Who would have thought that Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Judgmental Personality could become career defining skills? I keep harping on reading/rereading 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' if you want some insights into where tRump wants to steer this whole thing. It's time for his Reichstag Fire moment.
I'm currently reading Jonathan Taplin's THE END OF REALITY, which focuses on Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, and Andreesen. A case could be made that narcissism, psychopathy, and judgmental personality are top-level job requirements.
Follow up with details on that book. I couldn’t get through it if I tried. I’ve said Zuckerberg ruined the world since about 2014. Opened a facebook account in late 2008. It took about four years for it to evolve into garbage and unverified trashy news.
I've been on FB since about 2011. I've been using FB Purity (https://www.fbpurity.com/) for years, so I never see ads and I can pretty much customize my feed. I'm an editor by trade and I'm active in several of the international editors' groups on FB -- they're indispensable. Yeah, there are some annoyances (like I got reprimanded for calling myself a dyke, and some friends have done time in Facebook "jail" for using colorful language about Trump), but it's a very useful tool, and it's free.
I was a therapist and familiar with the personality disorders throughout my career, but I never heard of a Judgmental Personality diagnosis, although it's correct to note that many people are burdened with a critical/judgmental style. Are you talking about Trump? If so, my take on him is that he is psychopathic (sociopathic) a severe narcissist, has ADHD and is possibly addicted to Ritalin and or Adderall. His sleep wake cycle is also disturbed, which only makes things worse. If I had to guess, I'd say his IQ was within the normal range, but that he has deteriorated due to the aging process, poor nutrition, obesity and quite possibly a dementing process of some sort. Hope that helps you as you attempt to grapple with the fact of this complex and basically repulsive person. Also, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a great and very helpful book, if you can stomach reading it.
I think ‘Judgmental Personality’ should be an additional axis II disorder characterized by the worldview that ‘theirs’ is the only valid viewpoint and the need to control other people particularly their behavior and speech.
Trump can’t be intelligent, and they’ve said he literally can’t read…the destruction and harm, the cruelty, viciousness, rage is equivalent to Kim Jong il…it isn’t logical, sustainable therefore not intelligent. it he hadn’t been born rich, so many wouldn’t have enabled him.
In fact we see WW2 continue with the MAGA party as the renaissance of NSDAP and the struggle of the White Rose or Staufenberg, French Resistance, Franklin Roosevelt against it. Only difference that MAGA/Musk/Trump plan no Holocaust. But other types of genocides are possible.
If we ever went down that terrible road, the GOP would first send Liberal journalists, activists, labor organizers, etc. to the camps. The very camps they're desperately trying to build for illegals. After building the camps, adding extra showers would be a breeze.
Then, they'd turn on the Jews, mainly because racism, antisemitism and xenophobia are fairly ingrained personality traits in many/most GOP voters. Regarding Evangelicals, who comprise 50% of the GOP Base, they currently conditionally approve of Israel and Jews, because they believe Israel will start the nuclear war that will end all life on earth, and result in all Tue Christians being raptured up into heaven on mushroom clouds of glory to live with Jesus.
But Evangelical support for Jews and Israel is conditional. The Mormons, for example, pledge their support conditional on Jews/Israel remaining a "righteous" people. All it would take would be whoever is currently running the GOP to wake up in a bad mood one day and revoke that designation. Then, shower time.
I'd been told the "rapture" will take all the Christian Nationalists [includes only some groups of evangelicals as not all evangelicals are MAGAs] to Israel where they'll see Jesus who will then allow them to spread out again over the world scooping up the riches of those who were not righteous enough to survive the flying zombie trip to Israel. So, basically, no different than the oligarchs mindset -- just take all the riches for themselves.
Schumer interview on today’s MSNBC’s Morning Joe, paraphrased: if the gov’t shutdown, it would never have reopened. The R’s were gleefully hoping that would happen because they knew it would be the end of our democracy
Strongly disagree. If the shutdown had happened, FOX News and RW media would've run nonstop segments on how the crashing economy--and eventual recession--were all Dem's fault, and not due to Trump/GOP. The MSM would've spinelessly concurred. IF FOX News were NOT where nearly all conservatives and many independent voters get their news, it might've been effective. For a few days or a week.
Secondly, a protracted shutdown would've hurt Americans on SS, Medicare, etc. the hardest. People Dems want to help not hurt.
How 'bout let's find the right hill to fight and/or die on. Shutdowns are politically risky even at the best of times, even for the GOP--and they've got a full-time propaganda network in their corner.
They are the ones who can easily be dominated and pushed around - neither Tr nor any of his sycophants could stand up to any mature self-confident adult (just watch Tr submitting to Putin...)
They've also effectively pulled several women into that group of sociopaths. Listening to Pam Bondi trying to sternly stare into the camera to justify Trump's right to ignore a federal judge decision this week made me want to laugh. It's so obvious she has no clue whatever of what she was supposed to have learned in law school. Tulsi Gabbard is the real scary one. All of Trump's appointees are so truly inept and trying to function out of their league.
The Khmer Rouge also slaughtered the educated people of Cambodia in what became known as The Killing Fields. There is a strong resentment by Trump et al against the educated and educators.
People with doctorates voted 3:1 against Trump last year. Any and all highly informed voters are a threat to Trump/GOP, who almost entirely prefer the voters uneducated and gullible. OR who entirely get their news from non-news infotainment sources like FOX News.
A few years ago in Florida I was talking to this fund manager. A FOX-loving guy with a frickin' MBA, who insisted Florida--even then a Red state--was intentionally giving illegals voting rights along with their driver's licenses. So even the educated can fall for RW gibberish, like Replacement Theory.
Yes, but people with doctorates might also agree that the economy has been much, much kinder to Ph.D.s than it has been to non-college educated workers and maybe rather than simply stupid without ability to read Donald Trump, Joe Sixpack is irate and hears his own voice in Trump’s bile.
That is, intelligent or not they can read people and the poison is a feature, not a bug.
That's a nice turn of phrase, "Joe Sixpack is irate and hears his own voice in Trump’s bile." But it only partly explains the appeal of Trump to the low-information voter; who's been conned by Fox News into nonsense land to believe that it's *not* the GOP financial elites that own America that are providing his financial ass-fucking.
And despite *my* doctorate, I'm still $100k in debt, and got screwed the same as everyone else.
I agree. They are incels because they give off bad vibes - a product of a really bad upbringing. Same with the Nazis, MAGAts, Jan 6ers... The GQP is a hotbed of personality disorders masquerading as a political movement.
Elizabeth, You are not nuts. Not only are these young thugs much like all religious zealots, the MAGA base also reflects a number of cult-like characteristics. To me this whole episode also feels much like what we saw during the Chinese cultural revolution decades ago.
Actually the tech bros are not usually religious in the traditional sense of the word. Many, like Musk, ascribe to an extreme form of sci-fi, Matrix-style transhumanism in which AI seems to function as their God. If it’s not a cult it is very like one.
“ Transhumanism: billionaires want to use tech to enhance our abilities – the outcomes could change what it means to be human”
“ Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion
The tech world’s fixation on artificial intelligence has spawned beliefs and rituals that resemble religion — complete with digital deities, moral codes, and threats of damnation.”
Recently, NYT featured an article where attendees at $50 a pop (covered the refreshments cost/weeds out financial losers) were invited to religious discussion groups hosted by Peter Thiel. One gathers that the attendees pretend to be religious and attend these functions as a networking opportunity to climb the tech company ladder. I think leaders (corp, govt) find that people who claim to be religiously devout aren't critical thinkers, fearful & easily cowed, therefore won't question them. Considering that the Christian right movement is anti-LGBTQ & Thiel has a male partner with whom he's adopted kids just goes to show how fraudulent this whole religious charade is.
I mean, kind of, yeah? It reminds me of the proto-too-online kid who ran off to join the Taliban in 2001 from Marin. Just looking for something to believe in and an empire to break.
Ergo, Musk's comment on empathy being the fatal flaw in Western Civilization. Tech bros like Musk may be brilliant in certain professional ways; but they're too broken to understand their own personality defects, trumpeting their cruelty like it's a strength.
The Cambodian killing fields should have put paid to the idea that young adults, whether men or women, are incapable of extreme cruelty and callousness. The Khemer Rouge was essentially an army of teenage boys and girls armed with AK47 and an ideology. The only difference between them and the Muskjugend is the absence of guns.
As someone who receives SSDI every month, I now hold my breath on the second Wednesday of every month, checking to see that the money has been deposited.
I also reduced the amount of cash in that account to the bare minimum, just in case they somehow have access (because of the direct deposit link) and want to take some benefits back. Scary times!
My bank sends me a text whenever there is a deposit, also when there is a draft over the amount I have specified, and when the account drops below a level I have set. Go to their site and fill in the settings.
