Donald Trump isn’t a narcissist, because we shouldn’t be calling anyone a “narcissist”. It’s an ableist slur.
Whether or not you are supposed to call him a narcissist doesn’t change whether he is a narcissist.
Not calling him a narcissist doesn’t make him not a narcissist.
This piece is bad. That (and this post in general) is, of course, my lay opinion about the piece. But then, we are having a lay discussion about a lay opinion piece. So, the piece is bad. Perhaps the claim it makes has merit, but I find the piece itself unconvincing and thus don’t find the actual claim particularly persuasive either.
First, an initial annoyance. While I found myself at least initially compelled by the argument that to call someone a narcissist could be considered a harmful slur, I won’t be censoring the term “narcissist” in my thoughts here. This is because the author has established by convention in this piece (title and content) and others on the same blog (I’ll come back to this) that, in contrast to other slurs, it is acceptable to use that term uncensored in at least some cases. In this piece that convention seems to be that it’s acceptable to use the term when it isn’t directed towards a person, and perhaps for initial “establishment” purposes. That said, the other slurs are censored. Maybe that’s because they aren’t related content, and that’s fair, but I feel that if you’re comparing the badness of two words, and you won’t even say one of them, that’s the worse word..
And about that other content. One might imagine that, after reading a piece about how it’s never acceptable to use the term narcissist directed towards an individual, that “we don’t use those words,” it would be inconceivable for the author to directly identify a specific individual as a narcissist, regardless of a diagnosis or lack thereof. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. That Maui (the character from the movie Moana, identified in the linked post as a narcissist) is a fictional character is not lost on me, but it would certainly be inappropriate for me to call him the n-word simply because he’s not a real person and his skin happens to be a shade other than alabaster. Moreover, the Donald Trump piece argues that it would be improper to attempt to label someone as a narcissist (more specifically that it would be improper to attempt to diagnose him thusly) because he’s a celebrity, and one we only get a narrow view of through the lens of “wacky media hijinks.” What, then, is a Disney movie? To argue (implicitly) that it’s alright to use the term “narcissist” to refer to a specific individual in some cases entirely erodes the argument that it’s a critically harmful slur. Can it be used in offense? Of course, but “You’re just a woman, you wouldn’t understand” is an offensive statement too, but it doesn’t make “woman” a slur. Anyways, I’ve rambled about this particular annoyance for WAY too long already.
Next, there’s the title of the thing. If the goal of a piece is to change minds, this is a bad way to go about it. While it’s impossible to set aside the bonfire that any post about Trump will attract, such an obviously provocative title is sure to kindle the flames under any reader even before they begin. Those who support him are probably not going to open the thing, or will almost surely bail after the first few lines in any case. And those who don’t are going to be annoyed that a significant portion of the piece seems to be spent largely defending him against the label being applied, and thus disregard the actual arguments being laid out regardless of merit.
I’d also like to comment on the claim the piece makes about it being improper to diagnose Trump. More than half of the whole post is spent elaborating on the particular nuances of whether it’s appropriate for trained professionals to make statements about whether Trump. That’s well and good, but isn’t really relevant to the question the piece presents. The question of whether clinicians can use clinical terms in a clinical context to refer to someone isn’t an open one. The post makes the compelling argument that clinicians can’t ethically comment on the specifics about a patient whom they’ve not examined. However, the piece seems to intentionally misrepresent the actual standard explained by the referenced materials. First, the Goldwater Rule does not contain any exemption that would permit psychiatrists to “rebuke” claims about a specific individual. The Wikipedia page linked in the piece is explicit about this in the section about Donald Trump specifically. Second, the comments about Allen Frances “speak[ing] out against diagnosing Trump” link to two sources where Frances specifically comments on Trump having narcissistic personality traits, but for a few (potentially) missing criteria. The sources do not really indicate what the piece purports that they do, and the combined error is egregious.
The piece goes on by detouring into a discussion on the morality of who is allowed to make comments on topics, vaguely implying that the only moral interaction one can have about a narcissist’s behaviors is the interaction between a clinician and patient. The only healthy and acceptable interaction towards those with NPD is help, acceptance, and sympathy. Oh, and also it’s totally fine to think that Donald Trump should be harmed “to the fullest extent” or shot.
