GOP Will Shit Itself

[Classic]

No disagreement. Trying to speak to the feelings of cowards who wouldn't be comfortable with the amount of violence and cruelty their pleasure requires. Or perhaps the people seeking some kind of "heroism" by which to distinguish themselves.

Also feel that "bigotry" makes demands the way a screwdriver or a hammer does. It's a tool for justifying iniquity. An appetizer for a feast of cruelty? If heaping cruelty on to a particular subject of bigotry became dangerous, the bigotry pivots to an easier victim. Because for the kind of person doing the "wet work" it is only "fun" if it is personally consequence-free, which usually means socially sanctioned.

[Friday]

To be clear, I don't think anyone who posts here qualifies as an Ivory Tower liberal. I've seen some posters engage in tower-adjacent opinion in the past, (and I've done it myself as well) but that basically all fell off after 2018 or so. I think The George Floyd protests were the final nail in the coffin of "it can't happen here" for a lot of people, including everyone here. When the secret police showed up and started taking protesters into unmarked vans, I think even the most privileged posters here realized that this was no longer some sort of academic debate about "far away peoples".

Yoji's frustration, I believe, is similar to mine: As a person with empathy, it's difficult to wrap your head around how someone could not have that trait, or have blind spots for empathy for people of certain skin colors, sexual orientation, gender orientation, etc. And it is important to try to understand the causes of such behavior, in the end, because it's important to understand one's enemy. It helps you defeat them, one way or another. And that's the goal.

Defeat can be, of course, converting them away from their beliefs. That's one way. But it's not the only way and those who constrain themselves to that being the only acceptable method for winning are, well, sitting in a Tower. And usually have a problem with BLM because they were "so violent."

[Classic]

I'm hoping no one was sweating that accusation, but- I mean- I wouldn't have tried to express that observation if I didn't feel like I spent enough time amongst the privileged classes.

There's a lot of propaganda (or maybe just inertia) around accepting the status quo and wishy-washy-ing away the violence that maintains it. e.g. People taking milk from a mcdonalds is violent, but teargas or other "less-lethal" tools used by the state are not. It is difficult to even recognize the assumption that there are classes of people for whom arbitrary punishment is justified. And maybe it is difficult to have empathy for a class of people who you only see in effigy, either plotting your fall from grace or waiting to be crucified.

I still don't have a strong gauge of how much of this apparent absence of empathy is driven by a very real fear that the violence of the state could be turned on you, in contrast with the massively naïve belief that the violence of the state is only ever turned on "the deserving".

- - -
If the US project is in fact, Just and Glorious, then acting in its defense would be Heroic, right?

[Friday]

If the US project is in fact, Just and Glorious, then acting in its defense would be Heroic, right?

Yeah, I'd agree with that being core to the right-wingers ideology. Any and all failings of the state are due to outside influences (immigrants) and traitors (those who defend the oppressed). The state itself is pure and above wrongdoing, so anything done in its name is likewise pure.

[atog]

My take on religious beliefs is steaming hot.

We're taught in Abnormal Psychology that among family members and first-degree relatives of patients with clinical delusional disorders, strong religious and/or spiritual beliefs, magical thinking, etc. are very common, and often serve as a prodrome of actual clinical first break psychosis.

Neurologists have confirmed that among several different types of higher order mammals, including elephants and chimps, some portions of the brain are activated while engaging in habitual "mourning" or "ritual" behaviours near where a fellow of their band or troupe has died. The insula of the human brain is likewise metabolically active during prayer or meditation, or when the subject is asked to think of something that might be forbidden by God.

Studying the insula is hard, it's a lobe of grey matter buried underneath and behind the temporal lobe, where it's hard to get at with microelectrodes. So our understanding of what makes this piece of brain 'tick' is full of gaps. Strokes of the insula can cause all kinds of weird non-brain effects like sudden cardiac death and respiratory suppression, suggesting it has strong two-way connections with the brainstem and hypothalamus. Whatever it does, it's > 5 million years old and grandfathered in to the BIOS of our circulatory system.

We also have studies suggesting highly religious tendencies or high amounts of superstition and spiritual anxiety in certain types of epilepsy patients and family members of these patients suggesting electrophysiologic instability is a matter of degrees ranging from a propensity towards magical thinking, to highly emotionally charged delusions involving elaborate spiritual delusional constructs, to frank electrical chaos resulting in seizure activity.

tl;dr spirituality is a brain abnormality, and the line between religion and psychosis is a fine one indeed.

