Youtube comments of Dan (@Dan-ud8hz).
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"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212439213
The electoral college is anti-democratic in the way it destroys the spectrum of representation and forces polarization. It's pre-industrial and obsolete.
It turns a broad analog spectrum of represented ideas into a super-low frequency binary output. Wrong tool for the job.
Not only is the population inevitably polarized, but a great deal of representation is lost.
Duverger's Law explains this:
“Duverger’s Law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system, whereas "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
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“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
―Friedrich Nietzsche
"It is important that any effort to influence or effect the American public that is not in the public interest be killed by the light of pitiless publicity and analysis."
―Edward Bernays
“That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
―Christopher Hitchens
“The discovery of instances which confirm a theory means very little if we have not tried, and failed, to discover refutations.”
—Karl Popper
“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
―John Maynard Keynes
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of
Fascism: 4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.” http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that
hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of
identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed
by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and
by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment.
Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and
economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that
misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the
family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s
rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while
facilitating submission." (The traumatic basis for the resurgence of
right-wing politics among working Americans)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212439213
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
-- C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.”
– Maxim Gorky
"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.”
– Sergei Aksakov
"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.”
– Ivan S. Turgenev
"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.”
– Ivan C. Shmeliov
"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!”
– Aleksandr Pushkin
"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.”
– Vasyli Rozanov
“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.”
– F. M. Dostoevsky
"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
― Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
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"Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes form lying continually to others and himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility..."
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, 'Why Socialism?'
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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'In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.'
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
― Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
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“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
“It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail where reason prevails. War begins where reason ends. The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”
“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.”
“For no man who lives at all lives unto himself. He either helps or hinders all who are in anywise connected to him.”
“To enslave men, successfully and safely, it is necessary to have their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable good must be kept before them.”
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”
“A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,—before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.”
“Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency; and of consequence he was an object of contempt, and was held as such even by his slaves. ”
“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . . Make a man a slave, and you rob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
― Frederick Douglass
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"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
―Paul Eldridge
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is
not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all
classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
'In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the power struggles of human politicians. "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says.' https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_the_surprising_science_of_alpha_males
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
“It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting our high technology from Weaponry to Livingry.”
"There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well. "
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
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Sound familiar?:
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
"Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The 3rd, 4th, and 5th Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews."
Jean-Paul Sartre
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
(Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
(Stephen Hawking)
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
(Albert Einstein)
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
-- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
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"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
— J.J. Rousseau, 1754
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
-- C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Same principle applies to Left-Hand paths:
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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"I don't take responsibility at all."
Donald Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else."
Admiral H.G Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
The Fifth Basic Law of Stupidity:
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person" because "stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta 'might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women.' The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
— J.J. Rousseau, 1754
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"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
— Jean-Jaques Rousseau, 1754
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Those crocodile tears of Lyar Shithouse speak volumes...
"...When confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie.”
"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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Republicans love their deceiver:
'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”' https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
― Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
― Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
― Marvin Minsky
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
"I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success."
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
"When doing a job — any job — one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in that job forever."
“Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass
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"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons):
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“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
―Friedrich Nietzsche
"People unacquainted with Nietzsche’s writings may be inclined to interpret the idea of the will to power rather crudely. But Nietzsche is not thinking only or even primarily of the motivations behind people like Napoleon or Hitler who expressly seek military and political power. In fact, he typically applies the theory quite subtly.
For instance, Aphorism 13 of "The Gay Science" is entitled “The Theory of the Sense of Power.” Here Nietzsche argues that we exercise power over other people both by benefiting them and by hurting them. When we hurt them we make them feel our power in a crude way—and also a dangerous way, since they may seek to revenge themselves. Making someone indebted to us is usually a preferable way to feel a sense of our power; we also thereby extend our power, since those we benefit see the advantage of being on our side.
Nietzsche, in fact, argues that causing pain is generally less pleasant than showing kindness and even suggests that cruelty, because it is the inferior option, is a sign that one lacks power." https://www.thoughtco.com/nietzsches-concept-of-the-will-to-power-2670658
(Smarter individuals engage in more prosocial behavior in daily life, study finds)
https://www.psypost.org/2020/03/smarter-individuals-engage-in-more-prosocial-behavior-in-daily-life-study-finds-56221?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=smarter-individuals-engage-in-more-prosocial-behavior-in-daily-life-study-finds
"We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims."
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
―R. Buckminster Fuller
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and
inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial
redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the
social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and
compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome
will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of
luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can
end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth
redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with
technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate
these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy,
accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social
goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
47
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain
“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
― Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
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"Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, (From "Anti-Semite and Jew",1944 )
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"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
(THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE) https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"If, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“As a counterpoint to sociopathy, the condition of narcissism is particularly interesting and instructive. Narcissism is, in a metaphorical sense, one half of what sociopathy is. Even clinical narcissists are able to feel most emotions are strongly as anyone else does, from guilt to sadness to desperate love and passion. The half that is missing is the crucial ability to understand what other people are feeling. Narcissism is a failure not of conscience but of empathy, which is the capacity to perceive emotions in others and so react to them appropriately. The poor narcissist cannot see past his own nose, emotionally speaking, and as with the Pillsbury Doughboy, any input from the outside will spring back as if nothing had happened. Unlike sociopaths, narcissists often are in psychological pain, and may sometimes seek psychotherapy. When a narcissist looks for help, one of the underlying issues is usually that, unbeknownst to him, he is alienating his relationships on account of his lack of empathy with others, and is feeling confused, abandoned, and lonely. He misses the people he loves, and is ill-equipped to get them back. Sociopaths, in contrast, do not care about other people, and so do not miss them when they are alienated or gone, except as one might regret the absence of a useful appliance that one has somehow lost.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"... Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
Voltaire
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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The Preamble to the US Constitution sounds pretty damn socialist:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/
Priority #1 is to form a more perfect Union for We the People, not build an economy that only serves a few.
Priority #2 is establish Justice and is why there are so many peaceful protests on the street.
Priority #3 is to insure domestic tranquility, also why peaceful protesters are on the street.
Now, Priorities #4 & #5 do both sound awfully similar to (and were seeds for) later paradigms of Karl Marx, pen-pal of Abraham Lincoln, and other progressive thinkers.
Priority #6, 'Blessings of Liberty'... What are those?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ―Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
―Paul Eldridge
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Imagine—if you can—not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members."
"...when confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
-- C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success."
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
"When doing a job — any job — one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in that job forever."
“Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
-- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Pity … should be reserved for innocent people who are in genuine pain or who have fallen on misfortune. If you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes form lying continually to others and himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, 'Why Socialism?'
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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MTG belongs in an asylum, not the capitol building.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
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“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Only one way to handle the demagogue brand of incorrigible:
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
-- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it."
Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
"Precision is more than just a desirable property. It’s a product. It has value, there is competition to create it, and our ability to create it as a species has improved over time. When your “precision product” is in the centimeter range, congratulations — you can make catapults and portcullises. Once you get into the millimeter range, guess what? You can make fine millwork in fancy houses, and indoor plumbing. Once you get sub-millimeter, now things get really interesting. It’s time for steam engines and automobiles. Once you get into the micrometer range, well, now we’re talking artificial heart valves and spaceships. Much like materials science, the ability to create precision is the unsung foundation and driving force of our standard of living."
Quinn Dunki, The Precision Upon Which Civilizations are Built
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"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.”
– Maxim Gorky
"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.”
– Sergei Aksakov
"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.”
– Ivan S. Turgenev
"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.”
– Ivan C. Shmeliov
"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!”
– Aleksandr Pushkin
"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.”
– Vasyli Rozanov
“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.”
– F. M. Dostoevsky
"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
-- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"A food desert is an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food, in contrast with an area with higher access to supermarkets or vegetable shops with fresh foods, which is called a food oasis.The designation considers the type and quality of food available to the population, in addition to the accessibility of the food through the size and proximity of the food stores.
In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture reported that 23.5 million people in the U.S. live in "food deserts", meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.
Food deserts tend to be inhabited by low-income residents with reduced mobility; this makes them a less attractive market for large supermarket chains. Food deserts lack suppliers of fresh foods, such as meats, fruits, and vegetables. Instead, the available foods are often processed and high in sugar and fats, which are known contributors to the proliferation of obesity in the U.S.."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
The BITE model for authoritarian cult mind control also describes the way they brainwash children and cognitively-disabled people.
Strict control of "Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion" prevent escape from conservative ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“In the case of economic agents, just like in the case of bandits, stupid people do not optimize the system they exploit. But whereas the bandits can survive a crash in their revenues when their victims rebuild their wealth, stupid people ruthlessly destroy them, ruining themselves as well. There are several examples in the history of economics: one is the case of the mining industry which is exploiting resources that will need at least hundreds of thousands of years to reform by geological process, if they ever will. It is also the case of industries that exploit slowly reproducing biological resources. A modern example is that of whaling, as we demonstrated in previous papers. The same resource destruction also occurs for other cases of human fisheries. Humans do not seem to need modern tools to destroy the resources they exploit, as shown by the extinction of Earth’s megafauna, at least in part the result of human actions performed using tools not more sophisticated than stone-tipped spears. Overall, the destruction of the resources that make people live seems to be much more common than in the natural ecosystem. This observation justifies the proposed '’6th law of stupidity,'’ additional to the five proposed by Carlo Cipolla that has that ’Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosphere.’”
"...Humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it."
― Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi | The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
(Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
(Stephen Hawking)
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
(Albert Einstein)
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
— J.J. Rousseau, 1754
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Now that's Orwellian.
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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"Why are all sociopaths not in positions of great power? … Why do they not win all the time? … most of them are obscure people, and limited to dominating their young children, or a depressed spouse, or perhaps a few employees or coworkers. Not an insignificant number of them are in jail, … or in danger for their careers or their lives. Very few are fabulously wealthy. Even fewer are famous. Having never made much of a mark on the world, the majority are on a downward life course, and by late middle age will be burned out completely. They can rob and torment us temporarily; yes, but they are, in effect, failed lives."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Let's not forget, Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security alone. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”'
https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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@mattvesta5721 You certainly are a psychotic victim-blamer.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
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Anybody looking for symbols?: 'Pestilence Pence was clearly endorsed by Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Bernie Sanders gets a beautiful bird (a little tyrant flycatcher, if I remember correctly); Pence spreads American carnage.
Cursed and corrupt 'Conservative Christianity':
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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@startsomewhere5467 “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
“It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail where reason prevails. War begins where reason ends. The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”
“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.”
“For no man who lives at all lives unto himself. He either helps or hinders all who are in anywise connected to him.”
“To enslave men, successfully and safely, it is necessary to have their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable good must be kept before them.”
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”
“A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,—before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.”
“Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency; and of consequence he was an object of contempt, and was held as such even by his slaves. ”
“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . . Make a man a slave, and you rob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
― Frederick Douglass
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
“...Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency.”
― Frederick Douglass
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
"Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The 3rd, 4th, and 5th Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
‘Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
“You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.”
“A great many of those who "debunk" traditional or (as they would say) "sentimental" values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman. “I've been thinking,” he said, “I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." (Kwame Ture)
"Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism"
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"... Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
- Frederick Douglass
Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.
Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
- The Gospel of Thomas, verse 77
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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💯
“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes form lying continually to others and himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
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"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Socialized democracy was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics (tax cuts on the wealthy, removal of regulation) started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble (and Philosophical Cornerstone) to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
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"The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
---Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
---Voltaire
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
-- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
“The politician, small or lofty, who menaces the people with frequent reminders of the possibility of crime, violence, or terrorism, and who then uses their magnified fear to gain allegiance, is more likely to be a successful con artist than a legitimate leader.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Each morning, a missionary advertises neon sign
He tells the native population that civilization is fine
And three educated savages holler from a bamboo tree
That civilization is a thing for me to see
So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't want to leave the congo, oh no no no no no
Bingo, bangle, bungle, I'm so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go
Don't want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords, I make it clear
(That no matter how they coax him) I'll stay right here
I looked through a magazine the missionary's wife concealed
(Magazine, what happens)
I see how people who are civilized bung you with automobile
(You know you can get hurt that way Daniel)
At the movies they have got to pay many coconuts to see
(What do they see, darling)
Uncivilized pictures that the newsreel takes of me
So bongo, bongo, bongo, he don't want to leave the congo, oh no no no no no
Bingo, bangle, bungle, he's so happy in the jungle, he refuse to go
Don't want no penthouse, bathtub, streetcars, taxis, noise in my ear
(So, no matter how they coax him) I'll stay right here
They hurry like savages to get aboard an iron train
And though it's smokey and it's crowded, they're too civilized to complain
When they've got two weeks vacation, they hurry to vacation ground
(What do they do, darling)
They swim and they fish, but that's what I do all year round
So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't want to leave the congo, oh no no no no no
Bingo, bangle, bungle, I'm so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go
Don't want no jailhouse, (shotgun) fish hooks (golf clubs) I got my spears
(So, no matter how they coax him) I'll stay right here
They have things like the atom bomb (so I think I'll stay where I am)
Civilization, I'll stay right here
(Civilization by Danny Kaye)
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics and apparently also core to scientology as well.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Einstein was a Democratic-Socialist. The most intelligent people in the world tend to be.
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
Maybe it's not obvious to everyone, but hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation. Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
― Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
― Niels Bohr
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
― Isaac Newton
Personal heuristic recalibration upgrades for post-humanist cyborgs:
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
"I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success."
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
"When doing a job — any job — one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in that job forever."
“Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
“Once every hundred years Jesus of Nazareth meets Jesus of the Christian in a garden among the hills of Lebanon. And they talk long; and each time Jesus of Nazareth goes away saying to Jesus of the Christian, "My friend, I fear we shall never, never agree.”
― Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
“I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success.”
“Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla):
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
(Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload)
"The discovery of instances which confirm a theory means very little if we have not tried, and failed, to discover refutations."
Karl Popper
"It is important that any effort to influence or effect the American public that is not in the public interest be killed by the light of pitiless publicity and analysis."
Edward Bernays
"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Aldous Huxley
"When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"
John Maynard Keynes
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
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“In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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"Conservative Christianity" is an abomination of desolation and is the opposite of what Jesus preached.
"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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Let's not forget, Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security alone. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"We are a peace—loving people, and we had to learn to hate. But fierce hatred rose within us after we saw with our own eyes what the Hitler beasts could do. Now we hate the enemy too much to fear him. When you are out there at your post you know that it is either you or your enemy who is killed. Our whole people know that today.
I have been asked often since I have been here how I feel when I kill a German. The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
--- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Karl Popper's "Critical Pluralism" identifies three principles that connect epistemology and ethics through intellectual responsibility:
"1) Principle of Fallibility: Perhaps I am wrong and you are right. But we both could turn out wrong.
2) Principle of Rational Discussion: We want to try, as impersonally as is possible, to weigh up our reasons for and against a theory that is definite and criticizable.
3) Principle of the Approximation to Truth: Through such an impersonal discussion, we almost always come closer to the truth. And we come to a better understanding, even if we don't reach any agreement."
"For they imply, among other things, toleration, tolerance: If I can learn from you and I want to learn in the interest of truth, then I have to not only tolerate you, but recognize you as a potential equal. The potential unity & equality of all people is a prerequisite of our willingness to discuss matters rationally. Also of importance is the principle that we can learn a lot from discussion, even if we don't reach agreement. For a discussion can help us shed light on some of our errors.
Thus ethical principles underlie science. The idea of truth as the fundamental regulative principle is one such ethical principle. The search for truth, the approximation to truth is also an ethical principle. So too is the idea of intellectual honesty & fallibility, which leads us to a self-critical attitude and to tolerance."
- Karl Popper, 1981 Lecture (in German)
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'In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.'
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Wave the Preamble.
It's the Philosophical Cornerstone we need to realign to and the focus of the Oaths of enlistment and commissioning:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
"The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.”
Frederick Douglass
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
"
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill ( British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68 )”
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865-1868)
😵😵
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews." Jean-Paul Sartre
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
The BITE model for authoritarian cult mind control also describes the way they brainwash children and cognitively-disabled people.
Strict control of "Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion" prevent escape from conservative ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla (The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity)
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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The best weapons against war itself are full bellies, warm beds, and shelter from abuse. Through vulnerability comes humanity.
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
― Abraham Lincoln
“The Devil is in the details, but so is salvation.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover
“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”
― Sun Tzu
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
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@nicholasgleis3786 "Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
"
(Jean-Paul Sartre)
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“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
However, Isaiah 1:17:
"Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow."
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“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
(Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
(Stephen Hawking)
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
(Albert Einstein)
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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Solution: An Aggressively Green New Deal
Since business-as-usual industry and technology are contributing to the degradation of the planet's life support system, priority number one is to stop the practices that are causing mass extinctions.
An analogy comes to mind: The first step in the casualty procedure for flooding aboard submarines is to isolate and stop the incoming water flooding the compartment. The other steps of the procedure following the first, such as dewatering the compartment and repairing and restoring damaged equipment, are actions made to recover from the flooding and will not be effective unless the flooding has stopped. If water comes into a space faster than it's being removed, the space will fill with water.
Excessive carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by human activity may not be as urgent an issue as a flooding submarine to its occupants, and the life-support systems of a submarine are much less complex than the natural ecological life-support system, but if carbon dioxide is being emitted into the atmosphere faster than it can be removed, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase until critical thresholds are exceeded and irreversible effects will occur.
However, on a submarine, it's not likely that you'll encounter active resistance from a person who insists on allowing the flooding to continue the same way we encounter active resistance to cutting carbon emissions. Almost like a passenger in a car traveling on a highway attempting to grab the wheel and steer the vehicle into oncoming traffic, there is a short-sightedness in corporate large-scale industry that seeks short term gains over long term sustainability (and existence) that won't stop unless regulated to stop, and even then will continue to try to cut corners wherever it can. This has led me to think that the "Gordian Knot" to cut is an socio-economic and political one that redistributes the wealth accumulated from profiteering off of environmental destruction to first remove control from the passenger who's trying to steer the car into oncoming traffic, and to fund a variety of concerted technological and social efforts beyond the crumbs they're currently allotted to sequester carbon and get to real recovery and restoration work.
