to Sheldon Wolin, whom I had not heard of.
Everybody does know. It is a relief to be away from Australia and I imagine the lockdown in the US is worse. But you have better media on the sidelines. Where people don't count they take certain things for granted and they are kinder to each to
each other.The role of a politician these days in the US is to deliver a constituency to the donor class. Was his cabinet not selected in advance by Robert Rubin and Citibank? There was some email trail.
This was Wolin's point.....there is no longer a public. Sliced diced and pitted against one another.
Some climate scientists believe in private that the human carrying capacity of the planet in 100 years time may be only a small fraction of what it is now. The culture wars are ridiculous and of course contemptible. India built its wall along the border with Bangladesh quite a few years ago. The military and the police know. Parliamentary politics has become a farce. Murdoch and people like him have a lot to do with it.
Posted by sigismund on November 23, 2017, at 8:04:23
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on November 23, 2017, at 3:33:44
Posted by beckett2 on November 23, 2017, at 16:14:29
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on November 23, 2017, at 8:04:23
Thank you for the link. Klein is wonderful-- her book Shock Doctrine has me in a tizzy because there is an ideologic vacuum here.
We're too big a country. Many have not been forced to face diversity. Our state, yes, and I think many here are happier for it-- I was touched when Corbyn said most people want the same thing. When I hear people affirm this, I feel temporarily better, then fall to gloominess again. There is that thing with the vacuum. It is dangerous as Klein says.This fed my unhappy mood yesterday http://tinyurl.com/y9jn3pcc
You've spoken or racism in AU. Here, I feel it's wielded to divide while we are deliverd as you put it.
Posted by sigismund on November 24, 2017, at 5:13:12
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on November 23, 2017, at 16:14:29
>We're too big a country.
Smaller countries (like Norway and New Zealand) have better or less dreadful politics than bigger countries.I had been reading (where?) a conversation between Bill McKibbon and perhaps Robert Scheer. So Bill McKibbon lives in Vermont and at least every month the community votes on (here I don't remember) on whether to buy a new grader or not (anyway something like that). He really liked it. (I think I'd like the climate. Nothing like a good excuse to keep you inside.)
The USA is a lot more decentralised than Australia. We have 2 levels, federal and state, and local is by state legislation and has very limited powers. (There were 2 Greens elected in the Victorian state election recently, I heard.)
People I read talk about using that decentralisation in the US. Our senate is modelled on yours, but we have proportional representation there so it is better than it sounds. There was a rancher from somewhere like Wyoming promoting a film he was part of. He and his son were there in their big hats. It must have been "Gasland". There wasn't a dry eye in the house at the sight of those truly decent ordinary (in the best sense) people trying to live as they had always done. He came twice I think. We elected a Green State member and very nearly a second after that campaign. The State Government backed off and reaccepted the leases they had so easily given out. That's what happens when you deprive the regulatory agencies of support for decades on end. The question should have been (in a dry country like Australia) 'Can you prove that this will not contaminate the aquifers'.
Trump's appointments hit a new level in disassembling the regulatory agencies. I wonder about his motivation. The attack is on reality itself? He is enviously in love with Barack? Should he have married a black athlete? Certainly a man to make you think.
Posted by beckett2 on November 24, 2017, at 13:25:48
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » beckett2, posted by sigismund on November 24, 2017, at 5:13:12
> I wonder about his motivation
Liquidation of public for redistribution among the donor class.
He's insulted by everything about Barack which he is not coupled with his race. Trump is deeply racist in a way we have not seen a public figure for a long time. Irrational, a mobster risen to a level beyond his competency, he breaks everything down until they are terms he can buy and sell. He's a very wicked man.
Posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:26:19
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on November 24, 2017, at 13:25:48
I listened to a Slate podcast which said that Obama's ideas about race were formed in Hawaii and by having 2 white grandparents.
I can sort of empathise with some of Trump's appeal at a stretch. Why more women voted for him than for Clinton (that is correct?) remains a mystery, as does the gold toilet bowl (urban myth?) as does his support among evangelicals.
I was more influenced by the Bible than I had realised. As in 'What must I do to be saved?' 'Sell all your goods, give the money to the poor and follow me.' or something like that. Once I visited someone in the madhouse. This angelic looking young man looked me directly in the eyes and said, 'You know I'm God, don't you?' I thought it unwise to say 'Yes' so I kept walking. My shrink says that when it comes to this many other psychs call it over-objective thinking, when the reality is that the over-objective thinking is the psych not understanding language as metaphor.
