Prester Jane posted:

I hear what you are saying and all I ask is that you give me a few months to elaborate on my underlying thinking. I am abbreviating a great deal of complicated material in the above post- partly out of necessity so that I have some sort of frame-of-reference to structure my underlying arguments. My thinking on this starts with a novel model of the subconscious mind and builds layer-upon-layer up from there- with a heavy focus on how childhood influences the subconscious structures that directly impact how a given individual is experiencing reality.

I'm not saying that when I'm done your mind will be changed, all I'm asking is for a chance to elaborate on my full theoretical framework

Prester Jane posted:

I honestly haven't since I got things somewhat formalized on the website, I tried previously before that there was some interest but I did too have a convenient way to present it to someone who wasn't inactive follower of the D&D thread at the time. I'd be willing to try again though. Do you happen to have any suggestions?

Prester Jane posted:

I didn't even have a Social Security number until I was 14. I was raised in a backwards doomsday cult and my life has primarily been preoccupied with trying to overcome that. Beyond basic arithmetic and reading my actual education didn't start until I entered High School, prior to that I had been educated by the cult. I am literally a disabled schizophrenic who lives in Portland on less than $1,000 a month from my social security check, I never really had the option to go to college.

Also when I started this project the first drafts were literally written on a library computer because I was living in a homeless shelter at the time. Like I am doing the goddmned best job of this I can with basically no resources whatsoever and a huge pile of obstacles in front of me, you'll forgive me if I have no idea how to even go about reviewing literature that I've never once had access to in my life.

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.

Helsing posted:

Also to be slightly more constructive, some freely available places to start if you wanted to compare your ideas with others or get an idea of what best practices are for developing your ideas:

Downloadable pdf of an Intro Sociology Testbook - provides broad overview of many topics that are similar to your interests, including group dynamics

Textbooks aren't great but they can be helpful for broadly framing the issues and giving a good overview of major theoretical traditions. See, for instance, chapter six of this book and how it takes a single incident (Occupy Wall Street) and shows how different theoretical lenses would each analyze the same event.

Downloadable pdf of an Intro Psychology Textbook - similarly gives broad overview and introduction to many topics of interest to you including basic primer on links between psychology and study of the brain, etc.

A short youtube primer on preparing a lit review - not something I'm saying you follow rigorously, but its helpful to see what best practices are thought to be for a grad student preparing a research project

PDF version of "The Reactionary Mind" by Corey Robbin - a book that tries to offer a unified psychological theory of conservatism

Online copy of "When Prophecy Fails" - a famous and influential book of definite relevance to your interests. From the wiki summary:


The Makings of a Pro-Life Activist by Ziad W. Munson. A very important book released in 2008. It examines the dynamics of social movement mobilization using a case study of the pro-life movement. It specifically zeros in on the question of who becomes directly engaged as an activist - the answer is surprising, in that merely having strong beliefs isn't enough to motivate action.

The True Believer - famous book on the nature of mass movements

BrandorKP posted:

The forums aren't a cult, so one would hope they'd recover in a way that cults don't manage to.

Aleph Null posted:

PJ does seem a bit sensitive to constructive criticism, but people are still offering it. Including a giant reading list of free material that anyone could download.

Jazerus posted:

the kind of narratives non-narrativists construct are limited in scope. they are about things like their dreams and ambitions, careers, romantic interests, interests, etc. and a person might have many different narratives in different spheres of their life. a narrativist has a "grand narrative" - a single, mostly all-encompassing narrative that is invoked to explain most of the events in life. grand narratives tend to fall into categories, such as religious, conspiratory, nationalist, etc. and the narrativist connects most of their life into this grand narrative - although unless they are very radicalized or mentally ill they are unlikely to actually admit to this inner grand narrative. instead, they present to the world an "outer narrative" - a safer explanation for their beliefs and behaviors that won't raise as many eyebrows, and even if it does come under attack, it's not as distressing because it's not their real position. this explains, for example, the rapidly shifting nonsense logic of right-wing media - any given 'issue' is a new outer narrative that really serves the purpose of further defending the inner narrative.

