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Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

quote:

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Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
One of the most :psyduck: things about this for me is Justine Tinney throwing her support behind this movement. What does she think they'd do to transsexuals like her if they ever managed to gain any actual power, and why does she think it would be any different than what fascists always do?

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Devil Wears Wings posted:

I couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs. Not because of the content, but because the author's writing style is so obtuse and prosaic. It's like Gene "Time Cube" Ray started reading some classics.
You get that a lot with DE/neoreactionary types. I tried reading some Moldbug out of morbid curiosity the other day, but I didn't get very far before his droning, meandering tone made my eyes slide off the screen. If I know fascists, it has something to do with them believing that actually writing things that people have the patience to read is giving in to some sort of modern intellectual degeneracy.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

FouRPlaY posted:

I seem to remember that Michael Moorcok's Starship Stormtroopers was all about the fascism in Sci Fi.
On the whole I like this essay, but it strikes me as odd that Moorcock criticizes Reaganism and Thatcherism while identifying as a libertarian.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
I had a run-in not too long ago with someone that, while they not full-on DE (they were a self-professed communist), had the same weird admiration for autocracy and same conviction that democracy was a failed experiment. I made the mistake of arguing with them, and these were the main points that came up:

-They were in favor of a strong social safety net, so I mentioned that most of the countries with those (included Scandinavia, Japan, Germany, France, the UK) were democracies. He said something to the effect of "Are they? Cuba isn't a democracy." and said that Japan and Germany didn't count because "their economies are due to collapse any day."

-He brought up China as an example of superior governance, using the recent passing of their GDP over the US's as evidence. I brought up the Foxconn factory suicides, and he said that those were "exaggerated by the media, and Foxconn workers actually had a lower suicide rate than the Chinese population in general." I also mentioned the horrible air and the buildings that weren't likely to last more than 20 years, which he waved off with a vague "China is actually working on fixing those."

-As an elaboration of the previous, he said that the problem with democracy was that "all the arguments create deadlock and nothing gets done." This was the reason he gave for the the US's economy fell behind China's.

-He claimed that it didn't make any sense to point out the USSR's gulags, because the U.S.'s high incarceration rate and terrible treatment of its prisoners didn't make it any better.

-I mentioned that autocracies often were plagued by hilarious wastes of taxpayer money, such as dictators' inauguration ceremonies that cost the entire nation's GDP. He said democracies weren't any better because they often wasted the taxpayers' money on military boondoggles such as the F35.

-The subject of food insecurity came up. When I pointed out that, for all their faults, democracies tend to have much higher food security and much lower starvation rates for their people (even the US), he claimed that the data was unreliable because it was pulled from American governmental agencies.

I just... holy poo poo. :psyduck: How can someone have so many left-wing sympathies (he's made his outrage over American police brutality very plain, I should add) and still support the forms of government that machine gun people like him?

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

neonnoodle posted:

I used to work with a guy who was a self-professed fascist and the conversations were pretty much the same.
Please, do elaborate :allears:

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Jack Gladney posted:

There was a political scientist a few years ago who did personality inventory tests with libertarians and had them do ethics tests, and the result was that they had measurable deficits in theory of mind and capacity for empathy, and that they accurately predicted that they cared less about fairness and harm to others than the people they see every day.
Anyone got a link to this? I'd love to read it if possible.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
What the hell is with these guys' obsession with cuckoldry?

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
What I like about that Yud quote is that the easy part is going to be building an AI that isn't hilariously awful at image recognition. Which has been one of the major hurdles of computer science since forever.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
I've heard Lord of the Rings brought up in relation to DE types before. How exactly does it fit in? I mean, I'm fairly sure most of the messages in LotR (anti-industrialism and the dangers of pursuing power in particular) would be repellent to a bunch of nerds who want to be machine gods torturing the poors with dust specks for their own amusement or whatever.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Count Chocula posted:

I don't agree with any NrX political views but like the Futurists I long for an art that glorifies the works of humanity and our inginuity. I was in a poetry workshop that visited a nuclear research facility and I was the only one uplifted by the beautiful machines on display instead of writing horrified Luddite screeds. But I'm sure art that glorifies steel and glass and science already exists; most art does. And I'm sure ' NrX art' will be terrible because nerds have no sense of aesthetics. But i appreciate the idea.
I can sympathize. I love technology to the point that I actually feel calm and relaxed from watching assembly lines, but the far right's fetishization of science and machinery, along with the distaste for it from much of the left, is enough to legitimately make me feel uncomfortable with myself for it.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Not neoreactionary but #1 with neoreactionaries.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

But my grandpa who fought them in WWII called them Japs and/or Tojos though :confused:

I just learned recently that it's even on his discharge papers, "took shrapnel while disarming a Jap detonator." I didn't realize that was the official military term :v:
The term was well-known enough to feature in the title of a prominent cartoon.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
More to the point, why would the left want them to adopt ruling-class behavior? The left tends to loving hate the ruling class.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
I'm reading the Red Rising trilogy and all I can think of is how the Dork Enlightenment would probably consider it a utopia

Edit: Never mind, I just remembered that the society in Red Rising has gender equality

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
Why are all these motherfuckers so drat smug?