To save the 'camel' from the final 'straw that breaks the camel's back,' the 'camel's' burden should have nothing more added until it can be unburdened to a manageable load.
Supplements:
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
(Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z (Links to an external site.)
"Innovation has slowed in the U.S., stymying economic growth. To get back on track, the U.S. needs more low-income children, women, and minorities to become inventors — but that won’t be easy."
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors (Links to an external site.)
"For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it."
(The constructal law of design and evolution in nature)
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0302 (Links to an external site.)
"Whenever we make even the smallest change within a complex system, we risk dramatic unintended consequences. The interconnections and dependencies within systems make it almost impossible to predict outcomes—and seeing as they often require a reasonably precise set of conditions to function, our interventions can wreak havoc. The Precautionary Principle reflects the reality of working with and within complex systems. It shifts the burden of proof from proving something was dangerous after the fact to proving it is safe before taking chances. It emphasizes waiting for more complete information before risking causing damage, especially if some of the possible impacts would be irreversible, hard to contain, or would affect people who didn’t choose to be involved."
https://fs.blog/2021/06/precautionary-principle/ (Links to an external site.)
Atlantic Ocean: Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers (w/ Dr. Michael Mann)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxu--0oE8Ag (Links to an external site.)
Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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"...when confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie.'
'After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.'
-- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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'In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.'
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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It's not the emotion itself, it's what the pseudo-emotion is used for. It's weaponized self-pity and it's sociopathic manipulation.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
-- C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews." Jean-Paul Sartre
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Conservativism" is little more than sadistic sociopathy.
"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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@priapulida "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
Sir Isaac Newton
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MAGA rallies are 21st century smallpox blankets. What we're witnessing is biowarfare by an aspiring authoritarian dictator against the civilian population of his country. Pure criminal negligence and dereliction of duty.
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
The Declaration of Independence
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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Now that's Orwellian.
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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George Santos is a normal Republican, not an exception.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
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"It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."
― Undersecretary Screwtape, Senior Tempter, to his young nephew Wormwood (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942))
"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
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MTG belongs in an asylum, not the capitol building.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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Want to read some fake news?
Just wait until you crack open your bible 😘
"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
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If you're interested in the pursuit of happiness:
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB."
(The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals
) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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It's not that he's crying it's that he's crying over nothing. He's pitying himself and that's a sign of sociopathy.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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@rhettlover1 "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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“...When confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie.”
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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The cheapest way to deal with homelessness is to give homeless people homes.
"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
Will Durant, The Lessons of History
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
""If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865-1868)
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“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible. Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you want to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
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@wolfman8449 Fanatical pacifism is toxic positivity.
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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@melissasaint3283 Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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The Paradox of Tolerance:
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
The BITE model for authoritarian cult mind control also describes the way they brainwash children and cognitively-disabled people.
Strict control of "Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion" prevent escape from conservative ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
― Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Lady Death
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?" ―C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
―Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
―Paul Eldridge
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
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- Jean-Paul Sartre
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"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels."
--Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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Prominent Russians describing Russia and Russian culture:
“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.”
– F. M. Dostoevsky
"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.”
– Vasyli Rozanov
"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.”
– Sergei Aksakov
"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.”
– Maxim Gorky
"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.”
– Ivan S. Turgenev
"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.”
– Ivan C. Shmeliov
"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!”
– Aleksandr Pushkin
"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
“A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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There's no such thing as a conservative christian. Christianity is literally socialism:
James 5:1-5 New International Version (NIV)
Warning to Rich Oppressors
5 Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2 Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.
Isaiah 10:1-3 New International Version (NIV)
10 Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, 2 to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. 3 What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?
Acts 2:44-45, "All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need."
Acts 4:32-35, "Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. ... 34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. 35 They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
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liberal slayer "... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible. Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you want to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
"Per hunc… castissimum ante regiam iniuriam sanguinem iuro, vosque, di, testes facio me D. Trumpinium Superbum cum scelerata coniuge et omni liberorum stirpe ferro igni quacumque dehinc vi possim exsecuturum, nec illos nec alium quemquam regnare Americae passurum."
― Oath of Brutus (Updated)
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"The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews." Jean-Paul Sartre
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"... the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.” ― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
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HT: How have you managed to keep your integrity while becoming a successful businessman?
Frank Zappa: It's really easy. All you have to do is decide you don't want to be one of those guys. You don't make as much money, but you can certainly live well enough.
HT: It's a bizarre thing - you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, or what they want to do, and their answer is, "I want to make money." In a survey among high school students, more kids said Donald Trump was their hero than anybody else.
FZ: Yeah, but on the other hand, let's deal with it as a fact of life in America. I think that's a very good indicator of the failure of US education. Now if you add these two facts together, Donald Trump is the idol of American teens, and that teens can't read, write, or do arithmetic, what do we have?
HT: What?
FZ: A failure to communicate.
(December 1989 interview with Frank Zappa, HIGH TIMES magazine)
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"A woman should have every honorable motive to exertion which is enjoyed by man, to the full extent of her capacities and endowments. The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence."
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
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You're goddamn right.
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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“A woman should have every honorable motive to exertion which is enjoyed by man, to the full extent of her capacities and endowments. The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
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The prominent Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote this description about an "un-man" like Donny the Dunce 3 years before he was born: "What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@dan2178 Junkie Jordan is weaponizing his self-pity and you're falling for it. Context matters.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
―Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
―Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB."
(The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@papercup2517 Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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All Dereliction-of-Duty Donny does is whine about Joe Biden and blame him for problems that he caused himself.
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@FUNKY_BUTTLOVIN Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
"Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?"
Frank Herbert
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@cv4809 In the Western world, yes. And Nietzsche built on his work. However, he's echoing sentiments from earlier times and other places:
"A thousand measures of gold is substantial profit, and prime ministership is an exalted position indeed. But haven't you ever heard about the ox offered in the official sacrifice? He is generously fed for years and dressed in the finest embroidered fabrics, so that he may one day be led into the Great Temple for slaughter. When that day comes, though he may wish that he were just a little orphaned piglet instead, it is too late! So scram, you! Do not defile me! I'd rather enjoy myself wallowing in the filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state."
— Zhuangzi
Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.
Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
— The Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi Scrolls), Verse 77
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@ZaxorVonSkyler I appreciate your sentiment and it's true for the vast majority of people who talk to each other in good faith. Where I disagree and why I chose that quote specifically is because there really are irremediable people with no conscience that are incapable of empathy and they really don't care about anyone who gets in their way in their pursuit of power.
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S." https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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@TragoudistrosMPH "... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
(Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
(Stephen Hawking)
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
(Albert Einstein)
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
(Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door)
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Never ever give a sociopath your pity.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Yes. She walks the walk.
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons):
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
" Jean-Paul Sartre
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews."
- Jean Paul Sartre
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Absolutely.
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Churches consolidating power are antithetical to what Jesus taught.
"Conservative Christianity" has always been an abomination of desolation.
Mother Teresa was no friend of poor people, she was a friend of poverty -- she was a sadist who wanted people to suffer horribly.
"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
-- C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws
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"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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Sound about right?:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
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@jimskarw25 'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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Anybody looking for symbols: 'Pestilence Pence was clearly endorsed by Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Bernie Sanders gets a beautiful bird (a little tyrant flycatcher, if I remember correctly); Pence spreads American carnage.
Cursed and corrupt 'Conservative Christianity':
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1944)
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The prominent Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote this description about an "un-man" like Donny the Dunce 3 years before he was born: "What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb.
I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.
I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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Trump deserves impeachment for his own effect on US national security first and foremost. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@Studio-yi2bm “The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class- leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.
You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.
What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.”
― Isaac Asimov
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Joe Rogan is a good representation of a bad vocabulary.
Orwellian? If we're veering towards an Orwellian future, Rogan is hastening it.
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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After July 4, 1776, 180,000 enslaved people were legally brought to the United States.
After June 19, 1865, zero were.
What is more worthy of celebration, the beginning of a slave nation or the end of one?
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
The Preamble (and Philosophical Cornerstone) to the US Constitution
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@buzzhawk “What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
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“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
― Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
― Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
"Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy."
Frank Lloyd Wright
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
-- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Those crocodile tears speak volumes.
"...When confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, “I never did that,” and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie.”
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Third and Fifth Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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'Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.'
'A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.'
(The Declaration of Independence)
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865-1868) @DanielJStromme
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..."
― Kwame Ture
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Pestilence Pence was clearly endorsed by Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Bernie Sanders gets beautiful birds; Mike Pence gets maggots to feast on his American carnage.
Cursed and corrupt 'conservative christian'.
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Make America Great Again" is referring to a time when America was essentially a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
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Wave the Preamble.
It's the Philosophical Cornerstone we need to realign to:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
"The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.”
Frederick Douglass
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
(THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE) https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
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“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865-1868)
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
"The anti-Semite does not become a decent man just because he lies according to his principles."
― Friedrich Nietzsche
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can be trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews."
- Jean Paul Sartre
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How sweet would a Sanders/Yang ticket be?
Solidarity > Charity
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
- Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
- Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accomplished by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
- Albert Einstein
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
- C.S. Lewis
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
- Greek Proverb
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
- Paul Eldridge
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
- Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
'In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the power struggles of human politicians. "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says.'
https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_the_surprising_science_of_alpha_males
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Biggest (or most obvious) logical mistake of Atlas Shrugged (and Objectivism, more generally): Ayn Rand’s “greatest” work required more than a thousand pages to “elaborate” on Aristotle’s contributions to the law of non-contradiction using a fantasy whose physicist hero invents a free energy device (violating the law of non-contradiction, ¬(p ∧ ¬p), as well as violating basic laws of physics).
Biggest aesthetic/literary mistake: Deep-sea divers say that “divers that can’t tie a knot, tie a lot.” Shakespeare wrote “brevity is the soul of wit.”
Biggest character/ethics/morality mistake, part 1: she equivocates what in real-life are Promethean “demonstrators” (from the latin demonstratus, past participle of demonstrare “to point out, indicate, demonstrate”, figuratively, “to prove, establish”) like Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Tesla, Fuller, and Hawking with “monsters” (from the Latin monstrum, “divine omen (especially one indicating misfortune), portent, sign,” figuratively “repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, abomination”) like child murderer William Edward Hickman, whose characteristics she admired:
“[The] claim that Hickman’s greatest crime is his anti-socialness confirmed my idea of the public’s attitude in this case - and explains my involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling just because of this and in spite of everything else.”
― Ayn Rand, Journals, (p. 42)
“There is a lot that is purposely, senselessly horrible about him. But that does not interest me. I want to remember his actions and characteristics that will be useful for the boy in my story. His limitless daring and his frightful sense of humor…”
― Ayn Rand, Journals, (p. 43)
Whereas the actual character intentions and conclusions of said Promethean demonstrators aren’t difficult to find:
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
― Isaac Newton
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
― Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
― Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.”
― Nikola Tesla
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
― Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?" ―C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Conservatism" is a euphemism for sadism. "Conservative Christianity" is an oxymoron.
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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@Michael Kevin Millet He's also very shortsighted in the political ambiguity he serves up. The most intelligent people who have ever lived acknowledge the giants whose shoulders they stand on.
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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Pretty much why Dumpsterfire Donny received assistance from America's adversaries in the 2016 election, and why he'll receive assistance from America's adversaries in the 2020 election:
“In our article, we briefly summarized some of the potentially harmful tendencies of narcissistic leaders, such as the following: defensively dismissing criticism and attacking critics, prioritizing the elevation of their public image over national well-being, refusing to admit they lack relevant knowledge instead of learning new information, making self-serving decisions instead of maintaining consistency with their stated beliefs, turning on anyone who stops singing their praises, and etc.,” Fiala explained.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to look at that list and believe it is a summary of a book chapter written in 2006 by the founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior rather than an editorialist’s recap of last week’s headlines. I am left wondering whether Trump supporters would have been more concerned about the narcissistic traits they saw in him if they were aware that these traits tend to motivate these types of potentially disastrous behaviors, or whether they would be as accepting of such behavior if they understood it to be motivated by narcissistic traits.”https://www.psypost.org/2020/04/trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds-56646?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?" ―C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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@sarahtiferet9025 "A thousand measures of gold is substantial profit, and prime ministership is an exalted position indeed. But haven't you ever heard about the ox offered in the official sacrifice? He is generously fed for years and dressed in the finest embroidered fabrics, so that he may one day be led into the Great Temple for slaughter. When that day comes, though he may wish that he were just a little orphaned piglet instead, it is too late! So scram, you! Do not defile me! I'd rather enjoy myself wallowing in the filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state."
— Zhuangzi, Daoist philospher
Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.
Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
— The Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi Scrolls), Verse 77
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
-- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb.
I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.
I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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This "Christianity" is the opposite of what their precious Jesus preached.
"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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@toyotaprius79 "The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
— J.J. Rousseau, 1754
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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To paraphrase Sartre: We are now in a position to understand the racist. He is a man who is afraid. Not of people of color, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except people of color.
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill
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Dr Downtime "Now, what are the obligations? And here, for me, it gets really interesting, and it deviates very much from your typical image of the alpha male. The alpha male has two sorts of obligations. One is to keep the peace in the group. We call that the control role, to control fights in the group, and the second is to be the most empathic, the consoler in chief, basically, of the nation, so to speak."
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“If anything, people without conscience tend to believe their way of being in the world is superior to ours. They often speak of the naïveté of other people and their ridiculous scruples, or of their curiosity about why so many people are unwilling to manipulate others, even in the service of their most important ambitions. Or they theorize that all people are the same—unscrupulous, like them—but are dishonestly playacting something mythical called “conscience.” By this latter proposition, the only straightforward and honest people in the world are they themselves. They are being “real” in a society of phonies.”
“The politician, small or lofty, who menaces the people with frequent reminders of the possibility of crime, violence, or terrorism, and who then uses their magnified fear to gain allegiance, is more likely to be a successful con artist than a legitimate leader.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."
― Simone de Beauvoir
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..."
― Kwame Ture
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can be trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Orwellian" is a more appropriate word for describing the restriction of language:
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB."
(The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals
) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists."
― George Orwell, Collected Essays; Vol 1 page 289
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
― Yagyu Munenori
"Mangalores won't fight without the leader."
― Corbin Dallas, The Fifth Element
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
― Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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The Declaration of Independence, Preamble to the US Constitution, and the US Uniformed Services Oath of Office, if read in order, should be a strong "leftist" rebuke to domestic enemies like Matt Gaetz who think the specific violence they precisely call for is in their favor, but he's as incorrigible as he is immoral:
"A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Karl Popper's "Critical Pluralism" identifies three principles that connect epistemology and ethics through intellectual responsibility:
"1) Principle of Fallibility: Perhaps I am wrong and you are right. But we both could turn out wrong.
2) Principle of Rational Discussion: We want to try, as impersonally as is possible, to weigh up our reasons for and against a theory that is definite and criticizable.
3) Principle of the Approximation to Truth: Through such an impersonal discussion, we almost always come closer to the truth. And we come to a better understanding, even if we don't reach any agreement."
"For they imply, among other things, toleration, tolerance: If I can learn from you and I want to learn in the interest of truth, then I have to not only tolerate you, but recognize you as a potential equal. The potential unity & equality of all people is a prerequisite of our willingness to discuss matters rationally. Also of importance is the principle that we can learn a lot from discussion, even if we don't reach agreement. For a discussion can help us shed light on some of our errors.
Thus ethical principles underlie science. The idea of truth as the fundamental regulative principle is one such ethical principle. The search for truth, the approximation to truth is also an ethical principle. So too is the idea of intellectual honesty & fallibility, which leads us to a self-critical attitude and to tolerance."
- Karl Popper, 1981 Lecture (in German)
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@Rhiannon011 “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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The Preamble to the US Constitution sounds pretty damn socialist:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/
Priority #1 is to form a more perfect Union for We the People, not build an economy that only serves a few.
Priority #2 is establish Justice and is why there are so many peaceful protests on the street.
Priority #3 is to insure domestic tranquility, also why peaceful protesters are on the street.
Now, Priorities #4 & #5 do both sound awfully similar to (and were seeds for) later paradigms of Karl Marx, pen-pal of Abraham Lincoln, and other progressive thinkers.
http://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx
Priority #6, 'Blessings of Liberty'... What are those?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Dear Leader Donald and his Wall of Babel are a perfect example of hierarchy of domination replacing hierarchy of competence to the detriment of all:
Free iron sits rusting in the desert for anyone with a cutting torch or sawzall.
Ozymandias
BY Percy Bysshe Shelley
'I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”'
Quoting Carl Schmidt is ironic considering what happened to the "Reich" commanded by his biggest fan.
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No Country for Old Men: (Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta 'might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women.' The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Jody Owen "Christianity" contradicts what Jesus taught more often than not.
“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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She hit the nail on the head!
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"Conservative Christianity" is a deceptive oxymoron and an abomination of desolation.
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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I really hope so.
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Who considers compassion a weakness?
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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TheGOP TRAITORS “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him."
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Why Dumpsterfire Donny received assistance from America's adversaries in the 2016 election, and why he'll receive assistance from America's adversaries in the 2020 election:
“In our article, we briefly summarized some of the potentially harmful tendencies of narcissistic leaders, such as the following: defensively dismissing criticism and attacking critics, prioritizing the elevation of their public image over national well-being, refusing to admit they lack relevant knowledge instead of learning new information, making self-serving decisions instead of maintaining consistency with their stated beliefs, turning on anyone who stops singing their praises, and etc.,” Fiala explained.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to look at that list and believe it is a summary of a book chapter written in 2006 by the founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior rather than an editorialist’s recap of last week’s headlines. I am left wondering whether Trump supporters would have been more concerned about the narcissistic traits they saw in him if they were aware that these traits tend to motivate these types of potentially disastrous behaviors, or whether they would be as accepting of such behavior if they understood it to be motivated by narcissistic traits.”https://www.psypost.org/2020/04/trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds-56646?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865-1868)
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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@Brock Madigan If all you took from that story about that raised-wrong MAGA kid was criticism of the kid himself, you weren't paying attention. He was just the face of the story about a church of false-Christianity busing teenage boyss into DC to protest abortion rights. Creepy.
