De Niro - Trump is not bad, but evil.

Jedi boro

Jedi boro

Well-known member
Robert De Niro’s full statement on Trump. Please read and let me know your thoughts:

I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men. I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly.

I see an evil one.

Over the years, I’ve met gangsters here and there. This guy tries to be one, but he can’t quite pull it off. There’s such a thing as “honor among thieves.” Yes, even criminals usually have a sense of right and wrong. Whether they do the right thing or not is a different story — but — they have a moral code, however warped.

Donald Trump does not. He’s a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself — not the people he was supposed to lead and protect, not the people he does business with, not the people who follow him, blindly and loyally, not even the people who consider themselves his “friends.” He has contempt for all of them.

We New Yorkers got to know him over the years that he poisoned the atmosphere and littered our city with monuments to his ego. We knew first hand that this was someone who should never be considered for leadership. We tried to warn the world in 2016.

The repercussions of his turbulent presidency divided America and rattled New York City beyond imagination. Remember how we were jolted by crisis in early 2020, as a virus swept the world. We lived with Donald Trump’s bombastic behavior every day on the national stage, and we suffered as we saw our neighbors piling up in body bags.
The man who was supposed to protect this country put it in peril, because of his recklessness and impulsiveness. It was like an abusive father ruling the family by fear and violent behavior. That was the consequence of New York’s warning getting ignored. Next time, we know it will be worse.

Make no mistake: the twice-impeached, 4-time indicted Donald Trump is still a fool. But we can’t let our fellow Americans write him off like one. Evil thrives in the shadow of dismissive mockery, which is why we must take the danger of Donald Trump very seriously.
So today we issue another warning. From this place where Abraham Lincoln spoke — right here in the beating heart of New York — to the rest of America:
This is our last chance.

Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator.

And it won’t overcome evil if we are divided.

So what do we do about it? I know I’m preaching to the choir here. What we’re doing today is valuable, but we have to take today into tomorrow – take it outside these walls. We have to reach out to the half of our country who have ignored the hazards of Trump and, for whatever reason, support elevating him back into the White House. They’re not stupid, and we must not condemn them for making a stupid choice. Our future doesn’t just depend on us. It depends on them.

Let’s reach out to Trump’s followers with respect. Let’s not talk about “democracy.” “Democracy” may be our holy grail, but to others it is just a word, a concept, and in their embrace of Trump, they’ve already turned their backs on it. Let’s talk about right and wrong. Let’s talk about humanity. Let’s talk about kindness. Security for our world. Safety for our families. Decency. Let’s welcome them back. We won’t get them all, but we can get enough to end the nightmare of Trump, and fulfill the mission of this “Stop Trump Summit.”
 
The Trump followers will follow him regardless. It's like a cult. Anyone who tries to speak with reason are dismissed. Facts that show him in a poor light are written off as Fake News. The more the media cover him, the worse it gets.

If the media ignores him and the outrageous things he says, then he will become an irrelevance. But the media love to show him and write about him because he says and does stupid things - both the left wing and right wing media lap it up. More media coverage = more power.

Same sort of thing applied to Boris. But of course being Britain, we did it in a slightly crapper way. Eventually most people saw through it, but it took years,, but even now the Boris backers are probably desperate for him to come back.
 
A classic Trumpism online a couple of days ago at a rally in Iowa.
“ Isreal was invaded by ‘Hummus’” He actually said it, then finally rectified it.
 
I don't think he is "evil" like Hitler, Pol Pot, Amin, etc. He doesn't appear to want to destroy other countries, lead his country into a war or yet exterminate those who don't see his way. He is however, sociopathic, he is entirely self centred, devoid of empathy for anyone else. He wants power not so that he can wield but so that he can HAVE it. I don't doubt that he is dangerous and were he to be re-elected it could mean an end to true democracy in the USA at least until he shuffled off his mortal coil which is unlikely to be too far in his future. The danger is not Trump but who follows him were he to be elected as Trump will ride roughshod over the democratic institutions in order to cement his grip on power.
 
