Digby wrote an article yesterday, A Quick Test for The Donald. To be honest, I think she’s lost much of her edge. Even before the election, she wrote almost exclusively about Donald Trump. And this article was especially dumb. She suggested, “In case you had any doubts about our new president being a sick piece of work, take the following short test as if you were Trump.” But do any of us really need to take any kind of test to find out that Trump is a narcissistic Machiavellian psychopath? But I was pleased that there is a name for this group of pathologies: the dark triad.
Learning about the dark triad made the article worth while, of course. And the fact that it linked to a single test for all these of these things — In just 27 questions! — made it all the better. As regular readers know, I love tests like these. I think a big part of it is that they are so difficult for me. I have to fight with myself. The tests are never hard to figure out. So I have to use my limited power of objectivity against my super-power of wanting to look like a Good Guy™.
Dark Triad Test
You can take the Short Dark Triad test at the Open Source Psychometrics Project. It tests for “Machiavellianism (a manipulative attitude), narcissism (excessive self-love), and psychopathy (lack of empathy).” I’ve already tested myself multiple times for narcissism and psychopathy. It reminds me of a David Mitchell joke, “I don’t have OCD. I know — I took a test — about a hundred times.” Strangely, I too don’t have OCD, despite taking multiple tests to find out. But I do — and think this is important — score higher on OCD than everything except for straight anxiety, which is connected.
I’ve never tested myself on Machiavellianism, so I was curious how I would come out. I knew my score on narcissism would be low because I’m going through a depressive phase and that always lowers my score. And I always test low on psychopathy, either because I really am empathic or because I am such a clever psychopath that I always fool the tests. But I could see myself testing high on Machiavellianism — as long as the test didn’t distinguish between successful and unsuccessful Machiavellianism.
My Machiavellianism
As I took the test, I felt sure that I would get a high score. It contained questions like this, “It’s not wise to tell your secrets.” Well kiddies, I have some advice for you all: It’s not wise to tell your secrets! I have learned this from extremely painful experience. The test only contained 5 choices, ranging from disagree to agree. If I could have entered, “agree to the googolplex power,” I would have. So maybe the test just wasn’t up to power of some my answers.
There were more standard Machiavellian questions that I agreed with. For example, “Avoid direct conflict with others because they may be useful in the future.” It’s not exactly something I live my life by, but it makes good sense. And how about, “There are things you should hide from other people because they don’t need to know.” You can take this statement in a negative way, but I consider it an act of kindness. There are too many things people have told me that I didn’t need to know. Why do they do that?!
Vague Questions
There were also questions like, “I like to use clever manipulation to get my way.” On those, I tended to disagree — but not completely. And the questions are vague. I assume this particular question didn’t mean entering the right numbers in your television remote control to watch the shows you want. But still, don’t most people like to manipulate situations to their benefit rather than find themselves dumped on for no good reason?
The answer appears to, “Yes!” I scored at the 20th percentile in Machiavellianism. That means 80 percent of you all are working the world more than I am. And it explains a few things in my life — like my relatively low success despite having really very good opportunities in life. It also explains, I think, my low credit rating. But we’ll leave that to another time.
Pathologies or Key to Success?
I scored at the 6th percentile on both narcissism and psychopathy. You can post your results, if you like. But I already know they will be low. That’s because Frankly Curious readers tend to be pathetic losers like I am. What is interesting is Digby’s relating this test to Trump. But it isn’t really about Trump; it’s about most of our society’s “winners.” It’s curious that our society rewards the behaviors that it teaches children to eschew.
The dark triad is a bad thing!
Also: the dark triad will make you rich and famous!
Your choice kids.
Knowing that I had this difficult Wellesian period in my sights, friends sympathized with me — “how sad it is,” they said, “such a terrible decline.” But I have never shared that view. Welles did it his way. If he had modified his behavior — if he had trimmed his sails, if he had pulled in his horns — he could have made many more films. But he would not then have been the force of nature that he was. He would just have been another filmmaker. As it was, this period in Welles’ life left behind him at least two films, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, that are remarkable by any standards, plus extraordanary work in several other media — but above all I looked forward to tracing that arc as Welles struck out towards the unknown region.
The Intercept, during an election campaign between a competent, moderate liberal and an unprecedentedly unfit and corrupt candidate who ideologically represents a cross between George Wallace and Calvin Coolidge, devoted a substantial amount of resources to analyzing hacked emails from the campaign of the former. And rather than admitting that they had been sent on a snipe hunt by an Australian libertarian who was plainly trying to throw the election to Wallace/Coolidge, they decided to hype up inane trivia (“Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a PUBLICIST!” “Candidates say snarky things about opposing candidates in private emails!”) as if they were revealing the Pentagon Papers. And, as Paul [Campos] says, they did this in the context of media coverage being dominated by the coverage of Clinton non-scandals that revealed no significant misconduct, drowning out coverage of the countless examples of Trump’s actual misconduct. I can’t blame Glenn [Greenwald] and his publication for wanting to be preemptively absolved of any responsibility, but it won’t fly. It is absolutely true that The Intercept — like mainstream publications — also published coverage critical of Trump. Both Sides Do It was perfectly good enough for Trump, and while that it helped Trump in itself doesn’t condemn the press coverage the fact that this effective false equivalence is utterly ludicrous certainly does.
Racism greeted Obama in both his primary and general-election campaigns in 2008. Photos were circulated of him in Somali garb. Rush Limbaugh dubbed him “Barack the Magic Negro.” Roger Stone, who would go on to advise the Trump campaign, claimed that Michelle Obama could be heard on tape yelling “Whitey.” Detractors circulated emails claiming that the future first lady had written a racist senior thesis while at Princeton. A fifth of all West Virginia Democratic-primary voters in 2008 openly admitted that race had influenced their vote. Hillary Clinton trounced him 67 to 26 percent.
Greg Sargent wrote a good article yesterday, 
Debbie Mills and I spoke for about an hour about Obamacare. By the end of the conversation, it had moved from me interviewing her to her asking a few questions about what might change and whether the coverage she would sign up for in a few minutes would still be valid.
It seems I got in trouble on Twitter again. 
The simplest way to summarize the core of Marxism is to begin with Marx and Engel’s insistence that “the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” “This struggle for emancipation,” they continued, “[is] not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.”
It’s that time of the year: the trudge through dozens of healthcare plans and figure out what your best option is. Because we all have to remember: we are all perfect consumers and by letting us waste hours and even days going over this, the God of Economics will look down on us fondly and make rich people even richer.
One of my favorite recipes is Potatoes au Gratin. And it is popular among everyone I know. I get a lot of requests. I assume that’s because it is so simple. It’s just potatoes, onions, and cheese. Nothing complicated — just pure gooey goodness. But there has always been a problem that I will get to in a moment.
For months, evidence has mounted that the Russian government used its hacking prowess to interfere with the US presidential election, stealing emails from Democrats and and leaking them via Wikileaks. The Obama Administration formally accused Russia of hacking the Democrats two months ago.
Last night was my big Don Quixote talk. I published my planned talk yesterday, 