'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”' https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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@bradleejones9959 'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”' https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism"
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
'Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be "blamed" for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external "evil."'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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Doesn't take a deep look into the Bible to see that atheist socialists are more Christian, according to Jesus's words, than evangelical "Christians". Condemnation of "temptation" is just an attempt at weaseling out of personal responsibility. Prior to the Cold War, if asked what book "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was from, most American Christians would have told you it came from the New Testament book of Acts:
All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. [...] Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. [...] There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
— Acts 2:44–45, Acts 4:32–35
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"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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@credman You don't seem to understand the difference between disagreement, mockery, and intolerance, and are thus equating and equivocating them. I've not yet encountered a leftist who wants to do away with free-speech, but I encounter right-wing nut-jobs every day who think that somebody disagreeing with them and explaining why their opinions are ridiculous is the same thing as intolerance.
Right-wing nutjobs suppress free-speech, especially critical thinking and criticism of their actions and speech about responsibility and accountability. As an example, ask anybody you hear or read condeming "critical race theory" what "critical race theory" actually is-I guarantee they won't give you a straight answers, and will likely abuse or mock you just for asking to try to shut you up, and would even use violence to shut you up if the means and opportunity are available to them.
In reality, people complaining about "cancel culture" are people who can't reckon with their past mistakes to learn from them. It takes maturity to take responsibility and grow past mistakes, especially when it comes to injury caused to other people.
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"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Yes, Trump does deserve to die and burn in Hell.
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
Lyudmila "Lady Death" Pavlichenko
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
Yagyū Munenori
Honor the old ways.
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
The BITE model for authoritarian cult mind control also describes the way they brainwash children and cognitively-disabled people.
Strict control of "Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion" prevent escape from conservative ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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You have to target the shame of the Trump-cultists themselves. 'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory:
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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He's never had one. He's entirely superficial. There's nothing behind that veneer.
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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@BarryLyndon2025 I am non-religious and understand the allegory perfectly well. I guarantee I'm more familiar with the mythology and metaphor of the Bible than Jordan Peterson is. It's exactly why I'm not religious.
The wallowing in self-pity to garner sympathy after dehumanizing people is a big red flag for sociopathy.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”'
https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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You nailed it. The best weapons against war itself are full bellies, warm beds, and shelter from abuse. Through vulnerability comes humanity.
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
― Abraham Lincoln
“The Devil is in the details, but so is salvation.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover
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"White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
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@gr.vo.3058 You're afraid of refugee immigrants taking jobs Americans literally refuse to do, most prominent being agricultural field work. You're lazy and afraid to get your soft hands dirty. The jobs that are going away are being automated. Irony is that you call me a fear monger and but you're the one who's afraid to help children, while supporting politicians who actively hurt them. Don't bother pleaing to my xenophobia, I'm a world traveler so it doesn't exist. And I'd happily trade MAGAs like you away for decent refugees.
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Sam Mendez Republicans are not smart people. Their stupidity is a danger to them, their families, and anybody affected by their control.
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
The Fourth Basic Law of Stupidity
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
"
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Dator’s Laws of the Future
by Jim Dator
I. "THE future" cannot be "studied" because "THE future" does not exist.
II. "THE future" cannot be "predicted," but "alternative futures" can, and should be "forecast."
III. There is no such thing as a "best case scenario" or a "worst case scenario."
IV. What is often popularly, or even professionally, considered to be "the most likely future" is, in all probability, one of the least likely futures.
V. "THE future" cannot be "predicted," but "preferred futures" can and should be envisioned, invented, implemented, continuously evaluated, revised, and re-envisioned.
VI. Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.
VII. If futurists expect to be useful, they should expect to be ridiculed and for their ideas initially to be rejected.
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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@omnibus5359 I think there's more synchrony in the language now than there used to be, but "libertarian" was used by at least some prominent Europeans and a few people I've known whose political beliefs more closely corresponded with Kropotkin's ideas of Anarchism than any of Ayn Rand's nonsensical Dunning-Kruger overconfident incompetence. I wish I could recall more clearly who used this terminology, sorry.
It never really made sense to me either, but there's a lot of bad faith linguistic enantiodromia in the modern disinformation atmosphere, Ayn Rand's explicit word-twisting of "we" (the first and most important word of the US Constitution) into a scare-word in Anthem and "selfish" into a supposed virtue in everything she wrote are a couple of examples of what I mean.
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, 1984
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@72 Nova There are many factors that need to be included to explain your situation. Most important: What securities in what industries is your 401k comprised of? How much is domestic and how much is foreign? (Don't tell me, it's rhetorical and I'm not looking for tips) I'll also mention that correlation does not equal causation. My investments have also accelerated in growth more recently, but its due to technological change and new trading platforms, not politics. However, due to inflation, relative prices have also effectively made the dollar less valuable for many vital expenses. So even if your investments are doing well, there are many other considerations. But the math problem I ask is a shibboleth for a very important reason: it distinguishes how well someone understands basic calculus and exponential math. The macro- and micro-economics to explain why your investments are apparently doing well while the economic environment your investments exist in is not is too complex for me to explain without using the language of exponents, derivation, and integration, so if you'd like for me to explain further I'll need an answer to the silicon ingots problem. I'm sure there are other people more intelligent than I that could break it down without calculus, but I'm not that smart.
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Trump is going to die in prison.
If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
“I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success.”
“Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@jimskarw25 “Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
- Frederick Douglass
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@jimskarw25 “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@jimskarw25 "What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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@jimskarw25 Donny the Dunce deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security first and foremost. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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'I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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This passage perfectly describes interacting with an "un-man" like Trump but was written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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@sheogorath616 Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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Why Dumpsterfire Donny received assistance from America's adversaries in the 2016 election, and why he'll receive assistance from America's adversaries in the 2020 election:
“In our article, we briefly summarized some of the potentially harmful tendencies of narcissistic leaders, such as the following: defensively dismissing criticism and attacking critics, prioritizing the elevation of their public image over national well-being, refusing to admit they lack relevant knowledge instead of learning new information, making self-serving decisions instead of maintaining consistency with their stated beliefs, turning on anyone who stops singing their praises, and etc.,” Fiala explained.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to look at that list and believe it is a summary of a book chapter written in 2006 by the founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior rather than an editorialist’s recap of last week’s headlines. I am left wondering whether Trump supporters would have been more concerned about the narcissistic traits they saw in him if they were aware that these traits tend to motivate these types of potentially disastrous behaviors, or whether they would be as accepting of such behavior if they understood it to be motivated by narcissistic traits.”https://www.psypost.org/2020/04/trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds-56646?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Same principle applies to Left-Hand paths:
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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@cipher940 Let's not forget, Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security alone. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@justinunion7586 "When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Not just "Toxic Masculinity", it's toxified masculinity:
'Testicular pain, erectile dysfunction, reduced sperm count and quality, decreased fertility are direct consequence of infection, new study shows.
Multiple tissues of the male genital tract can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study in large animal models. The study, in SARS-CoV-2 infected-rhesus macaques, revealed the prostate, vasculature of testicles, penis, and testicles were all infected with the virus.
The surprising discovery was made utilizing a PET scan specially designed to reveal sites of infection spreading over time in a whole-body scan. Scientists didn’t know what they would find, but they expected to see the virus in the lungs and high up in the nose near the brain because people were experiencing loss of taste and smell.
“But the signal that jumped out at us was the complete spread through the male genital tract,” said lead investigator Thomas Hope, professor of cell and developmental biology at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. “We had no idea we would find it there.”
“These results indicate that the testicular pain, erectile dysfunction, hypogonadism, reduced sperm count and quality, and decreased fertility associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection are a direct consequence of infection of cells of the male reproductive tract and not indirect mechanisms such as fever and inflammation,” Hope said.'
(COVID Infects Penis, Testicles and Prostate – Causes Pain, Erectile Dysfunction, Reduced Sperm Count)
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”
― Sun Tzu
“The robot said, “I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good.”
He hesitated, then, almost as though he were surprised at his own words, he said, “Go, and sin no more!”
― R. Daneel Olivaw
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@justinkirschenman2232 There's a reason that deep thinking intelligent Prometheans with emotionally mature morality independently arrive at similar conclusions, no Marx necessary:
“We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.”
Will Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
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Since business-as-usual industry and technology are contributing to the degradation of the planet's life support system, priority number one is to stop the practices that are causing mass extinctions.
An analogy comes to mind: The first step in the casualty procedure for flooding aboard submarines is to isolate and stop the incoming water flooding the compartment. The other steps of the procedure following the first, such as dewatering the compartment and repairing and restoring damaged equipment, are actions made to recover from the flooding and will not be effective unless the flooding has stopped. If water comes into a space faster than it's being removed, the space will fill with water.
Excessive carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by human activity may not be as urgent an issue as a flooding submarine to its occupants, and the life-support systems of a submarine are much less complex than the natural ecological life-support system, but if carbon dioxide is being emitted into the atmosphere faster than it can be removed, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase until critical thresholds are exceeded and irreversible effects will occur.
However, on a submarine, it's not likely that you'll encounter active resistance from a person who insists on allowing the flooding to continue the same way we encounter active resistance to cutting carbon emissions. Almost like a passenger in a car traveling on a highway attempting to grab the wheel and steer the vehicle into oncoming traffic, there is a short-sightedness in corporate large-scale industry that seeks short term gains over long term sustainability (and existence) that won't stop unless regulated to stop, and even then will continue to try to cut corners wherever it can. This has led me to think that the "Gordian Knot" to cut is an socio-economic and political one that redistributes the wealth accumulated from profiteering off of environmental destruction to first remove control from the passenger who's trying to steer the car into oncoming traffic, and to fund a variety of concerted technological and social efforts beyond the crumbs they're currently allotted to sequester carbon and get to real recovery and restoration work.
To save the 'camel' from the final 'straw that breaks the camel's back,' the 'camel's' burden should have nothing more added until it can be unburdened to a manageable load.
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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Dr Downtime According to the way the guy who coined the term "alpha" defined it, what you're saying is not quite accurate. Humans are primates that exist simple- and complex-groups, and complexity is not a factor in the simple definition:
"So Amos was an example of a male who was liked as a leader, and I think the term alpha male, if you look it up on the internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an alpha male, and what they mean is how to beat up others and beat them over the head and let them know that you are boss and don't mess with me and so on. And basically an alpha male for them is a bully. And I really don't like that kind of description, because I am actually partly responsible for the term "alpha male" because I wrote this book "Chimpanzee Politics," which was recommended by Newt Gingrich to freshmen congressmen. I don't know what good it did, but he recommended that book to them, and after that the term "alpha male" became very popular. But I think it is used in a mischaracterization. It's used in a very superficial way that doesn't relate to what a real alpha male is. And so I'm here to explain what that is. The term itself goes back actually much further. It goes back to the '40s and '50s, research on wolves, and basically the definition is very simple. The highest ranking male is the alpha male. The highest ranking female is the alpha female. Every primate group has one alpha male, one alpha female, not more than that, there's only one. And I will explain how that goes."
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This passage perfectly describes interacting with an "un-man" like Trump but was written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..."
― Kwame Ture
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Frederick Douglass made an interesting observation about essential differences in the "Christianities" transcribed from biblical DNA:
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
Verse 77, Gospel of Thomas, Nag Hammadi Library
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'So what is existentialism, and why does Camus not qualify? In simple terms, Sartre believed that existence precedes essence; Camus that essence precedes existence. In Sartre's bleak cosmos, man first becomes conscious of his existence as a free agent, condemned to forge his own identity -- his essence -- in a world unprotected by god. Camus, on the other hand, was willing to posit principles as absolute "essences," among them a belief that almost all violence is immoral. Therein lies the foul: Preconceived dogma, no matter how well intentioned, is not "existential." '
https://m-huffpost-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7699530/amp
------------------------
"Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks."
Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements
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With his shoulder-shrugging apathy of Absurdism, Camus didn't seem to understand the mythical integrity of Sisyphus's spine.
He's the entirely superficial guy who says to the messenger "I bet you're no fun at parties" when he overhears them warning others how to prepare for encroaching existential threats.
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@sifibruh7055 “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, (From "Anti-Semite and Jew",1944 )
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"All men are by nature conservative but conservatism in the military profession is a source of danger to the country. One must be ready to change his line sharply and suddenly, with no concern for the prejudices and memories of what was yesterday. To rest upon formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover (Father of the US Nuclear Navy), US Naval Postgraduate School Address (1954)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
“Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
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"Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
‘We have discovered happiness' -- say the Last Men, and they blink.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death.
One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.
No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
‘Formerly all the world was insane,'’ -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink.
They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled -- otherwise it upsets their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
‘We have discovered happiness,' -- say the Last Men, and they blink."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.” ― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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@bluenami7520 You're still oversimplifying a dilemma that, if embracing pacifism, leaves innocent people defenseless against conscienceless sociopaths. I agree that economic justice would prevent these assholes from popping up, but ignoring them as they exist doesn't help anything.
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..."
―Kwame Ture
"Never wound a snake; kill it.
"
―Harriet Tubman
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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Let's not forget, Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security alone. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
"Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive....it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
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"The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Fifth Basic Law of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Wallowing in self-pity is far more popular among "conservatives" than personal responsibility.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
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"Conservative Christianity" has always been a malicious and deceptive oxymoron and an abomination of desolation.
“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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Trump and McConnell both seem to be kunlangeta:
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
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"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell
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The MAGA and Nazi cults hate accountability so much that they'd rather enslave themselves, their children, and everybody else than face the music. What Nietzsche called 'Slave Morality'.
“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . .Make a man a slave, and you rob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
Authoritarian slave-mindedness is not exclusive to the MAGA and Nazi cults, of course, but the MAGA and Nazi cults are entirely built around authoritarian slave-mindedness. What Nietzsche called the 'Slave Morality' possessed by this cult is more appropriately called "Enslave-All Morality' (as opposed to the "Self-Master Morality").
We are all cursed with freedom; "conservativism", in whatever local flavor, is a desperate attempt to return to the mother's womb rooted in the fear of this reality. All we have are each other and the zero-sum game is for inferior animals.
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."
― H.L. Mencken, American Mercury
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865-1868)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
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"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
"Per hunc… castissimum ante regiam iniuriam sanguinem iuro, vosque, di, testes facio me Dontard Trump cum scelerata coniuge et omni liberorum stirpe ferro igni quacumque dehinc vi possim exsecuturum, nec illos nec alium quemquam regnare Americae passurum."
― Oath of Brutus (Updated)
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"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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Darth Wheezius The economics, oversimplified:
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat
of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
(Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (Great Book! Short read that's a great quick reference for inspiring curiosity))
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
(Stephen Hawking)
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
(Albert Einstein)
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
The morality:
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
(C.S. Lewis)
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
(Anonymous Greek Proverb)
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
(Paul Eldridge)
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
(Admiral H.G. Rickover)
'In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the power struggles of human politicians. "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says.' https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_the_surprising_science_of_alpha_males
"Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source
" https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020101
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews." Jean-Paul Sartre
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
""If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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No it hasn't.
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
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"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization⋆
• The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
• Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
• Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
• Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
• Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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@manuginobilisbaldspot424 “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Let's go Brandon," like "make America great again," is just another moronic slogan the brain-dead Hitlerite slobs chant instead of trying to think.
"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
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This passage describes interacting with an "un-man" like Trump perfectly but was written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.”
– Maxim Gorky
"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.”
– Sergei Aksakov
"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.”
– Ivan S. Turgenev
"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.”
– Ivan C. Shmeliov
"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!”
– Aleksandr Pushkin
"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.”
– Vasyli Rozanov
“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.”
– F. M. Dostoevsky
"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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“A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate.”
― Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, "Exchange with Admiral Rickover", in Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life, Second Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (12 May 1982)
"Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
― Ancient Greek Proverb
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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This is a tangent but still relevant to narcissistic exploitation, and especially relevant if you've lost friends or loved ones to a certain cult-of-personality:
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
"Pathological narcissistic reactions can be understood as an inability to tolerate, and a refusal to accept, the annihilation of self that identifying with the aggressor entails or the emotional abandonment that provoked it (Kohut, 1971, 1972; Rothstein, 1977; Bach, 2006), both of which feel horribly shameful (Frankel, 2002b, 2015). These twin intolerable realities are denied by soothing omnipotent fantasies in which what feels lost has been restored—that one is whole, good, and loved—and more: that one is special—though this protest may be only half-believed.
These omnipotent fantasies come with a sense of special entitlement to have the real people cast in one’s fantasy roles behave just as one wants; to coerce them to do this (Rothstein, 1977); and to express a righteous rage and inflict punishment when, inevitably, they fail to come through (see Kohut, 1972)."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Bernie/Yang 2020
Grassroots Solidarity Beats Status Quo Scarcity & Charity
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"On the basis of overall rankings (independent of respondent’s party affiliation), Trump’s personality was collectively perceived to be at or above the 99th normative percentile for traits associated with four personality disorders (sadistic, narcissistic, antisocial, and passive-aggressive)."
― Voter Perceptions of President Donald Trump’s Personality Disorder Traits: Implications of Political Affiliation - Jacob A. Fiala, Salwa A. Mansour, Shannon E. Matlock, Frederick L. Coolidge, 2020
🌹
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified.Try science instead of willful ignorance.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 69 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
--- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate.”
― Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, "Exchange with Admiral Rickover", in Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life, Second Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (12 May 1982)
"Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
― Greek Proverb
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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"Conservatives" have always been morons, like it or not.
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill
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"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 65 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“... the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
"I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success."
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
"When doing a job — any job — one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in that job forever."
“Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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"Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
― Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
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“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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@1MarkKeller I find it very important to consider the etymology of the word 'religion' to distinguish differences in what people mean by it. Considering its original meaning has more to do with self-discipline than the elaborate supernatural fantasy constructs fundamentalists who can't understand metaphor create and coerce others into, I don't think I can say that shuttering all religions would be beneficial (i.e. I'm not a Christian but I won't equate Frederick Douglass's liberating personal Christianity with the coercive authoritarian "Christianity" of his oppressors and their descendants, who still believe the same depraved and immoral abusive filth):
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
"The Devil is in the details, but so is Salvation."