Yea, my one-legged, severely diabetic brother is busily looking for work, ANY work that he can do, with the assumption that Musk is going to savage SSDI
Remember Alan Greenspan’s assertion that funding for the social security system may not be sufficient to honor future claims without reforms to that system .
My belief has always been that the uber rich
dread that the masses will enact legislation to
use the general fund to support social security
- ie raising income taxes to keep SS afloat
as the baby boomers strain the system.
They are perfectly ok with using tax dollars to
buy bombs for “ peace” but heaven forbid some of that money goes to disabled workers!
Medicare Advantage is already looting those funds like FL politician Rick Scott did as CEO of HCA. The goal is to privatize SSI and PE funds like Black Rock are lining up to get on that gravy train.
FWIW, the general fund already is diverted to support social security. This is what the fictional social security trust fund is. There is not a large pile of money set aside decades ago to pay for social security as people might imagine. Previous surpluses were diverted into the general fund to support spending programs at the time and are long gone. Instead the trust fund is a IOU the government wrote to itself. Cynically it is about as valid as an IOU you might write to yourself to pay yourself back for the trip to Vegas last week.
What has to happen is at some point payroll taxes are increased and/or benefits cut until what is necessarily a pay as you go program decides to actually balance payments against receipts.
My son has cerebral palsy, a condition usually resulting from brain injury at birth. He used to receive SSI. Now he gets SS Survivor benefits. As his Representative Payee, I know exactly when his payment is in the bank. It’s always been very reliable. No anxiety! Now? Who knows! And I am so dammed angry at the villains in The White House, the whole rotten crew of them!
Coleman, I feel your pain. I am panicking just thinking back to when SSDI was my main source of income, and man! SSDI is a real lifeline for many, and unfortunately it can be meager as it is, depending on your income history and the cost of living in your area. The fact that WE ALL PAY SOCIAL SECURITY OUT OF OUR PAYCHECKS, and we always have, doesn't seem to have registered with Elon Musk or his team of dunces. Can we somehow collectively promise a backlash major enough to force them to cancel their plans to steal it?
The reason for the gleeful and gratuitous cruelty—aside from the childish ego-driven behavior Mr. Krugman points out—is that Elon and the Doge kids’ minds are saturated in video games. We the people are NPCs, “Non-Playing Characters”— we are not human. It’s fun to blow us up. That’s what we get as a culture for raising a generation of boys on these games.
One thing I will never understand is why working people would want to come home and be entertained by watching an a**hole boss firing people for not kissing his a**. I mean, don’t they get enough of that at work? OTOH I don’t understand the appeal of horror movies, either, so maybe it’s me.
I mean, it's stupid, but I swear that's what the thinking is.
I live in the DC area, though thankfully not a fed. Even here and even after more than forty years of Reaganite assaults on government functions, you would not believe how many feds I've met who are utterly convinced that all of these assaults are good and necessary. All of them think they're the literal only person in their office who does any work, and if the GOP was finally allowed to cut loose in their department without all of these foolish "laws" and "contracts" to hold them back, all that dead weight would be fired while *they* would finally be recognized and promoted.
Main Character Syndrome and Dunning-Kruger Effect turn a hell of a lot of people into complete idiots.
I totally agree with your last sentence. And thank you for the insight about the folks who swear they are the only one who does any work— I have seen this dynamic in other work environments.
I now understand why my old boyfriend had that book The Art of the Deal and admired Trump....he was just like him. Working in a biz with his dad, who started it. Who was it that said, "Started on 3rd base & thought he hit a triple?" I never aspired to read/watch blowhards, however I did used to read biz publications for whatever insight I might gain. I can't remember--think it was Forbes--bragging about how successful of a biz person Melinda Gates was the other day and now realize what a sucker I once was. If she wouldn't have married Bill, no one ever would see her on the cover of some biz pubs. People in positions like her's while employed at MS are a dime a dozen and aren't billionaires.
I love horror movies, but I would never watch the apprentice. Even before the orange one switched to politics, I never understood his appeal to people. That show was never that good.
I couldn’t watch it, either. I think part of the appeal is that people who feel they have little power or control in their lives derive vicarious comfort (and some dopamine) watching a “powerful man” behave cruelly to other little people. The cruelty some people show towards, for example servers in restaurants or retail workers is similar.
Your comment articulates what I was thinking years ago, as my wife and teenage son were amused and entertained watching The Apprentice. When the show evolved into “Celebrity Apprentice” things got even worse, because in that version the winner was whomever had the most rich friends who wanted to advertise their philanthropy while simultaneously kissing tRump’s ass. At that point the show stopped pretending to be a meritocracy and morphed into a soulless dollar-ocracy, which is where we now are as a nation.
He's also a disposable cut-out who absorbs ire that would otherwise be directly aimed at DJT. A cut-out who can be disposed of when he's become too unpopular, "Your $290 million could only take you so far, Elon. You're dragging me down, and have to go."
Sadly, we're the ones who got the ball rolling. Remember "don't trust anyone over thirty"? Yes, we had good reason for that, but I suspect it's lost to history. We are now experts on the generation gap - we've lived both sides of it.
Heh, I was a little kid when people said “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” My parents, who were over thirty, but not by much, were sorely offended, and being a little kid I was offended on their behalf. (My parents were liberal dems and did not like being lumped into the category of “enemy.” And they went and named me “Karen.”)
I was a little kid too, but my parents were well over thirty. They too were liberal dems. They never mentioned how they felt about the generation gap, but they were opposed to the war - even though my father was a WWII vet.
The reason was we were young and ignorant and there were a lot of us. The “good reason”—that people are not angels—is something we hadn’t fully figured out the dimensions of. Treating everyone as suspect because you come across a bad apple or two is a hallmark of immaturity, of not having learned how the world works. Some extrapolated the tragedy of the war in Vietnam to indict everyone in government and business as suspect, though that remained a fringe view until everyone got access to the internet.
That's not 100% true. A lot of it was legitimate paranoia. Since no one over thirty was getting drafted, a lot of people over thirty supported the illegal war, and "volunteered" anyone they knew to be planning to dodge.
As a result, how was anyone supposed to know who they could trust? They had to hold their cards as close to the chest as possible right up until they safely landed in another country.
Well, kind of. I think it was because most of those over thirty supported the war in Vietnam, and those of us under thirty opposed it. But we were young and naïve, not so much ignorant.
A lot of those doge boys had very coddled childhoods, and exhibit entitled behaviors typical of that . …while I had a very traumatic childhood & believe I’m a very empathetic person, so don’t know if that’s the reason.
are they all young? tell us what they’ll be like or predict when 59, 60, etc… if aged, unsuccessful, etc like the tea party that came out of gingrich and started the current downfall of America…
I honestly don't think the cruelty is the point of this particular attack. It's just like you say, the recipients, are faceless masses to Musk and the DOGE Kids. It is inevitable that some these recipients will die when their income is cut off, from starvation or delayed medical care or heat or cool their homes. But these abstract entities are going to be sacrificed on the altar of Musk's inability to admit he was wrong, and fed into the grinder to feed the upcoming tax cuts for billionaires.
That >is< cruelty. They don't see their victims, but they're gleefully harming people. They're enjoying the pain they're inflicting.
They might claim "it was just about profit" and "we never saw the faces of the victims, so that makes us innocent", but that doesn't absolve them of their sadism.
Japan has young generation too much into video games. Europe and Canada young generation into video games. But they don't have the problems as we have in America.
Japanese Manga [comics] can be very violent, as are some anime. They don't appear to have the same problems as we have in the US, so I don't blame violent videogames which have been the target of moral panics in the US.
Some combination of video games and economic hardship seem likely to me why a much larger segment of 20 something’s are not dating. That will have profoundly negative and demographically unrecoverable consequences down the road.
I'm gonna push back on this a bit. As a 24 year old I also grew up around video games, in truth they're no different from any other form of media from the past. Just as it was your parents' job to make sure the books you read and TV you watched were kosher (at least until you were worthy of the responsibility of choosing for yourself), my mom made sure the games I played were suitable to my mental acuity growing up. Sadly, it seems like many parents were derelict in this responsibility.
There are also NPCs with exponentially more humanity than Elon and his goons; lovingly crafted by artists who chose games as their medium. Look up the stories of Millicent from Elden Ring or Aerith from Final Fantasy 7 (although to be pedantic, she is a playable character) as a start - you may be pleasantly surprised by the depth of storytelling you may find.
Not really. For very young adolescent and pre-adolescent boys what you say may be true. But for older kids--myself at sixty-three included--video games have evolved into much more mature, reality- and values-contemplating challenges that I believe encourage nuanced thought. Which is perhaps why young people are 5-6x times more likely to recognize online scams than older people like myself.
