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Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

> Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing.

Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths—part of the reason why they have gotten “so far”. Yet you are worrying about relatively harmless average Joes and Janes looking up to these people? Very weird priorities considering that people like Trump just have very few or no built-in stops. Unlike most people. A normal person can’t just live like a sociopath and also be able to sleep at night.

You see these people ruining everything and you think to yourself: you know the problem here is that hypothetically someone might be inspired to steal my television if I leave the door unlocked.

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>> Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing.

> Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths—part of the reason why they have gotten “so far”.

Wait, you can both be right!

The main thing is there's always a ruthless fight to get to the very top of (civilized/hierarchical/capitalist/whatever) society. But when the people doing that fighting can put an honest and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level folks to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.

> But when the people doing that fighting can put an honest and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level folks to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.

Yeah! Like when pre-Trump the norm was that all powerful and well-known people were magnanimous, self-sacrificing, and good people that the “mid-level” and below looked up to. But after Trump (grunts) that just changed on a dime.

Except the opposite of that.

Nah, the system was pretty visibly corrupt pre-Trump.

I mean, the bodies that piled up around Clinton were being noticed at the time. That you had a potential presidential sequence of Bush, Clinton and Bush and Clinton had a pretty 3rd world kind of feeling. Trump ran as "the corrupt guy who take on corruption 'cause he's honest". Still, contrary to your claim, Trump launched the career of a whole new horde of grifters, with the Qanon types as just the most visible examples.

Seems like we are in violent agreement.

The Clinton body count thing is just a conspiracy theory. It’s proto Qanon nonsense.

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