On Tuesday, a widely cited psychologist took to YouTube to raise the alarm regarding “more highly concerning behavior” from President Donald Trump. According to Dr. John Garrison, Trump’s recent actions suggest “steep neurological decline” and a dangerously “manic-like state.”
Garrison began by playing a clip from a recent Fox News interview, in which Trump declared that the price of oil is “going to go down like a rocket.” According to Garrison, “There were two neurological issues in this very short clip, both of them verbal. One is that he's having speech planning issues, saying ‘going down like a rocket.’ Obviously, that's combining phrases. He's having a hard time organizing his thoughts. And second is an involuntary vocalization.” Here Garrison replays the clip, noting an abrupt sound Trump makes, explaining, “The pathways that deal with language are disrupted. We are seeing serious issues with language with President Trump.” What’s more, Garrison asserts that such vocalizations are “relatively new.”
In the interview, Trump begins talking about the midterm elections, saying, “I'm going to campaign like I did for myself and I'm going to hope that people think that I'm on. And if I'm not on, if they don't go out and vote, if they go out and vote, we're going to win easily.” As Garrison notes, “What he's saying makes absolutely no sense. He cannot organize his thoughts. He gets confused and he believes what he's saying is coherent. But it truly makes no sense.” According to Garrison, this struggle with verbal planning can be evidence of underlying “neurological issues.”
Here Garrison points to Trump’s pupils, which have remained dilated throughout the interview. “Trump is in a very bright room for this interview,” says Garrison. “You can see the lights actually reflecting off of his eyes, and what should be happening is that his pupils should be constricting rather than dilating because when there's too much light in a room, your pupils get smaller, not bigger.” According to Garrison, “Dilated pupils like this can be from a wide variety of reasons, but it's not just something that happens,” and likely culprits include medication for something like incontinence, Parkinson’s disease, or seizures.
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I mean, I don’t disagree Jeffries and ol’ Chuck are screwing up bigly, but when election day comes - debate has ended y’know? It’s trump or not.
Last election I was really disappointed with some people who couldn’t face the thought of voting against trump. People who presumably were immediately and lastingly oppresse by his brand of incompetent fascism.
While I've always shared that sentiment to some degree, I've always known it was doomed to fail without a change in party. It's become all too obvious that the people that rejected voting all along, were right all along, I hate to say it.
And I say it as someone the encourages people to vote and always votes, against the worse candidates.
But let's not lie to ourselves, unless we get better candidates the non voting people are not entirely wrong. It means nothing in the medium let alone long term, we end in the same place with the controlled opposition in power every other cycle.
I hear you, but the ‘better candidates’ phase was the last year culminating in the recent primaries and there was approximately zero chatter on Lemmy about that. There was 100% more chatter about a certain mayor of a large city where most of us don’t live.
This is either ignorance of the local politics or standard-issue laziness, and it usually manifests as ‘all politicians are terrible; i refuse to vote’, which we should know by now is support for the fascists currently in power. In fact that’s how we got here to start.
So no, I disagree that the non voting people weren’t entirely wrong - they were entirely wrong, and expecting their favored candidate to magically show up on the ballot without any pre-primary support doesn’t change that totals in Congress make a huge difference as so many items fall along party-line votes.
If they choose to abandon democracy entirely- ok. Then they abandon the notion that change can or should happen. Because that’s how change happens at a national, societal level, right?