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
I'd consider myself a nihilist, but I don't see why nihilism would necessarily lead to becoming a neoreactionary.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
I'm a nihilist for a few different reasons, a major one being that, if there were any sort of moral fabric woven into the universe that I'd be able to recognize, I wouldn't expect history to be full of vast, exploited underclasses working to early graves while their masters died fat and happy after a lifetime spent ruining and destroying the lives of countless others. When you know that, it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that an intrinsic, objective morality either doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

I guess the difference between me and NRx is that, rather than decide "Exploitation is cool and good," I hold onto my existing (socialist) values that much more closely, because I realize that they're as frail and passing as my own life.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

This is just being an atheist plus ethical relativism, not really a "nihilist."
How do you define nihilism, then? What else would you say I'd need to believe to qualify as a nihilist? It's possible I may have oversimplified the definition.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Count Chocula posted:

Ironically, I just read a massive article supporting Brexit from a left-wing perspective: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/11/exit-left-the-socialist-case-for-britain-leaving-the-eu

The main argument is that the EU is a neoliberal project.
I'd hesitate to trust Counterpunch, since they engage in Pol Pot apologism and deny the Bosnian genocide.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

bowser posted:

It's from a reddit (I know, I know...) thread lamenting the "normalization of sexual degeneracy". It's completely vile but it's just so over-the-top that I couldn't help but laugh. Although that might have just been a defense mechanism by my brain trying to understand what the gently caress I had just read.
I found the subreddit this was from and decided to see if this guy was an aberration there, so I sorted by rating and had a look at the top post. I think I found the alt-right version of Galtse:

quote:

