Aleph Null posted:

Cooperates don't want to upset their status quo. Who does?
I'm a middle-aged trans woman married to a cis woman with a raft of health problems. I have a job that pays just enough to cover our bills. My employer finally offered insurance that didn't explicitly exclude trans-related coverage on 2017. I'm a target but damned if I'm gonna stick my neck out. I have too much to lose.
I vote. That's it.
If the tide turns too far, then I'm hosed.

quote:

When exposed to pathogen-related body odours (e.g. faeces), people report being more willing to pursue pathogen avoidant behaviours (e.g. using a condom during sex) [35]. Disgust-evoking odour stimulation was shown to amplify the severity of moral condemnation of norm violations [36]. Furthermore, a genome-wide analysis on the possible genetic determinants of ideology has suggested that differences in a DNA region that includes several genes related to olfaction vary systematically across liberals and conservatives [37].

Dead Beef posted:

Hello thread,
What do you guys think about this:
Body odour disgust sensitivity predicts authoritarian attitudes

Authoritarians exploit unconscious feelings of disgust, something which we evolved to protect ourselves from disease.

Dead Beef posted:

Hello thread,
What do you guys think about this:
Body odour disgust sensitivity predicts authoritarian attitudes

Authoritarians exploit unconscious feelings of disgust, something which we evolved to protect ourselves from disease.

Dead Beef posted:

Hello thread,
What do you guys think about this:
Body odour disgust sensitivity predicts authoritarian attitudes

Authoritarians exploit unconscious feelings of disgust, something which we evolved to protect ourselves from disease.

Ethnic "purity"
Cultural "purity"
Moral "purity"
Does this language exploit an evolutionary defense mechanism?
A desire to cleanse impurities (eg: "drain the swamp", emphasizing traditional values, deporting immigrants, committing genocide, etc)
A desire to be protected from infection (eg: "build the wall", strengthening the military, isolationism)

Authoritarians have a heightened fear of being infected or contaminated, and if they feel infected then they want to be purified/cleansed.
They frame many issues in a way that exploits this particular fear. For instance Islam is often described like a disease which is spreading. They often make claims about the moral decay of society, do they mean to say that society is diseased? Foreigners and minorities are depicted as dirty, both literally and symbolically. Foreign ideas and culture are contaminants. Outsider mores will infect our society and lead to various kinds of sickness. The authoritarian believes a "deep state" has infiltrated their government and infected their country. The authoritarian believes the media is a vector of disease, the media spreads what they unconsciously feel is a threat to their social or cultural (or even racial) hygiene. Authoritarians flock to leaders who relieve their anxiety by promising to protect their borders, build a stronger military, return to traditional values and greatness, and cast out the foreign bodies (and ideas) that infect us.


I think authoritarians choose language which trigger feelings of disgust to gain power. I think you can make a person more sympathetic to authoritarianism by showing them disgusting images or alluding to other disgust-provoking ideas. I think an authoritarian is one who has become obsessed with ethnic, cultural, and/or moral hygiene. The authoritarian has a strong desire for "purity" which might stem from an evolutionary aversion to disease.

Just some things I think, feel free to disregard or disagree, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert here, I'm just an observer.

Prester Jane posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Guilloti...%3D1706%23pti27

eke out posted:

cw: insane person is insanely racist

Prester Jane posted:

Now all that remains to be seen as whether or not he was Qultist.

Prester Jane posted:

The thing about Narrativists is that they do not conceptualize conflict in terms of a control or exchange of resources. Narrativists conceptualize as conflict in terms of big dramatic gestures that change the dominant narratives within a society. This conceptualization of conflict strikes the structuralists cooperator mindset as being exceedingly stupid and easy to manipulate- and they are half right. In terms of armed or economic conflict between State actors, the Narrativist group will almost assuredly lose. They simply I'm not very good at the kinds of large-scale organization or marshaling of resources that such conflict requires. However within a given society Narrativism does not need to achieve victory through Superior management of resources, all they need to do is change how that population is talking about itself and precedes itself. That's why despite Hillary Clinton being a Greek god in terms of resource management-, the Trump campaign still won out because they altered our dominant social narratives. They didn't need to win conflicts over resources cam they could lose as many times as it took as long as they got people talking about them and what they were doing.

Now mind you, this disparity in access to resources also has a strong tendency to fuel the development of some sort of progressive movement within a given Society. (Often partially as a reaction to a growing Narrativist movement) This progressive movement conceptualizes conflicts in the same terms as Structuralist Cooperators- conflict is decided by whomever best controls the most resources. And it is this difference that I feel is the primary reason why Structuralist Cooperators will often side with Narrativists over an energized progressive movement.

Structuralist Cooperators see the Narrativist preoccupation with grand gestures that garner attention as childish and inevitably futile; whereas they perceive an energized progressive movements focus on marshaling resources I'm controlling the levers of power as a much more visceral and real threat to their authority. As such a group of established elites will perceive a rising Narrativist movement as a bunch of useful idiots that can be manipulated into stopping the greater threat of an energized progressive movement- before being eventually discarded.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

Just gonna say I was re-reading this today because of the bomber. And it's really good.

