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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   31425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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You should probably not believe this. Such arguments have a very poor track record in the past; see similar claims for Trump and Hillary. Particularly the part about revving him up for public appearances with drugs; I'm pretty confident that drugs do not work that way for the actually senile. Biden still does public appearances, still makes public speeches. Sure, he's obviously a doddering old man, but doddering isn't vegetative, nor even close. If he can deliver a coherent speech, he's still enough there to sit in the big chair.

For 'drugs not working that way' - drugs like amphetamines increase attention, drive, but those are all intents or orientations that depends on already-present intelligence, understanding, desires, and just pushes you locally around them. Senility is usually due to general degradation of function - bad memory, lower intelligence, etc - and drugs can't compensate for that. Like how drugs can't make a dumb person smart.

Based on a few clips I've seen recently (and not ones selected by republicans), his speech itself seems very off, stuttery, mumbly - but this isn't senility, he's still quite sharp, able to respond to surprises, read the room, and score points on republicans.

Yup. This thing about "[Leader] is completely senile, and the other side is pretending otherwise in a bid to hold on to power" is just another variant on the "Secret knowledge that will let us win easily" meme. There's been dozens of them for every president in my lifetime, and they never, ever pan out. The real world just doesn't work that way. It's not a subtle pattern, and people should learn to avoid it.

This is the most extreme example of this in my recent memory. While Bush might have pretended to be dumb on stage at least he was somewhat witty and didn't forget what the hell he was talking about mid-sentence.

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