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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@cryptsub
"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
"
- Jean-Paul Sartre
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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@SevenOfNineteen I'm an atheist, and I think you're referring to Vanilla ISIS, which I will not equate to the Christianity that Frederick Douglass freed his mind with:
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
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@SevenOfNineteen If you were credible in your assertions, you'd be able to cite your sources to build an argument... You're still only speculating, just like the people Asimov was criticizing. If you were "bound to reason" as you claim I'm not, you'd be able to prove it. You have to establish the proof for the claims you're making. It's not difficult to cite your sources, with modern technology, all it takes is a copy and paste. It's not like we're limited to the ticker-tape used for communication through space that Asimov described in Foundation. Just read the full text of Asimov's paper. I copied it and pasted it for you since you think your ignorance is just as good as my knowledge:
"It's hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: "America's right to know." It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenously, "America's right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?"
None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through out political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Politicians have routinely striven to speak the language of Shakespeare and Milton as ungrammaticaly as possible in order to avoid offending their audiences by appearing to have gone to school. Thus, Adlai Stevenson, who incautiously allowed intelligence and learning and wit to peep out of his speeches, found the American people flocking to a Presidential candidate who invented a version of the English language that was all his own and that has been the despair of satirists ever since.
George Wallace, in his speeches, had, als one of his prime targets, the "pointy-headed professor," and with what a roar of approval that phrase was always greeted by his pointy-headed audience.
Buzzwords: Now we have a new slogan on the part of the obscurantists: "Don't trust the experts!" Ten years ago, it was "Don't trust anyone over 30." But the shouters of that slogan fount that the inevitable alchemy of the calendar conveted them to the untrustworthyness of the over-30, and, apparently, they determined never to make that mistake again. "Don't trust the experts!" is absolutely safe. Nothing, neither the passing of time nor exposure to information, will convert these shouters to experts in any subject that might conceivably be useful.
We have a new buzzword, too, for anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning and skill, and who whishes to spread it around. People like that are called "elitists". That's the funniest buzzword ever invented because people who are not members of the intellectual elite don't know what an "elitist" is, or how to pronounce the word. As soon as someone shouts "elitist" it becomes clear that he or she is a closet elitist who is feeling guilty about having gone to school.
All right, then, forget my ingenuous question. America's right to know does not include knowledge of elitist subjects. America's right to know involves something we might express vaguely as "what's going on". America has the right to know "what's going on" in the courts, in the White House, in industrial councils, in the regulatory agencies, in labor unions -- in the seats of mighty, generally.
Very good, I'm for that too. But how are you going to let people know all that?
Grant us a free press, and a corps of independent and fearless investigative reporters, comes the cry, ans we can be sure the people will know.
Yes, provided they can read!
As it happens, reading is one of those elitist subjects I have been talking about, and the American public, by and large, in their distrust of experts and in their contempt for pointy-headed professors, can't read and don't read.
To be sure, the average American can sign his name more or less legibly, and can make out the sports headlines -- but how many nonelitist Americans can, without undue difficulty, read as many as a thousand consecutive words of small print, some of which may be trisyllabic?
Moreover, the situation is growing worde. Reading scores in the schools decline steadily. The highway signs, which used to represent elementary misreading lessons ("Go Slo", "Xroad") are steadily being replaced by little pictures to make them internationally legible and incidentally to help those who know ho to drive a car but, not being pointy-headed professors, can't read.
Again, in television commercials, there are frequent printed messages. Well, keep your eyes on them and you'll find out that no advertiser ever believes that anyone but an occasional elitist can read that print. To ensure that more than this mandarin minority gets the message, every word of it is spoken out loud by the announcer.
Honest effort: If that is so, then how have Americans got the right to know? Grant that there are certain publications that make an honest effort to tell the public what they should know, but ask yourselves how many actually read them.
Thera are 200 million Americans who have inhabited schoolrooms at some time in theri lives and who will admit that they know how to read (provided you promise not to use their names and shame them before their neighbors), but most decent periodicals believe they are doing amazingly well if they have circulations of half a million. It may be that only 1 per cent -- or less -- of Americans make a stab at exercising their right to know. And if they try to do anything on that basis they are quite likely to be accused of being elitists.
I contend that the slogan "America's right to know" is a meaningless one when we have an ignorant population, and that the function of a free press is virtually zero when hardly anyone can read.
What shall we do about it?
We might begin by asking ourselves whether ignorance is so wonderful after all, and whether it makes sense to denounce "elitism".
I belive that every himan being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal an can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly neet is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.
We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and indeed any true concept of democracy, have any meaning."
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles."
(DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK FOR COUNTERING TERRORISM AND TARGETED VIOLENCE)
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"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.”
– Maxim Gorky
"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.”
– Sergei Aksakov
"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.”
– Ivan S. Turgenev
"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.”
– Ivan C. Shmeliov
"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!”
– Aleksandr Pushkin
"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.”
– Vasyli Rozanov
"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov
“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.”
– F. M. Dostoevsky
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"What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
" Jean-Paul Sartre
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"What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 69 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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@gidim8367 There is no moral equivalence between incidental vandalism at primarily peaceful left-wing protests with the domestic terrorism, mass murder, and attempts at genocide made by right-wing nut jobs, and it's not only stupid of you to assert that it is, but mentally deprived and morally depraved (in bad faith) for you to do so:
A∨¬A.
"But on the other hand there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate. This is clear, in the first place, if we define what the true and the false are. To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false."
— Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV, Part 7
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"Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1944)
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Megalomania Traitor Goon belongs in an asylum, not in the capitol building.
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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benny pitt "... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
(THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE) https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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Valfor Atlas The question is: what's wrong with Alex Jones?
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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You're off the mark, Matt. Context matters. Junkie Jordan isn't expressing emotion over real concern, he's weaponizing self-pity.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Sex and gender are not the same thing and never have been, plus there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered and that's been natural as long as humans have existed.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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@Richard Phillips Another observation as proof that "conservative christianity", in application, is nothing but an abomination of desolation wrapped in the flayed skins of Jesus's actual supporters:
“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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@Richard Phillips Consider the road to Hell we're on:
"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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@hanovergreen4091 "What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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aka mechanical recalibration
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"Unless under the spell of a psychotic delusion, extreme rage, inescapable deprivation, drugs, or a destructive authority figure, a person who is conscience-bound does not—in some sense he cannot—kill or rape in cold blood, torture another person, steal someone's life savings, trick someone into a loveless relationship as sport, or willfully abandon his own child. Could you?"
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
“The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
― Angela Y. Davis
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
―Frederick Douglass
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Bernie 2020! Grassroots Solidarity beats status-quo failed-promise pseudo-charity!
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
―Paul Eldridge
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
―C.S. Lewis
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
―Anonymous Greek Proverb
“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine."
―Saying derived from The Great Binding Law
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Seriously, it's past time to lock up EVERYBODY pushing this seditious MAGA-cult bullshit.
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”
― Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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(The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals): "Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@TheEMC99 What you're saying is that you don't understand why they're relevant:
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S."
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
In the US, Right-wing extremists murder women, children, and old people because they're too afraid to pick a fight with men their own size.
In the US, Left-wing extremists started the free-lunch program in public schools and want to make sure everybody's kids are fed.
This is not a "both sides" issue. There is no moral equivalence.
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@onurdmetu Thank you for providing yourself as an example of the kind of "un-man" Lewis was talking about. The essence of everything you've said amounts to your parents failing to teach you right from wrong.
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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RWNJs are stunted:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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@TheMorriganAensland A certain verse is pretty useful for distinguishing between Jesus's Christianity and the abomination of desolation that calls itself "Christianity", Matthew 6:24:
"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."
If you were to remove the supernatural from the Bible (as Thomas Jefferson did) and read the New Testament for metaphor and for economic advice (given its historical origins), one could see the New Testament as very well aligned with the Preamble to the US Constitution:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." (Gouverneur Morris)
Another deep irony is that prior to the Cold War, if you were to ask most American Christians what book "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" came from, they would have told you that it came from the New Testament, Book of Acts 4:32–35: ³² And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. ³³ And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all. ³⁴ Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, ³⁵ And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.
So in essence, the most intentional atheistic and secular principles used to found the US and the USSR are also the most Christian, according to the New Testament economic principles.
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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@sublimesense7761 “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
―Christopher Hitchens
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212439213
(Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8721.01235
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Exactly:
"A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
The Declaration of Independence
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
The Preamble to the US Constitution
"I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
The Oath of Commissioned Officers
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"If you can get people to believe in absurdities, then you can get them to commit atrocities."
―Voltaire
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots" https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S."
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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C.S. Lewis wrote this description about an "un-man" like Donny the Dunce 3 years before he was born: "What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified. Try science instead of lazy stupidity.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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Let's not forget, Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security alone. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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John Sholl I'll be more precise:
If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
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"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
"The anti-Semite does not become a decent man just because he lies according to his principles."
― Friedrich Nietzsche
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can be trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley:
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
―Isaac Newton
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
The BITE model for authoritarian cult mind control also describes the way they brainwash children and cognitively-disabled people.
Strict control of "Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion" prevent escape from conservative ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
― Archilochus
“Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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MTG belongs in an asylum, not the capitol building.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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I hope he recovers. We the People can't lock Demagogue Donny up for the rest of his life if he passes away.
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 71 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@justinkirschenman2232 Were you educated in basic calculus? The math is easier to explain if understand exponents, derivation, and integration. Don't need to do mathematical operations, just dimensional analysis.
Ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Progressive agendas best serve the values of the average decent "conservative" who's been deluded into modern conservative ideology and nostalgia.
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Doesn't matter whether it's political or mental health related, the situation remains the same:
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
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Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has personally lost more money than any other American, ever.
He was featured in The Apprentice but he's literally The Biggest Loser.
King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
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@wally2276 If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@philadelphiaeagles834 Capitalism is what's on trial here, not Socialism.
Socialism worked just fine in the US, from when FDR partially repaired the economy with the New Deal (The full Second Bill of Rights didn't happen) up until Ronny Retardation gummed up the works in 1980.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
(Declining Life Expectancy in the United States: The Need for Social Policy as Health Policy)
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
Socialism's precepts all came from the Preamble (and Philosophical Cornerstone) to the US Constitution:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Why do you hate American prosperity?
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
―Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
Frederick Douglass
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The GOP = Vanilla ISIS.
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
@t
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Yes.
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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This passage perfectly describes interacting with an "un-man" like Trump but was written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory:
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
#FascistLivesDontMatter
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@blogintonblakley2708 “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 71 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Welcome to the Trump Slump
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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@Starmiinor "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings
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@thelmagreenwood3377 What I'm able to read between the lines is that you don't have anything to offer here except menticidal abuse and coercion.
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
(If- by Rudyard Kipling)
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
(The Declaration of Independence)
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"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory:
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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Floda Brin We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
Will Durant, The Lessons of History
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
""If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Nietzsche hated Christians but loved what Jesus taught: No Country for Old Men.
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb.
I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.
I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'; and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household.'
― Matthew 10:34-36
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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“The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.
When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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I hope he recovers eventually. We the People can't lock Demagogue Donny up for the rest of his life if he passes away.
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@Go away “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified.Try science instead of kissing up to morons.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@Go away “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@1sthawkfeathers547 Nobody's authority exists beyond criticism.
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes form lying continually to others and himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility..."
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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"...between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@briantyson1136 Conservatism is just politicized abuse-the spoiled child trying to force its will on everyone else. And you're wrong in another way, but you'd have to be able to see past yourself to recognize it:
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 65 times that many-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://lnkd.in/gzAxNBV
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
―Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified. Try science instead of whiny stupidity.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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@Mr Popeye “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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J Wil Want to know what's really stupid?:
"Traumatic emotional abandonment can occur in societies as well as families—what sociologist Daniel Bell (1962), seeking half a century ago to explain the appeal of the radical right, called being dispossessed. In the US in recent years, many in the working- and middle- classes have felt this both economically and culturally. Income and wealth inequality have been growing in recent decades (Piketty, 2014). And, contrary to our national myth, people are likely to be stuck where they are—intergenerational income mobility in the US is lower than in most other developed countries (Surowiecki, 2014). The recent economic crisis has deepened an already existing economic dispossession arising from income and wealth inequality, lack of income mobility, and the lack of a strong social safety net in the US.
Interestingly, it is the conservative southern states where the social-safety-net is generally weakest (Sauter et al, 2014) and there is least intergenerational income mobility (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2012), suggesting that those who have been most economically dispossessed are most likely to support a movement that runs directly counter to their economic interests."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
The Fifth Basic Law of Stupidity:
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person" because "stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
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@ElCyberWizard If the Preamble to the US Constitution I swore to support and defend against domestic enemies is radical leftism, then I'm more of a radical leftist than you can imagine:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://lnkd.in/gzAxNBV
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?" ―C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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Bertrand de Born Factual evidence proving you wrong:
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S."
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…” https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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'In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.'
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons):
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
"Per hunc… castissimum ante regiam iniuriam sanguinem iuro, vosque, di, testes facio me Donald Trump cum scelerata coniuge et omni liberorum stirpe ferro igni quacumque dehinc vi possim exsecuturum, nec illos nec alium quemquam regnare Americae passurum."
― Oath of Brutus (Updated)
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“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
"I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success."
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
"When doing a job — any job — one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in that job forever."
“Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
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"Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S."
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill
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“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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Why Degen Donny received assistance from America's adversaries in the 2016 election and will again in the 2020 election:
“In our article, we briefly summarized some of the potentially harmful tendencies of narcissistic leaders, such as the following: defensively dismissing criticism and attacking critics, prioritizing the elevation of their public image over national well-being, refusing to admit they lack relevant knowledge instead of learning new information, making self-serving decisions instead of maintaining consistency with their stated beliefs, turning on anyone who stops singing their praises, and etc.,” Fiala explained.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to look at that list and believe it is a summary of a book chapter written in 2006 by the founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior rather than an editorialist’s recap of last week’s headlines. I am left wondering whether Trump supporters would have been more concerned about the narcissistic traits they saw in him if they were aware that these traits tend to motivate these types of potentially disastrous behaviors, or whether they would be as accepting of such behavior if they understood it to be motivated by narcissistic traits.”
www.psypost.org/2020/04/trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds-56646?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles." https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory.
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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“A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate.”
― Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, "Exchange with Admiral Rickover", in Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life, Second Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (12 May 1982)
"Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
― Ancient Greek Proverb
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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This passage perfectly describes interacting with an "un-man" like Trump but was written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible..."
Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization⋆
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
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@Maureen_Schilder Yes, I think so too.
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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"The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."
--- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
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“In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
“What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…” https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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@lindaupton1397 "What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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@lindaupton1397 'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”'
https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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@tracybarhite852 Hate comes from Donny the Dunce's cult members who are willing to kill innocent men, women and children. Let's be perfectly clear: Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security first and foremost. And any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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@jeffarnold3800 The Afghanistan War, by the numbers (2001 - today (July 31, 2020)):
US troops killed: 2,309
US troops injured: 20,660
Taliban members killed: 72,000
Afghan national security forces killed: 65,596
Afghan civilians killed: 38,480
US taxpayer dollars spent: $2 trillion
Sources: US Department of Defense, icasualties.org, Brown University, Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies Afghanistan, United Nations, Congressional Budget Office
NOW:
How many American lives have been claimed by COVID-19 in 2020 alone?
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Maybe it's not obvious to everyone, but hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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Nietzsche hated Christians but loved what Jesus taught: No Country for Old Men.
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb.
I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.
I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'; and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household.'
― Matthew 10:34-36
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Junkie Jordan is weaponizing the self-pity he's wallowing in and you're falling for it.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley
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"It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."
― H.L. Mencken, American Mercury
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865-1868)
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Radical Leftism:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
(The Declaration of Independence)
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Flynn is an oath-breaking traitor and he deserves to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
“In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.”
― Diogenes of Sinope
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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@amirs.9495 I asked a guy who claims to have a master's from University of Texas to prove he made it through high school, giving him to chance to add credibility to his claim. It's a shibboleth that he apparently failed. It's cute that you're chiming in to prove yourself yet still can't answer what you claim is to be a simple question, also failing the shibboleth. Call me whatever names you like, but you're only adding weight to the conclusions of these studies:
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212439213
(Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8721.01235
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"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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MTG is going to eventually chase down somebody who fully stands their ground.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified. Try science instead of kissing up to narcissistic morons.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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“Historically speaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other international ideologies together, and they were the only ones who consistently denied the great principle upon which national organizations of peoples are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteed by the idea of mankind.”
“Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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Radical Leftism:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
(The Declaration of Independence)
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill
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"Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1944)
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla):
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi):
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Karl Popper's "Critical Pluralism" identifies three principles that connect epistemology and ethics through intellectual responsibility:
"1) Principle of Fallibility: Perhaps I am wrong and you are right. But we both could turn out wrong.
2) Principle of Rational Discussion: We want to try, as impersonally as is possible, to weigh up our reasons for and against a theory that is definite and criticizable.
3) Principle of the Approximation to Truth: Through such an impersonal discussion, we almost always come closer to the truth. And we come to a better understanding, even if we don't reach any agreement."
"For they imply, among other things, toleration, tolerance: If I can learn from you and I want to learn in the interest of truth, then I have to not only tolerate you, but recognize you as a potential equal. The potential unity & equality of all people is a prerequisite of our willingness to discuss matters rationally. Also of importance is the principle that we can learn a lot from discussion, even if we don't reach agreement. For a discussion can help us shed light on some of our errors.
Thus ethical principles underlie science. The idea of truth as the fundamental regulative principle is one such ethical principle. The search for truth, the approximation to truth is also an ethical principle. So too is the idea of intellectual honesty & fallibility, which leads us to a self-critical attitude and to tolerance."
- Karl Popper, 1981 Lecture (in German)
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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"Pro-Life"? Conservative policy is "Forced Birth". Progressives ARE pro-life in that we don't want society to collapse on a burning hellscape. Remember - Progressive policies better serve any conservative values actually worth keeping.