But adolescent boys--and girls--also require actual human interaction to grow and mature. Which even before the Pandemic was lessening due to the siren song of social media.
The Grace Commission under Reagan was a group of ideological CEOs that cut SSA's staffing by 17,000 as SSI expanded.
This was critical because Reagan administratively changed the definition of disability and then hastened eligibility reviews to knock people off. Judges and then Democrats eventually outlawed changing definitions for current recipients and without Congress. In NY State we had 330,000 cases to re-review that took over a decade with staffing losses. Many died or disappeared. It was cruel. It was the point.
The GOP found that the disabled were an easy target of scorn and so accusations of laziness and dependence were rampant. The focus became adminstrative law judges (ALJs) who frankly were more administrative than real judges. Allowance rates on disability claims varied immensely by ALJ with many noting appeals took years with their ranks reduced. A lot of cases were allowed due to delays rather than evidence.
And so Trump I tried to bypass ALJs and the courts were all over that too.
I worked 43 years at SSA. The GOP stood for cruelty. I worked in or near offices that shut down. Staffing cuts were gratuitous. In a small office with me and 3 people as manager I did more public service than anything else because I should have had 7 people. Stupid Americans would get mad at me, the staff, the guard even because the waits were long, never equating their vote "to get government off their backs" with real world results. We were officially not allowed to equate the two.
And then after decades of performative shutdowns I was never so glad as to hand in the office keys. Government requires the consent not just of the governed, but tens of millions of them who speak only in talking points inspired by legislators and an executive branch filled with fools aligned with donors speaking only in talking points. Self-imposed cruelty. The cult, according to Theda Skolpol, only saw themselves as deserving.
I am so sorry you had to live through this in your career. Working in systems that are trying to help disenfanchised people, you often get kicked in the teeth. No good deed gets unpunished.
A key aspect of the human condition is that when people are pissed off, they take it out on whoever is right in front of them. It's something we have in common with bumblebees.
First, thank you for your service! SSI saved my life when I was temporarily unemployable and desperate. As for St Reagan -- although the GOP already harbored a fringe of fascists (eg the John Birch Society) that's since consumed it -- he's the phony grandfatherly actor who really popularized the idea that "government is the problem" and made it inevitable that the bitter cult spawned by FOX/GOP propaganda would be able to shout "keep the government's hands off my social security!" without an ounce of awareness.
Before Medicare was approved, Reagan campaigned against Medicare and did ads opposing it as socialized medicine. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he was against any public program that actually helped people.
Thank you. This is obviously true…to the 0.001% of Americans reading this. But thanks to a grossly incompetent Democratic Party and an unethical and incompetent media, the rest of America is oblivious, clueless, befuddled, confused, and completely ignorant.
And, you may want to discuss another concerning work requirements for Medicaid.
American Public Media did a piece on conditioning work requirements for medical assistance. Great opportunity for corporations to rip off the government,
Here's how it works based on similar examples: Let's say there is a work requirement to get Medicaid. There are companies who get paid for finding you that job, each time they find you a job, they get another fee, So, what do they do: they place you in SEASONAL, not permanent jobs, so when one job is over, you need another job, they find you another seasonal or temporary job, and they get another fee,
But don’t you have to be disabled to qualify for Medicaid? Or a poor mother with children she can’t just leave unsupervised? I know in states that expanded Medicaid, lots of people on Medicaid already have jobs because so many jobs pay less than the federal poverty line. As far as private companies benefitting, I doubt they even do that much, there was a big scandal some years ago in my area with one of these job placement companies that was signing people up (sometimes without their consent) and taking credit when one of them found a job on their own.
In a normal functioning nation we would have beautiful federal offices with lovely lobbies and plenty of staff to serve citizens. They would combine postal services, social security, medical, internal revenue, passports, etc in one place. And there would be lots of them.
Currently, we as a society, treat our federal employees and citizens as scurrying rats. It is all so stupid.
I just need to say thank you for your service! As the mother of a disabled son, I have been blessed to have had the assistance of some very helpful, kind and knowledgeable employees in the SSA offices in Los Angeles. I get quite annoyed at people who like to complain about government workers.
Reagan also used the same tactic against black people on welfare with his infamous “Welfare Queen” slur. The media refused to make it clear that there were more poor white people than black people on welfare which helped diminish support for those programs with many on the right. This is a long standing tactic — find examples of cheating in a federal system, no matter how rare, and use that to tarnish entire programs. When it comes to corporations cheating the government on the other hand…. Rick Scott was running Columbia HCA when it cheated Medicare out of millions of our taxpayers’ dollars yet Republicans elected him governor of Florida and then Senator.
At the same time, when Clinton kicked a pile of people from the welfare roles, disability picked up the slack according to the numbers. Was this because welfare was covering for a lot of disability or because non-working individuals suddenly decided they were disabled as another way to get aid?
Thanks for your service, and for illuminating what Republicans are all about! We don't hear enough about all the good things that government does. I'd like to see a social media spotlight on this. Not glamorous but absolutely vital to our well being.
For those of us who have actually been to a Social Security office, it’s even worse than you think. On my visit, it involved long lines just to be let into the building. Then, once inside, crowds of people standing in hallways and sitting on floors. Not an easy experience for the able-bodied, and probably simply not doable for many people with disabilities. But I guess that’s exactly the point.
On the East Coast, even getting through on the phone to SS has always been a time-consuming challenge. They were understaffed long before musk was put into power! It will get much worse.
While they’re enjoying the cruelty, I think the main idea may be to create a system that doesn’t work, highlight the fact that it doesn’t work, then use that as a reason to privatize it.
It is one of my many personal pet theories that in employing teens and tweens, Musk is emulating the Nazi policy of "Jugend führt Jugend", "Youth shall lead the youth", the idea behind which was that kids who never learned shame or compassion were best suited to execute shameless and cruel acts. This policy did not achieve it's nominal ideological goal of rooting out the old elites, because it turns out that if you want to organize things you still need people who have a bit of education which was more readily available to kids from wealthy families. So to some extent it persisted the upper classes through the time of the Nazi rule. But then, persisting oligarchy might not be a flaw from Musks point of view.
In 2018, I toured the Pima Air Museum in Tucson that contains a pristine refurbished B-17 bomber and talked with the 92-year old docent who survived two B-17 crashes flying for the 8th Army Air Force over Germany. He showed a picture of a shot up B-17 that barely made it over the Cliffs of Dover before belly landing in an English field! His second B-17 took a direct hit by AA fire and he was blown out of the plane on fire and landed in a German field and was quickly taken to a German hospital for his burns and then to Stalag 17. Fast forward to the end of the war and the SS guards and Hitler Youth marched the POWs into the Austrian Mountains and they thought they would be killed. Fortunately, lead elements of Patton’s 3rd Army caught up to them and the SS guards surrendered while the Hitler Youth shot at the U.S. soldiers and were quickly killed! The DOGE misfits are today’s Hitler Youth!!!
Urgh, most undeserved Nobel ever. Children going savage because they lack the civilizational input of grown ups? I mean, have you seen todays so called "grown ups"? Children turn not into barbarians all by themselves, they do need direction for that. But I do have to admit that "get them while their young" is not so specifically Nazi, more totalitarian 101. But then for one reason or the other, Musk attracts the Nazi comparison more than the other options.
I think more like 20% population get SSi. SS as 0.2% GDP is about right, but more like 20% of annual budget, which is likely more quoted/understandable figure.
Even here in Norway people on disability are regularly checked up on. Some of them appear in media, with sarcasms like "no, my amputated leg hasn't grown back yet."
You have to keep in mind that laws require reviews. At SSA Congress gave us 3 categories: improvement expected, improvement possible and permanently disabled. Ideally the least permanent would get the most attention, but all needed a contact at some point based on the people we voted into Congress.
Not all national systems are the same. Our SS disability came into existence during economic expansion. And so it was required you could only meet the definition if you couldn't do a job "that existed in significant numbers in the national economy". So according to Congress an amputation that prevents previous employment doesn't prevent a different job (based on education and other factors) on even the opposite coast.
Needless to say Congress never reviewed standards to reflect modern economic realities that especially could be used to serve GOP cruelty.
I listened to an episode on This American Life years ago and it was about a town where a quarter of the residents were on disability. It showed how complex the issue was/is. One of the biggest problems was that the people on disability couldn't stand on their feet for long periods of time making them ineligible for most unskilled or even semi-skilled work. I've had times with slipped discs where I couldn't have stood and walked for hours at a time. (!!! Let's hear it for core exercises!!! No sciatica for 5 years!!) But I'm college educated and can do other kinds of work.
Their motivation has nothing to do with uncovering fraud or manifesting efficiency. They are simply Chaos Agents, frenzied and out of control, smelling blood in the water.
