#derangement

[charnel-grounds]

Jeanne Bieruma Oosting (1898–1994), “The Deranged One”

from the series ‘Accent Plaintifs’ — lithograph, 1934

source

[werewolfguts]

my lesbian uncles

[dougielombax]

Apparently some people believe that the Irish language doesn’t actually exist.

Claiming it’s all made up, a fiction. (Putting aside that all words are made up!)

Claiming it was made up for political and propaganda purposes as part of a “sinister Republican/Papist plot”.

This obviously isn’t the case.

(Made up languages would be like Esperanto or fictional languages like Klingon in Star Trek, or the elvish languages (Quenya and Sindarin) in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth stories, among others)

It’s a real language. Like any other.

Why does it frighten you?

Bloody hell.

Nobody acts this way about any other language (except maybe Hebrew?).

Yeah it’s a fringe belief (I think), but it’s still jarring to see.

[chainmurders]

What possesses a 14 year old to talk like this? Like? What is going on at home fr?

[irisembury]

I’ve heard it said in a few different ways that the worst part about the Trump era is how many people we’ve lost to him—how many people you used to think were decent, but whom Trump, or rather their support for him, has exposed as actually being terrible. Before Trump came along, you wouldn’t have predicted how low they would sink, you wouldn’t have thought they could’ve supported somebody like him. But here he is, and here they are. Trump brought out the worst in them.

I’ve also heard it said Trump didn’t only reveal how bad people were all along. He made people worse. Not Trump alone, of course, but the information landscape of conspiracy-driven misinformation that’s permeated the internet over the last decade, creating the environment in which Trump has thrived. There were people who used to be normal, but after letting Fox News reshape their reality for the last 10 years, they’ve reöriented everything they believed around adherence to the cult of Trump.

If you didn’t know any better, and you heard the term “Trump derangement syndrome,” you’d probably think it referred to the behaviour of Trump supporters. To be deranged is to be irrational, out of line, to lose control of yourself or your senses. Trump’s followers, the loyal ones, are deranged. It’s like they live in their own alternate reality. There’s something about Donald Trump that broke them.

There’s a number of issues that seem to function as a foot in the door for this kind of derangement. A person has one set of beliefs, a certain way of viewing the world, but then something sets them off, and before you know it, they’ve gone crazy and they’re voting Trump now. It’s like that issue is the first crack in the glass. It breaks them. Their whole world starts falling apart.

Not all topics are likely to cause this type of effect. I don’t think anybody’s world is falling over taxes or gun legislation or healthcare. It depends on the issue. Some prime examples of topics that seem to break people are:

medical misinformation/anti-vaccine content/distrust of pharmaceutical industry

wokeness, or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives

political correctness/perception of social media censorship

the existence of trans people/fear about lefties trying to make their kids trans

immigration/demographic anxiety/fears related to the decline of the white population as a percentage of the country

religion/fear about society becoming less religious

A person can go from being sort of normal, to being persuaded about just one of these topics, and then fully come around into being a frothing MAGA cult-member, sacrificing everything else they believed as required of them. These are all what I should term “first crack” issues. And interestingly, all these roads lead to Trump, because Donald Trump and his people have made appeals to all of these different crowds.

Not because they truly care about any of it. Trump himself didn’t seem to have any inherent skepticism about vaccines or pharmaceuticals in general. He also didn’t care that much about trans people until recently. Instead, the Trump lobby noticed certain people in the country losing their minds over a certain topic, and they would try to incorporate all of those people into their movement.

This is why the Trump following is so generally dysfunctional. It’s a big tent only insofar as it caters to people of all different sorts of derangement. They all went crazy for all different reasons, but somehow found unity by all putting on the same red hat and voting for the same orange turd.

There isn’t nearly as much of this behaviour on the left. Perhaps on the far left, like the communists, whose uniting quality, instead of “supporting Trump” is hating America or hating the West, but those people are on the fringes and don’t represent much of society; whereas the Trump following has taken over the mainstream right, the Republican Party, and a huge portion of the political media landscape.

The most prominent left-wing “first crack” that some people become fixated on is Israel. They look at Israel, they think Israel is doing bad things (as it often is), but for some reason this shatters their reality, they reörient their entire world view around this conflict, and soon it comes to define what they feel about seemingly everything else. They often come out the other side hating the Democratic Party, and believing that Israel and AIPAC are controlling all of their politicians, if not being outright antisemitic.

The Israel fixation creates an opening to also become crazy about a few other topics. A telltale sign is they start being overly concerned about the “military industrial complex,” which isn’t a serious or legitimate problem. It’s the left-wing version of how people talk about “the deep state” on the right. It’s designed to be an ambiguous bogeyman that makes people feel as though their democracy is illegitimate because everybody we elect is secretly being controlled by a powerful but unseen force.

The damage done to our discourse by Israel is bad enough that I intend on doing a series on Israel–Palestine after I’m done with the other things I have planned.

[woman-with-a-movie-camera]

Frankenstein (2025)

[hale-my-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Deranged Trump Syndrome 02 - UN