ThePrisoner said:
Most of what De Niro says also applies to Johnson. Two cheeks of the same populist, depraved @rse.
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Not really as bojo was a politician it wasn’t just about ego it was about money and corruption trump is all about ego.

Trump isn’t a republican never has been
 
While in a Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil. Exactly how evil Trump is I'm not sure, but it is the stupidity of those who support him that is the danger, because they enable him.

What you then have to do is drill down into that stupidity and define it. We are ALL capable of stupidity and intelligence. Intelligence is harder because it usually requires an effort of critical thinking and reasoning, which is a skill of it's own, while it has to battle our instincts, heuristics that have been honed over millennia of evolution to give us an edge for our primary purpose of simply passing on our genes. These instincts are therefore inappropriate to rely on to answer most political questions of the 21st century, but they are powerful. Furthermore, once we 'feel' something so powerfully, our intelligence will then be employed to justify our powerful feelings, often ingeniously or with convoluted arguments, confident that if we were wrong we wouldn't feel so strongly.

This will change over time as evidence emerges we were wrong, since we don't like to be wrong, or admit to it even to ourselves. Even our memory changes. It's an act of self preservation as there would otherwise be significant mental effects that we would struggle to cope with.
 
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Muttley said:
He wants power not so that he can wield but so that he can HAVE it.
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Power and money seem to go hand in hand. Look at all these billionaires who have far more money than they ever could spend but they always want more no matter who they have to screw over to get it. As with power they just want it.
 
Lefty said:
While in a Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil. Exactly how evil Trump is I'm not sure, but it is the stupidity of those who support him that is the danger, because they enable him.

What you then have to do is drill down into that stupidity and define it. We are ALL capable of stupidity and intelligence. Intelligence is harder because it usually requires an effort of critical thinking and reasoning, which is a skill of it's own, while it has to battle our instincts, heuristics that have been honed over millennia of evolution to give us an edge for our primary purpose of simply passing on our genes. These instincts are therefore inappropriate to rely on to answer most political questions of the 21st century, but they are powerful. Furthermore, once we 'feel' something so powerfully, our intelligence will then be employed to justify our powerful feelings, often ingeniously or with convoluted arguments, confident that if we were wrong we wouldn't feel so strongly.

This will change over time as evidence emerges we were wrong, since we don't like to be wrong, or admit to it even to ourselves. Even our memory changes. It's an act of self preservation as there would otherwise be significant mental effects that we would struggle to cope with.
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This is a decent article that summarises a lot of the studies done on this over the years.

www.newyorker.com

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
 
Jedi boro said:
Robert De Niro’s full statement on Trump. Please read and let me know your thoughts:

I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men. I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly.

I see an evil one.

Over the years, I’ve met gangsters here and there. This guy tries to be one, but he can’t quite pull it off. There’s such a thing as “honor among thieves.” Yes, even criminals usually have a sense of right and wrong. Whether they do the right thing or not is a different story — but — they have a moral code, however warped.

Donald Trump does not. He’s a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself — not the people he was supposed to lead and protect, not the people he does business with, not the people who follow him, blindly and loyally, not even the people who consider themselves his “friends.” He has contempt for all of them.

We New Yorkers got to know him over the years that he poisoned the atmosphere and littered our city with monuments to his ego. We knew first hand that this was someone who should never be considered for leadership. We tried to warn the world in 2016.

The repercussions of his turbulent presidency divided America and rattled New York City beyond imagination. Remember how we were jolted by crisis in early 2020, as a virus swept the world. We lived with Donald Trump’s bombastic behavior every day on the national stage, and we suffered as we saw our neighbors piling up in body bags.
The man who was supposed to protect this country put it in peril, because of his recklessness and impulsiveness. It was like an abusive father ruling the family by fear and violent behavior. That was the consequence of New York’s warning getting ignored. Next time, we know it will be worse.

