[Oldmanmatt]

Hey up Andy, no worries. I fully respect your opinion of course. I asked my wife if she thought I was narcissistic. She said her ex was a narcissist and I was probably ok. 😂

Hey up Tom, I’ll be down the wall today with the little one so happy to explain if I catch up with you there? ✌️💗. Your post above creates the much utilised moral high ground ‘double bind’. Classic in ukc opinion pieces and as a tool to win arguments. Guess I’m fucked on that account.

Dan, I have mixed feelings, because I’m not fond of utilising ad hominem or mocking people, unless in direct response to the same.

However, in this instance, I responded to you in the context you chose to enter the conversation. Your post was a textual cartoon, a parody on “opinion pieces” and blunt in it’s mocking description of it’s own (mocking) importance and clearly written to be many of the things you have subsequently denied intending to imply.

I suspect all of your respondents feel a little ashamed at hitting back so hard, I know I do, but you have to understand why that was the initial response.

You were the unexpected Court Jester, leaping out behind us, shouting “Hey Nonny Nonny Ho!” And bouncing an inflated pigs bladder off the back of our heads, in the middle of a funeral. It is unsurprising that a few turned around and bounced a metaphorical fist off your metaphorically red painted nose.

[SA Chris]

I suspect all of your respondents feel a little ashamed at hitting back so hard, I know I do, but you have to understand why that was the initial response.

I don't.

[tomtom]

Hey up Andy, no worries. I fully respect your opinion of course. I asked my wife if she thought I was narcissistic. She said her ex was a narcissist and I was probably ok. 😂

Hey up Tom, I’ll be down the wall today with the little one so happy to explain if I catch up with you there? ✌️💗. Your post above creates the much utilised moral high ground ‘double bind’. Classic in ukc opinion pieces and as a tool to win arguments. Guess I’m fucked on that account.

I’m nipping to the Wilton’s for a quick hit as it’s dry - sorry - the double bind (didn’t know that) was probably naughty on reflection. The overall post was just trying to point out how your posts can come across. Hope that came across. (This is so badly explained... so...)

When talking to you in person there’s a lot of secondary information coming across in facial expressions, body language, tone etc.. that makes what you say (to me) seem fine and in context - but as ever with online most of that gets lost and when you pop up in the middle of a thread with a - er - different kind of post then that’s gonna rock the boat a little (esp without the context etc..)

I expect there’s a fancy word for that....

I’m going to take my foot out of my mouth now and go out. Enjoy DasDepot.

[mrjonathanr]

If you were a narcissist you wouldn’t have been sufficiently concerned to have posed the question.

Now, back to the matter in hand...
https://mobile.twitter.com/PulpLibrarian/status/677854293492371456/photo/1

[Mr E S Capegoat]

I asked my wife if she thought I was narcissistic. She said her ex was a narcissist and I was probably ok. 😂

I meant the post, not you, but my comment was badly phrased.

On a different note, I’m sat reading OTE 63 (quite a good issue with Patta’s born slippy reported). Anyway I can see you lost a Staffordshire guide at the Roaches on the 9th of November 1996. Can’t help wondering if you got it back?

[SA Chris]

Really? I found one there about that time...

[Mr E S Capegoat]

Just following on from genuinely trying not to derail the trump thread... I put some likely incoherent thoughts down


Thoughts on trump and a counterpoint in free solo. It’s hard to think about trump without considering the broader perspective of conscious and unconscious drives of the surrounding society. It goes without saying that trump is a very dangerous and unpleasant man, and at the same time is a scapegoat for a society / culture based on the illusion of the ‘American dream’. It’s easy to become enraged by his behaviour on all levels which is a helpful distraction from deeper issues of divide and alienation created by extreme consumerism / capitalism. Trump appears to me both a narcissist (in its true sense) a sadist and a man who appears to revel in death, (Hence Fromm’s Political leader as a necrophile) in a literal sense and an existential sense. His supporters and haters alike are alienated and disenfranchised, which for him is very useful. He’s a ‘container’ for hate and discontent which can be more comfortably experienced outside the individual. A kind of existential death of self. It’s an interesting idea that this ‘monster’ is (possibly) the product of a corrupt Democratic Party and people who through fear of embracing humanism gave birth to the trump administration. So trump is an idol, all be it an antichrist. I mentioned free solo as a counterpoint as this is a climbing forum and thought it was possibly an interesting way to explore what’s happening. In one sense you could imagine trump on one end of a seesaw and free solo on the other, I don’t believe one would exist without the other to balance it out. Not literally of course but as an illusion of free will and the pursuit of the American dream. Free Solo represents the ultimate accomplishment in this sense, a man with literally no bounds, choosing to deeply express his authentic self through this act of perfect death defying control, all captured for the eyes of a nation and held aloft as a superhuman idol (an alien to the alienated) In trump we experience the Death drive or hate and destruction, in  free solo the Life drive or love and procreation. Yet somehow it managed to be become the ultimate expression of the American dream. A story of a man driven by forces seemingly beyond his awareness and control bewildered and prepared to risk all and at the expense of those around him to conquer the ultimate symbol of El Cap. Leo Houlding tweeted this was death or ‘perfection’ which reminds me of quote by Spinoza who (I think) said ‘when you stare for long enough into the abyss, it begins to stare back at you’.