"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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Have any of you ever heard of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"...See, it's easy for cats to kill other cats, it's just the dogs they got trouble with
You know what I'm sayin'?
It's time for us to stand up like men and women, yo
Word up, we gotta stand up and do something about this
You know why?
You let a motherfucker kick you five times, they gon' kick you five times (True)
You let 'em kick you three times, they gon' kick you three times
You let 'em kick you twice, they gon' kick you twice
(I wouldn't let that nigga kick me once, you know what I'm sayin'?)
You let 'em kick you once, they gon' kick you once
But if you break off the motherfuckin' feet
Ain't gon' be no more kicking goin' on, kid (Oh, shit)
Ain't no more kickin'
I learned that shit growing up in Newark, man, the Brick City"
--- Fugees | Manifest, The Score
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Pestilence Pence was clearly endorsed by Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Bernie Sanders gets beautiful birds; Mike Pence gets maggots to feast on his American carnage.
Cursed and corrupt 'conservative Christian'.
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@plaidpanda "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible. Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you want to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
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Omnipresent Spirit On the contrary, mature, moral, evolved behavior is a slow acting of moving past conservatism - conservatism is just that in us that's childish, selfish, and animalistic:
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
(Greek Proverb)
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
(Paul Eldridge)
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
(Admiral H.G. Rickover)
'In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the power struggles of human politicians. "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says.' https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_the_surprising_science_of_alpha_males
"Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source " https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020101
(Don't worry, if you're a Trump-cultist I know you're too lazy to read and think about these articles critically. They're for the real mature adults that may have some kind of intellectual curiosity and openness to experience)
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Omnipresent Spirit You've only demonstrated that you're incapable of self-reflection. Naming names of people you've heard to be thinkers is neither referring to ideas nor making any arguments about any points whatsoever.
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
(C.S. Lewis)
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
(Greek Proverb)
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
(Paul Eldridge)
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
(Admiral H.G. Rickover)
Odds are you're younger than me anyway, but it's irrelevant.
'In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the power struggles of human politicians. "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says.' https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_the_surprising_science_of_alpha_males
The men that become more 'conservative' over time aren't the men that become trustworthy elders. They become the kind of hypocrites that love to swing their bibles around like weapons instead of reading the words of and about their supposed savior, who was a Jewish democratic-socialist/communist.
James 5:1-5 New International Version (NIV)
Warning to Rich Oppressors
5 Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2 Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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How about that party of "family values" and "fiscal responsibility"?
Kudos for anyone who recognizes toxicity of sociopathy and has the mind to head for the door.
I usually agree with Emma and I understand the empathy for family problems, but the kid is wise for trying to get back to humanity while she can.
All that gaslighting of Kellyanne we see in public, you know she developed the knack for it at home.
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"If you can get people to believe in absurdities, then you can get them to commit atrocities." ―Voltaire
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots" https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S." https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Irony is that Temple Satanists are far more Christlike than "Conservative Christianity" has ever been.
"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 69 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
""If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles." https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 65 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://lnkd.in/gzAxNBV
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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Manchin immediately violates the law of non-contradiction with those two sentences before Seth says "Do you hear yourself though?"
Since Manchin's second proposition negates his first proposition, then his entire assertion is not true... ¬(p ∧ ¬p).
From the violation of law of non-contradiction comes Pseudo-Scotus's principle of explosion... (p, ¬p)⊢Q.
'From contradiction, anything follows.'
No good comes from this willful ignorance and stupidity in power. It's funny in the hands of a skilled comedian, but when politicians do it, the worst things follow.
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"This is a god whom ye knew not, for mankind forgot it. We name it by its name Abraxas. It is more indefinite still than god and devil. [...] Abraxas is effect. Nothing standeth opposed to it but the ineffective; hence its effective nature freely unfoldeth itself. The ineffective is not, therefore resisteth not. Abraxas standeth above the sun and above the devil. It is improbable probability, unreal reality. [...] It is the effective itself, not any particular effect, but effect in general."
― Carl Jung, The Second Sermon to the Dead
"Between man and his one god there standeth nothing, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas."
― Carl Jung, The Seventh Sermon to the Dead
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Trump deserves death.
"I don't take responsibility at all."
Donald Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else."
Admiral H.G Rickover
"The problem with incompetence is its inability to recognize itself."
Orrin Woodward
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
Lyudmila "Lady Death" Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
Yagyū Munenori
Honor the old ways.
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@HoloScope “If, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“As a counterpoint to sociopathy, the condition of narcissism is particularly interesting and instructive. Narcissism is, in a metaphorical sense, one half of what sociopathy is. Even clinical narcissists are able to feel most emotions are strongly as anyone else does, from guilt to sadness to desperate love and passion. The half that is missing is the crucial ability to understand what other people are feeling. Narcissism is a failure not of conscience but of empathy, which is the capacity to perceive emotions in others and so react to them appropriately. The poor narcissist cannot see past his own nose, emotionally speaking, and as with the Pillsbury Doughboy, any input from the outside will spring back as if nothing had happened. Unlike sociopaths, narcissists often are in psychological pain, and may sometimes seek psychotherapy. When a narcissist looks for help, one of the underlying issues is usually that, unbeknownst to him, he is alienating his relationships on account of his lack of empathy with others, and is feeling confused, abandoned, and lonely. He misses the people he loves, and is ill-equipped to get them back. Sociopaths, in contrast, do not care about other people, and so do not miss them when they are alienated or gone, except as one might regret the absence of a useful appliance that one has somehow lost.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill ( British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68)”
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About the GOP: 'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”' https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 65 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable σ fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the σ fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.
In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B2 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the σ fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell."
― Carlo Cipolla, Economic Historian (The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity)
"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill, British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster 1865-1868
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla (The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity)
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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Maybe it's not obvious to everyone, but hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory:
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
―Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Conservativism" is little more than the mixture of cowardice and abuse.
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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(Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization⋆):
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://lnkd.in/gzAxNBV
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@spiffygonzales5899 You've never actually taken a biology or human development class, have you?
"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified. Try science instead of kissing up to morons.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about.
War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors.
You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail."
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
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Why it's perfectly ethical to kill klansmen:
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
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(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 68 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Conservatives" apparently admire Trump and people like him for the same reason that decent human beings reject him:
"On the basis of overall rankings (independent of respondent’s party affiliation), Trump’s personality was collectively perceived to be at or above the 99th normative percentile for traits associated with four personality disorders (sadistic, narcissistic, antisocial, and passive-aggressive)."
Voter Perceptions of President Donald Trump’s Personality Disorder Traits: Implications of Political Affiliation
"Conservativism" is essentially a euphemism for sadism.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans
They'd rather suffer to make the "other" suffer than see everyone succeed.
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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“The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.
When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
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'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”'
https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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Kill your masters
'In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.'
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 71.5 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@daytonjobgen8639 You literally reacted exactly as I predicted you would and are completely missing how obvious that is. You believe your ideology is blameless despite a vast amount of evidence to the contrary, demonstrating that you can't tell facts from opinions, falsehoods, and fictions. You're suffering from a nasty delusion.
I'm willing to examine evidence to the contrary, and there's a possibility you might stumble across something I haven't seen, but it's pretty obvious you're not exactly a credible researcher. I don't know if English is your first language or not, but you've also got a lot of room for improvement there, leading me to believe you struggle with reading comprehension. Just ask if you need help.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
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@daytonjobgen8639 How about you just read some excerpts from the short paper for my honors comparative politics course that presents evidence-integrated opinion I formed on why in general, the salience of experience, irrespective of accuracy of experience to reality, is of greater influence on a person's political persuasions than conclusions formed rational and statistical reasoning? You'll have to do a great deal of orienting yourself with the terms, but I don't think in the binary left-right terms you're accustomed to because I'm aware of tools that you can learn to make more accurate and precise decisions:
"Democracy is a useful system for obtaining humanist objectives, as “On balance, the evidence suggests that democracy improves human development outcomes like education and health, but is at best modestly associated with economic growth.” (Miller 87) - So though demonstrated economic performance of democracies abroad promotes the spread of democracy, it’s also its most effective selling point, a means to the end of adaptively prioritizing that “Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.” (Rickover 12)."
"Samuel Huntington’s “Gap Hypothesis” provides a framework for synthesizing the initial beliefs and orientations of a country’s people discussed by Almond and Verba with the significance of influence on the way perception of economic success is shaped argued by Miller."
"Miller elaborates on four models of policy diffusion internationally to differentiate their modes, diffusion in this context being “any process where prior adoption of a trait or practice in a population alters the probability of adoption for remaining non-adopters.” (Miller 84): coercion, competition, emulation (also called contagion), and learning. “Coercion occurs when foreign powers ‘explicitly or implicitly influence the probability that weaker nations adopt the policy they prefer.’”(Miller 85), “…competition similarly involves incentives for adopting policies, but the competitive pressure is non-deliberate and decentralized.”(Miller 85), “In the emulation mechanism, practices spread not from economic incentives, but from social or cultural conceptions of what is appropriate.” (Miller 85), and “the final mechanism of policy diffusion is learning, whereby ‘information about policy success or failure abroad will influence the probability of policy change at home.’”(Miller 86)."
"Miller also distinguishes between learning-based diffusion models between policies and regime types, “… the former involves a choice by empowered politicians and the latter a determination of who has power, usually by a much broader array of actors.” (Miller 86) Miller provides evidence to form a theory of policy diffusion by learning by testing “whether the global economic record of democracy predicts its spread.” (Miller 86) and concludes “… Countries shift toward the regime type with the superior global record of economic performance… In addition, the effect has strengthened over time.” (100)." "Miller states: “Considerable evidence… shows that individuals are bounded rational learners, over-weighting evidence that confirms their existing beliefs or that comes from salient examples.” (Miller 89) and “A final insight from studies into bounded learning and political diffusion is the salience of single, prominent examples. Individual countries perceived as exceptional economic successes often inspire imitation of their political and economic institutions.” (Miller 90) Almond and Verba may frame what Miller calls “bounded rational learning” as a synthesis of their cognitive- and affective-orientations into an evaluative-orientation. Without distinguishing between the significance of emotional or rational information processing, the ideas behind “bounded rational learning” and “evaluative orientation” are generalized into the machinery of Huntington’s gap hypothesis - the “gap between one’s aspirations and their expectations of government is what generates social frustration and dissatisfaction.”""
"Over-weighting salience as described by “bounded learning” implies limitations to Miller’s theory of learning diffusion, but also hints to the mechanics of evaluative synthesis that leads to dissatisfaction and instability when attempts at modernization fall short of expectations as described by the gap hypothesis. This over-weighting of salient examples may lead to overly optimistic projections based on observed successes elsewhere but given the specifics of a nation’s current circumstances, as well as overly pessimistic criticism towards innovation due to perceived scope or magnitude of risk compared to maintenance of the status quo."
"In addition to individuals’ political orientations, in an increasingly globalized world with a digital information infrastructure, access to external sources of information that provide them with a greater scope of knowledge about the economic successes and failures of different political systems is available in abundance. Salience of models and examples of success provide over-simplified but greatly appealing impulses to adopt new practice, but increasingly available accurate information that may help navigate the specifics of successes and failures may help to expand the bounds of bounded rationality and increase policy diffusion by learning, tip the scale of evaluative-orientation more in favor of cognitive-orientation, or reduce degree of dissatisfaction and destabilization described by the gap hypothesis. “… increasing international flows of information and influence suggest that learning at the global level should strengthen over time, which is tested and supported…” (Miller 89)."
"Ultimately, “…a widespread belief that democracy Is economically beneficial” because it “will naturally lead to a broad, cross-class support for democratic institutions.” (Miller 86). Even if economic benefit is only a byproduct of what is most desirable about implementation of democratic national institutions, “… the global economic success of democracy facilitates its spread.” (Miller 86)."
References:
Miller, Michael. “Democracy by Example? Why Democracy Spreads When the World’s Democracies Prosper.” Comparative Politics, Volume 49, Number 1. 2016. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24886229?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Almond , G. and Verba , S. ( 1963 ) “The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations.” Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Retrieved from: https://www.questia.com/library/1451304/the-civic-culture-political-attitudes-and-democracy
Huntington, S. (1968) “Political Order in Changing Societies.” New Haven, CT and London, England. Retrieved from: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gov2126/files/huntington_political_order_changing_soc.pdf
Rickover, Hyman G. Responses to questions after his presentation of "Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life", as published in "Exchange with Admiral Rickover". Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life, Second Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture. Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (12 May 1982). Retrieved from: http://web.archive.org/web/20070621034446/http://www.cceia.org/resources/publications/morgenthau/763.html/_res/id=sa_File1/763_2ndMML-H.G.Rickover.pdf
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@daytonjobgen8639 Again, you seem to miss the very basic point of the initial argument. Now, it's not that my opinions on Miller, Huntington, and Almond and Verba aren't up for debate, I just don't think you have any useful or credible evidence or claims to integrate with or negate my own conclusions and models that are specific to that framework. You referenced nothing relevant and cited no evidence supporting or disproving any claims. The point is not my reaffirmation of different forms of evidence that somewhat confirm claims of others who have similar evidence-based frameworks, I never claimed to see beyond any other human in history. What I provided were only excerpted paragraphs from a longer paper since YouTube comments are limited to a certain length. What I did and wanted to point out is how I support my claims by citing my sources very specifically, and then built my arguments after presenting already agreed upon factual evidence. You're also making the assumption that the excerpts of evidence I presented from my paper are the sum argument I'm making, in the paper I have time and space to build up to my argument. I don't particularly care about your opinion on that specific paper since you don't have anything relevant to say about it anyway. What I'm trying to point out to you, you're not referring to any real evidence with your assertion that DARVO pertains to current left-wing ideology in the US in any way that is similar in scope to the abuses committed by the Republican party and its supporters against their fellow citizens and against their own families. There's simply no moral equivalence and you have no evidence to support your claim of such. That's the reason I referred to my paper, as an example of how to refer to supporting evidence. You've made it apparent you're not credible enough to debunk anything, I'm trying to make you understand what credibility looks like. Like I said before, it's the ability to actually make rational conclusions with evidence, not the ability to spin up some rhetoric to support your confirmation biases or Gish-gallop with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense that just distracts from any productive conversation.
Or should I just assume that everything you're peddling is already in bad faith?
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@HackingYourLifeLOA Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
“If, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
Google: "Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?" and "Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors"
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Ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Echos:
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..."
―Kwame Ture
"Never wound a snake; kill it."
―Harriet Tubman
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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Don't equate biologically-rooted developmental disorders with culturally-induced and incentivized retardation. Autism is not social retardation through constant abuse excused with a label of "conservative family values". The lawyer is right about his client's cognitive limitations, but they don't excuse his client, even if they also implicate Donard Trunt.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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I hope he recovers. We the People can't lock Demagogue Donny up for the rest of his life if he passes away.
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Sounds like they're oblivious to the context of the oaths they swore. But that is an intentional effect of Republican politics: temptation to oath-breaking.
Most often those who are loudest about the First Amendment are the most ignorant of the Constitution's first principles, written in the first sentence: the Preamble.
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/preamble#:~:text=The%20Preamble%20to%20the%20Constitution%20is%20an%20introductory,,or%20powers%20not%20granted%20specifically%20in%20the%20Constitution.
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Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://lnkd.in/gzAxNBV
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
And your children's.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
What are you going to do?
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate.”
― Paul Eldridge
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“There are few fates worse than sustained, self-protective, self-paralyzing, generalized distrust of one’s human environment. The worst pathology of trust is a life-poisoning reaction to any betrayal of trust.”
― Annette Baier
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
— C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://lnkd.in/gzAxNBV
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
―Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
“Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do not have higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins. They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored, even the few who become rich and powerful.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
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@naomiogle5410 The boy who cried wolf is particularly relevant to Donny Drumpf's lying. It's insane that anyone believes anything that comes from his mouth. Have you ever read Carlo Cipolla's Basic Laws of Stupidity? Sums up the Trump-Cult. Chicken-Little is more relevant to all the people who cry about their fears of ISIS and Islamic Jihad while ignoring white-supremacist domestic-terrorism.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots" https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S." https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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@Rodney Williams Marvin Here's a talking point:
Let's not forget, Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US national security alone. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 69 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@dj-dq4lr "Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Isaiah 1:17
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
(Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
(Stephen Hawking)
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
(Albert Einstein)
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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@stevenhughes1110 Is ignorance bliss?
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB."
(The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals
) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
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"The most important sign of victory for the Russian people is their cruelty full of sadism.”
– Maxim Gorky
"Ah, how hard it is to live in Russia, in this place full of the stench of physical and moral deception, a place of wickedness, lies and wickedness.”
– Sergei Aksakov
"The Russian is the biggest and most naughty liar in the world.”
– Ivan S. Turgenev
"A people who hate freedom, worship slavery, love chains on their hands and feet, defiled physically and morally… ready at any time to defile everything and everywhere.”
– Ivan C. Shmeliov
"People regardless of their smallest duty, the smallest justice, the most insignificant truth, the people who do not recognize human dignity, do not generally recognize human freedom or free thought… Alas, how sharp the Russian language is!”
– Aleksandr Pushkin
"We are not a nation, we are a crazy hell.”
– Vasyli Rozanov
“A nation that roams Europe and is looking for something to destroy, to simply dust everything.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
"We are not a people, but cattle, rats, wild hordes of villains and murderers.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism
"It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."
― H.L. Mencken, American Mercury
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster, 1865 - 1868)
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@SepticFuddy Just like the Preamble to the US Constitution, Jesus the Nazarene was further Left than Kropotkin and Karl Marx. Where they wrote books, Jesus was an actual VIOLENT anti-capitalist and anti-fascist that got books written about him:
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'; and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household.'
Matthew 10:34-36
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
Matthew 6:24
"Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’"
Matthew 21:12-13
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
Matthew 5:17
"Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow."
Isaiah 1:17
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Preamble to the US Constitution
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@jerrymarshall2095 1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
'Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be "blamed" for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external "evil."'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists."