The War on Drugs: Oxytocin, Cultural Marxism vs. the West, and their Synthesis
Oxytocin: "Isn't that a prescription painkiller?" No, you're thinking of oxyCONtin.
Do you think just because you manufacture your own supply of a molecule, in the core of your brain, that war can't be waged on it? It may not be formally declared, but a de facto war is already well underway.
First, a definition: Oxytocin is a peptide hormone produced in the hypothalamus, deep in our limbic system near the brainstem. It is stored in - and released from - our pituitary gland, AKA the "master" gland.
In clickbait science, it's called the "cuddle hormone". More accurately, it's the hormone of bonding. It underpins many of our strongest and most noble instincts: love, friendship, trust, cooperation, loyalty, generosity, courage, and fidelity. It's also essential for optimism and healthy self-esteem.
Oxytocin has a half-life of about 3 minutes in the blood, so its effects are very short-lasting, but it initiates a cascade of positive hormonal events that reinforce overall health and pro-social behaviour. Its release is especially affinitive to touch: a hug, a handshake, even a Duchenne smile can evoke it... it's enmeshed in the intricate nonverbal dance, the largely subconscious symphony of communication linking all humanity.
Released in greatest quantity during childbirth, it relieves pain and forges a lifelong bond between mother and child. It's also intimately involved in father-child bonding, lactation, wound healing, sexual arousal, and orgasm (when again, its release is copious). Oxytocin injected into the cerebrospinal fluid causes spontaneous erections in male rats. Female rats, administered oxytocin antagonists after giving birth, fail to exhibit typical maternal behaviour; yet virgin female sheep under oxytocin show instinctual maternal behaviour toward foreign lambs. Babies deprived of caring touch can actually die from lack of it; orphans have been shown to display hampered oxytocin function well into adulthood. Clearly this molecule is crucial to life.
Oxytocin release reduces fear and anxiety, quelling the amygdalae (crucial danger/alert neurostructures) and suppressing the stress hormone cortisol. It evokes contentment, enabling feelings of calmness and security by inhibiting overactive brain regions associated with behavioural control. Deprived of it, we are scattered, timid, and paranoid: shut inside ourselves. Trust is increased by oxytocin: it affects social distance and friendship, and plays an essential role in romantic attraction and subsequent monogamous pair-bonding. We find receptors for it in the heart, and in the vomeronasal organ, which is directly wired to both the hypothalamus and the amygdalae. Thus we detect it pheromonally, and when bonding in person, this facilitates mutual positive feedback.
This precious endodrug is fundamental to mechanisms of in-group bonding, reaching from the family unit to friends, tribe, town, and country... it's even involved in our higher order feelings about nationalism, ethnocentrism, and religiosity. It's an enigmatic chemical: while fostering togetherness, it's also involved with xenophobia and in-group evolutionary strategy. In a carefully controlled study exploring the biological roots of immoral behaviour, oxytocin has been shown to promote dishonesty in outcomes favouring the group to which an individual belongs.
Let's look at some of the ways our modern paradigm deliberately interferes with - and seeks to subsume - our oxytocin expression.
**** TRIGGER WARNING ****
The following is not for the faint of mind. If you choose to read on and find yourself offended, your worldview threatened by one person's opinion, and characterize the author in your imagination as someone who is a bad person – not like YOU – and yield to the seduction of directing emotional tones of anger toward this ad hominem paper tiger in your mind, giving sweet sanctimony to yourself for being “better than them”, oxytocin is likely involved.
Central is Cultural Marxism, and the concepts stemming from Critical Theory incubated by the Frankfurt School. These ideas of intellectual warfare were assembled to undermine and subvert the social fabric of Western culture, and break down the oxytocin-mediated bonds of trust and community that maintain it, lest they congeal to support the dreaded "Authoritarian Personality". It's almost laughable, were it not the cause of such suffering, that the authors of this strategy - based on Freud's cocaine-fuelled navelgazing - lacked the self-awareness to reflect on their own propensity for psychological projection (far left ideologies invariably horseshoe towards authoritarianism themselves, and without peer: look no further than the unparalleled body count of Communism in the 20th century). But this discussion is not so much about the dialectic trap of left vs. right; it is about the mechanisms through which the "high-status" have sought to preserve their position and cohesion at the expense of greater humanity, and extend the reach of their power.
Anyway, ol' Freud was still pretty brilliant, and he hit close enough to the mark that we can add psychiatry to the list alongside horseshoes and hand grenades. His nephew Eddy Bernays took the torch and ran with it, taking the science of people's inner workings and applying it to groups of people: he wrote the book on Propaganda in 1928, launching the sleight-of-hand enterprise known as Public Relations and steering the unfolding of the 20th century, as delineated thoroughly in Adam Curtis' Century of the Self.
The Western cultural mindset has its feet rooted in the bedrock of Ice Age Europe. Its ethos of openness, cooperation, stoicism, and personal sacrifice towards the future of the community was an adaptation to the harsh environment. It made sense to help strangers and contribute. Since Ice Age Europe had very low population density, inter-group competition was not as significant a cultural stimulus as it was for more temperate and densely populated parts of the world.
Cultural Marxism exploits this deep-rooted template. The psychoanalists of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries did not conduct a comprehensive study of all peoples on earth: they studied Europeans, and their insights into the weaknesses and blind spots of our inner workings are insights into the European (and Eurpoean-derived North American) psyche.
It operates chiefly through the manipulation of language and managing mass-perception, and its most effective adherents are indeed uniquely talented in their capacity for the generation of new terms and symbols and the redefinition and recontextualization of old ones, often flipping them into new meanings exactly opposite from original. This is something Orwell foresaw with great prescience. The thinking style it engenders has gained dominance over the channels through which information and opinion are disseminated, principally academia and media, and is now being standardized as the "official" cultural framework of business.
If we accept that Critical Theory's original positive intent was to undermine ideology as the obstacle to human liberation, it has indeed become what it sought to unseat. It is now the oppressor.
Here's how the steamroller of Cultural Marxism, and the weaponized concepts it promotes, is tantamount to a war on oxytocin:
