Placeholder for a possible recap to come. (Greetings from a relatively sane part of the USA, California.) ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> ----- Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2019 18:16:11 -0800 From: Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> To: skeptic(a)linuxmafia.com Subject: Re: [skeptic] Trump in a (British) Nutshell Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already. Quoting Laurie Forbes (laforbes(a)telus.net): [...] One difficult aspect of summerising The Toddler-in-Chief to an international audience is that any honest recounting of his failings as to competence, integrity, intellectual capacity, morals, and half a dozen major aspects of life inevitably seems to outsiders like a gross exaggeration, mere absurd and tedious ranting against a political other. It does no good to say 'No, really, I don't see Republican politicians as sui-generis horrible, and here's a list of the ones I've voted for.' Uninitiated listeners will _still_ assume you're merely a bit unhinged. I have an analogy from my personal life. Upon marrying Deirdre in 2000 and having her mother Cheryl move into our house from Courteney, BC, later that year, I tried several times to warn them about interactions with my sister: 'Michele will attempt to pry about my personal doings, by subtly pumping you for information, because she will know you to be not yet on your guard. You need to know, please, please know, that Michele is both the most manipulative and the most offhandedly dishonest person you will ever meet. You should always classify anything she asserts to be fact as unconfirmed until proven otherwise, never take what she says on faith, and, most important of all, any time she asks questions about my personal affairs of any sort, please, please, please refer her to me for what she says she wants to know, and do not answer such questions. Just don't. You probably think, being new to this, that my request is unreasonable and outlandish: That's OK. I don't mind, and I completely understand that reaction. All I ask is please humour me. Do not answer any question from her about my personal affairs. Assume that if I wanted to know, I'd have told her, and that if she should be told something new, I should always and every time be the one to decide that, and never you. So, respect my privacy, I beg of you. Do _not_ just have carefree give-and-take with Michele. She'll play you for a fool, and I'll pay the price, which will be extremely vexing. I don't want to be the seriously annoyed guy saying "I told you so", so please just humour me.' Naturally this did _not_ work, because Deirdre and Cheryl didn't take the request seriously and blabbed details of my medical and work life about the second or third time Michele casually dropped questions about them, which information Michele then maliciously used to my detriment, and Deirdre and Cheryl just reacted with 'Gosh, who knew that she was manipulative and dishonest? There's no way we could have known.' Yeah, thanks, folks. Great job of having my back. For years, I would occasionally post roundups covering current American problems (mostly political) to a mailing list in Melbourne, NSW, but I've not been able to get around to climbing Mount Toddler (covering his stunning feat of combining incompetence, pervasive immorality, a seeming allergy to ever telling the truth, historic corruption, a total absence of leadership traits, all the management habits of a Mafia capo, probable creeping senility, probable foreign corrupt influence, an inability to comprehend democracy, and a love for violent dictators whom he obviously envies) or detailing the GOP slow coup, and haven't yet done one of my roundups since before the November 2016 general election. To borrow Leisureguy's term (in the blog post), the topics are fractal, for starters. And also, one risks sounding unhinged if one is forthright and detailed about them. ----- End forwarded message -----