― George Orwell, Collected Essays; Vol 1 page 289
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . .Make a man a slave, and you rob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
The BITE model for authoritarian cult mind control also describes the way they brainwash children and cognitively-disabled people.
Strict control of "Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion" prevent escape from conservative ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 69 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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The paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
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To judge Capitalism by its ultimate output, it's the belief that people are capital.
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
― Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
― Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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(Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization⋆)
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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Impervious You really have no idea how desperate you sound, do you?
Or why people don't trust you?
I suppose your screen name is fitting, as you seem impervious to reason and critical thinking. But it betrays your feelings of weakness, vulnerability, and the need to hide in an impervious safe space. I don't need to guess about the quality of your parents and what you weren't able to escape from. You seem to confuse abuse for argument, rendering you incapable of productive debate or dialectic, let alone understanding applied dialectics expanded through Hegel, Clausewitz, Marx, etc., ethical reasoning through dialectical prioritization, of dialectics used in machine learning and other artificial intelligence protocols. I'm not sure about the source of your incorrigibility, but it's amusing to see Ben Shapiro-style copycat whiners in the Youtube comments section. Learn propositional logic before attempting to deconstruct somebody's words, you're just embarrassing yourself by confusing myopia for attention to detail. Thanks for at least trying to use proper punctuation, even if you get super-butthurt about me not answering a question you never asked. Vote Bernie so college is free and you no longer have any excuses not to study actual philosophy. You can look up any of the ideas I mentioned and grow from them. You have your pittances; I'm done casting pearls before swine.
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or
inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one
of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Ignacio Couce This is what emerges when you survey enough people for subjective anecdotes to find patterns emerging in the data:
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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Spok In addition, the Preamble to the US Constitution pretty much describes the moral imperative of Socialism:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/
Priority #1 is to form a more perfect Union for We the People, not build an economy that only serves a few.
Priority #2 is establish Justice and is why there are so many peaceful protests on the street.
Priority #3 is to insure domestic tranquility, also why peaceful protesters are on the street.
Now, Priorities #4 & #5 do both sound awfully similar to (and were seeds for) later paradigms of Karl Marx, pen-pal of Abraham Lincoln, and other progressive thinkers.
http://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx
Priority #6, 'Blessings of Liberty'... What are those?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Her (Lady Liberty's) Beauty is Our Duty.
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Spok You've also yet to support any claims with empirical evidence. Repeating the same old loops of irrelevant trivia isn't helpful or productive to getting to factual truth. For example:
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots" https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S." https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
In the US, Right-wing extremists murder women, children, and old people because they're too afraid to pick a fight with men their own size.
In the US, Left-wing extremists started the free-lunch program in public schools and want to make sure everybody's kids are fed.
Therefore, this is not a "both sides" issue. There is no moral equivalence.
Left-wing politics in the US are in greater accordance with the principles described in the Preamble to the US Constitution.
But I'm not done!
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of causing as much loss of life in the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
71 9/11s of Americans lost to the Trump Virus, not COVID-19.
4/20: The US has 4% of the world's population and 20% of its deaths from COVID-19.
That is the Trump Virus: incompetence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Her (Lady Liberty's) Beauty is Our Duty.
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
'In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.'
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Gross. Though I'm glad he's recovering. We the People can't lock Demagogue Donny up for the rest of his life if he passes away.
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
The BITE model for authoritarian cult mind control also describes the way they brainwash children and cognitively-disabled people.
Strict control of "Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion" prevent escape from conservative ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@Gage King Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@credman Karl Popper's "Critical Pluralism" identifies three principles that connect epistemology and ethics through intellectual responsibility:
"1) Principle of Fallibility: Perhaps I am wrong and you are right. But we both could turn out wrong.
2) Principle of Rational Discussion: We want to try, as impersonally as is possible, to weigh up our reasons for and against a theory that is definite and criticizable.
3) Principle of the Approximation to Truth: Through such an impersonal discussion, we almost always come closer to the truth. And we come to a better understanding, even if we don't reach any agreement."
"For they imply, among other things, toleration, tolerance: If I can learn from you and I want to learn in the interest of truth, then I have to not only tolerate you, but recognize you as a potential equal. The potential unity & equality of all people is a prerequisite of our willingness to discuss matters rationally. Also of importance is the principle that we can learn a lot from discussion, even if we don't reach agreement. For a discussion can help us shed light on some of our errors.
Thus ethical principles underlie science. The idea of truth as the fundamental regulative principle is one such ethical principle. The search for truth, the approximation to truth is also an ethical principle. So too is the idea of intellectual honesty & fallibility, which leads us to a self-critical attitude and to tolerance."
- Karl Popper, 1981 Lecture (in German)
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"Family Values..."
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Conservative Christianity" is a deceptive oxymoron and an abomination of desolation.
Just like the Preamble to the US Constitution, Jesus the Nazarene was further Left than both Kropotkin and Marx. Where they wrote books, Jesus was an actual VIOLENT anti-capitalist and anti-fascist that got books written about him:
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'; and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household.'
Matthew 10:34-36
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
Matthew 6:24
"Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’"
Matthew 21:12-13
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
Matthew 5:17
"Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow."
Isaiah 1:17
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Preamble to the US Constitution
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King Couch Potato (the Thief-in-Chief) Dereliction-of-Duty Donny and the Gluttonous Obsolete Pornocrats steal futures.
Yours included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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Progressives Against the Regressive Left If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 65 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@sandshark2 'The robot said, “I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good.”
He hesitated, then, almost as though he were surprised at his own words, he said, “Go, and sin no more!"'
R. Daneel Olivaw (Isaac Asimov)
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@sandshark2 I'm purposefully vague about prevention/deterrence, but you're right to assume diplomatic and non-violent measures are preferable. When it is clear that is not possible, basic rules of engagement are appropriate... for the most part.
"Less well known [than other paradoxes Popper discusses] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Paradox of Tolerance
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price."
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam
"A thousand measures of gold is substantial profit, and prime ministership is an exalted position indeed. But haven't you ever heard about the ox offered in the official sacrifice? He is generously fed for years and dressed in the finest embroidered fabrics, so that he may one day be led into the Great Temple for slaughter. When that day comes, though he may wish that he were just a little orphaned piglet instead, it is too late! So scram, you! Do not defile me! I'd rather enjoy myself wallowing in the filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state."
— Zhuangzi
The industrialist said to the fisherman, "Why are you napping under a tree?"
"Because I've caught enough fish for the day."
"Why don't you catch more?"
"Why would I do that?"
"So you can buy more nets, a bigger boat, go out into deeper waters, then buy a whole fleet of boats and be rich like me."
"Then what?"
"Well, then you can enjoy life."
The fisherman: "What do you think I'm doing now?"
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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Yes, hope he recovers. We the People can't lock Demagogue Donny up for the rest of his life if he passes away.
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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True statement.
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta 'might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women.' The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
— Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@matthewcaesar7033 Makes perfect sense if you've ever actually read the Christian Bible.
"Warning to Rich Oppressors
5 Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2 Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter."
"Isaiah 10:1-3 New International Version (NIV)
10 Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, 2 to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. 3 What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?
"
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"All men are by nature conservative but conservatism in the military profession is a source of danger to the country. One must be ready to change his line sharply and suddenly, with no concern for the prejudices and memories of what was yesterday. To rest upon formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover (Father of the US Nuclear Navy), US Naval Postgraduate School Address (1954)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
“Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Just want to point out that hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation, when student debt was virtually nonexistent compared to today. There was no need.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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The prominent Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote this description about an "un-man" like Donny the Dunce 3 years before he was born: "What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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¬(p ∧ ¬p):
“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of the slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”
"...Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
“To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man that takes his earnings, must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force; the slave must know no Higher Law than his master's will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate, to his mind, its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
""If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb.
I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.
I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Interacting with an "un-man" like Trump. Written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
--- Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"All men are by nature conservative but conservatism in the military profession is a source of danger to the country. One must be ready to change his line sharply and suddenly, with no concern for the prejudices and memories of what was yesterday. To rest upon formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover (Father of the US Nuclear Navy), US Naval Postgraduate School Address (1954)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
“Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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Joe Rogan is the idiot's idea of a smart man.
'The word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, individual', 'a private citizen' (as opposed to an official), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios 'private', 'one's own'. In Latin, idiota was borrowed in the meaning 'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common', and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'.'
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Carlo Cipolla's Third Basic Law of Stupidity:
"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
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"A thousand measures of gold is substantial profit, and prime ministership is an exalted position indeed. But haven't you ever heard about the ox offered in the official sacrifice? He is generously fed for years and dressed in the finest embroidered fabrics, so that he may one day be led into the Great Temple for slaughter. When that day comes, though he may wish that he were just a little orphaned piglet instead, it is too late! So scram, you! Do not defile me! I'd rather enjoy myself wallowing in the filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state."
— Zhuangzi
"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
— J.J. Rousseau, 1754
Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.
Split a piece of wood; I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
— The Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi Scrolls), Verse 77
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When the only tool you know is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@rivh4246 "He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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@rivh4246 Grow up, ingrate.
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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The Basic Laws of Stupidity:
1) "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2) "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3) "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4) "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5) "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person:
In other words the helpless with overtones of intelligence (area H1), the bandits with overtones of intelligence (area B1) and above all the intelligent (area I) all contribute, though in different degrees, to accrue to the welfare of a society. On the other hand the bandits with overtones of stupidity (area B2) and the helpless with overtones of stupidity (area H2) manage to add losses to those caused by stupid people thus enhancing the nefarious destructive power of the latter group.
All this suggests some reflection on the performance of societies. According to the Second Basic Law, the fraction of stupid people is a constant σ which is not affected by time, space, race, class or any other sociocultural or historical variable. It would be a profound mistake to believe the number of stupid people in a declining society is greater than in a developing society. Both such societies are plagued by the same percentage of stupid people. The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly:
a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2.
This theoretical presumption is abundantly confirmed by an exhaustive analysis of historical cases. In fact the historical analysis allows us to reformulate the theoretical conclusions in a more factual way and with more realistic detail.
Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable σ fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the σ fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.
In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B2 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the σ fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell."
http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/
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I hope he recovers. We the People can't lock Demagogue Donny up for the rest of his life if he passes away.
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 75 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
And there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"DARVO" decribes behavior of abusers.
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Semper Fortis "Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S., ADL Finds
"
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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@dennisdillon7305 Actually, socialist atheists are more "Christian", according to what Jesus taught in the primary 4 books of the New Testament and by what Isaiah taught in the Old Testament, than any evangelical right-wing "Christians" who go around stealing from the common funds put together to help children, widows, and the disable.
Read Marx's Das Kapital, then read the New Testament book of Acts and tell me they're not alluding to the same thing:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
— Karl Marx
"All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. [...] Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. [...] There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need."
— Acts 2:44–45, Acts 4:32–35
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@dennisdillon7305 You're blaming "secularism" for a problem caused by "Reaganism." You should make yourself less oblivious to reality:
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?" (C.S. Lewis, Perelandra)
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Why would anybody 'cancel' hateful people when you can use them as lessons in morality?
"Any sufficiently advanced act of benevolence is indistinguishable from malevolence."
Charles T. Rubin, 'What is the Good of Transhumanism?'
“The robot said, “I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good.”
He hesitated, then, almost as though he were surprised at his own words, he said, “Go, and sin no more!”
― R. Daneel Olivaw
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@cosmicapple9921 If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@lavernekeller1658 If you think I'm going to read your literally-meaningless uneducated drivel, think again. There's a reason you're an abject failure. Try reading something besides propaganda, like actual science and theory, troglodyte. The opinions of intelligent men will always mean more than the whining of trolls like you who never stop to think if your ideas are rooted in reality and natural law.
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
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Nat I doubt you know how to wash your ass properly crybaby.
Hey, maybe you can explain the hypocritical irony of 'Randian Heroes'?-that is, that all the people on par intellectually with John Galt in real life are Socialists, whereas all the people on par with Galt and Rand morally are Fascists:
“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of the mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.”
― Nikola Tesla, My Inventions
"There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well. "
― Buckminster Fuller
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is
not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all
classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky, Co-Founder of MIT's AI Laboratory, 'Grandpa'
vs
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
― Benito Mussolini, Fascist Dictator and Terrible Person
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Trump has proven his evil in near countless ways. It's apparent what he deserves.
"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, 'The Sociopath Next Door'
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
Yagyū Munenori, samurai and daimyo of the early Edo period
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Megalomaniac Traitor Goon belongs in an asylum, not in the capitol building.
"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
―Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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All Junkie Jordan Peterpan is doing is wallowing in self-pity and that's a big red flag for sociopathy.
“After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"On the basis of overall rankings (independent of respondent’s party affiliation), Trump’s personality was collectively perceived to be at or above the 99th normative percentile for traits associated with four personality disorders (sadistic, narcissistic, antisocial, and passive-aggressive)."
― Voter Perceptions of President Donald Trump’s Personality Disorder Traits: Implications of Political Affiliation - Jacob A. Fiala, Salwa A. Mansour, Shannon E. Matlock, Frederick L. Coolidge, 2020
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable,
egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the
planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that
began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm
temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world.
Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state
societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new
level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by
3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the
planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible.
Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating
and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies
to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies,
rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@ryan.1990 "Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified. Try science instead of lazy stupidity, anonymous mouth-breathing couch-potato.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American. Hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
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"Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"There may not be a predictable future but there is still a need to engage in futuring—continually constructing a future. We need ways to decide whether we are engaged in the most appropriate activities and relating in the most appropriate way to our stakeholders…”
(Futuring - A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to Strategic Planning)
https://www.academia.edu/11897598/Futuring_a_Complex_Adaptive_Systems_Approach_to_Strategic_Planning
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"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine."
―Saying derived from The Great Binding Law
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
―Paul Eldridge
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
And your children's.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
―Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212439213
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
(THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE) https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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What will you do when you hear that Dereliction-of-Duty Donny was found dead in his prison cell?
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
―Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― Carlo Cippolla, Economic Historian | The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
“In the case of economic agents, just like in the case of bandits, stupid people do not optimize the system they exploit. But whereas the bandits can survive a crash in their revenues when their victims rebuild their wealth, stupid people ruthlessly destroy them, ruining themselves as well. There are several examples in the history of economics: one is the case of the mining industry which is exploiting resources that will need at least hundreds of thousands of years to reform by geological process, if they ever will. It is also the case of industries that exploit slowly reproducing biological resources. A modern example is that of whaling, as we demonstrated in previous papers. The same resource destruction also occurs for other cases of human fisheries. Humans do not seem to need modern tools to destroy the resources they exploit, as shown by the extinction of Earth’s megafauna, at least in part the result of human actions performed using tools not more sophisticated than stone-tipped spears. Overall, the destruction of the resources that make people live seems to be much more common than in the natural ecosystem. This observation justifies the proposed '’6th law of stupidity,'’ additional to the five proposed by Carlo Cipolla that has that ’Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosphere.’”
"...Humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it."
― Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi | The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lt. Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Kevin Burrow Pretty goddamned obvious to anybody with a head on their shoulders and a heart in their chest:
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S."
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
In the US, Right-wing extremists murder women, children, and old people because they're too afraid to pick a fight with men their own size.
In the US, Left-wing extremists started the free-lunch program in public schools and want to make sure everybody's kids are fed.
This is not a "both sides" issue. There is no moral equivalence.
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Gym Jordan is a sociopath:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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@frx1p32dz2 Are you whining at me about something in a comment thread with 352 replies? You're going to have to be more specific. But actually, Socialism proved its merits in the US prior to Reagan as recovery from the Great Depression, called 'The New Deal'.
(THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE) https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
Also, quick civics lesson:
Antifascism is more American than apple pie, but who is willing to say so?
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
The Preamble to the US Constitution pretty much describes the moral imperative of Socialism:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/
Priority #1 is to form a more perfect Union for We the People, not build an economy that only serves a few.
Priority #2 is establish Justice and is why there are so many peaceful protests on the street.
Priority #3 is to insure domestic tranquility, also why peaceful protesters are on the street.
Now, Priorities #4 & #5 do both sound awfully similar to (and were seeds for) later paradigms of Karl Marx, pen-pal of Abraham Lincoln, and other progressive thinkers.
http://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx
Priority #6, 'Blessings of Liberty'... What are those?:
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Her (Lady Liberty's) Beauty is Our Duty.
So politically 'Conservative' interpretations of the Constitution are not actually trying to conserve the philosophical foundation of the Constitution.
The word "Socialism" wasn't invented until long after the Preamble and the Constitution were written.
The First Amendment makes much more sense in light of the Preamble. The whole "redress of grievances" is an allusion to the Declaration of Independence if the philosophical priorities mentioned in the Preamble aren't being adequately met. If people are protesting or even rioting in the streets in mass numbers, who's responsibilities and who's rights are made clear:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
And from my own personal experience, I'll quote some of my basic training:
“Placing Alarms in Cutout:
1. Alarms and warning lights provide watchstanders with audible and/or visual indications of abnormal conditions. Inadequate or untimely response to alarms and warning lights may result in degraded capabilities, equipment damage, or personnel injury. …”
(USS Asheville SSN 758 Basic Submarining and Watchstanding Guide ASHEVILLEINST 9210.7A, p.10)
Why are all the people who can do the advanced math and have a mature sense of morality Democratic Socialists?
High school math competency check:
To reduce its inventory, a warehouse runs a sale on silicon ingots. The sales rate (ingots sold per day) on day t of the sale is predicted to be 40/t (for t ≥ 1), where t = 1 corresponds to the beginning of the sale, at which time none of the inventory of 200 ingots had been sold.
Find a formula for the total number of ingots sold up to day t.
C(t) =
?
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@Ae21403 You have my pity.
"Traumatic emotional abandonment can occur in societies as well as families—what sociologist Daniel Bell (1962), seeking half a century ago to explain the appeal of the radical right, called being dispossessed. In the US in recent years, many in the working- and middle-classes have felt this both economically and culturally. Income and wealth inequality have been growing in recent decades (Piketty, 2014). And, contrary to our national myth, people are likely to be stuck where they are—intergenerational income mobility in the US is lower than in most other developed countries (Surowiecki, 2014). The recent economic crisis has deepened an already existing economic dispossession arising from income and wealth inequality, lack of income mobility, and the lack of a strong social safety net in the US.