I also want to combine this with Marx who wrote about the lumpenproletariat as the foot soldiers of reaction -- a class which he said did not have class consciousness and was made up of various vagabonds. Well, the bomber was a male stripper.

BrandorKP posted:

Via Hegel is the way to do that, you need the things an idealist can do that a strict materialist can't.

Loel posted:

As an aside, where do I start with Hegel? Everytime I try to start I'm immediately in the deep end.

Loel posted:

As an aside, where do I start with Hegel? Everytime I try to start I'm immediately in the deep end.

Loel posted:

As an aside, where do I start with Hegel? Everytime I try to start I'm immediately in the deep end.

quote:

One of the lawyers who took Sayoc’s deposition had a similarly skeptical perspective.

“He gave a biography of himself that seemed delusional and almost comical in how farfetched it had to be,” the attorney, David McDonald, wrote in an email to the Times. “He seemed to want to place himself as a key figure in a number of wildly divergent business ventures, when it was obvious he could not have played the role he described.”

In a 2012 bankruptcy filing, Sayoc said he was unmarried, living with his mother, and earning $13,000 a year as a grocery store manager after collecting unemployment in 2009 and 2010. He said he owned a 2001 Chevy Tahoe with 285,000 miles on it.

Even in the bankruptcy filing, Sayoc didn’t list the grocery store as his employer — rather, he said he worked for the investment company that owned the property.

He didn’t.

[...]

The criminal case drawing the most curiosity this week was Sayoc’s 2002 arrest for threatening to bomb an electric utility “worse than September 11th” if it shut off his electricity, according to a police report.

In Sayoc’s deposition more than a decade later, he blamed his own “stupidity” and said, “I got on the phone and I said, ‘What do I have to do, blow up a building to talk to somebody?’” He said it was all a misunderstanding over a joke.

Except in Sayoc’s version of the story, he was a dry-cleaning business owner who had been overcharged for some sort of deposits. (He didn’t actually own the shop.)

“Even though what he was saying was fantastical,” McDonald said, “he said it with conviction and seemed to believe it.”

And by 2018, Sayoc’s social media feeds seemed to be singularly focused on his assertion that Democrats were deceiving the world about their true, manipulative natures.

McGlockenshire posted:

The LA Times got their hands on a deposition made by the MAGAbomberin 2014. It's wild.


This guy doesn't fit my expectations. He's not newly broken, for one.

quote:

Even in the bankruptcy filing, Sayoc didn’t list the grocery store as his employer — rather, he said he worked for the investment company that owned the property. 

McGlockenshire posted:

The LA Times got their hands on a deposition made by the MAGAbomberin 2014. It's wild.


This guy doesn't fit my expectations. He's not newly broken, for one.

BoneMonkey posted:

There has been a lot of different terms thrown around to describe people, I may have missed this but how do people get into these states?

Or are we born into these states?

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I think the short answer is: desperation, mostly.

ShriekingMarxist posted:

One thing I was thinking about today, pertaining to online specifically, is the role of the individual as a node in the network, let's say on the fringe, away from the large entities of that network who have lots of social status and capital, the beating heart of it and the ones always present after a compaction. Depending on their level of radicalization, they act as living gates for the flow of the network's agenda. Several times a day they review a proffered piece of information and decide whether to pass it along to their connected network nodes, or just let it go by, or in a rare instance, attempt to counter it or build upon it with their own opinions. These actions filter through the nodes in the web and can ratchet up their status if it's boosted by the right people or cause social upheaval if they're engaging in "wrongthink".

Twitter and other soc media being designed as a skinner box w/r/t lighting up those reward pathways heavily reinforces the desire to stay in the good graces of your network and on message. I feel like the design is insidiously crafted to enable these types of cultures to promulgate and stay densely coherent and hard to disengage from. The types of people that are folded into hate groups and radicalized into violence have a large overlap with people who are susceptible to becoming overly invested in the online social sphere to the point that it's a detriment on their life (isolated, mental illness, social anxiety/awkwardness, trauma/abuse survivor somewhere in the cycle, etc), where casual betrayal and cruelty are omnipresent because "lol nothing matters".

As someone who spent a good chunk of time invested in all the deep drama of social media movements, especially politically flavored ones that get people passionately involved, I've come away from a lot of it basically thinking "all of this poo poo is extremely unhealthy and needs to be more tightly monitored/regulated or at least taken more seriously as a vector to continue maladaptive coping", but who even knows where to start there.

BoneMonkey posted:

There has been a lot of different terms thrown around to describe people, I may have missed this but how do people get into these states?

Or are we born into these states?

Reclines Obesily posted:

Prester Jane posted:

So this is apparently thae gab of the guy who just shot up a synagogue this morning:

Archived here.