Feminism and Sexism: these encourage women to distrust and resent men, and reactively, men to distrust and resent women. A direct society-wide oxytocin antagonist. Much is yet to be written about feminism and its leading role in the subversion of traditional Western values, especially in academia. Currently, it has achieved such supremacy that open-minded discussion is impossible within institutes for higher learning (where the free exchange of ideas was once exalted), and criticism of it is punishable. At feminism's core is the sad presupposition that women have been oppressed by men for all of history, which is an ipso facto statement of belief in their inferiority. This is disempowering. The cognitive dissonance of this is too great for most to accept.
Those who contend that men and women have always been equal and complementary, and that we as a species could never have made it this far without the talents of both sexes in equal measure – in other words, those who honour the historical contributions of women and grant that they were intentional agents of free will, seeking their own biological imperative - are excoriated. The aim is to “deconstruct” traditional gender roles, presumably to give everyone choice and freedom to express themselves in how they wish to live their lives; yet, those who prefer traditional roles – genuinely exercising their right to choose – are still criticized, and told they're only doing so because they don't know any better: they've “internalized” the oppression. This is condescending. So we see that it's not about freedom, it's about targeting old modes of conformity - which were undeniably successful - for disassembly, and installing new ones. Broadly speaking, the thrust is towards opening up traditionally male spheres of influence to women – the reverse is of little concern - and hamstringing men from objecting.
Hookup Culture and Slut Pride: female oxytocin response is permanently impaired by multiple partners, specifically disappointments (bonds repeatedly established and then broken), with impairment increasing with partner count. She becomes both less trusting and less trustworthy, and more likely to practice infidelity. She is less able to form strong bonds, including with her own offspring.
Demonizing Fatherhood (war on Patriarchy) and destruction of the Family Unit: getting both parents working means not only more consumers and taxpayers, but less contact with children and less oxytocin in their formative years; divorce, ditto. Encouraging single motherhood: boys raised without positive father-bonding are at greater risk for a cluster of avoidable issues, many of which have negative effects on society at large (but not coincidentally give fuel to those who call for increased state intervention).
Mainstreaming of Smut and Profanity: The West is largely Christian in its morality, and Freud's observation of its sexually repressive nature was seized upon by the Critical Theorists, who deemed that this repressed energy (which, for hundreds if not thousands of years, had been sublimated into productive work) should now be allowed direct release. Decades of threshold shift in standards have led us to where we are today, where almost any non-traditional expression of sexuality is publicly encouraged.
Depopulation of the target culture: a core aim of these criticisms. All of the above lead to lower fertility; delayed onset of child-rearing; more abortions; the glamourization of childless career women; and pets as substitute children. Societies rarely grow without some degree of traditionalism, and the expectations – stifling though some may find it – that come with it. Societies shepherded towards radical individualism invariably decline.
Pushing Racism and Multiculturalism simultaneously: although not coined by them, the term "racism" was thrust into popularization by early figureheads of the Communist movement, and later enshrined in academia, in no small part from the efforts of the Frankfurt set. Remember, ingroup preference - a positive trait by definition - is simply a natural consequence of oxytocin expression. This has been deemed unacceptable in the “host” culture, and only in it. Functionally, the spectre of racism in the West is deliberately employed to shoot down, shout down, or shut down sincere discussion, and foment mistrust of the host by all out-groups (who are, in fact, strategically encouraged to perceive themselves as such, which is inherently dehumanizing).
Note that the rise of racism's (and sexism's) centrality in cultural discourse is inversely proportionate to severity of injustice – they're more popular terms now, in our era of “sensitivity”, than ever. This should be an obvious clue to the intent.
Trust and solidarity are fostered between out-groups "in the same fight", and in-group trust in the deceptively-named "dominant" culture is poisoned by the attachment of guilt to positive self-assessment. The narrative here seeks to constantly remind this group, which is actually internally diverse already, of negative aspects of itself. This would be entirely ineffective if the so-called “oppressive” majority were actually as evil as they're painted: it only works because they have concern for others' feelings. Out-groups, of course, know this, and their private mockery of it has begun to leak into the mainstream as they become more emboldened.
Finally, ceaseless messaging implores the silent, brow-beaten majority to trust all out-groups, with shaming and ostracism (oxytocin deprivation) as punishment for straying from the gospel. The descendants of the former in-group will be made to grovel and pay for their group's historical successes (achieved largely through in-group bonding), and milked for an unspecified duration moving forward. Note that even positive expressions of appreciation for out-group culture are kept open for redefinition as “appropriation”. They can thus be squeezed from both sides, and criticized for either not being accommodating enough, or expressing too much xenophilia. Eggshells are strewn at their feet. Third parties line up to self-appoint as judges, yet no one labels the enjoyment of the gifts and comforts of Western Civilization as “appropriation”.
Those pushing this narrative have no problem hijacking the pituitary glands of their pet "oppressed" groups, using funding and targeted emotional messaging to foster excessive oxytocin expression and radicalization within their ranks.
Cultural Marxism, while purporting to be fighting racism and sexism, is not only aligned with the thought-processes that created these concepts, it actively promotes them to hallucinatory levels of hypersensitivity. People are prompted to see “inequality” everywhere, and quickly become incapable of perceiving anything clearly through their personal, stifling lens-tint of subjective “privilege” assessment. Offense is encouraged to be “taken”. Microaggressions abound, each more preposterous than the last, with few courageous enough to call it what it is: emotional blackmail on a society-wide scale.
It is maddening and uniquely dispiriting to be told that you hate someone when you do not, with any protestations further ensnaring you in the kafkatrap, as you find yourself under the scrutiny of the public loupe, and stuck in a dog-and-pony show conducted for the self-gratification of the mob. In this way we are silenced.
In-group preference, rooted in oxytocin expression and as natural as anything, is thus recast as pathological. Notable exemptions from this demonization only manage to exist at the very top of the human hierarchy, and they are well-versed in avoiding it.
Multiculturalism and xenophilia have always occurred naturally and were essential in our evolution. Historically, anywhere two groups met there was interbreeding, much of it peaceful. This even occurred between groups of humans separated by hundreds of millenia, barely able to produce viable offspring due to genetic drift: Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals, and other archaic hominid groups all interbred on a scale large enough for their once-thought extinct genes to persist in us today.
