nhboy
Ubi bene ibi patria
" That’s crazy! That is the instant, intuitive, and, one might think, only possible response of a sane person to a week’s worth of tweets from President Donald Trump. Only crazy people make reckless charges, without any plausible foundation, and then simply shrug and sit on them. Take one recent example: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” This charge is mindboggling, not least for being self-exploding. For Obama to have wiretapped Trump (put aside that that’s not, technically speaking, what is done any longer; the President may have been moved by vague memories of how the feds brought down John Gotti), Obama would have needed his own private team of plumbers to break into, or hack the systems of, Trump Tower. And no one in his right mind suggests that Obama ever had such a team.
The most obvious alternative would be that it was done by the F.B.I., in response to a court order spurred by genuine suspicion of grave wrongdoing. In that scenario, Trump would be asserting that someone in the Department of Justice had grounds for such suspicion, sufficient to convince a judge. But he couldn’t possibly have intended to say that. All this suggests that he may not be capable of the normal logic of normal people, of any kind of political bent. And that, folks, would be crazy.
Of course, we are quickly counselled never to say this, in part because calling Trump crazy would be, in plain English, an insult to crazy people. Diagnosis should be left to those with expertise in it; mental illness is not a category to be used casually to describe those whose behavior we find squalid or even abhorrent. And calling people crazy, to take it to the next dimension, is what totalitarian societies do when they want to lock dissidents away.
Understood. But it is still important, for the sake of sanity, to assert that there is a meaningful sense of the word “crazy” that doesn’t demand medical diagnosis. It arises, instead, from an intelligent description of the normal workings of human minds and human relationships. And it’s important to preserve that sense for common usage, because we often need to distinguish between normal people we disagree with or even think may be actively doing wrong—say, taking health insurance away from millions of people in blind pursuit of an ideological passion—and people who are dangerous because they have passed beyond the ability to actively reason with evidence about the world. "
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-words-we-use-about-donald-trump?mbid=social_twitter
The most obvious alternative would be that it was done by the F.B.I., in response to a court order spurred by genuine suspicion of grave wrongdoing. In that scenario, Trump would be asserting that someone in the Department of Justice had grounds for such suspicion, sufficient to convince a judge. But he couldn’t possibly have intended to say that. All this suggests that he may not be capable of the normal logic of normal people, of any kind of political bent. And that, folks, would be crazy.
Of course, we are quickly counselled never to say this, in part because calling Trump crazy would be, in plain English, an insult to crazy people. Diagnosis should be left to those with expertise in it; mental illness is not a category to be used casually to describe those whose behavior we find squalid or even abhorrent. And calling people crazy, to take it to the next dimension, is what totalitarian societies do when they want to lock dissidents away.
Understood. But it is still important, for the sake of sanity, to assert that there is a meaningful sense of the word “crazy” that doesn’t demand medical diagnosis. It arises, instead, from an intelligent description of the normal workings of human minds and human relationships. And it’s important to preserve that sense for common usage, because we often need to distinguish between normal people we disagree with or even think may be actively doing wrong—say, taking health insurance away from millions of people in blind pursuit of an ideological passion—and people who are dangerous because they have passed beyond the ability to actively reason with evidence about the world. "
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-words-we-use-about-donald-trump?mbid=social_twitter