This piece is bad. It’s not convincing, and probably does more to hurt its cause then to help it. A more compelling piece would have, amongst other things, probably spent literally any time at all on how one can healthily describe narcissistic traits without being harmful to those with NPD. But, that would necessitate a situation wherein we’re allowed to criticize narcissists without it being portrayed as us unfairly assuming that all of them are evil abusers. And alas, the piece is bad. And now, having spent the last several hours drafting this response, I can put it aside.
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I’d rather read a seven page essay on how triangles aren’t real than endure this God awful “article”.
What is this drivel, and why are you trying to share it?
I’m sharing it because I don’t like slurs and I don’t like people urging doctors to use diagnoses as weapons.
I really can’t tell whether you’re trolling or genuinely misled. Either way, can we please stop using faux political correctness to try & suppress any legitimate idea that just so happens to rub any self-declared militant snowflake the wrong way? It’s a stark abuse of (and disservice to) the legitimate fight against discrimination.
Yes, Trump is obviously a narcissist. Yes, anybody who claims that that statement has anything to do with ableism either doesn’t know what either of those words mean or is intentionally trying to cause trouble.
It’s not faux. I’m a person living with NPD. I suffer the abuse every day of people who heard that my disability was what we call evil people. You can say that slurs don’t harm disabled people when you’re disabled like I am. When you have lived experience of the struggles of people with NPD. Otherwise, it’s just a neurotypical talking down to a disabled person about how wanting to exist free of harassment and abuse is “performative”.
So, besides all the assumptions you make and, let’s say debatable conclusions you draw from them: your point is that the solution to the problem of this particular case of (perceived) ableism is that we simply pretend that Trump is just your regular low-key average Joe? Or are you attempting to solve the problem by prohibiting a word that you personally don’t like to hear and calling it a day?
I’m still not sure I understand what you’re getting at.Edit: spelling/grammar.
Of course he isn’t an average joe. He’s a rapist, a felon, a fascist, a traitor, and a world-be-dictator. Why do you think someone has to be neurodivergent in order to be extradordinarily evil?
And please stop nisgendering Me. My pronouns are in My bio.
I would like to tell you that some people can’t see bios on Lemmy (example: I am on Connect and it does not show up). Not capitalizing pronouns is convention in English except when using “I” since it’s one letter or (apparently from a quick search) when referring to god / a higher power. People aren’t misgendering or being disrespectful, it’s just how English works
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- High self-esteem and a clear sense of uniqueness and superiority, with fantasies of success and power, and lofty ambitions
- Social potency, marked by exhibitionistic, authoritative, charismatic and self-promoting interpersonal behaviours
- Exploitative, self-serving relational dynamics; short-term relationship transactions defined by manipulation and privileging of personal gain over other benefits of socialisation
I think we can put big checkmarks on all three of those for Trump. We don’t need a professional psychologist for that.
Which may be partially beside the point and argument the article is trying to make, but I still want to point these out.
The article is talking about “health problem” in its last paragraph. But Narcissism isn’t a mental disorder or a mental illness; it is a personality disorder. (The narcissist is not suffering from the disorder; it’s the surrounding people who are.) The whole text is based on the author’s wrong understanding of the fundamentals of the subject, which renders the whole article useless.
Well, that’s one exception to Betteridge’s Law.
No, it’s not an exception. The correct answer is no.
I don’t want to be an enabler of the drivel, so without posting the full URL to that article that’s reachable in the open free world, I will just say that medium.com links should never be publicly shared outside of Cloudflare’s walled garden. I realise aussie.zone is also in Cloudflare’s walled garden, but please be aware that it’s federated and reaches audiences who are excluded by Cloudflare.
The
medium.com
portion of the URL should be replaced byscribe.rip
to make a medium article reachable to everyone. Though I must say this particular article doesn’t need any more reach than it has.Anyone who just wants the answer: see @souperk@reddthat.com’s comment in this thread.
Setting aside the content of the OP, what is the issue with Cloudflare?