narrativists are essentially disconnected from reality in important ways because the narrative shapes their perceptions, and the narrative can in turn be shaped by other people either in person or in media. any narrative can, of course, but a non-narrativist has many small, simple narratives, so any one narrative doesn't dominate their worldview. narrativists can be convinced of many absurd things by appealing to the inner logic of their grand narrative, while most people have at least some degree of reality-based logical reasoning

there's a lot more to say on the topic but i'm kinda tired atm so i'll leave it there

quote:

PB: ...Every major tradition in Europe—Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox—comes out of a history of being a state church. There are some exceptions—nonconformist in England—but most of them —Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, Orthodox—were state churches. The United States started out with pluralism. Some of them didn’t like this at all. The Puritans in New England hanged Quakers on Boston Common. They weren’t tolerant of other religions. They had to become tolerant, because there were too many of these other people. You couldn’t hang them all. You couldn’t convert them all. It was, I think, a very good development. But what does a state church do in terms of people’s attitudes to religion? If a church is too closely linked to the state, every time people get annoyed at the state, they get annoyed with the church that is established by the state. It’s very simple. And that’s not good for religion, and it’s not good for the state, for different but ­similar reasons. That’s the most important reason, I think.

GT: And when it comes to the intellectual elites?

PB: That’s more complicated. It’s a particular kind of elite. The top of that elite are people mostly in the social sciences and humanities. Natural scientists are not so much in that groove. The problem, I think, has to do with—again—pluralism. It has to do with the relativization of worldviews and values, which is most conscious to intellectuals who are in literature, or sociology, or anthropology, or history, rather than chemists, let’s say, or physicists who are not as much affected by this relativization. I think an explanation can be made along those lines.

...

GT: Let’s talk about Mainline Protestantism. In The Sacred Canopy [1967], you say that Protestantism has significantly contributed to the secularization of the West. There’s a quote actually in the book that says, “At the risk of some simplification, it can be said that Protestantism divested itself as much as possible from the three most ancient and most powerful concomitants of the sacred—­mystery, miracle, and magic. This process has been aptly caught in the phrase, ‘disenchantment of the world...’ The Protestant believer no longer lives in the world ­ongoingly ­penetrated by sacred beings and forces.” Can you elaborate on that, how Protestantism might have contributed to secularization?

PB: An unoriginal idea. This was Max Weber. You quoted the “disenchantment of the world.” Yes, there’s something to that, and if you’re particular, Protestantism cannot be understood except against the Catholic background from which it came. And Catholicism, certainly even today, has more mystery, magic, and miracle than most Protestant denominations. That’s true. It’s not true, for example, when you talk about Pentecostals, which is a most rapidly exploding form of Protestantism. And to some extent, it isn’t even true of most Evangelicals. So I would be more careful now in formulating this.

GT: Would you say this would be true for Mainline Protestantism?

PB: No. And that is, I would say, a significant difference, and incidentally, since this is a Christian college, I don’t mind making theological statements. (At my age, I can say anything, what do I care?) I think that Evangelicals so far have resisted what has been I think the main sin—I wouldn’t call it a sin—the main mistake of Mainline Protestantism, which is to replace the core of the Gospel, which has to do with the cosmic redefinition of reality, with either politics or ­psychology or a kind of vague morality, which is not what I think the Christian Gospel is basically about. The Christian Gospel is about a tectonic shift in the structure of the universe, focused on the events around the life of Jesus. Obviously, there are a lot of implications to this. Evangelicals have not gone through this process. Luckmann many years ago called it “inner secularization.” Either it becomes politicized: What is Christianity all about? It’s some political program, which tends to be left of center, now it could just as well be right of center. That’s distortion. Or it becomes psychologized: it has to do with well-being and self-realization, Norman Vincent Peale type stuff. Or a kind of vague morality, which is usually something that most people would certainly approve of: don’t be nasty to little old ladies if they slip in the gutter. Okay, fine. But again, that’s not what the Gospel is about. And that is something that Evangelicals have retained, and I think, and I hope, will continue to retain....