I find it hard to believe Trump just wants to ruin the world. I mean, maybe he does, but why would you want to do that? Why not accept the limits reality provides? What is money anyway? We're not alive for long. Trump is of course a nihilist and said as much somewhere. I suppose if he doesn't read, and just watches Fox? Murdoch makes my skin crawl.
I'm confused by the idea of evil. Hitler was said to be evil but his racial ideas were a fairly accurate translation of the relations between countries onto race that existed before the first war.
Posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:30:59
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » beckett2, posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:26:19
Makes me think of the fall. What's wrong with us? And that the richest people in the world want more? Lack of imagination and rotten aesthetics?
I like Pope Francis. He is an adult. As is Merkel. As is Mujica. But his Spanish is difficult to understand.
Posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:52:47
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:30:59
I liked it when Elizabeth Warren said of Trump 'Women have had it with men like you'. Still, you can't underestimate the human imagination.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/24/men-in-power-abusing-women-what-a-surprise/
But what rotten aesthetics, a failure of the imagination. Like the desire to violate innocence rather than enjoy it.
Posted by beckett2 on December 2, 2017, at 20:15:08
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health, posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:52:47
A message from my congresswoman early today:
"Highlights of What Congress Did This Week
Passage of the Senate GOP Tax Plan
On Friday in the dead of night the Senate passed its own destructive tax plan. Like the House bill, it showers large multinational corporations with tax breaks at the expense of middle class families. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, the proposal would increase taxes on millions of middle class families. It also repeals the Affordable Care Acts individual mandate which will cause 13 million Americans to lose health insurance and increase premiums by 10% for millions of other Americans. The Senate bill permanently cuts the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% adding $1 trillion to the national debt.
It bulldozes the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. In our Congressional District nearly 200,000 of my constituents claimed an average of $31,193 in 2015. It sunsets all cuts to personal income tax rates included in the bill in 2025, while keeping lucrative tax cuts in place for large multinational corporations at a time when they are seeing record profits..
The Senate tax bill also opens the Arctic Ocean and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to destructive oil and gas drilling, threatening air and water quality across the 19 million acres of pristine protected lands.
Now that the Senate has passed its tax bill, the legislation will have to be conferenced with the House version (H.R. 1). The differences must be then reconciled before a final version passes the House and the Senate and then signed into law by the President. Republicans want to see a bill on the Presidents desk before Christmas. I will continue fighting with every fiber of my being to stop this, unfair, unbalanced, and fiscally irresponsible effort that dims the future of our country, robs the middle class and places debt on future generations."
Posted by beckett2 on December 2, 2017, at 20:27:35
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » beckett2, posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:26:19
> I find it hard to believe Trump just wants to ruin the world.I think he's indifferent to the world except how it serves him and his friends and family. (I believe, if I may say anything good about the man, he is loyal to a very small group.) I think he might not understand complexities and therefore has limited self reflection and moral sense. He's not 'evil' but Klein's shock doctrine explains the smash and grab happening in the States.
> I'm confused by the idea of evil. Hitler was said to be evil but his racial ideas were a fairly accurate translation of the relations between countries onto race that existed before the first war.For what it's worth, this excerpt is from the 90s, I believe
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, Heil Hitler, possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitlers collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitlers speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches? I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. Who told you that?
I dont remember, I said.
Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and hes a Jew. (I did give him a book about Hitler, Marty Davis said. But it was My New Order, Hitlers speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but Im not Jewish.)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.
Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitlers speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitlers genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well. Theres nobody that has the cash flow that I have, he told The Wall Street Journal long after he knew better. I want to be king of cash.
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner
Posted by beckett2 on December 2, 2017, at 20:51:52
In reply to Re: Politics meets mental health » beckett2, posted by sigismund on November 25, 2017, at 6:26:19
sig, I apologize for knowing little about world affairs, your country is a good example. There is a significant power shift in the Middle East which I don't understand, and South Korea and Japan are contending with North Korea. Last week Hawaii tested their nuclear sirens. Trump insulted the UK and Teresa May. My head fills with what pertains to the US. I've lost my curiosity?
I'm reading novels again. Kafka said books are a narcotic.
Tell me something about Australia.
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