A lot of people have issues with Cloudflare, some more justified (e.g. their shitty and aggressive “sales” tactics that skirt the line with extortion), and some not so much.
I checked their comments in another thread where they were discussing Cloudflare, and they linked to a site with some false information about CF, like claiming that Cloudflare blocks VPN traffic to sites hosted on or tunneled through them (they don’t, and I just tested this to verify I wasn’t crazy, because I’ve been hitting CF-tunneled sites through VPNs for years), or very misleading information (like seemingly trying to conflate CF blocking some CGNAT IPs, which could have blocked innocent users behind those addresses, into claiming that they block all CGNAT IPs… which they don’t).
There are also a lot of people who like to say that Cloudflare is a MITM (by ignoring the “unknown to the communicating parties” part of the definition of MITM), but honestly, as someone whose job is information security, this mostly strikes me as overfocusing on one part of a large chain that you have very little control over, to feel more in-control.
Once traffic leaves your home network, you are trusting a lot of different groups with your data, whether you like it or not. You’re trusting the DNS provider to send you to the right IP. You’re trusting the AS operators to properly and honestly maintain their BGP routes to take you to the legitimate owner of that IP. If a site is being served on a VPS, you’re trusting the VPS provider not to be reading or altering the traffic. If it’s SSL-encrypted, you’re trusting the CertificateAuthorities involved not to be issuing malicious certs, etc etc…
As usual, there is a grain of truth behind those claims:
Cloudflare offers their own DNS, with stated benefits like filtering out some sites, while resolving CF sites… but some VPNs also set their own DNS, which don’t fully match Cloudflare’s… resulting in some combinations of CF site and VPN, not working. I’d blame the VPN for that, but people’s experience is going to be “everything works, except some CF sites” 🤷
Cloudflare is a “potential” MITM: they claim not to read the traffic… but as a TLS terminator, they get the ability to read it without anyone’s knowledge.
All non-encryped traffic is considered to be “insecure” for some time now. The whole point of initiatives like Let’s Encrypt, is to remove everyone on the client-server path from the list of entities you have to trust, so it ends up as: client software, client system, CertAuth, server owner, server software.
Ideally, we’d have homomorphic encryption on the servers, but it’s not there yet.
Cloudflare is a “potential” MITM: they claim not to read the traffic… but as a TLS terminator, they get the ability to read it without anyone’s knowledge.
Yes, and this is also true for AWS ALBs and any other hosted reverse-proxies that do SSL offloading/ termination. Hell, it’s even worse for AWS in general, since they also have potential access to your databases and instances, nevermind SecretsManager info that you just directly give them. It’s just such a weird thing to specifically only harp on Cloudflare like that site is.
Besides, the only real threat actor I can see them being worried about with CF is the USFG, since they’re the only ones I could see being able to compel CF to break their customer contracts like this. And if the USFG is your presumed threat actor, and you’re in the US, you’re not going to “out-security” them by avoiding Cloudflare.
I think the more interesting question on this topic is whether and when calling people narcissistic is fine or not. Is it a slur? I don’t think so. Is it an insult? I certainly don’t think it categorically and always is. It depends on context.
But this article isn’t that.
If you were to come up with a word for an insulting noun based on the name of a marginalised identity, what would that word be?
I’ll provide a few other words which are insulting nouns based on the name of a marginalised identity: sp*rg, r*tard, tr*nny, h*mo, aut*st
Can you think of a word that succinctly categorises all of these words?
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NPD has a prosocial effect on society. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/anarcho-narcissism-b647c8062173
Bold claims for an article claiming to discuss psychology, without any peer-reviewed scientific sources. Then again, psychology is only half-science… but still.
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Thank you for sharing this. I completely agree!
As someone with axis ‘disorder’ friends a lot of trauma based reactions leading to diagnostic criteria or various very understandable synptoms get reated very poorly and it both angers and upsets me.
I do not currently have the energy to argue or correct the others in this thread. So I’d just like to say thank you for at least attempting to bring this to other’s attention, we need more of this.
Finally, a positive comment! Thank you so much, you made me believe posting this was worth it
You are welcome. Please do keep posting more!
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