Modern multiculturalism and undemocratic coercive migration, however, are a deliberate agenda, motivated primarily by top-down selfish economic and political imperatives (with a side order of self-congratulation), not true altruism. In fact, these programs exploit pathological altruism. The inevitable result - inter-group friction - is selectively reinterpreted by the Regressive Left as yet more "racism", and fed back into the front end of the propaganda machine. Thus the eyes of the masses are kept on each other: we are encouraged to bicker endlessly, and self-police. No one looks up to see where the marionette strings lead.
Media and Advertising Narrative: these constantly work to undermine our natural tendency to form bonds with those like ourselves, specifically seeking to portray as “uncool” or “dysfunctional” bonds between members of the host culture, and glamourize as sexy, cool, or wholesome depictions of bonds involving “visible minorities”, with consistent emphasis placed on European-derived women paired with “less-European” men, and any modes that support depopulation, like homosexuality.
This is not to say that these bonds should ever be prevented from forming or detract from their legitimacy; they'd no doubt do so organically anyway. The West is already effectively universalist in its acceptance of sincere love and friendship.
Most of us simply don't care who gets with whom, though we may take note of how fervently it's waved in our faces, or enjoy patting ourselves on the back for having the “correct” attitude. For many, it's just plain tiresome. The Regressive Left encourages us to twist our morality to excuse, for example, the structural misogyny of Islam, while focusing on the smallest transgressions of “misogyny” in Western culture, like “manspreading”. This is the “soft bigotry of low expectations” at work, and it makes it more difficult to establish and maintain genuine, spontaneous, egalitarian relations between people whose identities aren't identical. Applying different rules to different people – bigotry by definition – throws awkwardness and tension in the air between us all, and takes the fun and discovery out of the organic mingling of cultures. The calculated fashion in which role models are selected and portrayed comes across as cynical and phony. While they can't resist congratulating themselves and talking down to us, their true motive is all too transparent (money), and the way they go about messaging at us reeks of agenda.
Quota Hiring and Group Advocacy: In lockstep with the narrative outlined above is a deliberate push to populate establishment hierarchies with “diversity”. True merit, as championed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., takes a back seat to image; his dream of colour-blindness has yielded to hyper-awareness. Superficial differences, once cast as trivial and surmountable, are now seen not as less important than ability, but more important. Effectively, diversity points have become a new category of merit. Organizations that lag in implementing this are viewed with hostility and marked for infiltration. Conspicuous in their absence are calls to diversify unglamourous fields no one finds desirous, and calls for those with “privileged” identities to be granted entry into fields where they're currently under-represented. Advocacy groups are vehemently denied the right to form, or furiously eschewed legitimacy if they do, if their identity is perceived as already “too privileged”.
Tumblrism, Snowflakes, Intersectionality, and Identity Politics: making everyone hyper-aware and narcissistically proud of their singular uniqueness is a tool of isolation and control. The "oppression olympics" can drive a wedge between any two peoples' ability to find common ground. Allegiances shift according to the goals of the moment, which are typically emotional but often strategic. This is Divide and Conquer, and the strategy doesn't stop at the interpersonal, it worms its way into the "individual" themselves, dividing them within and encouraging them to espouse massively contradictory, even schizophrenic views simultaneously. They may seem blissfully un-self-aware of their hypocrisy and smug in their delusions, but beneath the surface, cognitive dissonance roils.
If oxytocin tells us: "I am safe, I am accepted and worthy, and I like those who are like me", its stifled expression in the individual results in: "I don't like myself, I don't fit in, I never feel safe, and I feel like/wish I were someone else". Paralysis of the psyche, anxiety/depression spectrum disorders, and unhealthy coping mechanisms follow. All that's needed to mobilize this new Useful Idiot to one's goals is to signal to them whom to blame.
In short, Cultural Marxism, through impairing oxytocin expression, leads to what Yuri Bezmenov calls Demoralization.
Other factors in the Modern World that may be related to Oxytocin function:
The rise of Autism and Social Anxiety disorders: may be associated with aberrant methylation of the OXTR gene, among others. Autistic people may intuitively sense the morass they've been born into, and their physiology is responding with a giant “nope”. After treatment with inhaled oxytocin, autistic patients exhibit more appropriate social behaviour. It has also been successfully administered to treat social anxiety disorders and PTSD.
Pushing unhealthy commercial “food” (if you can even call some of it that) and psych meds: these contribute to the progressive deterioration of our natural, healthy balance of hormones and neurotransmitters. Many people who think their serotonin levels are low may actually be oxytocin deprived. But oxytocin is difficult to measure clinically and unpatentable anyway, and getting levels up requires good nutrition and genuine human interaction, so they're encouraged to spend money on SSRIs that turn them into anhedonic, consumerized zombies. Their ability to form and maintain healthy bonds becomes further stunted. There's also a correlation between psych med use and mass killings. The pharma/medical community suffers from hubris in thinking it knows exactly what these products do in every case, and this blindness is compounded by the dazzling profits. In a similar, parallel fashion, many will bluster that we already know everything about what vaccines, GMO foods, and industrial pesticides do to our physiology. This is patently untrue, and those who refuse to entertain that there may be a tradeoff involved are essentially indistinguishable from religious zealots.
Fear mongering and the War on Terror: actually wars on comfort and privacy. These increase amygdala activity and cortisol, both oxytocin antagonists. Healthy oxytocin levels make us feel secure. As we're bombarded with messaging designed to make us feel perpetually insecure, both in our physical safety and in our worthiness as human beings, our oxytocin expression suffers. Typically these messages are sandwiched between ads, which seek to make us feel personally inadequate and compel us to spend to alleviate our previously established discomfort.
Professional sports: this is artificial tribalism, conducted as a controlled outlet for instincts of both in-group loyalty and “safe” expression of aggression towards out-groups. Sports fans in the throes of emotional investment - and under a flood of induced oxytocin - are in a highly suggestible state: advertising and social engineering through media have their greatest impact at this time. This is one of the reasons why Superbowl ads are the most expensive.
Note that between fear mongering and sports, the individual is reached in both high and low states of oxytocin.
