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Halloween Jack posted:
There’s always a bedrock of people ready to go fascist and hang others from lampposts, but there have to be causal explanations for why they sometimes sit and stew in the living room and sometimes put on helmets and march around. The nazis out in the streets now we’re pretty much the same people ten years ago. Trump wasn’t just an authoritarian pied piper, though he may well have been that. But this wasn’t his first run for president.
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Oct 23, 2018 14:44
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Part of it has to do with how you define “politics.”. Like that can specifically mean how formal powers are divided in governing a nation and how people in democracies vote, but politics itself as an object of study starts with how a household is ordered (according to the Greeks). The impulses that people have about what kind of social order is allowed and who belongs and what kinds of questions or activities are permitted are themselves political, no matter whether or how they are expressed by leaders or laws or institutions. And whatever we’re saying about the kind of person who’s eager to go nazi, nazis only become a threat when “regular” conservatives go along with it out of self-interestedness or the belief that they can take advantage of what’s happening (or that they can only survive by latching into it). imo material conditions dictate those formative moments and there’s not a way around it. There weren’t fascists taking control in the 70s even though the authoritarians were absolutely losing their poo poo over black kids being in their schools and women having jobs, and sorting themselves into the Republican Party in the process. The whole 80s-90s culture war never went “hot” as it were the way things are boiling over now, outside of some militia groups robbing banks and running drugs. Something’s different, and I don’t see how it can be tied up in the psychology of white boomers who were here the whole time.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:44
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Unzip and Attack posted:There is of course some truth to this, but on the other hand there is a sizable portion of the American populace that has been converted and militarized over the last 20 or so years by Rightwing media. We can point to 9/11, Fox News, AM talk radio, internet community (as a concept), the Great Recession, intensifying wealth inequality, or all of these, but everyone knows a few people who were largely apolitical that have become goose-steppers in that time period. I don't buy the "they were always Nazis" argument, especially given that many of these people are very young. It’s definitely not an either/or, but why were those racist kids spending so much time on 4Chan after 2008? Their narrative is that the culture changes too fast and demands that they be less racist than they are comfortable being, but there are boomer shitheads in my family still mad about the end of segregation and who believe white supremacy is a founding ideal of the United States who never contemplated shooting up a mall or bombing city hall and just lived their lives as middle-class drones. I never even knew what shits they were until Trump let them know it was ok to be that way. So I kind of feel like if the young nazis of today were distracted by building careers and paying for houses, they would never have moved into the “active nazi” category. But you’re right that it’s very much an open circle and people gravitate to what radicalizes them as they get a taste for being radicalized. I definitely think that social media and algorithms are extremely powerful and dangerous to us in ways we don’t understand, and that future generations will look at us playing with them so carelessly in the same way we look at radium water or those x-ray shoe-fitting stations.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:56
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Cadaver_Maclaine posted:I think a lot of derives from your first paragraph and the sense that since about that time white dominance felt itself threatened in a way it hadn't been since probably the civil rights era, which was especially aggravated by years of racially-laced fearmongering since 9/11 and anticipated economic stability falling out from beneath their feet. The end of whiteness had been chugging along pretty incrementally and predictably though, at least in the rainbow capitalism "yay a black president!" sense. I'm not prepared to cede the "you made us do this by demanding we tell you our pronouns!" argument to the nazis, as it really seems like the death of future prospects under capitalism in crisis made them jump that way. Not that white male teens aren't hugely racist and reactionary, but all the pieces were there in the 90s and had been there since Reagan mobilized white rage against the welfare state. That's a really good point about islamophobia and the clash of cultures stuff post-9/11, though. I wonder if we could chart the rise of discourse invoking "the west" as an identity or ideal 2001-present. I bet there would be a big jump as the years wore on.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:33
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Halloween Jack posted:A big problem I have with Altemeyer is that his definitions of what constitutes left-wing and right-wing thought are...pretty much absent. It's just relative to the always-slippery North American context. He mentions at one point that it’s a choice of his made to distinguish his subject from the larger body of more classic work made to address the authoritarians of the 20th century who claimed socialism or left politics.
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Oct 24, 2018 16:44
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One of the bombs has what appears to be a printed-out meme with the reporter’s face and an isis flag rubberbanded to it. Given the qanon fixation on this reporter as a secret isis member and given the fact that only a boomer would print out a meme to send through the mail, this being a qanon thing looks pretty likely. It’s just missing a minions guy.
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Oct 24, 2018 22:39
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Willie Tomg posted:though i understand why it is not, i wish the forum were just a teeeeeeensy bit more lenient toward the Five Finger Discount because savvy customers can snag a copy of Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality and the clinical and projective data in that book would be real drat relevant here IMO as a counterpoint to just-so proclamations about demography, though in lieu of that here is a pretty okay thesis paper digesting it and seating it among later works--like Altemeyer's--and goes a little way toward the supposed apolitical application of this strain of narcissistic ideology. Authoritarian Personality is out of print and has been for a long time, even with people printing his lecture notes as new releases, so far as I know. Double-check, but you’re probably in the clear.