Make no mistake: the twice-impeached, 4-time indicted Donald Trump is still a fool. But we can’t let our fellow Americans write him off like one. Evil thrives in the shadow of dismissive mockery, which is why we must take the danger of Donald Trump very seriously.
So today we issue another warning. From this place where Abraham Lincoln spoke — right here in the beating heart of New York — to the rest of America:
This is our last chance.

Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator.

And it won’t overcome evil if we are divided.

So what do we do about it? I know I’m preaching to the choir here. What we’re doing today is valuable, but we have to take today into tomorrow – take it outside these walls. We have to reach out to the half of our country who have ignored the hazards of Trump and, for whatever reason, support elevating him back into the White House. They’re not stupid, and we must not condemn them for making a stupid choice. Our future doesn’t just depend on us. It depends on them.

Let’s reach out to Trump’s followers with respect. Let’s not talk about “democracy.” “Democracy” may be our holy grail, but to others it is just a word, a concept, and in their embrace of Trump, they’ve already turned their backs on it. Let’s talk about right and wrong. Let’s talk about humanity. Let’s talk about kindness. Security for our world. Safety for our families. Decency. Let’s welcome them back. We won’t get them all, but we can get enough to end the nightmare of Trump, and fulfill the mission of this “Stop Trump Summit.”
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Did he deliver that in Italian?
 
I don't think such statements will make much difference.

Trump supporters, Qanon etc. will just see this as another pronouncement from "the elite".
It will just entrench opinions a little further.
 
festa5 said:
This is a decent article that summarises a lot of the studies done on this over the years.

www.newyorker.com

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
Click to expand...

Good article.

'In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.'

The article is subtitled 'New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason' which I think is a good subtitle, but it could substitute 'limitations' with 'difficulty'. Critical thinking is in a way an attempt to apply the scientific method to an issue and the hardest part is often the construction of the 'experiment'. Post referendum I had a serious go at doing this for Brexit because I assumed I'd got it wrong and was very intrigued as to why, where I'd gone wrong.
 
Lefty said:
Good article.

'In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.'

The article is subtitled 'New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason' which I think is a good subtitle, but it could substitute 'limitations' with 'difficulty'. Critical thinking is in a way an attempt to apply the scientific method to an issue and the hardest part is often the construction of the 'experiment'. Post referendum I had a serious go at doing this for Brexit because I assumed I'd got it wrong and was very intrigued as to why, where I'd gone wrong.
Click to expand...
As has been said many times about brexit, it should never have been put to the public anyway. Far too complex and the implications far too wide ranging.

One of the biggest factors in me believing (although could have been an incorrect belief of course) that I was right to back remain was how quick the leave side were to try and dismiss the experts.
 
Trump may not be evil on the scale of many other dictators, but he could be the precursor to really evil people who follow.
He wants the presidency to avoid jail, however to do so he'd have to dismantle a host of democratic and judicial institutions and that is where his real danger lies. In a country where gun ownership is so prolific, the consequences of a dictatorship are pretty easy to predict.
I hear people say that he's great for the US based on nothing more than his facade of being a tough guy. I've been told that Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he'd been president as Putin would have been terrified of Trump using nukes and no amount of discussion would change that view in the mind of the person who said it to me. That's part of his appeal or his veneer if you will. Once you scratch the surface though you see what he is and as you dig deeper then you get more concerned.
He needs stopping of course, but it's the forces he represents that'll continue to be the threat to the world and they need to be taken seriously.
Dystopian futures have to start somewhere.
 
dooderooni said:
I've been told that Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he'd been president as Putin would have been terrified of Trump using nukes and no amount of discussion would change that view in the mind of the person who said it to me.
Click to expand...
So how does this square with him being a Russian stooge and effectively putins puppet.
 
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