Individualism and Consumerism: there is nothing we can purchase or post online – no cheap dopamine rush - to replace the lost sense of connection we crave: only oxytocin, through authentic in-person social bonding, can satisfy us. Conspicuous consumption and displays of preening or material possessions, crafted to evoke envy, only estrange the so-called successful individual from mutually accepting, peer-to-peer interactions. The fallacious thinking encouraged here is that high-status signalling will entice others to wish to bond with us. This leads to resentment as often as admiration; but more importantly, a true sense of fulfillment can only be achieved through our own choice to extend bonds to others. Love is indeed an offering, experienced as much through giving as receiving.
Social Media: On top of its primary function as a surveillance tool, this is fake socialization. There is little to no actual oxytocin payoff (although early studies are indicating that women are more likely to express oxytocin response through engaging in social media than men). Our social contacts are reduced to curated caricatures on a screen, and any oxytocin response we have may serve to bond us to our devices. Consider the new term “nomophobia”, which gives name to the panic and crippling anxiety people experience when their handhelds are lost: currently under consideration for inclusion in the DSM-V, psychiatry's official handbook for diagnosis of disorders. Hollywood seeks to further normalize this idea of a relationship with our anthropomorphized technology. Expect narrow AI, targeted to seduce specific personality types, to be rolled out soon.
Promotion/normalization of Porn: people whose only oxytocin release comes from masturbating to their computer, this time far more likely in men, are short-circuiting their human-to-human oxytocin response, and possibly forming a new kind of perverse sexual bond with their computer. Some men are left unable to achieve erection or orgasm in “normal” sexual encounters, their neural circuitry having been dissociated from reality and rewired to the digital smorgasboard. They may think they can avoid the pain that accompanies emotional growth inherent in real relationships, but they end up sacrificing the capacity for emotional growth altogether, and if they're in a relationship, it suffers. Big money is being spent developing sexbots and virtual reality platforms for sex. It should be noted that porn and sexbots horrify feminism – they're not wrong about everything – but their objection to the objectification of the female form into “body parts” doesn't seem to impede their open pride and affection for their dildos and vibrators. (The status of so-called “sex-workers” have them in a similar bind, torn between their urge to tell other women “you go girl, make your bank, don't let anyone shame you”, and support-scolding them for being damaged but feeding into what is essentially a crude distillation of the gender roles they so despise. There is no solidarity on this, but keen minds will see the common thread behind their protestations: the preservation of gatekeeper status (in other words, power and privilege), over sex itself. “Ongoing affirmative consent” initiatives and the legitimization of post-facto “regret equals rape” charges seek to further bolster this imperative).
Branding and Celebrity Culture: people are encouraged to form bonds of loyalty with brands, and construct their self-concepts from brands they identify with. Celebrities are also marketed as brands; people often know more about celebrities than those "close" to them, and build their identities by mimicking the celebrities they like and follow. It's at the point now where many are fabricating their own micro-brands via social media, and presenting a calculated image - with varying degrees of deception, omission, and self-delusion - to their own acquaintances, seeking to impress or accrue social credit, but ultimately preventing others from ever really getting to know them.
Commercial loyalty programs track our every preference, and build detailed profiles on us. Upon consolidating your data, they likely know more about you than your friends and family do. Meanwhile, small, local, family-run businesses – some of the few places we can still interact within our communities organically - are unable to compete, and pushed out of the market.
It's a two-way street of alienation: we're encouraged to spend our time following and admiring people we will never meet - to the detriment of our personal relationships - and simultaneously, the depths of our own inner workings are known more completely by corporate entities than by our loved ones (in some ways perhaps even better than we know ourselves). A friend or family member who knows you well, including your flaws and weaknesses, can look out for you, or tell you a bit of painful truth you need to hear. Celebrities by and large don't even know you exist; corporations are definitely interested in you, but only insofar as they can use this information to access your money directly by facilitating a sale, or indirectly by lumping your data in with people you don't know.
All these forces work to atomize society, reshuffle identity groups, weaken organic solidarity, and transfer our sense of loyalty away from the people in our lives, and on to organizations with carefully crafted public images.
We may ask: who, in our new media narrative, is most encouraged towards self-love, acceptance and pride? The answer is those who form their identities on qualities of "otherness". They are thus encouraged into increasing their self-identification as "other" to secure narcissistic supply. This has been extended to pathological levels as younger generations seek to adjust to the expectations signalled to them. The more extreme their "otherness", the more deserving of support our narrative appraises them. Children in whom competition has been stifled - everyone gets a trophy - nonetheless have an innate urge to compete, and to “win”. This has come to express itself in the bid for “moral superiority”. Absurd, even comical results follow. However, should you let slip any outward sign you find it funny, you're instantly labelled a monster, and it's open season for ruthless, socially-sanctioned attacks. These modern day witch hunts belie the true pirhana-tank underbelly of “progressivism”. You can almost hear the rubbing of hands when someone is deemed to have crossed the shifting line, and if you stand still too long, that line of “correctness” will slide right under your feet by itself. Increasingly, the line is retroactively adjusted, with the actions and attitudes of figures from the distant past ripped out of context and reinterpreted by the standards of the day.
The biggest hypocrisy is the implicit suggestion that all members of the so-called “privileged” group are summarily assumed to be incapable of self assessment, and roundly deserving of silencing. This is exactly the kind of bias the “fairness police” claim to be against. Up is indeed down. But moral relativism and end-justifies-means, zero-sum thinking are hallmarks of this ideological style.
Middle-class, straight “white” males are the umbrella identity group most openly and gleefully mocked today, and universally demonized - or at least groaned at - for expressing any form of pride or solidarity in their identity. In truth they were never a monolithic entity, always a mosaic of competing haplogroups and cultures; nonetheless they provide a convenient boogeyman upon whom everyone else can project their resentment.
Insofar as this is a group, it pretty much built modern Western Civilization, and did much of the dying last century defining and defending it, slaughtering itself by the millions at the bidding of competing power elites.