1. Musical coda: great covet, great story and you had me at harmonies
2. Elon is offended that his companies as employer has to pay into the system along with employees...
3. and it is one big pot of gold for the S African leprechaun to put his grubby paws on.
4. Privatization cannot make the program more efficient ... go read a few 5500 schedule C filings for big pensions on eFast2. Oh yeah, also note most, except the Taft Hartley plans are frozen and in final pay out.
5. Privatization is the place you send good programs to be hollowed out by minied interests, and die while allowing employers to provide less and less for employee stakeholders.
Exactly. My brother in law had a massive stroke and was put into a private long term care facility in Pennsylvania. He must have become a too expensive to care for because during COVID he lost over 70 pounds (at over 6' he went down to 110 lbs) and then declared palliative. His kids found a non profit place who asked that he be checked at the hospital, The doctors found evidence of physical abuse and all the indicators of starvation, At the new facility he walked for the first time in years and gained back 30 pounds on 3 months. The lawyers told the family, that if they sued, the large corp would drain them of their resources. The police were informed.
Long term "care" facilities don't exist to care, they exist to profiteer, as evidenced by your brother in law's horror story. It's not an exception, it's the rule.
Privatization also helps create a class of millionaires who get contracts to provide services, such as skilled nursing facilities and all the different variations of senior living care homes. That millionaire class helps prop up those even richer than they are. They are the ones embedded in state and localities that make sure legislatures, county governing boards and city councils toe the line. It’s a recreation of the feudal system, with Mump as king, billionaires Bezos Zuckerberg etc as Dukes, and local millionaires as baronets. The rest of us are serfs.
Trump's hatred of Canada and his doubling and doubling down has now reached the absurd but harmful point of defunding programs of Canadian studies at US universities, such as the very well respected program at the Woodrow Wilson school of public affairs at Princeton, but not only that.
So knowing or saying anything about Canada (beyond insults) has been tacked onto DEI as something to be disparaged however possible.
And MAGAts say nothing, and Republicans say nothing. wow.
Dr. Krugman, respectfully, I think you're overlooking something obvious about Trump, and potentially/probably about Musk too.
There is very little, if any, doubt that Donald Trump is a eugenicist. He probably doesn't know how to spell the word, or what eugenics was/is but it's pretty clear he believes in it. The evidence for this is Donald's objection to helping his disabled nephew William, and comments he made to Fred Trump III.
During Donald's first term, Fred brought disability rights advocates to the Oval Office to meet with POTUS and urge him to do more to help disabled Americans. After that meeting, according to Fred, the POTUS objected to helping pay for William's care and said, "just let him die."
Donald Trump, and likely Elon Musk, see elderly and disabled Americans as "useless eaters" and simply don't care if they die.
Have you noticed eugenicists are often people who wouldn’t meet their own criteria? Hitler was a mediocre man until he tapped into the self-loathing of millions of other mediocre people and used othering to make them feel better about themselves while elevating himself temporarily. Trump and Musk are similar. Musk has openly admitted to having a mental illness and possibly being on the autism spectrum, which by eugenics standards would make him part of the disposable group of humans. Yet he runs around offering his sperm while he doesn’t even meet the criteria for donor banks. It’s absurd.
This thought has crossed my mind, as well. Especially when you consider USAID and who would be harmed and die as a result. No one wants to say it, but killing folks could have possibly been the plan.
Musk was ticked that the South African president wouldn't allow Starlink to operate there without local joint ownership, mainly for national security purposes, it would seem, after shutting off Starlink in Ukraine.
What's common between Trump and Elon Musk. Their arrested psychological development. Something happened in their childhood that their emotional development could not progress while they matured into adults. A part of them is still rebellious spoiled arrogant brat.
I once had a job where I had to tour a mental health facility for children with severe mental illnesses. I’ll never forgot watching six trained psychiatric attendants try to coax a slight blond six year old boy to pick up the mess he made after a severe tantrum. The look in the kid’s eyes made it clear he would harm them if he could. A judge had committed him to care after investigators found no evidence he been abused physically, sexually or emotionally. Because he was so young I asked a couple of the psychiatrists what his chances were for recovery. They said they would continue to try treating him, but the ugly truth is some people are born psychopaths. So it’s possible you are right.
"This is really not very different from what’s happened for four years-plus. You go back to Ronald Reagan, the 1964 speech that made him a national figure, a speech on behalf of Goldwater, and the same hardheartedness, the same — you know, he made fun of John F. Kennedy for talking about millions of people going to bed hungry each night. And he said, “Ah, they were probably all on a diet.” That’s Reagan, 1964. Saint Ronald Reagan. It just hasn’t changed."
This may sound nuts, but the way you describe the young men of DOGE reminds me of descriptions of Taliban recruits.
Poorly socialized young men (and poorly socialized older men) seems like the basic criteria for every Trump appointee from VP on down.
Who would have thought that Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Judgmental Personality could become career defining skills? I keep harping on reading/rereading 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' if you want some insights into where tRump wants to steer this whole thing. It's time for his Reichstag Fire moment.
Corporations love to empower bullies, so psychopaths & narcissists do very well in the corporate world.
There’s solid research indicating the 1 in 25 human beings are psychopaths. Scary how many become powerful.
I'm currently reading Jonathan Taplin's THE END OF REALITY, which focuses on Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, and Andreesen. A case could be made that narcissism, psychopathy, and judgmental personality are top-level job requirements.
Follow up with details on that book. I couldn’t get through it if I tried. I’ve said Zuckerberg ruined the world since about 2014. Opened a facebook account in late 2008. It took about four years for it to evolve into garbage and unverified trashy news.
I've been on FB since about 2011. I've been using FB Purity (https://www.fbpurity.com/) for years, so I never see ads and I can pretty much customize my feed. I'm an editor by trade and I'm active in several of the international editors' groups on FB -- they're indispensable. Yeah, there are some annoyances (like I got reprimanded for calling myself a dyke, and some friends have done time in Facebook "jail" for using colorful language about Trump), but it's a very useful tool, and it's free.
I confess I had never heard of FB Purity; while it sounds more... pleasant, and I respect that your professional niche presents you with more pro's
They may be requirements to become Oligarchs if you were not born to it.
The cruelty is the point. Musk and his technobrats probably think Lord of the Flies is an instruction manual.
Followed by a Kristallnacht moment.
I was a therapist and familiar with the personality disorders throughout my career, but I never heard of a Judgmental Personality diagnosis, although it's correct to note that many people are burdened with a critical/judgmental style. Are you talking about Trump? If so, my take on him is that he is psychopathic (sociopathic) a severe narcissist, has ADHD and is possibly addicted to Ritalin and or Adderall. His sleep wake cycle is also disturbed, which only makes things worse. If I had to guess, I'd say his IQ was within the normal range, but that he has deteriorated due to the aging process, poor nutrition, obesity and quite possibly a dementing process of some sort. Hope that helps you as you attempt to grapple with the fact of this complex and basically repulsive person. Also, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a great and very helpful book, if you can stomach reading it.
I think ‘Judgmental Personality’ should be an additional axis II disorder characterized by the worldview that ‘theirs’ is the only valid viewpoint and the need to control other people particularly their behavior and speech.
Trump can’t be intelligent, and they’ve said he literally can’t read…the destruction and harm, the cruelty, viciousness, rage is equivalent to Kim Jong il…it isn’t logical, sustainable therefore not intelligent. it he hadn’t been born rich, so many wouldn’t have enabled him.
Read it too long ago after a night in Santiago, Chile in the summer of 1974. Too many clueless people.
In fact we see WW2 continue with the MAGA party as the renaissance of NSDAP and the struggle of the White Rose or Staufenberg, French Resistance, Franklin Roosevelt against it. Only difference that MAGA/Musk/Trump plan no Holocaust. But other types of genocides are possible.
Hmm, replace Jew with illegal immigrant and there are some strong similarities.
If we ever went down that terrible road, the GOP would first send Liberal journalists, activists, labor organizers, etc. to the camps. The very camps they're desperately trying to build for illegals. After building the camps, adding extra showers would be a breeze.
Then, they'd turn on the Jews, mainly because racism, antisemitism and xenophobia are fairly ingrained personality traits in many/most GOP voters. Regarding Evangelicals, who comprise 50% of the GOP Base, they currently conditionally approve of Israel and Jews, because they believe Israel will start the nuclear war that will end all life on earth, and result in all Tue Christians being raptured up into heaven on mushroom clouds of glory to live with Jesus.
But Evangelical support for Jews and Israel is conditional. The Mormons, for example, pledge their support conditional on Jews/Israel remaining a "righteous" people. All it would take would be whoever is currently running the GOP to wake up in a bad mood one day and revoke that designation. Then, shower time.
