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Tag: Psychopathology

“The freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility” (Newsletter)

This is a difficult subject, but recently it’s been bothering me a lot and it’s all Steve Bannon’s fault.

Let’s say you hate something—anything from water pollution to child trafficking—with a passion. Maybe a kid you know got poisoned by PCBs or disappeared. You loathe it so much, you feel, that if you ever captured a trafficker or a polluter you would gladly torture him. Better yet, get someone else to do it and enjoy their suffering vicariously.

Maybe you wouldn’t get off on that, but mightn’t you titter at someone slipping on a banana peel? That’s a mild form of schadenfreude, and we’ve all felt it at some point in our lives. We’re talking about human

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Guest Post: What Russia Understands about Trump

Trump doesn’t qualify as an accomplice to Putin because he’s too unreliable. But he’s clearly under the strongman’s spell, not quite a dupe but close to one. If you want to understand Trump’s relations with Russia, you need to know how the Russian establishment views him, which is pretty much as a useful idiot, according to Michael Weiss‘s recent New York Review of Books article reblogged here.

Trump’s Russia connections go back to the dawn of klepto-capitalism in the Motherland, and he’s been carefully cultivated and curated by Russian intelligence ever since. What Weiss discloses doesn’t rise to a level that might enable Robert Mueller to indict Trump for treason, but it surely demonstrates that for all his blustering, Trump’s strings can be easily pulled by any tempter or temptress savvy enough to stroke his fragile ego.

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