So, why no sympathy for them? Because they signed up for it?
“They were warlike”, some say. “Serves them right”.
But this is a simplistic - and hubristic – dismissal, so typically tossed over the shoulder by righteousness addicts who have always taken their freedoms for granted. How exactly were all those well-meaning, but ultimately gullible, middle-class Caucasian men from neighbouring states compelled to kill each other en masse? Seems kind of... well, oppressive...
They were told, using freshly minted propaganda techniques, that their participation was needed to protect those who couldn't protect themselves. And they believed. Their sense of duty was appealed to: their loyalty, based on oxytocin expression, was used against them for the so-called "greater good". This is how they were able to form heroic bonds of brotherhood, willingly place their lives on the line, endure pain, and face down fear itself: it was for their people.
As Stanley Milgram's experiment demonstrated, they abdicated their personal responsibility to higher authority. Oxytocin played a big role in that.
And so the lies of today - that middle-class, straight white males are the problem - are precisely backwards from the truth of history. Those who look like the humans who were sacrificed for the cushy existence of today's entitled "skeleton warriors" are now blamed for their inevitable, engineered unhappiness.
Meanwhile, campaigns of dominance and acquisition continue unabated, inflicting devastation and suffering across the globe on a scale beyond measurement using any Western-calibrated yardstick of fussy “equality”. Designated outgroups are still strategically dehumanized to cement sentiment, while domestically, increasing surveillance and brutality erode from under us the precious rights and freedoms so many died so recently to preserve. Crises are created (or allowed to happen), and then managed, filtered and massaged, our tantrums shushed. Coverage is infotainment, and rife with misdirection.
The reason why established powers are pushing people in the West towards stunted and dysfunctional oxytocin expression is this: when they form strong ingroup bonds with moral solidarity, they quickly become healthy blocks of social influence, and much more difficult to control. This threatens entrenched interests who have grown accustomed to and feel entitled to the continuous flow of our blind consent. That's why historically, they've sought to tear men from their families and pit them against one another, even men so genetically similar as neighbouring Europeans: to cull them, and any threats to power that arise from a lower level of the pyramid.
Effectively, an echo of human sacrifice by the priest-class.
To maintain supremacy, and perhaps in a tentative step towards curtailing large-scale physical barbarity, their new goal is to prevent in-group autonomy from forming by impeding our innate social urges, and isolating us into narcissistic, distracted, anxious individuals, splintered inside, bitterly fighting each other over petty, magnified differences, and vainly seeking external validation. Where our natural bonds persist, they seek to mediate and surveil them through communication technologies, and commoditize them at every possible stage. Our trust, loyalty, and life's output can then be accreted to the state/banking/media/academic/corporate superstructure. Through this apparatus and its codes of behaviour, we are told what to believe, what to think, what we should desire, and what we're allowed to say aloud if we wish to keep our station. They've encoded cultural killswitches in our cerebral cortices, interfering with our self-integration, and signal-jamming our connection with our own deep, ancient limbic drives.
It feels good to be a part of something bigger than oneself, something one believes in. This is completely natural: we're social animals. We seek a sense of purpose, and groups of people with hearts and minds aligned can move mountains. They know this, and seek to dictate to us exactly what we may feel good being a part of, so our energies can be funnelled to their ends.
They are literally trying to hijack our physiology from the inside out.
The singular collective hallucination working to steadily undermine oxytocin (which is nothing more than organic, spontaneous bonding and cooperation) as the primary means of ordering culture and mobilizing human activity is debt-based currency.
The transfer and concentration of “wealth” that has accelerated recently, supported by the machinations described here, has been unprecedented. However, money is still nothing more than a symbol, even in its reduced form of easily-fudged ones and zeroes on computer drives, and its only value is what we collectively ascribe to it. It is merely representative of real trust, value, work, and assets. True wealth - beyond that of earth's resources and the integrity of our environment - resides in our organic bonds, and its source is our primordial will to survive. The entrenched powers seek to prune, mow, and uproot our natural bonds so they can supplant them with monetary-based ones that increase their leverage.
Surely by now you've figured out that the debt owed to private interests by your country will never be paid off. It rockets higher each year, long ago surpassing escape velocity, while you and your fellow citizens grow less and less capable of ever covering your share. This isn't simply a counting exercise: it is a means of enslavement. Those who hold this debt don't want it paid off; it's an impossibility by design. All they care is that you remain in bondage and your children are born into it. It matters not what the numbers are: step back and look at the arrangement. This is a project of human domestication and farming.
Debt is fake money, which will never translate into tangible value for anyone except those who hold it and manage to keep convincing the rest of us it's real. This social obligation is replacing oxytocin as the new mediator of human enterprise, and increasingly, opinion. Our petri dish of earth is rapidly filling up, and the promises we're making to the future grow more mathematically unfulfillable every day. Without the upwards pressure of population growth, a shift is required, so our Deus ex Machina is arriving as fast as it can be invented. A massive campaign, well underway now, is pushing human evolution away from oxytocin-mediated ingroup trust, and towards the myth of “In God we Tru$t”, and our dependence on the techno-social edifice that supports it.
Ultimately, its architects seek to channel our religious instincts to themselves. They want our souls. The easiest way for them to do this is to standardize us: culturally (through the flattening effects Cultural Marxism and corporate consumerism), genetically (through accelerating race-mixing), and sexually (through postgenderism: sculpting our physiology and attitudes to make women more masculine and men more feminine).
If you notice that this standardization is acutely antithetical to actual diversity, congratulations: it is the point at which Divide and Conquer transmutes into Unite and Rule, and the frog is considered boiled.
On this, the Neo-Marxists of the Radical Left (and their useful idiots in Media and Academia) and the Neoconservative Imperialist Right (with their own stooges and goons of Corporatism and the burgeoning global Police State) appear to reach complete and total agreement.
Open your eyes to our new landscape: Unfettered hegemony for the few, and “equality” - doublespeak for blind servitude - for everyone else.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