I'd been told the "rapture" will take all the Christian Nationalists [includes only some groups of evangelicals as not all evangelicals are MAGAs] to Israel where they'll see Jesus who will then allow them to spread out again over the world scooping up the riches of those who were not righteous enough to survive the flying zombie trip to Israel. So, basically, no different than the oligarchs mindset -- just take all the riches for themselves.
Who said they don’t plan a Holocaust?
I read that book in 11th grade.
Instead we’re seeing the Tesla Burning moment.
Schumer interview on today’s MSNBC’s Morning Joe, paraphrased: if the gov’t shutdown, it would never have reopened. The R’s were gleefully hoping that would happen because they knew it would be the end of our democracy
Strongly disagree. If the shutdown had happened, FOX News and RW media would've run nonstop segments on how the crashing economy--and eventual recession--were all Dem's fault, and not due to Trump/GOP. The MSM would've spinelessly concurred. IF FOX News were NOT where nearly all conservatives and many independent voters get their news, it might've been effective. For a few days or a week.
Secondly, a protracted shutdown would've hurt Americans on SS, Medicare, etc. the hardest. People Dems want to help not hurt.
How 'bout let's find the right hill to fight and/or die on. Shutdowns are politically risky even at the best of times, even for the GOP--and they've got a full-time propaganda network in their corner.
Either way we are damned. This way it will take longer or maybe something big will break in the months ahead that will break the hold.
I'm surprised he hasn't already given Rittenhouse a prominent role.
Please. Don't give him any ideas
None that he doesn't already have.
hush.
LOL, don't worry. It's nothing he hasn't thought of already.
Rittenhouse is not smart enough.
For Musk, no, thank god. But the Republican Chairman loves the poorly educated and the morally defective…
That's his top qualification!
Where's Pillow man & the Ghoul ?
They are the ones who can easily be dominated and pushed around - neither Tr nor any of his sycophants could stand up to any mature self-confident adult (just watch Tr submitting to Putin...)
Sexually Incompetent and Repressed is the term n for them
SIRs
They've also effectively pulled several women into that group of sociopaths. Listening to Pam Bondi trying to sternly stare into the camera to justify Trump's right to ignore a federal judge decision this week made me want to laugh. It's so obvious she has no clue whatever of what she was supposed to have learned in law school. Tulsi Gabbard is the real scary one. All of Trump's appointees are so truly inept and trying to function out of their league.
It reminds me of the Khmer Rouge many of whom were children given power they had no idea how to use
The Khmer Rouge comparison resonates.
Not off topic at all.
The Khmer Rouge also slaughtered the educated people of Cambodia in what became known as The Killing Fields. There is a strong resentment by Trump et al against the educated and educators.
Getting rid of the educated elites is a common autocratic move. Mao’s cultural revolution is an example.
Exactly.
People with doctorates voted 3:1 against Trump last year. Any and all highly informed voters are a threat to Trump/GOP, who almost entirely prefer the voters uneducated and gullible. OR who entirely get their news from non-news infotainment sources like FOX News.
A few years ago in Florida I was talking to this fund manager. A FOX-loving guy with a frickin' MBA, who insisted Florida--even then a Red state--was intentionally giving illegals voting rights along with their driver's licenses. So even the educated can fall for RW gibberish, like Replacement Theory.
Yes, but people with doctorates might also agree that the economy has been much, much kinder to Ph.D.s than it has been to non-college educated workers and maybe rather than simply stupid without ability to read Donald Trump, Joe Sixpack is irate and hears his own voice in Trump’s bile.
That is, intelligent or not they can read people and the poison is a feature, not a bug.
That's a nice turn of phrase, "Joe Sixpack is irate and hears his own voice in Trump’s bile." But it only partly explains the appeal of Trump to the low-information voter; who's been conned by Fox News into nonsense land to believe that it's *not* the GOP financial elites that own America that are providing his financial ass-fucking.
And despite *my* doctorate, I'm still $100k in debt, and got screwed the same as everyone else.
Idiot and troll.
Oh, a Rumper reads Krugman??
Maybe you had to be in Southeast Asia at the time.
I also suspect they are incels.
I agree. They are incels because they give off bad vibes - a product of a really bad upbringing. Same with the Nazis, MAGAts, Jan 6ers... The GQP is a hotbed of personality disorders masquerading as a political movement.
Spot on
That may change if they screw with the wrong vets. Methinks others would happily join.
I think that is a very good analogy.
Elizabeth, You are not nuts. Not only are these young thugs much like all religious zealots, the MAGA base also reflects a number of cult-like characteristics. To me this whole episode also feels much like what we saw during the Chinese cultural revolution decades ago.
Actually the tech bros are not usually religious in the traditional sense of the word. Many, like Musk, ascribe to an extreme form of sci-fi, Matrix-style transhumanism in which AI seems to function as their God. If it’s not a cult it is very like one.
“ Transhumanism: billionaires want to use tech to enhance our abilities – the outcomes could change what it means to be human”
https://theconversation.com/transhumanism-billionaires-want-to-use-tech-to-enhance-our-abilities-the-outcomes-could-change-what-it-means-to-be-human-220549
“ Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion
The tech world’s fixation on artificial intelligence has spawned beliefs and rituals that resemble religion — complete with digital deities, moral codes, and threats of damnation.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/silicon-valleys-obsession-with-ai-looks-a-lot-like-religion/
Recently, NYT featured an article where attendees at $50 a pop (covered the refreshments cost/weeds out financial losers) were invited to religious discussion groups hosted by Peter Thiel. One gathers that the attendees pretend to be religious and attend these functions as a networking opportunity to climb the tech company ladder. I think leaders (corp, govt) find that people who claim to be religiously devout aren't critical thinkers, fearful & easily cowed, therefore won't question them. Considering that the Christian right movement is anti-LGBTQ & Thiel has a male partner with whom he's adopted kids just goes to show how fraudulent this whole religious charade is.
The extreme form of transhumanism many tech bros ascribe to functions very much like a religion.
Thanks for the link. It's not a connection I was aware of. Certainly not a future I look forward to...
Yup. Just think how juiced you'll be when you get your own implants.
and hitler nazi youth…
I mean, kind of, yeah? It reminds me of the proto-too-online kid who ran off to join the Taliban in 2001 from Marin. Just looking for something to believe in and an empire to break.
Science fiction seduced my mind decades ago...But the heart is another thing entirely, yes?
Not nuts at all. These unconnected men lean toward cruelty and violence as a way to bond with others. But who pays the price?
Ergo, Musk's comment on empathy being the fatal flaw in Western Civilization. Tech bros like Musk may be brilliant in certain professional ways; but they're too broken to understand their own personality defects, trumpeting their cruelty like it's a strength.
Lack of empathy is a sign of a sociopathic personality disorder.
Not at all nuts. The parallel is striking.
Actually, it's the demographic all extremist groups target.
I'll spitball out there that 'Taliban recruits' are probably smarter.
And also had a semblance of an excuse for being so feral and angry, at least compared to these DOGE creeps.
I disagree.
That doesn't sound nuts at all.
Both groups have the same attitudes and beliefs.
The Cambodian killing fields should have put paid to the idea that young adults, whether men or women, are incapable of extreme cruelty and callousness. The Khemer Rouge was essentially an army of teenage boys and girls armed with AK47 and an ideology. The only difference between them and the Muskjugend is the absence of guns.
I like "Muskjugend."
Just so.
One of those DOGE kids is going to grow up, realize what theyve done, feel remorse and write a tell all book one day.
The word "Taliban" is literally the Pashtun translation of "students".
Neither was Musk
Musk was given huge power WITHOUT any form of Congressional approval. Unlike every single other Cabinet appointee.
That doesn’t help your case at all.
As someone who receives SSDI every month, I now hold my breath on the second Wednesday of every month, checking to see that the money has been deposited.
Same 😳
Same. Check your account online regularly.
I also reduced the amount of cash in that account to the bare minimum, just in case they somehow have access (because of the direct deposit link) and want to take some benefits back. Scary times!
I did the same with the account linked to the IRS. Money to be sent goes in the day before, and money comes out the day anything gets deposited.
My bank sends me a text whenever there is a deposit, also when there is a draft over the amount I have specified, and when the account drops below a level I have set. Go to their site and fill in the settings.
To be clear, I meant your Social Security account at ssa.gov. You can see if there are problems before a payment is missed
Yea, my one-legged, severely diabetic brother is busily looking for work, ANY work that he can do, with the assumption that Musk is going to savage SSDI
Remember Alan Greenspan’s assertion that funding for the social security system may not be sufficient to honor future claims without reforms to that system .
My belief has always been that the uber rich
dread that the masses will enact legislation to
use the general fund to support social security
- ie raising income taxes to keep SS afloat
as the baby boomers strain the system.
They are perfectly ok with using tax dollars to
buy bombs for “ peace” but heaven forbid some of that money goes to disabled workers!
