OT: politics

The poison gas attacks in Syria have stopped for some mysterious reason.

It did in my company.

We only have your word for that anecdote ;}

Nonetheless neoptism a A Bad Thing, from many points of view.

Even the word's synonyms don't sound all that positive: favoritism, preferential treatment, the old boy network, looking after one's own, bias, partiality, partisanship.

DNA is powerful. Historically, people have tended to trust family more than strangers. Usually.

There are lots of family farms and businesses in the USA. They tend to be a lot less ruthless than public corporations. People tend to respect their parent's business and employees, and want to pass it all on to their kids.

We have leased a new place for our company. Uber was bidding against us (to do self-driving car development) and had a lot more money. The owners, retiring from a family business, wanted to pass it onto "a San Francisco family business", which we are, so we got it.

Mother. Father. Children. Family. Love. Not a bad set of things to build a business around.

I didn't come up with those synonyms, the thesaurus did. But then you'd tell me you don't trust the thesaurus either.

A family run business is one thing. You screw up, you're done. Not necessarily so with politics where there can be little accountability and yet the money keeps flowing.

Indeed, except where they don't; think fratricide!

But "blood will out" may not be a bad way to run a family business, but it is a bad way to run a country. Unless, of course, you think hereditary monarchies are A Good Thing.

But then the US does tend to have its dysenteries (Kennedy, Bush), and Trump doesn't appear to be able to keep personal financial gain separate from governing.

Indeed, but it doesn't scale well, and can often be dysfunctional. Plus there are standard problems working for a family business if you aren't one of the family.

You must have hated JFK.

Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General was a major force in civil rights reforms.

Trump talks a lot about 'good people', but mainly seems to want people that won't do anything to get attention, or just plain won't do anything. He's budgeting for... letting US infrastructure collapse.

The population of DC was rather against the Donald on election day, presumably because he hadn't any bureaucratic experience.

rote:

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cure, thin-skinned and undiplomatic. But stranger things have happened.

o were trying to prevent him from getting the nomination? That wasn't becau se they wanted it themselves (for the most part), it's because they genuine ly believed he wasn't fit for office.

Nobody took his claim to be planning to "drain the swamp" any more seriousl y than they took his claim to be about to build a wall along the Mexican bo rder. Probably less seriously, since Trump is creature of that swamp, and always has been.

ose fears are playing out.

It is a feature of US politics, documented in the fact that US corporate ta x rates are amongst the highest in the world, and the amount of tax paid by US corporations (as a fraction of profits) is one of the lowest around.

east is behaving like he does. A president is supposed to be diplomatic, we ll-read, and open to new ideas. Is it any wonder his approval rating fell s o low so early in his term, or that the turnover at the WH is so high? I m ean really, this isn't a political issue. I didn't care for GW Bush, but he at least he didn't have all these personality issues. You can make up all the excuses you want about polls being wrong, "liberal media", but his beha vior speaks for itself.

overt about it and weren't the mental case Trump is.

nothing to do with his policies, it's his behavior that gets me.

Seems unlikely. If he were really smart, the people whom he lured into inve sting in all those projects that went bankrupt would have made money rather than losing it - that would have made it easier to recruit more suckers.

Sure they can. Back off and leave the crazy guy to talk to himself. That's why Trump ended up starring on "The Apprentice", away from people who knew what a fruitcake he was, then ran for president, where he was up against th e kinds of fruitcakes that the Koch brothers (aka the Tea Party faction) ha ppen to like.

Sure you should. It's isn't actually sub-titled "Megalomania for fun and pr ofit" and it was written by a ghost writer, but you do seem to exhibit much the same character defects, and you'd probably enjoy it.

What you ought to read is something closer to "How to live with megalomania " which would concentrate on dealing with the unrealistic convictions that you know best - as in you and Trump being convinced that you know better ab out anthropogenic global warming than the sane 290 of the 300 top climatolo gists.

But you are a megalomaniac, with unrealistic ideas about your own expertise.

Competence and objective judgement are better.

There's a shared common interest in making your off-spring and close relatives do well. Unfortunately "clogs to clogs in three generations" is also historical.

Who tend not to be as competent. Reversion to the mean.

Uber isn't getting great publicity at the moment - they don't seem to be treating their customer or their sub-contractors particularly carefully.

Pretty much every standard politician ever. Note the "advertised to be" part.

The world pre-Trump was no bed of roses.

Mark L. Fergerson

In other words it was contentless cynicism. Trump's predecessors had their defects, but Trump seems to lack any virtues at all.

And a *lot* worse.

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Bill Clinton isn't on record as boasting about having grabbed women by the pussy.

Trump gloated about being able to exploit his celebrity in a remarkably cru de and brutal way, which was unusually gross, even for a US politician.

Cursitor Doom's judgement is not exactly good - he not only reads the Daily Mail but also believes the nonsense they publish - and he doesn't seem to have noticed that Donald Trump is an unusually vile character, even for a U S politician.

He does seem to have been less repulsive than the other Republican candidat es, who were psychopathic enough to appeal to Tea Party extremists, like Ja mes Arthur, but to some extent that may reflect the fact the the American p ublic had been seeing his particular psychopathology on "The Apprentice" fo r some years and may have become habituated to it.

I don't disagree, but Trump is on an entirely different level. He doesn't even present himself as being all that intelligent nor diplomatic.