Interestingly, it is the conservative southern states where the social-safety-net is generally weakest (Sauter et al, 2014) and there is least intergenerational income mobility (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2012), suggesting that those who have been most economically dispossessed are most likely to support a movement that runs directly counter to their economic interests."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@benjamindover5676 "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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@E1987TO What the existentialists called "ressentiment". Throughout history, Jewish people and other ethnic minorities have been scapegoated by antisemites who want honors and accolades they haven't earned but won't put in their own work, despite having more abundant resources and better opportunities. The authoritarianism currently embedded in Pakistani culture as the clown in this video expresses it is made in bad faith by a man who's bitter about his own incompetence in his role but refuses to acknowledge his own lack of diligence preceding his incompetence.
For comparison and contrast:
Ressentiment (From Wikipedia):
"In philosophy and psychology, ressentiment (French pronunciation: [rəsɑ̃timɑ̃]) is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. The concept was of particular interest to some 19th century thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. According to their use, ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."
"Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
― Sir Isaac Newton
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“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
“It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail where reason prevails. War begins where reason ends. The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”
“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.”
“For no man who lives at all lives unto himself. He either helps or hinders all who are in anywise connected to him.”
“To enslave men, successfully and safely, it is necessary to have their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable good must be kept before them.”
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”
“A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,—before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.”
“Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency; and of consequence he was an object of contempt, and was held as such even by his slaves. ”
“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . . Make a man a slave, and you rob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
― Frederick Douglass
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@Intranetusa The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified. Try science instead of perpetuating stupidity.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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@sickofliberals9403 “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
"
Jean-Paul Sartre
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"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ―Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
―Paul Eldridge
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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'Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"'
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Parable of the Madman (1882)
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“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
"The anti-Semite does not become a decent man just because he lies according to his principles."
― Friedrich Nietzsche
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can be trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko of the Ukraine, Speech to Americans (1942)
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"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@dystopian2153 "Us?" Why do you align yourself with terrorists?
'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
'
https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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(The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws):
"Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
'Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world.'
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Republicans sure do love their pedophiles.
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"It's time for us to stand up like men and women, yo
Word up, we gotta stand up and do something about this
You know why?
You let a motherfucker kick you five times, they gon' kick you five times (True)
You let 'em kick you three times, they gon' kick you three times
You let 'em kick you twice, they gon' kick you twice
(I wouldn't let that n*gga kick me once, you know what I'm sayin'?)
You let 'em kick you once, they gon' kick you once
But if you break off the motherfuckin' feet
Ain't gon' be no more kicking goin' on, kid (Oh, shit)
Ain't no more kickin'"
― Fugees, The Score (Manifest/Outro)
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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I'm an atheist too but I was raised on the bible and recognize some really beautiful passages. Revelation 21:6 is my favorite.
What the Jesus of the Bible taught makes the most sense when the supernatural crap is discarded.
"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible. Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you want to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society's merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
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"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Interacting with an "un-man" like Trump. Written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Male" and "female" aren't demonized, they're just oversimplified.Try science instead of kissing up to morons.
Sex and gender are not the same thing and there are more than 6 sexes among humans to begin with before gender is even considered.
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.
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The Preamble to the US Constitution pretty much describes the moral imperative of Democratic Socialism:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/
Priority #1 is to form a more perfect Union for We the People, not build an economy that only serves a few.
Priority #2 is establish Justice and is why there are so many peaceful protests on the street.
Priority #3 is to insure domestic tranquility, also why peaceful protesters are on the street.
Now, Priorities #4 & #5 do both sound awfully similar to (and were seeds for) later paradigms of Karl Marx, pen-pal of Abraham Lincoln, and other progressive thinkers.
http://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx
Priority #6, 'Blessings of Liberty'... What are those?:
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Her (Lady Liberty's) Beauty is Our Duty.
So politically 'Conservative' interpretations of the Constitution are not actually trying to conserve the philosophical foundation of the Constitution.
The word "Socialism" wasn't invented until long after the Preamble and the Constitution were written.
The First Amendment makes much more sense in light of the Preamble. The whole "redress of grievances" is an allusion to the Declaration of Independence if the philosophical priorities mentioned in the Preamble aren't being adequately met. If people are protesting or even rioting in the streets in mass numbers, who's responsibilities and who's rights are made clear:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
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I hope he recovers eventually. We the People can't lock Demagogue Donny up for the rest of his life if he passes away.
If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@elcajondavid1 Yes, that's the only thing motivating Disgraceful Donny the Despot. Listen to the way he talks about Obama. Listen to the way he talks about anyone who disagrees with him. C.S. Lewis, a prominent Christian author of the 20th century, had this to say about 'un-men' like Despicable Donny the Dunce, who personify evil:
"What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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@elcajondavid1 And the 'christians' of the Trump-cult of the walking brain-dead are as far from Christian as any God-forsaken Antichrist.
'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”' https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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@theodoratorpey1255 Trump deserves impeachment for his effect on US domestic national security first and foremost. And it should be made perfectly clear: Any seditious cultists threatening civil war or violence if Trump is impeached or isn't reelected are promoting domestic terrorism and deserve to be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Why Dumpsterfire Donny received assistance from America's adversaries in the 2016 election, and why he'll receive assistance from America's adversaries in the 2020 election:
“In our article, we briefly summarized some of the potentially harmful tendencies of narcissistic leaders, such as the following: defensively dismissing criticism and attacking critics, prioritizing the elevation of their public image over national well-being, refusing to admit they lack relevant knowledge instead of learning new information, making self-serving decisions instead of maintaining consistency with their stated beliefs, turning on anyone who stops singing their praises, and etc.,” Fiala explained.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to look at that list and believe it is a summary of a book chapter written in 2006 by the founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior rather than an editorialist’s recap of last week’s headlines. I am left wondering whether Trump supporters would have been more concerned about the narcissistic traits they saw in him if they were aware that these traits tend to motivate these types of potentially disastrous behaviors, or whether they would be as accepting of such behavior if they understood it to be motivated by narcissistic traits.”
https://www.psypost.org/2020/04/trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds-56646?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds
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Some new insights:
'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory:
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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Considering that the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation, undoubtedly.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@TouringWolf42 You only think it's hypothetical because you're not aware of the actual history of its effectiveness. An uninformed opinion is an irrelevant opinion.
The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation. Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
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"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
(Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization⋆
)
DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours included.
And your children's.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
""If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@brendonwood7595 "Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'; and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household.'
― Matthew 10:34-36
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
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"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212439213
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@ashleej.3358 If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"If you can get people to believe in absurdities, then you can get them to commit atrocities."
―Voltaire
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots" https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S." https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The Shepherd’s Boy and The Wolf - A Fable of Aesop
(Townsend version)
A shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, “Wolf! Wolf!” and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains. The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: “Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep”; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated or destroyed the whole flock.
Moral
There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in variousWestern countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
― Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
"...This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals..."
― Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
― Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
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Does this not describe Donny the Dunce nearly exactly?:
"What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
-C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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@davidarmstrong713 The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles."
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
And there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“Placing Alarms in Cutout:
1. Alarms and warning lights provide watchstanders with audible and/or visual indications of abnormal conditions. Inadequate or untimely response to alarms and warning lights may result in degraded capabilities, equipment damage, or personnel injury. …”
(USS Asheville SSN 758 Basic Submarining and Watchstanding Guide ASHEVILLEINST 9210.7A, p.10)
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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'Conservativism' is the opposite of Christianity:
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
- Frederick Douglass
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons):
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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No surprise at this point:
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots" https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S."
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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Not surprised. "If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
―Friedrich Nietzsche
“The discovery of instances which confirm a theory means very little if we have not tried, and failed, to discover refutations.”
—Karl Popper
“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
―John Maynard Keynes
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
―Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
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"Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source" https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020101
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
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Yes!
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
💔
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"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
-- John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68)
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots" https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S." https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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@itsmeekers What you're arguing is that you're too dumb or lazy to do your own homework so you'll trust whatever con-man is able to most easily exploit your fears. Where is your credibility and integrity? You don't know what you're talking about. The entirety of the constitution's moral philosophy is written in the first sentence, the Preamble, with values written by order of precedence. First, if you understood the context of the time the Constitution was written, you'd understand that Donald Trump's "immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches" (James Madison) means he's not included in the phrase "We the People:"
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
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"The paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell, Partisan Review (1942)
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"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them
all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles."
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
-- John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68)
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@wethepeople4542 Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Conservativism is cowardice as a survival tactic.
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta 'might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women.' The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@Dimitris_Half People who condemn "wokeism" are the especially anti-intellectual type. He's trying to condemn people who are aware of, or awake to - "woke" - socially divisive issues that are broad in scope but arise from the same problems of emotional commitment to ignorance.
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
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You guys party?
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons):
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"Per hunc… castissimum ante regiam iniuriam sanguinem iuro, vosque, di, testes facio me Donald Trump cum scelerata coniuge et omni liberorum stirpe ferro igni quacumque dehinc vi possim exsecuturum, nec illos nec alium quemquam regnare Americae passurum."
― Oath of Brutus (Updated)
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From 'The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws' :
"The law states that humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Conclusion Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
-- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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@erik878 The Founding Fathers outlined Democratic Socialism in the Constitution, ignoramus:
The Preamble to the US Constitution pretty much describes the moral imperative of both the democratic process and Socialism (a word that wasn't invented until long after the Preamble and the Constitution were written
) as the ultimate goal:
'We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
'
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/
Priority #1 is to form a more perfect Union for We the People, not build an economy that only serves a few.
Priority #2 is establish Justice and is why there are so many peaceful protests on the street.
Priority #3 is to insure domestic tranquility, also why peaceful protesters are on the street.
Now, Priorities #4 & #5 do both sound awfully similar to (and were seeds for) later paradigms of Karl Marx, pen-pal of Abraham Lincoln, and other progressive thinkers.
http://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx
Priority #6, 'Blessings of Liberty'... What are those?:
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Her (Lady Liberty's) Beauty is Our Duty.
So politically 'Conservative' interpretations of the Constitution are not actually trying to conserve the philosophical foundation of the Constitution.
The First Amendment makes much more sense in light of the Preamble. The whole "redress of grievances" is an allusion to the Declaration of Independence if the philosophical priorities mentioned in the Preamble aren't being adequately met. If people are protesting or even rioting in the streets in mass numbers, who's responsibilities and who's rights are made clear:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
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@erik878 In the US, Right-wing extremists murder women, children, and old people because they're too afraid to pick a fight with men their own size.
In the US, Left-wing extremists started the free-lunch program in public schools and want to make sure everybody's kids are fed.
This is not a "both sides" issue. There is no moral equivalence.
"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S."
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/right-wing-extremism-linked-to-every-2018-extremist-murder-in-the-us-adl-finds
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists" https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
— Frederick Douglass
“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine."
―Saying derived from The Great Binding Law
"A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate."
―Paul Eldridge
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
―Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 67 times that many-so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://lnkd.in/gzAxNBV
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
―Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
“Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"...In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience..." ―Kwame Ture
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government” ― Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
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You might be underestimating the danger of stupidity:
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla):
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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@rickrose5377 "He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons):
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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@lv.99mastermind45 From 'The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws':
"The law states that humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Conclusion Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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@ジョジョさま You betray a completely ridiculous misunderstanding of evolution and the natural world if you think that's so. Fascism is a grand display of weakness:
'In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the power struggles of human politicians. "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says.' https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_the_surprising_science_of_alpha_males
"People unacquainted with Nietzsche’s writings may be inclined to interpret the idea of the will to power rather crudely. But Nietzsche is not thinking only or even primarily of the motivations behind people like Napoleon or Hitler who expressly seek military and political power. In fact, he typically applies the theory quite subtly.
"... Nietzsche argues that we exercise power over other people both by benefiting them and by hurting them. When we hurt them we make them feel our power in a crude way—and also a dangerous way, since they may seek to revenge themselves. Making someone indebted to us is usually a preferable way to feel a sense of our power; we also thereby extend our power, since those we benefit see the advantage of being on our side.
Nietzsche, in fact, argues that causing pain is generally less pleasant than showing kindness and even suggests that cruelty, because it is the inferior option, is a sign that one lacks power." https://www.thoughtco.com/nietzsches-concept-of-the-will-to-power-2670658
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@ジョジョさま Thanks for your emotional ranting. You've provided a direct link between your inability to cope with reality without scapegoating (ressentiment), Nietzsche's "Last Man", and fascist thinking:
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans): "The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2015.53
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212439213
(Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8721.01235
I pity you.
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Why Dumpsterfire Donny received assistance from America's adversaries in the 2016 election, and why he'll receive assistance from America's adversaries in the 2020 election:
“In our article, we briefly summarized some of the potentially harmful tendencies of narcissistic leaders, such as the following: defensively dismissing criticism and attacking critics, prioritizing the elevation of their public image over national well-being, refusing to admit they lack relevant knowledge instead of learning new information, making self-serving decisions instead of maintaining consistency with their stated beliefs, turning on anyone who stops singing their praises, and etc.,” Fiala explained.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to look at that list and believe it is a summary of a book chapter written in 2006 by the founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior rather than an editorialist’s recap of last week’s headlines. I am left wondering whether Trump supporters would have been more concerned about the narcissistic traits they saw in him if they were aware that these traits tend to motivate these types of potentially disastrous behaviors, or whether they would be as accepting of such behavior if they understood it to be motivated by narcissistic traits.”https://www.psypost.org/2020/04/trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds-56646?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds
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@JohnSmith-dh3kx "Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
(DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK FOR
COUNTERING TERRORISM AND
TARGETED VIOLENCE )
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Why Dumpsterfire Donny received assistance from America's adversaries in the 2016 election, and why he'll receive assistance from America's adversaries in the 2020 election:
“In our article, we briefly summarized some of the potentially harmful tendencies of narcissistic leaders, such as the following: defensively dismissing criticism and attacking critics, prioritizing the elevation of their public image over national well-being, refusing to admit they lack relevant knowledge instead of learning new information, making self-serving decisions instead of maintaining consistency with their stated beliefs, turning on anyone who stops singing their praises, and etc.,” Fiala explained.
“Frankly, it is hard for me to look at that list and believe it is a summary of a book chapter written in 2006 by the founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior rather than an editorialist’s recap of last week’s headlines. I am left wondering whether Trump supporters would have been more concerned about the narcissistic traits they saw in him if they were aware that these traits tend to motivate these types of potentially disastrous behaviors, or whether they would be as accepting of such behavior if they understood it to be motivated by narcissistic traits.”https://www.psypost.org/2020/04/trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds-56646?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=trump-perceived-as-abnormally-sadistic-and-narcissistic-by-both-conservatives-and-liberals-study-finds
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice. To enter by reason means to realize the essence through instruction and to believe that all living things share the same true nature, which isn't apparent because it's shrouded by sensation and delusion. Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and others, the oneness of mortal and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason. Without moving, without effort, they enter, we say, by reason.
To enter by practice refers to four all-inclusive practices:
suffering injustice, adapting to conditions, seeking nothing, and practicing the Dharma."
-Bodhidharma, Outline of Practice
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@jeffkeil1595 "... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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"Trump Cited As A Motivating Factor In 81 Murders And 7 Terrorist Plots"
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/update-trump-cited-as-a-motivating-factor-in-81-murders-and-7-terrorist-plots-JL1pSBucv0OSGgGvL2XFPQ/
"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. " https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws -
"Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
“In the case of economic agents, just like in the case of bandits, stupid people do not optimize the system they exploit. But whereas the bandits can survive a crash in their revenues when their victims rebuild their wealth, stupid people ruthlessly destroy them, ruining themselves as well. There are several examples in the history of economics: one is the case of the mining industry which is exploiting resources that will need at least hundreds of thousands of years to reform by geological process, if they ever will. It is also the case of industries that exploit slowly reproducing biological resources. A modern example is that of whaling, as we demonstrated in previous papers. The same resource destruction also occurs for other cases of human fisheries. Humans do not seem to need modern tools to destroy the resources they exploit, as shown by the extinction of Earth’s megafauna, at least in part the result of human actions performed using tools not more sophisticated than stone-tipped spears. Overall, the destruction of the resources that make people live seems to be much more common than in the natural ecosystem. This observation justifies the proposed '’6th law of stupidity,'’ additional to the five proposed by Carlo Cipolla that has that ’Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosphere.’”
"...Humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it."
― Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi
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If 2,977 people died from the #terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's #criminal #negligence has led to 68 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A #stupid person is the most #dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take #responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
― Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
"...This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals..."
― Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
― Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
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"Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'; and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household.'
― Matthew 10:34-36
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@g0679 “People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.
You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.
What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.”
― Isaac Asimov
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You've got to smack conspiracy theorists with facts for them to stick.
'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory:
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
― Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
"...This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals..."
― Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
― Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
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“A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate.”
― Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, "Exchange with Admiral Rickover", in Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life, Second Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (12 May 1982)
"Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
― Greek Proverb
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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@Dogatemyhomework927 I know most "conservatives" better than they know themselves.
They perfectly exemplify the biblical concept of the "sins of the father" perpetuating itself generation after generation.
Conservativism = Corruption.
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" ideology.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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"All men are by nature conservative but conservatism in the military profession is a source of danger to the country. One must be ready to change his line sharply and suddenly, with no concern for the prejudices and memories of what was yesterday. To rest upon formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover (Father of the US Nuclear Navy), US Naval Postgraduate School Address (1954)
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
“Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
"Conquering evil, not the opponent, is the essence of swordsmanship."
"If you have attained mastery of swordlessness, you will never be without a sword."
― Yagyū Munenori
“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”
― Sun Tzu, Art of War
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb.
I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.
I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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“A man’s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate.”
― Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society."
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, "Exchange with Admiral Rickover", in Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life, Second Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (12 May 1982)
"Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
― Greek Proverb
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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"In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta 'might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women.' The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice."
— Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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@gregorypowell9132 I definitely see the "other side", and all it has to offer is lies, abuse, coercion, domestic violence, domestic terrorism, and the kind of stupidity that's more of a threat to the people they supposedly "love" than any foreign or imagined threats.
To attempt to equivocate the incidental vandalism at essentially peaceful left-wing protests with the domestic terrorism, mass murder, and attempted insurrection committed by right-wing extremists is ignorant, arrogant, and immoral on your part.
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“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.
I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb.
I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.
I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going.
I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.
I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law'; and 'a man's enemies will be those of his own household.'
― Matthew 10:34-36
(Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
"In his book A Primate's Memoir, Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors. Around this time, Sapolsky and Share also began observing another troop, called the Talek Troop. The Talek Troop, along with the pre-TB Forest Troop, served as controls for comparing the behavior of the post-1993 Forest Troop. The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that's decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
In light of these observations, the authors investigated various models that might explain how the Forest Troop preserved this (relatively) peaceful lifestyle, complete with underlying physiological changes. One model suggests that nonhuman primates acquire cultural traits through observation. Young chimps may learn how to crack nuts with stones by watching their elders, for example. In this case, the young baboon transplants might learn that it pays to be nice by watching the interactions of older males in their new troop. Or it could be that proximity to such behavior increases the likelihood that the new males will adopt the behavior. Yet another explanation could be that males in troops with such a high proportion of females become less aggressive because they don't need to fight as much for female attention and are perhaps rewarded for good behavior. But it could be that the females had a more direct impact: new male transfers in the Forest Troop were far better received by resident females than new males in the other troops.
Sapolsky and Share conclude that the method of transmission is likely either one or a combination of these models, though teasing out the mechanisms for such complex behaviors will require future study. But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there's hope for us as well."
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@JUSTICEFORPEANUT Then there's what I think of as the "Ignorance is bliss" paradox (actually titled "The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals
"):
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB.
"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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The MAGA and Nazi cults hate accountability so much that they'd rather enslave themselves, their children, and everybody else than face the music. What Nietzsche called 'Slave Morality'.
“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . .Make a man a slave, and you rob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
Authoritarian slave-mindedness is not exclusive to the MAGA and Nazi cults, of course, but the MAGA and Nazi cults are entirely built around authoritarian slave-mindedness. What Nietzsche called the 'Slave Morality' possessed by this cult is more appropriately called "Enslave-All Morality' (as opposed to the "Self-Master Morality").
We are all cursed with freedom; "conservativism", in whatever local flavor, is a desperate attempt to return to the mother's womb rooted in the fear of this reality. All we have are each other and the zero-sum game is for inferior animals.
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The Book of Revelation is not part of the Torah. The relevant part of the Torah, the creation myth, was a mythical recollection of a history that repeats itself due to human stupidity.
Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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This passage perfectly describes interacting with an "un-man" like Trump but was written 3 years before he was born:
"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier
to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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@DadaPoopoo “In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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The Philosophical Cornerstone of the Constitution you're confused about is a Leftist manifesto:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
"The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.”
Frederick Douglass
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King Couch Potato (Thief-in-Chief) steals peoples' futures. Yours and your children's included.
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
― Frederick Douglass
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
― The Declaration of Independence
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 69 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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"He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him."
― C.G. Jung, on Hitler and the Shadow
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
" Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
― The Declaration of Independence
“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"Every Nazi who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Nazis are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a Nazi, I am saving lives."
―Lyudmila Pavlichenko
"It is bias to think that the art of war is just for killing people. It is not to kill people, it is to kill evil. It is a stratagem to give life to many people by killing the evil of one person."
―Yagyu Munenori
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
― General William Tecumseh Sherman
"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
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The MAGA cult has nothing but coercion to offer.
Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"...Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind."
― Lyudmila 'Lady Death' Pavlichenko
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"In truth, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive....it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
"After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy."
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@farrider3339 You can compare relative qualia of stress, but different forms of stress are not exactly fungible. I'm referring to Sapolsky's paper regarding how a peaceful culture emerged in a troop of baboons when all the old abusive male baboons died after eating toxic trash.
"Sapolsky studied the activities and lifestyle of the Forest Troop to explore the relationship between stress and disease. In typical baboon fashion, the males behaved badly, angling either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engaging in bloody battles with lower ranking males, which often tried to overthrow the top baboon by striking tentative alliances with fellow underlings. Females were often harassed and attacked. Internecine feuds were routine. Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive."
doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020124
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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@justinkirschenman2232 Perhaps you should start with Hobbes' Leviathan to get a basic understanding of social contract theory. Because right now it just sounds like you want all of the benefits society has to offer with none of the responsibility required to maintain it. I don't agree with all of it, it's as imprecise as it is old, and especially his preference for monarchy, but what it suggests is something you're avoiding. "THE final cause, end, or design of men (who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in Commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent, as hath been shown, to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants..."
You don't glorify war and suffering, do you?
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@justinkirschenman2232 Lol do you really think individuals ejected from hunter-gatherer tribes survived to pass on their culture?
“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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@rimacalid6557 Yes, I'd like to make a distinction for the use of the word nationalism described in the book, because the word has different meanings in different contexts. Lowercase-"n" nationalism is used by the author in a way that is more akin to "patriotism" than to the capital-"N" Nationalism that, as the primary driving force behind a political ideology, traps itself in a delusional echo chamber, unable to compare and contrast its successes and failures to those of other nations to learn and improve itself as well as silencing internal opposition to the egoistic belief system.
It's practical and patriotic to acknowledge the social progress a country has made compared to its geographical predecessor and to itself over time, but it's not good citizenship to think that ones country is the best country because its their country and its the best and will always be the best-that thinking is more appropriate for pre-game locker-room pep-talks than for formulating helpful ideas. It's just as practical and patriotic to condemn their nation's social regression and it's good citizenship to prioritize the people who are served by the imagined community over the object of the nation itself.
A nation is a life-support system, so it's reasonable for people to be skeptical about making repairs and installing updates and upgrades while it's plugged in and running, but if it stops functioning as intended, then no amount of gaslighting, obfuscation or menticide meant to prevent the possibility of criticism and preserve the status quo will change the physical reality that repairs are necessary to save lives still being supported and to slow the loss of lives caused by the already damaged equipment.
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@chadalston3313 Not "all scientists", just the most intelligent and competent scientists tend to hold progressive ideas. That Andrew Wakefield quack is most definitely not a progressive. And I'm certain a great deal just haven't had the opportunity to examine the evidence. Perhaps you're aware of the concept of "opportunity cost"? Lab time is especially precious if you're underfunded.
The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation. Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
This is the 'effect of the wind' I mentioned in the previous comment:
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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@liakogogidze2933 The Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
(Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?):
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-have-liberal-progressive-views/answer/Bryer-Sophia-Gardener
(Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors)
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Niels Bohr
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Isaac Newton
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"Then the clock will strike 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021, and Donald Trump will be sitting in the Oval Office. The street protests will inevitably swell outside the White House, and the ranks of Trump’s private army will grow inside its grounds. The speaker of the House will declare the Trump presidency at an end, and direct the Secret Service and Federal Marshals to remove Trump from the premises. These agents will realize that they are outmanned and outgunned by Trump’s private army, and the moment of decision will arrive.
At this moment of Constitutional crisis, only two options remain. Under the first, U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne. Under the second, the U.S. military remains inert while the Constitution dies. The succession of government is determined by extralegal violence between Trump’s private army and street protesters; Black Lives Matter Plaza becomes Tahrir Square."
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/08/all-enemies-foreign-and-domestic-open-letter-gen-milley/167625/
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Economic Historian Carlo Cipolla)
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla's Stupidity Laws (Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi)
6. "Humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem."
"Cipolla’s quadrant highlights several fundamental features of those systems that can be described as both “complex” and “autocatalytic,” where the growth rate is proportional to the size of the stocks. These systems include living creatures, biomes, entire ecosystems, as well as human-created entities such as companies, organizations, and entire economic systems. The analysis of Cipolla’s quadrant, carried out using the Lotka-Volterra model shows the similarity of many phenomena driven by the dissipation of energy potentials: from life to commerce [26]. There are, indeed, some basic laws at work in these systems and when we use the term “law” for a physical system we mean that some factors are at work to keep it, if not perfectly regulated, at least within some boundaries.
Cipolla’s quadrant tells us that these complex systems are all dominated by the same factors, but that these factors can operate in different ways. The simplest case is the predator/prey (bandit/victim) relationship, in which the predator seeks only maximum short-term profit. The result is periodical oscillations, homeorhesis. It is also possible to see the condition of “stupidity” where the actions of the actors in the exchanges lead to doom for everyone and everything. In ecosystems it is extinction, in economic systems, it is financial ruin. The analysis also shows the possibility for these systems to adjust in such a way to attain the condition that Cipolla describes as “intelligent people” and that in ecosystems goes under the name of “symbiosis.” As proposed by Lynn Margulis [20], symbiotic systems that go under the name of “holobionts” are the basic unit of the ecosystem. We may extend this definition to all kinds of autocatalytic complex systems, including those forming the human economy. But if holobionts are an efficient unit of energy dissipation, why does stupidity exist? In particular, why is it so common in the economy as Cipolla correctly notes? Cipolla’s description of stupid people is that “..some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.” What Cipolla calls “an act of Providence” may be seen also as the result of the genetic setup of human beings. Indeed, humans are a relatively recent element of the ecosystem: modern humans are believed to have appeared only some 300,000 years ago, although other hominins practicing the same lifestyle may be as old as a few million years. Yet, this is a young age in comparison to that of most species currently existing in the ecosphere. So, humankind’s stupidity may be not much more than an effect of the relative immaturity of our species, which still has to learn how to live in harmony with the ecosystem. That explains what we called here “the 6th law of stupidity,” stating that humans are the stupidest species on Earth. It is a condition that may lead the human species to extinction in a non-remote future. But it is also possible that, if humans survive, one day they will learn how to interact with the ecosystem of their planet without destroying it. Acknowledgment. One of us (U.B.) would like to remember the figure of Carlo Maria Cipolla (1922-2000), whom he had a chance to meet in Berkeley in the 1980s. Cipolla was a brilliant and creative mind, but also a kind and open personality. His work, not just about stupidity, is still having an important impact on the way we see the world."
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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."
4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
― The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Cipolla)
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
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“In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta "might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
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Amused Fewer than the number of innocent women, children, and old people murdered by right-wing domestic- terrorist vanilla-ISIS cowards in the US in the past year, I'm sure.
But the Revolution was pre-industrial revolution, genius, and you can thank Capitalism for making more powerful incendiaries.
Why don't you look up exactly how many Tory-loyalist buildings were burned down by the earliest anarchists in the US, the "Founding Fathers", for everybody who reads this?
"White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views." https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
"Right-Wing Extremists Killed 38 People in 2019, Far Surpassing All Other Murderous Extremists"
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-right-wing-extremists-killed-38-people-in-2019-far-surpassing-all
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Maybe it's not obvious to everyone, but hypocritically and ignorantly, the Trump-cult's slogan, "Make America Great Again", is referring to a time when America was a democratic-socialist nation.
Democratic socialism was used to pull the US out of the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and worked exceedingly well up until 1980, when Reagan's economics started to reduce and eventually lower the life expectancy of the average American.
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
The Preamble to the US Constitution is a leftist manifesto that we've yet to live up to:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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(Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization⋆):
"For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”
― Frederick Douglass
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"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization-
•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.
•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.
•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.
•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.
•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures."
doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102488
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
“There may not be a predictable future but there is still a need to engage in futuring—continually constructing a future. We need ways to decide whether we are engaged in the most appropriate activities and relating in the most appropriate way to our stakeholders…”
(Futuring - A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to Strategic Planning)
https://www.academia.edu/11897598/Futuring_a_Complex_Adaptive_Systems_Approach_to_Strategic_Planning
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"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
Will Durant, The Lessons of History
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
""If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
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"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism
"It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."
― H.L. Mencken, American Mercury
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party...
There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
― John Stuart Mill (British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster, 1865 - 1868)
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"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
"Even before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic occurred, the US was mired in a 40-year population health crisis. Since 1980, life expectancy in the US has increasingly fallen behind that of peer countries, culminating in an unprecedented decline in longevity since 2014."
doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.26339
"Technological fixes are not always undesirable or inadequate, but there is a danger that what is addressed is not the real problem but the problem in as far as it is amendable to technical solutions."
Engineering and the Problem of Moral Overload
doi: 10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.”
Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
Isaiah 1:17
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V S If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
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“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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'Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”'
https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
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If 2,977 people died from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, then Dereliction-of-Duty Donny's criminal negligence has led to 70 times that many lives lost to the Trump Virus - so far.
Oh, and there’s the equivalent of another 9/11 in American lives lost to the Trump Virus every few days.
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamed of doing as much damage to the US through terrorism as Dereliction-of-Duty Donny has through criminal negligence.
"A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/09/the_basic_laws_of_human_stupidity.html
-------------------------------------------
"I do not take responsibility at all."
― Impeached President 'Dereliction of Duty Donny' Trump
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Admiral H.G. Rickover, Father of the US Nuclear Navy
“Placing Alarms in Cutout:
1. Alarms and warning lights provide watchstanders with audible and/or visual indications of abnormal conditions. Inadequate or untimely response to alarms and warning lights may result in degraded capabilities, equipment damage, or personnel injury. …”
(USS Asheville SSN 758 Basic Submarining and Watchstanding Guide ASHEVILLEINST 9210.7A, p.10)
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"If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?"
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)
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"...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
(THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE) https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
―Marvin Minsky
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
―Isaac Newton
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"What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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'Sticks' and 'staples' are apparently more effective than 'sugar-cubes' for deprogramming conspiracy theory:
"... two belief changing strategies appeared to be effective: the rational and the ridiculing ones. From the perspective of the different theoretical backgrounds, there are alternative explanations for these findings. On the basis of the functional attitude theories (Katz, 1960), if someone wishes to reduce CT beliefs, the informational and ego-defensive functions of attitudes toward CTs could be equally employed in communication strategy building. From the perspective of the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), both central and peripheral paths can be equally effective, especially if the peripheral one is more closely related to ridiculing those who hold these beliefs than empathizing with the victims of CT beliefs. Finally, the consistency theories (e.g., Abelson, 1968), in order to reduce the acceptance of CT beliefs, appear to be effective to create inconsistency between being a logical person (as a specific part of positive self-concept) vs. the irrationality of CT believers and between the informational content of the previous beliefs vs. the new information regarding events or people related to conspiracies."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full
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I appreciate Jordan Peterson as a professional. I also have a big problems with the arguments he uses to sell the conclusions he reaches. I think three words poke the biggest hole in his paradigm: Complex Adaptive Systems. Especially their chaotic behavior (not metaphorical chaos, mathematical chaos.) The paradigm he teaches from oversimplifies or completely ignores complexity as an area of research, especially as applied to feedback between systemic cultural and economic effects on an individual and the way multiplicities of those individuals then go on to maintain or change their social systems. Like you said, you've noticed a gap in perspective on Mr. Peterson between academics working with theory and professionals working on application. Why would they have such different views? Similar to the differences in perspectives and priorities between engineers and technicians, could the differences in their individual perspectives that tend to group by profession be from whether the individual prioritizes systemic optimization or prioritizes individual maximization? Jordan Peterson's approach to philosophy is built from the perspective of the technician that prioritizes his own individually assigned area of responsibility to the detriment of the system, ultimately making his own responsibilities more difficult due to lack of awareness of wider circumstances. Of course the elementary things he says about individual responsibility are accurate for a healthy lifestyle, as a technician would recommend, but to politically prioritize those elements as Peterson and his followers do is an act of willful ignorance and deliberate stupidity. If one wants a more digestible interpretation of Jungian Archetypes, Joseph Campbell makes much more sense because he ties those archetypes into diverse wisdom traditions and more universal morality and economic common sense than Jordan Peterson. There's a reason Mr. Peterson is a pit-stop in a pipeline to the alt-right and fascist beliefs, and it has to do with Mr. Peterson's own confusion.
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat
of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
- Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
- Stephen Hawking
'Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors
' https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors?utm_source=mitsloanlinkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=einsteins
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"Domestic Terrorism. Domestic terrorists—a phrase typically used to denote terrorists who are not directed or inspired by FTOs—have caused more deaths in the United States in recent years than have terrorists connected to FTOs. Domestic terrorist attacks and hate crimes sometimes overlap, as perpetrators of prominent domestic terrorist attacks have selected their targets based on factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism. Lone attackers, as opposed to cells or organizations, generally perpetrate these kinds of attacks. But they are also part of a broader movement. White supremacist violent extremists’ outlook can generally be characterized by hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities, often combining these prejudices with virulent anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim views.
White supremacist violent extremists have adopted an increasingly transnational outlook in recent years, largely driven by the technological forces described earlier in this Strategic Framework. Similar to how ISIS inspired and connected with potential radical Islamist terrorists, white supremacist violent extremists connect with like-minded individuals online. In addition to mainstream social media platforms, white supremacist violent extremists use lesser-known sites like Gab, 8chan, and EndChan, as well as encrypted channels. Celebration of violence and conspiracy theories about the “ethnic replacement” of whites as the majority ethnicity in various
Western countries are prominent in their online circles. "
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf
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(THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE) https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
"Pornocracy is a government ruled by prostitutes or by corrupt officials (who metaphorically "prostitute" themselves for power)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
'The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure'
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
'Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
‘Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors’
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lost-einsteins-us-may-have-missed-out-millions-inventors
"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
―Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
―Stephen Hawking
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
―Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
“Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”
― Niels Bohr
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lol right-wingers can't do math, and when they can, they never understand how to use correctly!
High school math competency check:
To reduce its inventory, a warehouse runs a sale on silicon ingots. The sales rate (ingots sold per day) on day t of the sale is predicted to be 40/t (for t ≥ 1), where t = 1 corresponds to the beginning of the sale, at which time none of the inventory of 200 ingots had been sold.
Find a formula for the total number of ingots sold up to day t.
C(t) =
?
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB." (The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals ) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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