Medicare Advantage is already looting those funds like FL politician Rick Scott did as CEO of HCA. The goal is to privatize SSI and PE funds like Black Rock are lining up to get on that gravy train.
Part of the deficit, has been financed by borrowing from social security. Shrub spoke once, Very briefly about defaulting on those debts.
FWIW, the general fund already is diverted to support social security. This is what the fictional social security trust fund is. There is not a large pile of money set aside decades ago to pay for social security as people might imagine. Previous surpluses were diverted into the general fund to support spending programs at the time and are long gone. Instead the trust fund is a IOU the government wrote to itself. Cynically it is about as valid as an IOU you might write to yourself to pay yourself back for the trip to Vegas last week.
What has to happen is at some point payroll taxes are increased and/or benefits cut until what is necessarily a pay as you go program decides to actually balance payments against receipts.
Me too!
Ditto. So far so good, but ....
My son has cerebral palsy, a condition usually resulting from brain injury at birth. He used to receive SSI. Now he gets SS Survivor benefits. As his Representative Payee, I know exactly when his payment is in the bank. It’s always been very reliable. No anxiety! Now? Who knows! And I am so dammed angry at the villains in The White House, the whole rotten crew of them!
Coleman, I feel your pain. I am panicking just thinking back to when SSDI was my main source of income, and man! SSDI is a real lifeline for many, and unfortunately it can be meager as it is, depending on your income history and the cost of living in your area. The fact that WE ALL PAY SOCIAL SECURITY OUT OF OUR PAYCHECKS, and we always have, doesn't seem to have registered with Elon Musk or his team of dunces. Can we somehow collectively promise a backlash major enough to force them to cancel their plans to steal it?
Us, too.
The reason for the gleeful and gratuitous cruelty—aside from the childish ego-driven behavior Mr. Krugman points out—is that Elon and the Doge kids’ minds are saturated in video games. We the people are NPCs, “Non-Playing Characters”— we are not human. It’s fun to blow us up. That’s what we get as a culture for raising a generation of boys on these games.
And a previous generation raised on Apprentice
One thing I will never understand is why working people would want to come home and be entertained by watching an a**hole boss firing people for not kissing his a**. I mean, don’t they get enough of that at work? OTOH I don’t understand the appeal of horror movies, either, so maybe it’s me.
"He's not firing people like ME! He's firing people like my idiot co-worker! I'm sure he'd recognize MY value!"
That is the same rational that people use when they vote in populist dictators: "he won't repress me, he will repress the other guys"
Yeah, right.
I mean, it's stupid, but I swear that's what the thinking is.
I live in the DC area, though thankfully not a fed. Even here and even after more than forty years of Reaganite assaults on government functions, you would not believe how many feds I've met who are utterly convinced that all of these assaults are good and necessary. All of them think they're the literal only person in their office who does any work, and if the GOP was finally allowed to cut loose in their department without all of these foolish "laws" and "contracts" to hold them back, all that dead weight would be fired while *they* would finally be recognized and promoted.
Main Character Syndrome and Dunning-Kruger Effect turn a hell of a lot of people into complete idiots.
I totally agree with your last sentence. And thank you for the insight about the folks who swear they are the only one who does any work— I have seen this dynamic in other work environments.
I now understand why my old boyfriend had that book The Art of the Deal and admired Trump....he was just like him. Working in a biz with his dad, who started it. Who was it that said, "Started on 3rd base & thought he hit a triple?" I never aspired to read/watch blowhards, however I did used to read biz publications for whatever insight I might gain. I can't remember--think it was Forbes--bragging about how successful of a biz person Melinda Gates was the other day and now realize what a sucker I once was. If she wouldn't have married Bill, no one ever would see her on the cover of some biz pubs. People in positions like her's while employed at MS are a dime a dozen and aren't billionaires.
I love horror movies, but I would never watch the apprentice. Even before the orange one switched to politics, I never understood his appeal to people. That show was never that good.
I couldn’t watch it, either. I think part of the appeal is that people who feel they have little power or control in their lives derive vicarious comfort (and some dopamine) watching a “powerful man” behave cruelly to other little people. The cruelty some people show towards, for example servers in restaurants or retail workers is similar.
It’s no wonder I never got it then. I can find no pleasure in cruelty. I’d worry about my mental state if I could.
Even seeing the occasional ad for the show mad me cringe. For me Trump had negative charisma even back then.
Your comment articulates what I was thinking years ago, as my wife and teenage son were amused and entertained watching The Apprentice. When the show evolved into “Celebrity Apprentice” things got even worse, because in that version the winner was whomever had the most rich friends who wanted to advertise their philanthropy while simultaneously kissing tRump’s ass. At that point the show stopped pretending to be a meritocracy and morphed into a soulless dollar-ocracy, which is where we now are as a nation.
Even seeing the occasional ad for the show made me cringe. For me Trump had negative charisma even back then.
Not to worry. Democrats will be blamed and Musk's approval rating will grow in direct correlation to the suffering.
Musk’s approval rating (which is going down) doesn’t matter, he doesn’t have to win votes to do what he does.
He's also a disposable cut-out who absorbs ire that would otherwise be directly aimed at DJT. A cut-out who can be disposed of when he's become too unpopular, "Your $290 million could only take you so far, Elon. You're dragging me down, and have to go."
Maybe they like watching it happen to someone else.
It's not you.
Yes! This may be a very important under researched contributor to our present circumstances.✅
And of course a culture where what is most feared (and therefore most hated) is aging and disability.
Sadly, we're the ones who got the ball rolling. Remember "don't trust anyone over thirty"? Yes, we had good reason for that, but I suspect it's lost to history. We are now experts on the generation gap - we've lived both sides of it.
Heh, I was a little kid when people said “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” My parents, who were over thirty, but not by much, were sorely offended, and being a little kid I was offended on their behalf. (My parents were liberal dems and did not like being lumped into the category of “enemy.” And they went and named me “Karen.”)
I was a little kid too, but my parents were well over thirty. They too were liberal dems. They never mentioned how they felt about the generation gap, but they were opposed to the war - even though my father was a WWII vet.
My dad served in the Korean War, in military intelligence.
Thanks for the laugh. That said, seriously, Karen Anderson was my beloved babysitter long, long ago. How dare people misuse that name!
The reason was we were young and ignorant and there were a lot of us. The “good reason”—that people are not angels—is something we hadn’t fully figured out the dimensions of. Treating everyone as suspect because you come across a bad apple or two is a hallmark of immaturity, of not having learned how the world works. Some extrapolated the tragedy of the war in Vietnam to indict everyone in government and business as suspect, though that remained a fringe view until everyone got access to the internet.
That's not 100% true. A lot of it was legitimate paranoia. Since no one over thirty was getting drafted, a lot of people over thirty supported the illegal war, and "volunteered" anyone they knew to be planning to dodge.
As a result, how was anyone supposed to know who they could trust? They had to hold their cards as close to the chest as possible right up until they safely landed in another country.
It wasn't entirely unlike Stalin's Soviet Union.
Well, kind of. I think it was because most of those over thirty supported the war in Vietnam, and those of us under thirty opposed it. But we were young and naïve, not so much ignorant.
We're in 1984 now.
Indeed we are. Indeed, 1984 arrived four years ahead of time.
He was born that way.
That plus MuskRat is a psychopath/sociopath.
So is the fat fascist traitor!
I know a lot of people who are gamers and decent people. I think the problem is damaged personalities from a mean or neglectful upbringing.
A lot of those doge boys had very coddled childhoods, and exhibit entitled behaviors typical of that . …while I had a very traumatic childhood & believe I’m a very empathetic person, so don’t know if that’s the reason.
You can grow up in the lap of luxury and still be neglected and abused. Read Mary Trump’s first book: ‘Too Much and Never Enough…
Ordered! Thanks for the tip.
are they all young? tell us what they’ll be like or predict when 59, 60, etc… if aged, unsuccessful, etc like the tea party that came out of gingrich and started the current downfall of America…
I honestly don't think the cruelty is the point of this particular attack. It's just like you say, the recipients, are faceless masses to Musk and the DOGE Kids. It is inevitable that some these recipients will die when their income is cut off, from starvation or delayed medical care or heat or cool their homes. But these abstract entities are going to be sacrificed on the altar of Musk's inability to admit he was wrong, and fed into the grinder to feed the upcoming tax cuts for billionaires.
That >is< cruelty. They don't see their victims, but they're gleefully harming people. They're enjoying the pain they're inflicting.
They might claim "it was just about profit" and "we never saw the faces of the victims, so that makes us innocent", but that doesn't absolve them of their sadism.
Japan has young generation too much into video games. Europe and Canada young generation into video games. But they don't have the problems as we have in America.
