aquascoot wrote on Apr 14
th, 2026 at 4:27pm:
Incorrect
Understanding someone's motivation is not endorsing it.
The Jews are religious fanatics
The Iranians are religious fanatics.
Donny is an old guy who wants to out with a splash.
Trying to study the psychodynamics of this triad is not judging it or being conned.
And remember
Every judgement is a confession.
You also have to know your limitations.
Nothing you or I can do will have any effect.
Naive people say " all that is required for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing".
Not much can be done to diffuse 1000 years of religious fanaticism.
And nuclear armed as well.
The wise man studies it , makes what plans he can and makes peace with the fact that it is quite likely Australia faces a food and energy crisis.
That's not cheering it on.
Thats studying the form of the players who will determine this.
If studying it is too scarey, go study covid with carl
No, Scoot, that's not what you've been doing, and trying to rebrand it as detached "psychodynamics" doesn't suddenly make it so.
You don't get to spend years cheerleading for Donald Trump, framing him as some kind of decisive, anti-establishment strongman, and then, when the consequences arrive exactly as predicted, pivot into the pose of a dispassionate observer "studying the players". That's not analysis, it's revisionism.
"Understanding motivation is not endorsement" is a nice line, but it only works if there was ever any real distance. There wasn't. You weren't sitting above it all like some neutral academic, you were actively buying into the persona, the rhetoric, the whole "alpha" mythology that surrounded him. Now that it's unravelled into volatility, escalation, incoherence, and strategic incoherence, you're trying to launder that past support into something that sounds intellectual.
It's not working.
And this fatalistic routine about "nothing can be done" is just the next layer of the same dodge. It conveniently absolves you from having to reckon with the fact that political choices, narratives, and support do shape outcomes. You don't get to amplify a figure like Trump, dismiss criticism at the time, and then retreat into "well, it was all inevitable anyway" when it goes sideways.
As for the "everyone's a fanatic" framing, that's just flattening reality to avoid engaging with specifics. Lumping complex geopolitical actors into a neat little triad of inevitability might feel clever, but it's lazy. It replaces analysis with cynicism and calls it wisdom.
Misunderstanding wisdom is pretty much you in a nutshell.
And the "every judgement is a confession" line isn't insight, it's a shield. It's a way to dodge accountability by pretending that calling out obvious patterns is somehow just projection. It isn't. Sometimes a bad call is just a bad call.
This isn't about being "too scared" to study anything. It's about recognising the difference between actually analysing a situation and retroactively pretending you were never invested in it.
You weren't studying Trump, you backed him. Now you're trying to rewrite that as detachment because the outcome is indefensible.
That's not wisdom, it's damage control, presented poorly, as philosophy.
And what for? All of this theatre just to avoid the simple admission that you were wrong about Donald Trump. Instead of owning it, you've escalated into this absurd posture where years of very real support are retroactively recast as some kind of elaborate troll, purely to salvage your own ego.
No one's buying it. The pattern is obvious to anyone paying attention.
What you're doing isn't analysis, and it isn't detachment, it's reputational triage. You backed one of the most transparently dishonest political figures in modern memory, and now you're trying to intellectualise your way out of the consequences of that call.
You don't get to rewrite history just because it's become inconvenient.
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