Flashback: Remember Post-Election Stress and Trauma Syndrome in 2004?

Laura is giddy with schadenfreude and recalled this old psychiatric diagnosis.

Are you ready for PESTS 2?

The symptoms vary region to region and person to person, but the general diagnosis is the same: severe disorientation, melancholy, a need to be around like-minded others and a lingering fear that the country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Howard Menger, a film technician in New York, woke up with PESTS on the Wednesday after the election. He called his old friend Jerry in Ohio, who'd been the best man at his wedding, and left this message:

"Just calling to make sure, for the sake of me and my family and people around the world, that you didn't vote for Bush yesterday. Give me a call and reassure me."

By Sunday, he hadn't heard back. "I have a gut feeling," he says, "that it might be the end of a 10-year friendship."

Thanks to rdbrewer and I think someone, here's another sydrome we should be aware of:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."[2]

That's kind of half the problem with liberals in both office and the media, right there.

posted by Ace at 06:20 PM

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