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I think it is obvious now that he has a mild form of dementia.
Scott Alexander wouldn't accept that Biden was senile but it was clear to me early on. It is not professional to diagnose people online, but from the other hand it has to be done for political persons who could cause a lot of harm.
Biden could function because he was surrounded by reasonable people. It does not appear to be the case with Trump. Trump should be removed from the office for reasons of mental incapacity.
You might be right, but it sounds like so much special pleading.
Really? It didn't look like that to me. It looked like he couldn't function, and he was surrounded by liars who propped him up and did their best to hide and deny any lapses.
Biden should have been removed for reasons of mental incapacity, and he was forced to abandon his already-won primary nomination when he couldn't hide it any more. Trump isn't as bad as that guy, so recent in our memories, so why should I care now? Applying the standard to Trump is just another way to try to take him down, and not a genuine concern about the mental capacity of the executive.
If Wilson, Reagan, and Biden can finish their terms, I don't see why Trump should be any different, and I'm not willing to entertain talk of dementia as anything other than partisan sour grapes.
Biden should have been removed. I am just saying that even though he wasn't, it didn't seem to be so bad because people who actually made the policy on his behalf were reasonable. Not great but competent.
Maybe the same expectation was with Trump. It doesn't matter how crazy he is if the administration is reasonable. No one believed that absurd tariffs will get implemented etc. In a way, the problem is not with Trump but that he is surrounded by people who are not competent.
JD Vance is competent, but these people are chosen for loyalty
I can understand that some say nothing against Trump because of loyalty. But allowing tariffs destroying economy? That is borderline to treason against the USA. Most likely they are not competent and don't even understand that.
Is the economy that central to the American nation? I understand that market freedom has been an important component of our political strength, but at the same time, this feels like preparing for the last Cold War right as we are in the midst of a new one.
I think nothing is more important than economy. People talk about different values and in that sense we need more than economy, for example, democracy and pure air (ecology). But economy is a central thing that allows the country to thrive because everything is based on it. It is just that historically the growth was non-existent (0.01% per year) therefore not many past thinkers have mentioned it in the list of good values. We need to add this to the constitution of every country that achieving growth is very important.
I dunno, I think both left and right have been directionally-correct in that the economy is not the end-all-be-all of civilization. Plenty of societies in the past didn't give as much consideration to economic growth, yes, but they seemingly didn't really need it.
The way you wrote this post, I genuinely cannot tell if you are being sincere, because, at risk of mod intervention, it sounds like an alien value. If anything, I think it's the opposite: there are other values that allow us to have economic power, they are what lead to an economy and not strictly the other way around.
We are at this point, and you are concerned, because some of the very values that enable the economy are themselves weakened and endangered.
I think that both left and right makes the same mistake by not valuing economy enough.
Obviously, all people in the past depended on economy 100%. When it was on a subsistence level and they run out of game to hunt, they had to change to agriculture. When crops failed, a lot of people died from famine etc.
Only relatively recently in the history we have something more in our lives than just food to survive. But some of the values that ensure growth are not intuitive, for example, free trade. No wonder people have difficulty getting their heads around.
When Latvia got independence from the USSR, its nationalistic government didn't think clearly about economy, their idea was that we are finally free from the Soviet occupiers we should concentrate on agriculture and close all factories because they pollute. That shows this primeval thinking of economy only as a food source. In a way it is right, we would die without food. But they were unable to grasp the idea that economy is something bigger than that and people got very unhappy when they couldn't get stuff other than food. Food is to survive, what makes life worth living are other things that is not food.
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