McGlockenshire posted:

yes hello welcome to thread local jargon, where you can lurk and read or you can poo poo the place up

please don't poo poo the place up

Jazerus posted:

i mean, fishmech literally can't post in cspam, he's not allowed because we told him to gently caress off extremely hard. it is in general a place you can tell anybody to gently caress off though and people should do so

i feel like there is a weird refusal on your part to actually engage with the large body of material prester has written about all of the points you've raised in your last couple of posts. this isn't exactly new, the d&d thread was years old and the OP of this thread links to prester's blog where she lays this all out. there's been an ongoing discussion about this stuff for years so is it a surprise that there are a few bits of specialized vocabulary involved? this poo poo is not actually complicated, or even particularly far outside of currently existing psychological theory once you mentally transform it from prester's vocabulary into more standard terms. which requires reading it in detail - that's not going to be everybody's cup of tea and that's fine but that doesn't make jargon gibberish.


most people are not narrativists. some people have been in the past and aren't now, others aren't right now but will be in the future, and most people never will be. it's not a clinical pathology - it's a system of logical reasoning that a person can be talked into believing in, or talked out of believing in, and which ties everything into a larger-than-life narrative about a conflict between good and evil. the exact details vary according to the person's culture, interests, and experiences, of course - one narrativist might believe that life is a story about a left behind style rapture that'll happen any day now, another that the reptilians control the world through the UN, another that the end of civilization is coming and so they must stockpile food and weapons for the post-apocalypse. all of the familiar varieties of crazy that make a normal person go "" because they're people living in weird all-encompassing fantasy worlds. some of those people can pass for not-crazy - those are narrativists with an outer narrative.

it's certainly true that people use "genteel social signifiers covering power relations" but that's not exactly what is going on for a narrativist - the power relations part is the perspective of non-narrativists who feed the narrativists their narrative, while the narrativist is living a fantasy where they're the Good Guys fighting the Bad Guys. a lot of the folks who do nonsensical poo poo to "own the libs" are thinking on this symbolic fantasy level where their actions will contribute to the spiritual war that they perceive as happening all around them. narrativist theory is about the dittoheads, whereas the "rhetoric covering power relations" part is rush himself, to use a very last-decade comparison here. this isn't something that you are unfamiliar with, willie - it's just viewed through a different lens.

people in this thread aren't compelled by a grand narrative of narrativism. narrativists aren't the evil enemy, even if they're often easily fooled by grifters and authoritarians into supporting regressive poo poo, and we don't build our lives around a perceived conflict between narrativists and non-narrativists. narrativists simply are part of the human condition, an aspect of human society that is more usually treated as many discrete phenomena rather than a unified one. that's where i think PJ's writings really have value - they identify commonalities between disparate groups of folks who are disconnected from reality-based reasoning, and explain mechanically why we see certain behaviors and dynamics in these groups. is PJ right about everything? no, certainly not, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to take seriously here.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

how the gently caress is this harassment lol


unless you think correctly pointing out how fundamentally stupid all this is counts as harassment

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

i dont think yall " " get " " cspam

uncop posted:

There is a lot of criticism that stems from putting PJ alongside professional academics’ published books with a humongous amount of person-hours put into making sure everything works. Even if PJ was some kind of mythical genius that was right about everything she asserts somehow, her current work would still pale in comparison because of pretty obvious realities.

Preferring real books is only logical, and reading a whole lot is ultimately the only way to refine this kind of stuff to academic standards, but good books existing is not an argument for dismissing someone’s work, only for others to start somewhere else if they haven’t yet and want to learn about the subject right now. I’m yet to see an actual takedown that shows a correct understanding of PJ’s framework and uses knowledge of academic work to show it to be based on assertions that are untrue. ”It’s bad because it’s false”, rather than ”it’s bad because I don’t understand it / it’s nowhere near academic standards / it covers ground that is already trodden”. Your crit is firmly in the ”I haven’t put in any effort to understand it so it’s vague gibberish, here’s some counterevidence to it as I misunderstand it” camp.