ikanreed posted:

Of course, we will never get a meaningful answer for why excessive traditional manliness is to be preferred in society. It is simply passed as a token of faith among most segments of the right, alt-right to traditionalist, that more violence, physical toughness, and impassivity to the concerns of others is a natural and good thing.

If asked why the "feminization of society" such as they're often so concerned with is a bad thing, I doubt you'd get more than an incredulous stare as if such a question is inherently off base.
The answer they'd never admit is that anyone who wants a society based on brutal hierarchy assumes they'll be dishing out the brutality rather than receiving it. It's kind of like how no one who wants a fascist society imagines themselves being the ones digging ditches at gunpoint.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
If you tilt your head and squint just right, you could read this as a leftist criticism of conservatism in art, since it's conservatism that generally holds the view that what's normal is good and those weird and different people need to be shunned, assimilated, or wiped out.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
That's a pretty good summary of Log Cabin Republicans, yeah.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
The two hosts of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

except dont these pricks hate the modern world. and want to live in some weird fascist/medieval society.
They like modern technology, just not modern values. I think they want to live in that space feudalist society from Battletech.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
Or, from another angle, what happens to the millions of people who need some form of modern medical treatment/medication to survive?

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
LoB, you're doing God's work in this thread.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.

Annointed posted:

"You see we must contain the Negro and the Irish for they have latent tendencies if not left in check can cause great harm to themselves and society. Give them one ounce of freedom and they'll take everything from you."

Game literally justifies White Man's Burden.
I've heard people say this about Infinite, but the message I got was more along the lines of "Oppression creates anger and resentment, which tend to express themselves in ugly ways that leave collateral damage even when they're justified." Which I think there's historical precedent for. I see it as all the more reason to attempt to nip oppression in the bud at every opportunity, really ¯\:v:

Polybius91 has a new favorite as of 17:14 on Aug 6, 2016

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
The only thing I know about Homestuck is that it has a really contrived and dumb romance thing based on playing card suits. Also spitting in buckets is involved somehow.

Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
I think the professional vs. amateur porn thing is somewhat of a stopped clock moment for the alt-right.

"Somewhat" because, as someone said above, I get the feeling their opposition is based more on antisemitic conspiracy theories than concerns about worker exploitation.

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Polybius91
Jun 4, 2012

Cobrastan is not a real country.
How the gently caress could someone think any of this is a good idea

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