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Nov 1, 2018 17:10
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when that one says, “I’ve worked so hard,” what do they mean by that?
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Nov 7, 2018 09:49
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Altemeyer coined RWA to distinguish it from the fanaticism observed among the cults of personality that developed around leaders like Stalin and Mao, which presumably had been well-studied by that point.
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Nov 11, 2018 01:57
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Honestly a lot of it will always be people figuring out that they’re being exploited and subjected to a system that puts them at a disadvantage, but then being too dumb or racist to accept the reasons why and embracing one of the endless variations on antisemitism instead.
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Nov 17, 2018 16:57
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Cactus posted:They'll push it too far one day and actually get the result they're so diligently working towards and it wont end well for anyone, including them. In fact this happens often. How long do you imagine social orders last without a good crisis or straight collapse?
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May 4, 2019 17:40
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I don’t know the context for this discussion, but Neiwert is well worth reading. His concept of eliminationism explains a lot about the far right in America and how people are radicalized by mass media specifically.
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Aug 10, 2019 13:03
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:people are radicalized based on their material conditions. more people have radicalized in various ways because material conditions have worsened - inequality, poverty, capitalist alienation, economic stagnation. trying to explain away radicalization through this dumb psychobabble poo poo is liberal refusal to accept reality - that american liberalism has failed to benefit most people, and so they have radicalized in seek of new solutions. It was Adorno who came up with the category of the authoritarian personality, and I think he’d tell you that there were other reasons why people became nazis, but he’d probably also tell you that the f scale describes something real that has consequences for how history plays out.
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Aug 31, 2019 16:10
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How long has this fake piss tape been out there? I must be getting old to have not heard about it.
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Sep 26, 2019 12:20
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Kindness is what Orlando calls drone strikes.
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Oct 10, 2019 01:49
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A tearful Trump orders federal troops to remove Judge Jeanie from the bench.
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Oct 10, 2019 22:54
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I’d enjoy some documented examples of senile narcissists, or of what happens to really classic ones in old age.
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Oct 18, 2019 00:22
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God is so good and powerful that his will can be defeated by appeals to other gods, which are also real.
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Nov 7, 2019 04:47
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Mayman10 posted:He got arrested for a domestic incident felony warrant but no charges from the stand off. I'd love to see the libertarians try and do their "revolution" They do it every time they shoot a bunch of people in a school or at the park.
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Nov 24, 2019 15:59
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Can they really get that much more violent than they already are? They’re already butchering people monthly. Authoritarians of the classic Altemeyer kind are largely cowards if they think they’ll ever face any kind of consequence.
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Nov 26, 2019 00:29
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The modern religious right came into existence as a voting bloc because of desegregation. They want to dismantle all schools because black children can attend them.
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Dec 30, 2019 18:41
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I think he actually does claim to be perfect and gets furious whenever someone doesn’t agree, but I’m guessing anyone listening to that is a willing participant in the fiction.
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Jan 4, 2020 00:25
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Prester Jane posted:Anyone else worried that this Iran situation might cause America to really fall off the bus w/r/t fascism? You need more buy-in from the capitalist class and liberals before that can happen. Most people don’t like, and in fact dislike, Trump. It would have to generate 9/11 levels of disruption and disbelief, which can’t happen post-9/11 without a nuke or something.
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Jan 8, 2020 01:12
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I wouldn’t trust a nazi. His only purpose in doing anything is to make the forums collapse. If forum rules enforcement ends up protecting nazis and driving good people away, maybe we should leave. But ask yourself why a nazi would share this information and whose ends your behavior serves. If lowtax were a nazi, why would nazis hate this place?
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Jan 11, 2020 20:16
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There’s an element of heroism in the notion, that doing some complicated spy poo poo is better than just sweeping up all the trash. But that’s pointless and dangerous for reasons obvious in how things turned out. GDN, like it’s some secret society or something.
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Jan 12, 2020 00:06
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Psychopathy is a matter of degree and not a binary. There are degrees of psychopathy that are prosocial, like people who are driven to lead. It’s not possible to be a good leader if you’re not at least a little arrogant and don’t believe that you’re the best person for the job (because logically it’s not possible to know that with any certainty). It becomes a disease when people end up too far along the spectrum to function.
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Jan 17, 2020 15:11
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There’s also the fact that we live in a society that rewards psychopathy and encourages people to behave as psychopaths from an early age. If we had a different social order, who’s to say most psychopaths wouldn’t just go along to get along?
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Jan 17, 2020 15:13
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