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Notes -
Biden has been gaffe-prone his entire life. But I believe there's been an increasing chorus of voices talking about something adjacent to early stages of dementia starting around the beginning of this year. Sorry, no specific citations, just my general impression from listening to lots of news and pundits.
Whether Biden actually has dementia is an interesting question. I have known a number of elderly people through the entire dementia-related decline, in situations both very fast (like a year/18 months) and much slower, where the decline happened over more like a decade.
The way Biden speaks and acts during his muddled, confused phases like in the debate isn’t very similar to what I saw in those people. I know we have actual doctors here who probably have more experience with older patients with cognitive degeneration, but to my mind it doesn’t seem like dementia specifically. It almost seems like what happens when I’ve seen people on very powerful painkillers or downer drugs and they just kind of become incoherent. Dementia in the early stages often looks much more like very confident, almost angry restating of incorrect truths (“Stan is dead? Stop bullshitting me, I saw him yesterday for breakfast”), but not grammatically incorrect or mumbling or trailing off really, just memory loss.
Biden seems able to remember near-term facts to some degree, even if he sometimes muddles them up. But the sentence trailing and incoherency would typically come long after memory-related decline became MUCH more obvious and frequent than it currently is for Biden.
Whether you call it "dementia" or "age related cognitive impairment" is irrelevant. Pretty clearly something changed since 4 years ago. It's hard to notice because ablity to read a teleprompter is an extremely low hurdle to clear. I was just commenting that noticeably more people started saying the emperor had no clothes earlier this spring, rather than just the right-wing political hacks who've been saying it for years. I'm thinking specifically of the Wall Street Journal and Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Despite fumbling the beginning and ending, Biden had a legitimately pretty good 30-minute stretch in the middle. I suspect he was given a shot of something good, but the timing was too close to the start of the debate. There are a lot of nootropic-interested people on this board. I should ask if this sounds congruent with any cognitive performance enhancing drug.
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