Discussion: CNN: Ben Carson's Former Classmates Don't Recall His Violent Outbursts

And similarly, his skull is an apparently hollow box full of hermetically sealed chambers with a bunch of ideas that were never meant to see the light of day.

If he was a nerdy, bookish kid, he might well have raised a hammer or some kind of knife toward a classmate or a parent. It’s probably incredibly unlikely that they felt threatened by the act, so they may not remember it. (Speaking as a one-time nerdy, bookish kid who carried a swiss army knife in high school, that’s how long ago it was.)

I thought the same thing, AF, and I’ve had another feeling as well, which is that with Carson I always felt he sounded like a person relating things he was imagining more than he sounded like a person recalling real incidents however imperfectly. I think there’s a too-pat quality to the stabbing story and the holdup. A life is saved as the knife breaks on the belt buckle? A man is so self-possessed and negligent of death that he casually suggests the robber point the gun at someone else? It all sounds like mediocre TV writing, the kind most of us do in our heads all day as we revise reality to give ourselves a more glamorous role in it. It’s just that some of us have a better grasp of what’s real and what’s fantasy. Some of us don’t, and so we run for President. Like my mom says, it takes all kinds to make a world. : )

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One of my physician friends (a bit to the right, but not too crazy) has cited Carson to me several times as an intellect that should definitely be the front-runner. He’s a famous, and very competent neurosurgeon, don’t you know.

My friend seemed truly unaware that Carson seems so bat-shit crazy at times. Pyramids as grain silos (doubled-down), stories of gunmen at KFC, racism doesn’t exist. Some of it is blind adherence to his religion. Most of the rest of it smacks of mental illness.

Additionally…the signers were dominated by students of history and political structure. In the Age of Enlightenment there was a avid interest in, respect for and understanding of the Ancient Greek and Roman sociopolitical developments. They understood that the body politic has it’s own rules and requirements. It’s NOT a business or a religion.

I wonder if the Parthenon was used to store grain, too.

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I wondered where Ben Carson got that very mistaken notion about the signers, so I Googled, and all I could find quickly was a NewsMax article quoting Carson saying it. Apparently NewsMax and their commenters took it as gospel, because no one set him straight.

I guess the idea is that if you challenge Carson’s version of history, you hate America.

Thirty years ago, my husband was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Golly, it was so very, very, very long ago that we and our now-grown daughter can barely recall the 18 long months of surgery, chemo, and radiation. (By the way, he’s been in remission ever since, healthy as a horse.)

I’m a deep admirer of intellect, and incidentally, I’m smarter than the vast majority of people, so that shouldn’t indicate in and of itself whether a person’s mental state is sound. If anything, very high levels of intelligence correlate with certain types of mental illness rather than preclude them, and there have been many profound geniuses in history who struggled to keep hold of reality. When it comes to taking responsibility for the care of an entire nation, mental fitness is far more concerning to me than how well one is able to accomplish a narrower set of tasks, be them performing surgeries or navigating mathematical theories or writing novels, whatever. Carson is brilliant, perhaps, but being brilliant in a few ways is not the same as being competent and skillful nearly across the board, which is the least of what we should expect from the president. It’s plainly obvious that he is hardly the latter.

I would even argue that temperament and circumspection exceed intellect in terms of their desirability in a candidate. Your physician friend, I’d imagine, though I don’t like to generalize, suffers from a very common ailment among physicians: thinking physicians are eminently more qualified under any circumstances. Always be skeptical of doctors who aren’t inherently self-deprecating, at least when it comes to their more personal assessments of others, because they’re usually saying far more about themselves than anyone else.

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you know who else had political experience? i’m just sayin

Ya but just like Carson’s grain hypothesis, the slaves who built the darned things would’ve had to be convinced of way more lies and ridiculous nonsense than what the pyramid could possibly hold.

What? No ā€œCarson Without a Causeā€ until his born again date?

They didn’t ask his classmates whether he seemed like a kid who could think the pyramids were ancient grain silos.

What I want to know is if Carson would recommend that any ninth grader who succeeded in such an attempt should be tried as an adult or not?

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You’ve got one badass Avatar, though. (and never tell anyone you are from Grosse Pointe).

Finding out whether or not a candidate is fabricating his entire past is noteworthy.

I would put not knowing anything about the founding fathers of our country right up there.

Not to mention the planet.

Only for apparently viable candidates, really,…

Ben Carson should be an obviously unviable candidate for his present nonsense…

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The guy is intentionally ignorant of history and rejects the scientific method as a way of understanding the world. He’s like a very skilled jeweler, or butcher. These things take dexterity and skill, not intelligence or judgment or anything remotely necessary to be president.

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Yeah, but they had never been elected to the United States Congress. So there!