Jazerus posted:

i mean it's not true because i'm asserting it in earnest. that would be stupid! i am explaining prester's ideas to you. they are not necessarily accurate and need a much more scientific approach to be shown to be "true" inasmuch as science can approach the concept of "truth", but i personally feel there is value in exploring explanations based on this framework as prester develops it even if it is still rough and has not been empirically tested. all models start out untested.

unlike prester i am educated in this field and do have an awareness of the scholarly explanations about all of these things which is why i'm not asserting that everything PJ says is true - however, PJ's framework is not really in opposition to anything i have ever read. it is a very different perspective that has some overlap with existing scholarly writing but also raises new points worthy of discussion and eventually study, once she's in a position to do so.

you are kind of coming into this mid-stream and making assumptions that the people posting in this thread are hanging on prester's every word to discern the Truth or whatever. that is not the case - we're well aware that this isn't the most solid set of ideas ever created. prester is aware of that, even - the whole point is to help prester, who is passionate about this but not well-educated, to assimilate these ideas into the previously existing scholarly explanations while retaining the parts that seem to have new explanatory power. if it was just nonsense i wouldn't be posting, and if it was a super-solid academic theory that required no further discussion, i wouldn't be posting either.

ewe2 posted:

I found your appeals to authority rather weird. Adorno is well out of date, even Altermeyer is out of date, you also chose a Philosophy Phd thesis to back your claim which isn't properly related to the group sociology we're effectively discussing and it is also out of date, coming in the same year as Stenner's work but only quoting her initial paper. Unfortunately for you, if you had read Stenner you'd certainly need to read up on sociological/statistics jargon if you weren't already well-versed in that field, and since Stenner is relentlessly empirical your references are at least on similar shaky ground to PJ's which are after all still at the level of working theory.

Al! posted:

the most useful part of this thread is understanding how and why it's insanely toxic

E-Tank posted:

So uhh, to try and get things back on topic, I posted this and I don't know if PJ ever got a look at it. I was kinda proud of it, so posting it here again.

"So I found what I think is the most clear cut case of a narrativist being put on the spot by having exposed the inner narrative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hYxYZbqtQ&t=2558s

This is Mark Collett. At the time of this video, he was something of a rising star in the BNP, which is literally the British Nazi Party.

First thing he does when the reporter comes in and tells him that he's a reporter, and he's been writing a report about him, is to deny everything. Because he doesn't have any proof.

then when the reporter tells him he recorded everything he looks like a deer caught in headlights because he said some *Really* nasty poo poo. First he demands he leave because he has betrayed him, then immediately begs for him to stop it from airing. He repeatedly asks the reporter to turn off the camera for five minutes, the reporter refuses to. It is. . . Glorious, and at the same time terrifying, seeing someone realize that their brilliance 'superiority' to everyone else was tricked. That he said so many things, and got caught saying them. It's like two different people. One smug and so cocksure of himself, the other one is terrified. Terrified of what he's done, and how he got caught. He probably fakes trying to quit the BNP and it devolves from there."

If nothing else, watching someone's world suddenly collapse inward as the carefully constructed lie is destroyed by his own hand, is incredibly cathartic.

quote:

At the center of the conspiracy in Foucault's Pendulum is a short cryptic text brought to the attention of the young editors, Belpo and Casaubon, by a mysterious Colonel Ardenti. It holds the secret of the Templars in code, he says. Years later, Belpo, Casaubon, and their kabbalistic colleague, Diatallevi, will invent a elaborate parody conspiracy, "The Plan," based on their interpretation of Ardenti's text. Later, Casaubon's lover, Lia, will research and offer her own interpretation of the text. Far from a cryptic statement of the Templar's plan, she finds it a merchant's miscellaneous delivery list.