Are the Japanese video games as violent as the ones the Americans play? (genuine question)
Japanese Manga [comics] can be very violent, as are some anime. They don't appear to have the same problems as we have in the US, so I don't blame violent videogames which have been the target of moral panics in the US.
Some combination of video games and economic hardship seem likely to me why a much larger segment of 20 something’s are not dating. That will have profoundly negative and demographically unrecoverable consequences down the road.
Many of the games Americans love (including ones rated M) are both made in and more popular in Japan.
yes, they are violent. For example this.
https://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/03/30/japan.video.game.rape/index.html?hpt=P1&iref=NS1
While i personally think that video games are too violent and futile for today's generation, they are not the real cause of present political crisis.
I'm gonna push back on this a bit. As a 24 year old I also grew up around video games, in truth they're no different from any other form of media from the past. Just as it was your parents' job to make sure the books you read and TV you watched were kosher (at least until you were worthy of the responsibility of choosing for yourself), my mom made sure the games I played were suitable to my mental acuity growing up. Sadly, it seems like many parents were derelict in this responsibility.
There are also NPCs with exponentially more humanity than Elon and his goons; lovingly crafted by artists who chose games as their medium. Look up the stories of Millicent from Elden Ring or Aerith from Final Fantasy 7 (although to be pedantic, she is a playable character) as a start - you may be pleasantly surprised by the depth of storytelling you may find.
I think there is so much truth to your comment - I watch the way my own grandkids have been hooked..
Not really. For very young adolescent and pre-adolescent boys what you say may be true. But for older kids--myself at sixty-three included--video games have evolved into much more mature, reality- and values-contemplating challenges that I believe encourage nuanced thought. Which is perhaps why young people are 5-6x times more likely to recognize online scams than older people like myself.
But adolescent boys--and girls--also require actual human interaction to grow and mature. Which even before the Pandemic was lessening due to the siren song of social media.
Thanks for the correction! I appreciate it.
There is a huge GOP history of cruelty.
The Grace Commission under Reagan was a group of ideological CEOs that cut SSA's staffing by 17,000 as SSI expanded.
This was critical because Reagan administratively changed the definition of disability and then hastened eligibility reviews to knock people off. Judges and then Democrats eventually outlawed changing definitions for current recipients and without Congress. In NY State we had 330,000 cases to re-review that took over a decade with staffing losses. Many died or disappeared. It was cruel. It was the point.
The GOP found that the disabled were an easy target of scorn and so accusations of laziness and dependence were rampant. The focus became adminstrative law judges (ALJs) who frankly were more administrative than real judges. Allowance rates on disability claims varied immensely by ALJ with many noting appeals took years with their ranks reduced. A lot of cases were allowed due to delays rather than evidence.
And so Trump I tried to bypass ALJs and the courts were all over that too.
I worked 43 years at SSA. The GOP stood for cruelty. I worked in or near offices that shut down. Staffing cuts were gratuitous. In a small office with me and 3 people as manager I did more public service than anything else because I should have had 7 people. Stupid Americans would get mad at me, the staff, the guard even because the waits were long, never equating their vote "to get government off their backs" with real world results. We were officially not allowed to equate the two.
And then after decades of performative shutdowns I was never so glad as to hand in the office keys. Government requires the consent not just of the governed, but tens of millions of them who speak only in talking points inspired by legislators and an executive branch filled with fools aligned with donors speaking only in talking points. Self-imposed cruelty. The cult, according to Theda Skolpol, only saw themselves as deserving.
I am so sorry you had to live through this in your career. Working in systems that are trying to help disenfanchised people, you often get kicked in the teeth. No good deed gets unpunished.
A key aspect of the human condition is that when people are pissed off, they take it out on whoever is right in front of them. It's something we have in common with bumblebees.
That’s true.
First, thank you for your service! SSI saved my life when I was temporarily unemployable and desperate. As for St Reagan -- although the GOP already harbored a fringe of fascists (eg the John Birch Society) that's since consumed it -- he's the phony grandfatherly actor who really popularized the idea that "government is the problem" and made it inevitable that the bitter cult spawned by FOX/GOP propaganda would be able to shout "keep the government's hands off my social security!" without an ounce of awareness.
Before Medicare was approved, Reagan campaigned against Medicare and did ads opposing it as socialized medicine. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he was against any public program that actually helped people.
Thank you. This is obviously true…to the 0.001% of Americans reading this. But thanks to a grossly incompetent Democratic Party and an unethical and incompetent media, the rest of America is oblivious, clueless, befuddled, confused, and completely ignorant.
Good points.
And, you may want to discuss another concerning work requirements for Medicaid.
American Public Media did a piece on conditioning work requirements for medical assistance. Great opportunity for corporations to rip off the government,
Here's how it works based on similar examples: Let's say there is a work requirement to get Medicaid. There are companies who get paid for finding you that job, each time they find you a job, they get another fee, So, what do they do: they place you in SEASONAL, not permanent jobs, so when one job is over, you need another job, they find you another seasonal or temporary job, and they get another fee,
Sweet.
But don’t you have to be disabled to qualify for Medicaid? Or a poor mother with children she can’t just leave unsupervised? I know in states that expanded Medicaid, lots of people on Medicaid already have jobs because so many jobs pay less than the federal poverty line. As far as private companies benefitting, I doubt they even do that much, there was a big scandal some years ago in my area with one of these job placement companies that was signing people up (sometimes without their consent) and taking credit when one of them found a job on their own.
In a normal functioning nation we would have beautiful federal offices with lovely lobbies and plenty of staff to serve citizens. They would combine postal services, social security, medical, internal revenue, passports, etc in one place. And there would be lots of them.
Currently, we as a society, treat our federal employees and citizens as scurrying rats. It is all so stupid.
Spot on. We live in a bumper sticker society.
I just need to say thank you for your service! As the mother of a disabled son, I have been blessed to have had the assistance of some very helpful, kind and knowledgeable employees in the SSA offices in Los Angeles. I get quite annoyed at people who like to complain about government workers.
Reagan also used the same tactic against black people on welfare with his infamous “Welfare Queen” slur. The media refused to make it clear that there were more poor white people than black people on welfare which helped diminish support for those programs with many on the right. This is a long standing tactic — find examples of cheating in a federal system, no matter how rare, and use that to tarnish entire programs. When it comes to corporations cheating the government on the other hand…. Rick Scott was running Columbia HCA when it cheated Medicare out of millions of our taxpayers’ dollars yet Republicans elected him governor of Florida and then Senator.
At the same time, when Clinton kicked a pile of people from the welfare roles, disability picked up the slack according to the numbers. Was this because welfare was covering for a lot of disability or because non-working individuals suddenly decided they were disabled as another way to get aid?
Thanks for your service, and for illuminating what Republicans are all about! We don't hear enough about all the good things that government does. I'd like to see a social media spotlight on this. Not glamorous but absolutely vital to our well being.
For those of us who have actually been to a Social Security office, it’s even worse than you think. On my visit, it involved long lines just to be let into the building. Then, once inside, crowds of people standing in hallways and sitting on floors. Not an easy experience for the able-bodied, and probably simply not doable for many people with disabilities. But I guess that’s exactly the point.
On the East Coast, even getting through on the phone to SS has always been a time-consuming challenge. They were understaffed long before musk was put into power! It will get much worse.
I had no trouble getting into the building, but once I got onto my floor, the line was out the door. It's not as bad as HRA though.
While they’re enjoying the cruelty, I think the main idea may be to create a system that doesn’t work, highlight the fact that it doesn’t work, then use that as a reason to privatize it.
Ah yes, the Reagan Revolution. In action.
Yep
Pull out the spark plugs - smash the distributor
then scream that the car won’t run .
Or Improve it with AI agents. You don't need all of those "unproductive people". They can go to work at minimum wage picking strawberries.
It is one of my many personal pet theories that in employing teens and tweens, Musk is emulating the Nazi policy of "Jugend führt Jugend", "Youth shall lead the youth", the idea behind which was that kids who never learned shame or compassion were best suited to execute shameless and cruel acts. This policy did not achieve it's nominal ideological goal of rooting out the old elites, because it turns out that if you want to organize things you still need people who have a bit of education which was more readily available to kids from wealthy families. So to some extent it persisted the upper classes through the time of the Nazi rule. But then, persisting oligarchy might not be a flaw from Musks point of view.
In 2018, I toured the Pima Air Museum in Tucson that contains a pristine refurbished B-17 bomber and talked with the 92-year old docent who survived two B-17 crashes flying for the 8th Army Air Force over Germany. He showed a picture of a shot up B-17 that barely made it over the Cliffs of Dover before belly landing in an English field! His second B-17 took a direct hit by AA fire and he was blown out of the plane on fire and landed in a German field and was quickly taken to a German hospital for his burns and then to Stalag 17. Fast forward to the end of the war and the SS guards and Hitler Youth marched the POWs into the Austrian Mountains and they thought they would be killed. Fortunately, lead elements of Patton’s 3rd Army caught up to them and the SS guards surrendered while the Hitler Youth shot at the U.S. soldiers and were quickly killed! The DOGE misfits are today’s Hitler Youth!!!
