Earlier:
This bit you found convincing ignores the fact that the bios weren't changed, the cross-linking involved other people who weren't Obama, and the ones that did involve Obama weren't that many. In other words, you picked the cherries where the cross-linking mentioned Obama's initiatives and ignored all the other times cross linking had nothing to do with Obama at all or mentioned him along with other people, which doesn't seem very narcissistic at all.
This is all assuming that Obama was the one who had the cross-links added at all.
Those "Did you know" fact boxes strike me as highly inappropriate, and, yes, narcissistic. Did Obama put them there himself? No, of course not, but he sets the tone for the kind of grandiose embellishment his people have consistently applied to his administration and his persona. The same goes for having his own version of a Presidential seal and setting up Greek columns for his acceptance speech at the 2008 DNC. These are pieces in a puzzle. Evidence if you will. In any case, even if you don't agree that adding fact boxes to the bottom of the bio pages of past Presidents which tout his administration is rather graceless and tone deaf, it's hardly an example of his non-narcissism. Cherry-picking is leaving out evidence to the contrary, not advancing an (admittedly) subjective interpretation of actual data.
So far, very little of it is damning, if any. Most of it appears to be standard CT fare. I can find similar YouTube videos that prove that Michelle Obama is a man or that E.T. aliens abduct cows. That's why I keep asking which parts you find convincing.
I mentioned some already. The grandiose behavior based on few real accomplishments. The belief that he can change people's thinking and end decades of strife in troubled regions simply by speaking about his own personal history and by uttering platitudes. The high utilization rate of personal pronouns (e.g. Vaknin points out that his "pronoun density" is 3x the rate of even garden variety narcissists). There is a lot more, but as I said before, it's not all that interesting to me.
As for your disparaging analogies, I'll note Vaknin's video is quite different from the usual CT fare in that he actually just gives a reasoned interpretation of data that you can observe with your own eyes and ears. He is not requiring you to take a leap of faith or, alternatively, ask you to disbelieve the mainstream version of reality simply because there is an inconsistency here or there in that version. The claim that a politician who rises to be the President of the United States, at a relatively young age, and with relatively little political experience, by the way, is a narcissist is hardly an extraordinary one. I believe he is a narcissist, and I have given you plenty of reasons for why I believe so. I don't expect to change your mind, any more than I can expect to change a friend's mine about thinking his wife is charming.
The weird thing really is that you are so insistent on seeing evidence. When somebody makes the claim that George Bush is stupid, do I start a thread asking to see the evidence? I actually don't think he's stupid. I think he's probably one or two standard deviations above the average in IQ, and he's probably in the same ballpark as Obama actually. But I don't really care if somebody thinks he's stupid, especially now that he's out of power.
There are a number of people who write self-help books and books on pseudoscience topics. I'm not accepting them as authorities either, nor should anyone. Writing books does not indicate that you know what you're talking about or should be considered an authority on a particular topic.
And neither does having a degree in any particular field. What matters is what you can say on the subject. On the subject of narcissism, Vaknin can say quite a lot, and it makes a lot of sense to me. He states a lot of facts also. In theory, these can be cross-checked.
You have it the wrong way around. He is saying things that confirms your bias, thus he seems credible to you.
You don't know that. It's possible, but it's also possible that that's not the case. I'm hardly invested in believing Obama is a narcissist. I came to that conclusion myself, but I found it interesting that he has looked at things more quantitatively and reached the same conclusion. Some of the things he claims, I have already observed, but he puts some numbers and meat behind them.