So here we have it-either the secret plan of the Templars or a common list. A devotee of the occult might reject the commonplace interpretation out of hand as too mundane. A skeptic might accept it equally readily, for the skeptic is guided by what Eco calls "economy." Presented with a text, a "sane" interpreter searches for the context that provides for the easiest or most efficient interpretation. In most cases, economy will favor the mundane interpretation, which appears to require the least belief. The occult interpretation, however, is often more appealing psychologically, satisfying a craving for a fullness or even an excess of meaning in the world. For some, the occult may also be more economical, because excess meaning may be easier to believe than deficient meaning.

Unlike either the skeptic or the occultist, the conspiracist would accept Lia's interpretation without rejecting the Plan, for what could be more subtle than to disguise the Plan as a delivery list? A conspiracist sees an excess not only of meaning, but also of design or strategy.' And this gets at the crux of the problem the conspiracist presents: such an excess is unfalsifiable, not because it admits no proof of truth and falsity, but because it admits no possibility of uninvolvement. Once launched on this kind of reasoning, one can find nothing certain to be not-conspiracy. Everything, even the most trivial and miscellaneous of details, must fit, and in the effort to make it all fit together within a theory, the conspiracist comes to suffer from interpretative paranoia. It is against such paranoia that Eco's recent work, including Foucault's Pendulum, seems to be directed.' The paranoid interpreter does not misinterpret, but overinterprets. He or she doesn't see the trees for the forests.

LordSaturn posted:

it feels a little weird to describe a group dynamic like Compaction without a firmly-defined group to have that dynamic

Aleph Null posted:

I was phone-posting while pooping so I didn't have an easy way to go look up the relevant posts, but PJ directly predicted rising violence of white supremacist terrorists. What she did not predict was that some news outlets are actually calling them "terrorists" and not "lone wolves".

T-man posted:

Is your gimmick just posting "NUH UH I READ BOOKS" every thread?

Prester Jane posted:

(Also why are you complaining about my work using a specific lexicon in the thread that is supposedly the "containment zone" for me to quitely discuss said lexicon with other interested Goons?)

LordSaturn posted:

lol

go outside

WampaLord posted:

why does all the supposed "constructive criticism" always turn into yelling at PJ and describing anyone who posts in this thread without ripping her apart as cult members

BrandorKP posted:

"Myths of Origin" is a sociological/anthropological idea remarkably similiar to "narratives". And what happens when myths of origin are broken ties into how both fascism and socialism arise. And how the whole thing is related to religion.

Somfin posted:

Willie Tomg shouldn't be taken seriously, he's quarantined to the conspiracy thread in D&D for a reason.

T-man posted:

So Trump is calling himself the chosen one now, how hosed are we all scale of 10 to 10

Dumb Lowtax posted:

Yeah those things got better going from Obama to Trump and it's great how much power the centrist narrative has lost. I'd hesitate to call things excellent. The cult of Trump has still hosed us in terms of a total death of consequences in the public eye, and a sense of immunity from scandal among public officials and private racists. What he's done to negate the judicial branch and regulatory enforcement hasn't helped. Conmen like Elon Musk are absolutely thriving in this worsening culture when he wouldn't have lasted nearly this long a decade ago. Conmen thrived then too, but only ones who had to have the ability to be somewhat subtle about it. The climate was your main counterexample to things being improving, but don't forget about the economy either. That poo poo's not getting better no matter how far left Trump accidentally shifts the overton window. The wealth in our society has been sucked dry in an upward direction for so long that it is functionally all gone and it isn't coming back short of completely overthrowing the government.

quote:

The wealth in our society has been sucked dry in an upward direction for so long that it is functionally all gone and it isn't coming back short of completely overthrowing the government.

quote:

What he's done to negate the judicial branch and regulatory enforcement hasn't helped

BrandorKP posted:

I'm working on a thread about it Willie. I've got about 7000 words written on the Socialist Desicion. Probably will put an OP around the end of the month and then will put up my take away of a chapter from the book every few days. I'm going to be real pissy and away from my family for three days that'll be a good time to put it up, if I have internet. I think I'll have internet in Seward. I might have been able to put off getting to this book indefinately, Prester's a good portion of why I can't. It's rough and unproof read and I'm writing casually. I'm only addressing one work. But it's a really important one.