I don't think that's a coincidence.
Urgh, most undeserved Nobel ever. Children going savage because they lack the civilizational input of grown ups? I mean, have you seen todays so called "grown ups"? Children turn not into barbarians all by themselves, they do need direction for that. But I do have to admit that "get them while their young" is not so specifically Nazi, more totalitarian 101. But then for one reason or the other, Musk attracts the Nazi comparison more than the other options.
What hadn’t occurred to me until I read the comment about the cruelty of DOGE kids - is the uncanny parallel to Red Guards and child soldiers . .
And the Khmer Rouge.
We're not at the "anyone who wears glasses is a suspicious intellectual" stage yet, but...
I had that in mind as well
Slightly more than 2% of Americans receive SSI payments at a total cost of .22% of our GDP.
The Muskovite and Fascist-in-Chief are not just cruel, they are cruel + cheapskates.
Is that right, your SSI cost to the budget? That should be broadcast from the rooftops. By the way, love your name!
I wish Canada would consider annexing the US. That would give Americans universal healthcare.
I think more like 20% population get SSi. SS as 0.2% GDP is about right, but more like 20% of annual budget, which is likely more quoted/understandable figure.
There are 4.9 million SSI recipients in a country of 330 million, or just under 1.5%.
There are 73 million Social Security recipients, or over 20% of the population.
Thanks for that correction!! i’d conflated ssi (supplemental security income) and ss (social security) which are not the same. 👍
Even here in Norway people on disability are regularly checked up on. Some of them appear in media, with sarcasms like "no, my amputated leg hasn't grown back yet."
You have to keep in mind that laws require reviews. At SSA Congress gave us 3 categories: improvement expected, improvement possible and permanently disabled. Ideally the least permanent would get the most attention, but all needed a contact at some point based on the people we voted into Congress.
Not all national systems are the same. Our SS disability came into existence during economic expansion. And so it was required you could only meet the definition if you couldn't do a job "that existed in significant numbers in the national economy". So according to Congress an amputation that prevents previous employment doesn't prevent a different job (based on education and other factors) on even the opposite coast.
Needless to say Congress never reviewed standards to reflect modern economic realities that especially could be used to serve GOP cruelty.
I listened to an episode on This American Life years ago and it was about a town where a quarter of the residents were on disability. It showed how complex the issue was/is. One of the biggest problems was that the people on disability couldn't stand on their feet for long periods of time making them ineligible for most unskilled or even semi-skilled work. I've had times with slipped discs where I couldn't have stood and walked for hours at a time. (!!! Let's hear it for core exercises!!! No sciatica for 5 years!!) But I'm college educated and can do other kinds of work.
Their motivation has nothing to do with uncovering fraud or manifesting efficiency. They are simply Chaos Agents, frenzied and out of control, smelling blood in the water.
Can we say the word Anarchist, yet?
Or do we still need to spell it Republican.
1. Musical coda: great covet, great story and you had me at harmonies
2. Elon is offended that his companies as employer has to pay into the system along with employees...
3. and it is one big pot of gold for the S African leprechaun to put his grubby paws on.
4. Privatization cannot make the program more efficient ... go read a few 5500 schedule C filings for big pensions on eFast2. Oh yeah, also note most, except the Taft Hartley plans are frozen and in final pay out.
5. Privatization is the place you send good programs to be hollowed out by minied interests, and die while allowing employers to provide less and less for employee stakeholders.
Exactly. My brother in law had a massive stroke and was put into a private long term care facility in Pennsylvania. He must have become a too expensive to care for because during COVID he lost over 70 pounds (at over 6' he went down to 110 lbs) and then declared palliative. His kids found a non profit place who asked that he be checked at the hospital, The doctors found evidence of physical abuse and all the indicators of starvation, At the new facility he walked for the first time in years and gained back 30 pounds on 3 months. The lawyers told the family, that if they sued, the large corp would drain them of their resources. The police were informed.
Long term "care" facilities don't exist to care, they exist to profiteer, as evidenced by your brother in law's horror story. It's not an exception, it's the rule.
And they are becoming fewer and fewer as corporations buy up smaller care facilities. Best to die at home or better yet deep in the forest or the sea.
Unfortunately one must still have the ability to get deep into the forest or the sea. Old person's dilemma.
Where can I buy a personal catapult suitable for a 250 pound projectile? Range should be at least 23.6 miles against an onshore wind.
Asking for a friend…
True. Timing is everything.
Terrible, l hope the police take action against them.
Luigi. We need more like that. Lot's more. A few million should do the trick.
Just one note: privatization isn't meant to make it more efficient, just more profitable.
Privatization also helps create a class of millionaires who get contracts to provide services, such as skilled nursing facilities and all the different variations of senior living care homes. That millionaire class helps prop up those even richer than they are. They are the ones embedded in state and localities that make sure legislatures, county governing boards and city councils toe the line. It’s a recreation of the feudal system, with Mump as king, billionaires Bezos Zuckerberg etc as Dukes, and local millionaires as baronets. The rest of us are serfs.
Yes, exactly! Profiteering at its finest.
Or suck it dry and abandon it.
Trump's hatred of Canada and his doubling and doubling down has now reached the absurd but harmful point of defunding programs of Canadian studies at US universities, such as the very well respected program at the Woodrow Wilson school of public affairs at Princeton, but not only that.
So knowing or saying anything about Canada (beyond insults) has been tacked onto DEI as something to be disparaged however possible.
And MAGAts say nothing, and Republicans say nothing. wow.
For real??
Yet there are still a few Canadian MAGAs. The cult is strong.
Dr. Krugman, respectfully, I think you're overlooking something obvious about Trump, and potentially/probably about Musk too.
There is very little, if any, doubt that Donald Trump is a eugenicist. He probably doesn't know how to spell the word, or what eugenics was/is but it's pretty clear he believes in it. The evidence for this is Donald's objection to helping his disabled nephew William, and comments he made to Fred Trump III.
During Donald's first term, Fred brought disability rights advocates to the Oval Office to meet with POTUS and urge him to do more to help disabled Americans. After that meeting, according to Fred, the POTUS objected to helping pay for William's care and said, "just let him die."
Donald Trump, and likely Elon Musk, see elderly and disabled Americans as "useless eaters" and simply don't care if they die.
Have you noticed eugenicists are often people who wouldn’t meet their own criteria? Hitler was a mediocre man until he tapped into the self-loathing of millions of other mediocre people and used othering to make them feel better about themselves while elevating himself temporarily. Trump and Musk are similar. Musk has openly admitted to having a mental illness and possibly being on the autism spectrum, which by eugenics standards would make him part of the disposable group of humans. Yet he runs around offering his sperm while he doesn’t even meet the criteria for donor banks. It’s absurd.
This thought has crossed my mind, as well. Especially when you consider USAID and who would be harmed and die as a result. No one wants to say it, but killing folks could have possibly been the plan.
Musk was ticked that the South African president wouldn't allow Starlink to operate there without local joint ownership, mainly for national security purposes, it would seem, after shutting off Starlink in Ukraine.
Ooh, just wait until robots displace the workforce!
Musk has his fingers in that pie, too.
What's common between Trump and Elon Musk. Their arrested psychological development. Something happened in their childhood that their emotional development could not progress while they matured into adults. A part of them is still rebellious spoiled arrogant brat.
They're both psychopaths raised by psychopaths. It's self reinforcing.
I once had a job where I had to tour a mental health facility for children with severe mental illnesses. I’ll never forgot watching six trained psychiatric attendants try to coax a slight blond six year old boy to pick up the mess he made after a severe tantrum. The look in the kid’s eyes made it clear he would harm them if he could. A judge had committed him to care after investigators found no evidence he been abused physically, sexually or emotionally. Because he was so young I asked a couple of the psychiatrists what his chances were for recovery. They said they would continue to try treating him, but the ugly truth is some people are born psychopaths. So it’s possible you are right.
And it's known to be hereditary.
Paul, allow me to quote yourself back to you:
"This is really not very different from what’s happened for four years-plus. You go back to Ronald Reagan, the 1964 speech that made him a national figure, a speech on behalf of Goldwater, and the same hardheartedness, the same — you know, he made fun of John F. Kennedy for talking about millions of people going to bed hungry each night. And he said, “Ah, they were probably all on a diet.” That’s Reagan, 1964. Saint Ronald Reagan. It just hasn’t changed."
They've been sadists for a very long time. https://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/17/the_conscience_of_a_liberal_new