[Oldmanmatt]

I believe the abyss staring back was Nietzsche‘s nightmare.

That made more sense and I see where you are going with it, but I don’t believe one is dependent or axiomatically born of the other. I see Honold in the same light as any 6 year old climbing just a little further up the tree, where the child knows the branches are too thin, but the compulsion to push a little further is irresistible; rather than symbolic of “the American dream”.

Edit for clarity:

I think Honold, for reasons suggested elsewhere, never grew out of that “phase”, as most do, rather his trees grew with him.

[Mr E S Capegoat]

Ah yes Nietzsche. Funnily enough a psychologist said to me recently, if a client starts quoting Nietzsche then I assume they’re a narcissist 😬

[TobyD]

Ah yes Nietzsche. Funnily enough a psychologist said to me recently, if a client starts quoting Nietzsche then I assume they’re a narcissist 😬

Interesting Dan, I was told by one of my literature professors that if someone starts using the phrase 'American dream' without a very specific context and explanation then all of the remainder of what they're saying will be total rubbish. Except they were rather less polite than that.

[Mr E S Capegoat]

Did he provide an example?

[Oldmanmatt]

Did he provide an example?

Volunteering?

[Mr E S Capegoat]

I’ll have a go.....

‘One time a very long number of days ago, there existed a ‘professor’  of literature... let’s call him Prof. Dick Snodeworthy. He lived in a red brick castle surrounded by many fawning gnomes. Not being entirely sure how he’d arrived there, but struggling with a seemingly un-scratchable itch he became very frustrated. One day for an apparently unfathomable reasons he became very angry at those using the  term ‘American Dream’ and warned his gnomes to beware in quite foul language. Shortly after he released his Magnum Opus called ‘re-contextualising the American Dream’. The end

[tomtom]

Ah yes Nietzsche. Funnily enough a psychologist said to me recently, if a client starts quoting Nietzsche then I assume they’re a narcissist 😬

Is that another double bind? 😜

[webbo]

Ah yes Nietzsche. Funnily enough a psychologist said to me recently, if a client starts quoting Nietzsche then I assume they’re a narcissist 😬

Is that a Psychologist as in Psychology the science that always fails to get anything like the same results when they repeat a study.

[Mr E S Capegoat]

Just to confirm this was a tongue in cheek self mocking post, based on the narcissism thing. Ffs

Anyway don’t get me started on clinical psychology

[webbo]

Just to confirm that this  was to imply I was being deadly serious.






Not.

[Mr E S Capegoat]

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5KeE_oBLz6/?igshid=fwkzx2si58xp

[mrjonathanr]

Interesting article on support for Trump and the fear of death, pinches of salt at the ready:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/23/secret-trump-success-existential-dread-populist-death

Mr Capegoat, you may enjoy this one.
Mr pjh, you may not, it’s in the Guardian.

[Offwidth]

What these so clever analyses about popularism ignore is that these demagogues often get elected because the establishment don't put up a fight. In the US much of the establishment arguably aided Trump. In demographic terms, more than half of the white college educated voted for Trump... a good bit over half for the men in that group. In Trump's case most of his support was white middle class, as the Repulican party was pretty solidly tribal; popularism just helped get him over the line.

If we could put Free Solo anywhere in a comparative context (Im not sure it means much beyond whimsy)  it's probably an indication of the problem... the biggest fault of the US for me is too much emphasis on the rights to individual freedom and not enough on social responsibility. If you're poor in the US, such freedoms don't mean much, as the Clash correctly pointed out decades ago in Know Your Rights.

[andy popp]

Trump is of the establishment. Politically he may have begun as an outsider but the GOP establishment have fully embraced him, as have the corporate and legal establishments (all that said, I'm not letting the Democrat establishment off the hook either).

Trump's "genius" was to wed establishment support to populism and white fragility/ethno-nationalism/out-and-out racism. This essay is essential for understanding the race dimensions to Trump's victory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/

[SA Chris]

With the UK shitstorm going on, we've taken the eye off this one.

Today is going to be the day...

Reckon it will happen or not?

[andy popp]

Yes, he will be impeached today, the third in US history. I might be wrong, but it seems vanishingly unlikely.

[Oldmanmatt]

Yes, he will be impeached today, the third in US history. I might be wrong, but it seems vanishingly unlikely.

I wish I could believe it would have any real effect.

[teestub]

Do I understand correctly that, assuming this passes in the House today, then it just goes to the Republican controlled Senate who will vote against, and therefore there’s no impact on Trump?