[nosimpleway]

Nice to have some scientific backing on what I'd started to suspect about 30 years ago based on personal experience

[Büge]

But it's the MAGA weirdos I read about in the news- your Steven Crowders, Stephen Millers, Andrew Tates, etc.- that really fry my CPU trying to figure them out. We're so very close in age, but they're so much more fucked up. I've said it before, but how did we grow up in the same generational span and end up so horribly different? How did THOSE freaks get so evil?

It makes them money.

No, I'm not joking. They literally put their desire for money ahead of empathy or compassion. It's the same kind of mindset that gave us an investor class who will burn down their business if it makes them more money than maintaining it.

[Mongrel]

But it's the MAGA weirdos I read about in the news- your Steven Crowders, Stephen Millers, Andrew Tates, etc.- that really fry my CPU trying to figure them out. We're so very close in age, but they're so much more fucked up. I've said it before, but how did we grow up in the same generational span and end up so horribly different? How did THOSE freaks get so evil?

It makes them money.

No, I'm not joking. They literally put their desire for money ahead of empathy or compassion. It's the same kind of mindset that gave us an investor class who will burn down their business if it makes them more money than maintaining it.

Cops are assholes, but the old saying "Follow the women and the money" isn't wrong (if you amend 'women' to mean any kind of dick dowsing).

[sei]

But it's the MAGA weirdos I read about in the news- your Steven Crowders, Stephen Millers, Andrew Tates, etc.- that really fry my CPU trying to figure them out. We're so very close in age, but they're so much more fucked up. I've said it before, but how did we grow up in the same generational span and end up so horribly different? How did THOSE freaks get so evil?

The question's probably rhetorical, but it's a mix of narcissism, financial/power incentives, and reactionary tendencies.

As a person with empathy, it's difficult to wrap your head around how someone could not have that trait, or have blind spots for empathy for people of certain skin colors, sexual orientation, gender orientation, etc. And it is important to try to understand the causes of such behavior, in the end, because it's important to understand one's enemy. It helps you defeat them, one way or another. And that's the goal.

American History X at least did an entertaining job of showing how some people land there.

I would also expect that empathy'd aid in understanding how people land in these strange spots via religious or academic indoctrination, personal history with a group, personal history with a policy, etc. affect where people's views wind up. Understanding isn't necessarily agreement, but wouldn't empathy be the thing that helps you understand people who aren't like you, even when they're not your ally?

[Thad]

Even as my opinion of evangelical Christians is at an all-time low (and it wasn't high to begin with), I'm less inclined than ever to think that religion is really the problem. Over on the other side of the Atlantic you've got intellectual atheists pushing much the same kind of bigotry that anti-intellectual evangelicals do here. People identify with groups; some specifically choose a group identity based on their desire to dominate some other group; the nature of the group almost seems incidental.

I'm not sure a religion is fundamentally that much different from any other organized group of humans. Most of them have some kooky beliefs and customs; some of them are forces for good in the world, some are forces for evil, and most are some kind of mixed or neutral.

If white supremacists weren't using religion as a vehicle for their white supremacy, it'd be something else.

Which isn't to say that atog doesn't have something here with the talk about the overlap between religious beliefs and delusions. But if it weren't Jesus it could be healing crystals or Qanon or microchips in vaccines or any other kind of unsupportable faith. Or even scientists -- who may even be very skilled and knowledgeable in their particular field -- who couch their unsupportable dogmas in scientific language.

[Classic]

If white supremacists weren't using religion as a vehicle for their white supremacy, it'd be something else.

Maybe beating a dead horse here, but... I would take this even one step further: Religion is less a vehicle to justify white supremacy as White supremacy (and also religion) is a vehicle to justify using violence to continue deep and deepening iniquity.

[Thad]

Yeah, I picked white supremacy as an obvious example but any supremacy will do, any desire to dominate some other group as lesser.

[Mongrel]

MTG's been trying to disrupt the most recent Ukraine and Israel aid bills by adding blatantly spurious nonsense amendments like "Everyone who votes for this bill must go to Ukraine and join their army." and "We will develop space lasers. On the southwest border." Up until yesterday, the additions were crude, clumsy, and either probably illegal or definitely illegal. Enough so that Fox started running editorials mocking her over it.

Greene is not alone in her performative whackadoo nonsense, as other GOP Congressdorks have submitted amendments like "Cross out line 1 and then everything after that on this bill."

Curiously, one later and awfully specific amendment Greene submitted, and which has not received nearly the same news coverage as the more obvious space lasers nonsense was "No funding shall be made available to Ukraine unless restrictions on ethnic minorities', including ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools is lifted."

Now let me ask you, what are the odds that she wrote that one herself? Or that she could even identify which country Transcarpathia is in?