A man from Texas was convinced that the coronavirus was a hoax and hosted family gatherings that violated the guidelines. You can anticipate what happened. Fourteen of his family members, including him, got infected and two of them died. He too was hospitalized. He now regrets his behavior, saying that he feels like drunk driver who killed members of his own family and he cautions others against acting like him.
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Just recently, after the fiasco of the first presidential debate, I got an email from an old friend of mine whom I had not heard from in years. In it, he gently chided me for ‘Trump bashing’ (his words). It is not that he is a Trump supporter. His reason is different and because it was so thoughtful and raised an important question, I am bringing it up here for discussion.
My friend wrote:
I don’t think that all the Trump bashing is warranted. It’s pretty obvious that he has a mental disorder. It’s not fair nor reasonable to have a go at the behavior of a person whose behaviour is due to a mental condition. Will anyone criticize the behaviour of a person who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, dementia or even a person who is bipolar?
I am no psychiatrist but I think Trump suffers from a form of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
It appears that Trump has decided that he is just fine and that he can go about his normal activities. But both he and his doctors have been cagey and inconsistent about the status of Trump’s illness and it is not clear if the doctors are being dictated to by Trump about how he should be treated and what they should tell the media. Dan Froomkin writes that there are whole host of questions that need to be asked from the doctors and the White House spokespersons that they need to provide answers for.
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He puts his life on the line among the massless maskless hordes attending a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania to bring us a flavor of the nuttiness he encounters.
It is of course no secret that the wealthy get treated differently from the rest of us and the world of medical care is no exception. Doctors often stray from standard treatments when their patient is seen a an important figure, sometimes in an effort to impress the patient that they are doing as much as they can, and sometimes because the patient demands it. This can happen even when the patient is a friend or relative or a fellow doctor. As we have seen, Trump got all manner of treatments that ordinary people would never have received. This phenomenon even has a name, the ‘VIP syndrome’. But it is not clear that this is a good thing even from the patient’s point of view, because it can result in overly-aggressive treatment that can have unwanted side-effects.
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This election and the extreme nature of the Trump presidency has resulted in the breaking of all manner of precedents. In particular, scientific organization which normally stay out of explicit involvement have decided to make endorsements. Scientific American magazine, for the first time in its history, weighed in with extremely strong language on why it was important to vote for Joe Biden.
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It is disturbing that neither Trump nor his doctors nor White House spokespersons are saying when he last tested negative for the coronavirus, even as he insists that he plans to hold rallies and demands that the next debate on October 15 be held in person instead of virtually as the debate commission has decided. The fact that Trump seems to have later decided against traveling this weekend after saying that he would suggests that maybe, just maybe, wiser counsels have prevailed on him to not be so utterly reckless.
I will be giving a talk about the ideas in my book to the Science Cafe in Cleveland on Monday, October 12 from 7:00 – 8:00 pm (US Eastern time).
The first part will dispel some common myths about science by asserting that there is no such thing as the scientific method; that scientific ‘facts’ are not unchanging objective statements about nature but are theory-dependent judgments; that scientific theories are not falsifiable; that there is no reason to think that scientific theories are true or even approaching truth; that no amount of data can prove the truth of a theory; and that theories cannot even be assigned probabilities of being true.
The second part will describe how science can be so successful despite these seeming weaknesses. I will argue that this more sophisticated understanding of science will provide scientists, policymakers, and members of the general public with the tools they need to make sound, rational decisions in all areas of their lives and to better counter those opposed to specific conclusions of the scientific community–nonbelievers in vaccinations, climate change, and evolution for example–who have been able to exploit the weaknesses in the current folklore about the nature of science to advance their anti-science agendas.
The format of these highly interactive talks is that the speaker presents for just 20-30 minutes and the rest of the time is taken up with Q/A with the audience. These sessions start promptly.
You can join the Zoom session from PC, Mac, Linus, iOS or Android:
https://cwru.zoom.us/j/95328382598?pwd=V01GaEhvRGFWTzE4dU02WEhZcU0yQT09
Meeting ID: 953 2838 2598
Password: 031709
You can sign in starting at 6:45 pm but will be asked to remain in a waiting area until the session actually begins.
Calvin Coolidge, who presented a “quiet, boring, dour” image to the public, became president in 1923 when president Warren G. Harding died of heart attack. He was elected to the presidency in 1924 and practiced what might be called a minimalist style of governing and personal behavior. He would sleep for about 11 hours a night and also manage to get in a nap during the day lasting from two to four hours. He would speak as little as possible, advising his successor Herbert Hoover that he “could rid himself of long-winded visitors by simply sitting still and in silence until the visitor stopped talking.”
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