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Derangement Syndrome


ICTChris

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The phrase "Trump Derangement Syndrome" has entered the cultural lexicon in the past few months and years.  It's taken to refer to people whose opposition to Donald Trump's presidency causes them to become more and more extreme and irrational in their outbursts and reactions to anything he does.  There is a UK equivalent in Brexit Derangement Syndrome, where people seem to bemoan democracy and the fact that stupid people who disagree with me get to vote even though they didn't get any Highers.  The new Prime Minister is going to lead to another outbreak, we can catchily call it Alexander de Pfeffel Derangement Syndrome.

it's generally been associated with people on the left dealing with defeat by going crazy but the same sort of behaviour can be found on the right.  In the USA large parts of the right lsot their minds at the last two Democrat Presidents.  A lot of people who outwardly seemed relatively sane argued that Bill Clinton was responsible for numerous murders as well as large scale cocaine trafficking through Arkansas and then that Barack Obama was a Communist with a false birth certificate.  You can see more of the same thing in the railing against "cultural Marxism" today, usually on YouTube videos taken in their mums basement in front of a world map or the various "stabbed in the back" myths spun by Brexiteers.

Even in our own wee country you can see this.  You can find sensible people, the sort who remember to water their houseplants, claiming that we live in a nationalist dictatorship or people who are members of a long standing, moderate, centrist governing political party act as though they are part of an underground resistance, with talk of UDI and even hints at insurrections to come.  

Are we more deranged than we used to be?  I can remember the early 1990s recession and I don't recall everyone being so seething about that and millions of people lost their jobs, homes and businesses.  A lot of people suggest that social media has made people more deranged by pulling people into ideologically segregated groups which back up things they already think, leading them to react badly to opposing views.  I think social media also causes frustration as it gives the superficial sense of "doing something" politically but in reality by sharing an article or post you aren't really doing anything to change the world.  The dichotomy of increased availability of things to do (online petitions, FB groups etc) with the reduced effectiveness of them causes people anger when things don't change. 

As religious adherence reduces and some of the old class structures such as unions become less important, are people more defined by their political stances and opinions which leads them to react very badly to those who disagree.  There was a Demos survey done last year that showed people react to criticism of their identified party as though it is a criticism of them personally and also that political Twitter accounts are almost entirely separate so, for example,  people who support and oppose Brexit rarely meet.  However, is this any different to years ago when one family would read the Daily Mirror and another the Daily Mail?

What are your favourite examples of derangement?

Are you deranged?

Who is the most deranged P&Ber?

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Also worth saying that talking about things in terms of syndromes is a bit sinister. I don’t think all human beings are on the verge of madness. With obvious exceptions, WTM etc.

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Interesting post from the OP, but I strongly disagree with one section.

Given that we now have the Clown Prince in charge at Westminster who is far more likely to try and close Holyrood down than grant a S.30 order, It's actually about time that our senior politicians started talking about UDI and exploring other mechanisms for legitimately gaining independence. It would be deranged thinking not too.

This whole need a referendum for validity thing is a recent invention anyway.

 

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It's the same processes at work that have always been there, just sped up and multiplied. 

Imagine if they'd had the internet and 2019 social media when Kennedy was shot. They have gone up, around and through 10 times as many iterations of conspiracy theories, memes and controversies in a matter of weeks rather than the one or two it took a half century to percolate.

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1 minute ago, renton said:

It's the same processes at work that have always been there, just sped up and multiplied. 

Imagine if they'd had the internet and 2019 social media when Kennedy was shot. They have gone up, around and through 10 times as many iterations of conspiracy theories, memes and controversies in a matter of weeks rather than the one or two it took a half century to percolate.

jET fUel cAn't beND bUllET tRajekTrEES

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Social media is the main issue. Twitter and Facebook mean people don't really get any attention unless they are extreme. For the most part, reasonable discourse is completely ignored and loud, reactionary outbursts are amplified completely out of proportion, giving the impression that those opinions are more common than not and that reasonable people exist in far smaller numbers than they actually do.

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4 minutes ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

tbf she was an arsehole long before Donald became president 

I just looked her up on Wikipedia, it's quite the read.  She started her own rival to Twitter called Menshn :lol: 

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I don't think it's people on the left who are deranged about Trump and Brexit. It's mainly middle class centrist types who are tramautised that their comfy apolitical bubble has been burst.

It's generally people in the UK who were fine with austerity and Iraq but Brexit is an unrivalled castarophe. In America it's people who were fine with racism under Obama but find it horrifying under Trump.

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12 minutes ago, Detournement said:

I don't think it's people on the left who are deranged about Trump and Brexit. It's mainly middle class centrist types who are tramautised that their comfy apolitical bubble has been burst.

It's generally people in the UK who were fine with austerity and Iraq but Brexit is an unrivalled castarophe. In America it's people who were fine with racism under Obama but find it horrifying under Trump.

I would agree with this. The sort of people who constantly talk about certain centrist politicians being "grown-ups" etc.

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One of the worst cases is Louise Mensch and she was a Tory MP.


Getting on for two years since she infamously predicted Trump and Bannon were facing the death penalty.

I just looked her up on Wikipedia, it's quite the read.  She started her own rival to Twitter called Menshn :lol: 


Started with a convicted nonce IIRC.
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I think part of it is maybe the whole "end of history" story that was spun in the 1990s.  People did think that politics had moved to a very stable equilibrium and that it was effectively a management system for public services.  This was seen through the Major and Blair years and Cameron was a continuation of that.  The financial crash threw this view of things out but there wasn't a significant political reaction until the mid 2010s.   

This was a reply to Craig Killie's post, don't know what happened to my quote.  Function Derangement Syndrome.

Edited by ICTChris
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