When somebody introduces the President of Ukraine as 'President Putin' you can hardly blame that on a speech impediment. It's basically brain fog and an inexcusable and indefatigable capacity for fucking up the facts on a constant basis!
'Pity' and 'sympathy' shouldn't be anywhere near, letalone on the radar when it comes to describing the acting president of your nation! To that end I genuinely believe he's become a threat to your national security.
First, I said 'some' of his slips are due to a speech impediment, and 'some' are due to genuine cognitive decline. Clearly, fucking up facts is due to the latter. Second, I agree wholeheartedly that pity and sympathy are not notions that should be coming up in conversations about the ability of the president of the US, which is why I said the US is in serious political trouble and both candidates are shit options and why I said Biden is harming the Democratic party by insisting on running for a second term.
Still, I believe Trump is just as much a threat to our national security as Biden.
The position I'm coming from is that both candidates are terrible. But I do generally find it distasteful to ridicule the difficulties an older person has in virtue of their being older. To ridicule (make fun of, make and share Youtube compilations for purposes of amusement, etc.) Biden for messing up the facts due to age-related cognitive decline is confused. As
president, it is a significant failing to mess up facts, since a president should not do that to be good as president. But as a
person with age-related cognitive decline, it is not a moral or personal failing, in the sense of being one's own fault, that that person messes up the facts, and so is not the proper object of ridicule. There's this strange phenomenon of mixing assessments of the flaws of Biden the man with the flaws of Biden the president. The proper response is to call for him not to run for a second term, due to his cognitive decline. The improper response, in my mind, and which is common in the US population (but apparently elsewhere), and which Trump encourages, is to ridicule Biden for his cognitive decline as if it were his own fault. It's not. Any reasonable person (in my opinion) would agree that someone with his cognitive decline should not be president. And that he's bent on running again is a choice he's making that is criticizable and should be criticized. But where I fall off from what seems to be the popular bandwagon is making jokes at the expense of his age-related decline.
All I'm saying is there's a distinction between (i) taking a position about his fitness for presidency based on reasons of cognitive decline, and (ii) treating the cognitive decline itself as something he is in any sense responsible for and so treating it as an appropriate target of amusement or ridicule.
All I'm trying to point out is that some cases of making-fun are in good taste and others are not. Making fun of an old man for having cognitive decline seems to me to be in poor taste, even if it is true that his cognitive decline means he shouldn't be president; and it is the general predominance of poor taste in matters of ridicule that I think is unfortunate. Being critical is not the