Prester Jane posted:

Willie I am profoundly disinterested in engaging with you

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I do wonder if there's any applicability to the whole Shakesville saga.

https://theoutline.com/post/7887/shakesville-golden-age-blogging?zd=1&zi=jn4bn3nr

Dumb Lowtax posted:

drat straight

quote:

In early 2007 McEwan was hired, along with Amanda Marcotte, who was running the liberal blog Pandagon, to blog for the John Edwards presidential campaign. Both were soon forced to quit after Catholic activist Bill Donahue called them bigots and lobbied for their removal The incident made national news and McEwan achieved what I assume was dizzying notoriety, not least because it attracted a wider variety of troll to her blog and inbox. According to former Shakesville contributor Litbrit, when McEwan tried to move the blog to a new domain, it was subjected to DDOS attacks. She was doxxed and reported that she received rape threats. It is perhaps unsurprising that an air of paranoia became increasingly palpable at Shakesville. (McEwan did not respond to an email requesting comment for this piece.)

In a November 5, 2008 post titled “Great Expectations,” McEwan praised Obama’s victory and urged optimism from the community. What resulted became known to former Shakers as the Great Meltdown.

It’s easy to assume that McEwan, Dr. Frankenstein-like, built a monster she could no longer control, but when I read through that thread now, I don’t see an over-abundance of negativity. I see, with the exception of a couple smartasses, people skeptical of the country’s ability to reform itself after eight years of jingoism and war, and a few PUMAs who thought the nomination was stolen from Hillary. The mods wouldn’t abide this, and all hell broke loose. In the comments, McEwan appeared exasperated, claiming to be “hanging on by a thread.” She threatened to quit blogging forever. Readers departed en masse. According to Google Trends, searches for “Shakesville,” which reached an all-time peak that September, had by December dipped by 50 percent. This is about the time I myself stopped reading the site entirely.

In June 2009, after a few comment thread blow-ups and several days without posts, the blog’s 14 contributors posted “‘All In’ Means ALL of Us,” a manifesto intended “to address what we see as an ongoing and extremely problematic pattern within our community.” The pattern was the rampant disrespect of McEwan. They called on Shakers to “bring your vocal, visible support to Melissa (and other contributors) when you see others disrespecting them” and pledge to respect her as “acknowledged leader.”

...

The community, meanwhile, was very happy to police itself, especially the most notorious mods: Paul the Spud, a vocal McEwan admirer and her IRL friend; PortlyDyke, a self-described “psychic and full-body channeler”; and the infamous Deeky, another IRL McEwan pal known at ShakerKoolAid as her “attack poodle.” According to Persephone, “Deeky was a bully…the first to attack someone for being disloyal to the blog or to Melissa.” Readers learned quickly. One ShakerKoolAid poster said a scolding from Deeky taught them to “play the game well enough to occasionally comment without much fear.” Persephone told me that Deeky “kept people in that heightened ‘find the one who doesn’t belong’ mindset” and that she realizes now, with some embarrassment, “how easy it is to be swept up, almost addicted to the high of that cult behavior, going after people who weren’t in line.”

...

Shakesville was an object lesson in easy targets, and McEwan was fun to hate. To conservatives, she was a totem of the PC culture they revile. To leftists, she was a neoliberal phony. Her brand of commentary was desperately uncool, sarcastic but somehow irony-free. When she described being overworked and unappreciated, one Shaker mused that she deserved a “magic elf” assistant. McEwan called this “dehumanizing.” She wrote, “magical content-generating elves don’t exist, so your saying I should get one is, in reality, for me, an admonishment that I should do EVEN MORE.” Leak this evangelical-vlogger-level righteousness onto Twitter and get mocked from all quadrants of the political compass.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

What the hell is your problem?

quote: