Sunday School

[Strega]

@_Robert_
We really, really ought to have a ‘like’ or ‘upvote’ button 🙂

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_Robert_ wrote:

Modern democracies have to demonstrate zero tolerance for aggressive dictators.

I suppose the two major issues are first, that few nations want to expend the resources both in terms of lost trade and in terms of actively taking opposition measures. There are, of course, tactics that can be used to undermine a regime from within, but those same tactics can be used in retalation.

Second, realistically, while many nations might boast democratic efforts that rank okay when ‘better than Russia’ is the floor, there is probably some hesitancy to aggressively police other nations in fear of opening the door to being policed ourselves.  That is, unless the nation being policed is relatively poor or too politically disconnected to go tit for tat.

[jakelafort]

Modern democracies have to demonstrate zero tolerance for aggressive dictators.

That is just plain stupid. You can call it puffing. Or you can call it hyperbole. But it is demonstrably false.

And i see some of the names on that subcomittee. Yuck. As if that is not a tendentious pile of crap. I get the parallel to France after the first world war. But again it is not terribly relevant today. Were Putin to attack France or some western power it would not be a war by proxy. He knows it. He knows his army is shite also. He may support terrorists in Iran or invade 3rd world countries or attempt to retake Ukraine but he is no threat to the west unless the rest of the world sticks its nose in his affairs and chemical, biological weapons or nucs are used.

I think as i alluded that there ought to be a concerted and united effort to defeat dictatorship wherever it exists. It is insane that citizens tolerate dictatorships. But that does not change the calculus in terms of the risks taken in Ukraine.

[PopeBeanie]

Autumn wrote:

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Autumn, I didn’t see the part of the story on Reiki and Aromatherapy, but that by itself would’t make the story false.

The story strained credibility in the first place which makes it worth checking before reacting. It was a story that was not impossible, yet not plausible.

It sounds a lot like you put ‘Feelz’ before ‘Realz’ when you posted this story, then used that mistake to somehow lend credulity to the (likely) false narrative.

The purpose of my response here is not to further the discussion on the specific statements above, but to zoom out to a more general observation: How two ideologically super-charged sides do repeatedly hyper-focus on harping about extreme examples that exist in the opposite camp, while enabling (or even promoting) stereotyping of the whole opposite camp as co-conspiracists. Triggering escalated counter-responses in both camps… in a never-ending feedback loop of offenses and defenses.

Politicians, talk show hosts, et al (i.e. individuals with public platforms)  increasingly promote these types of arguments and narratives, for profit, not to mention nation-states and dictators who weaponize  society-corrupting “discourse” to gain and maintain power. Think Bannon, Trump, and perhaps sociopathic liberal analogs whom don’t immediately come to my Libtard mind.

Rather than simply call this human failure of modern civilization a case of “tribalism”, I’m working to understand this more as cases of viralism in preternaturally technical, modern times. Where humans pathologically respond to click-bait and other addictive, clickable pathways algorithmically presented to them by social media and other media-serving hubs and corporations.

It is increasingly easy to evilize each other, especially when politicians and corporations in power weaponize this new behavioral science of  media viralism for their personal gain. This phase of human evolution is completely different from, and even antithetical at times to our previous, natural phase of adaptation ruled by genetics.

[jakelafort]

Pope, astute.

Utilizing extreme examples and holding them out implicitly as the representative example is an easy way to make one’s case when ideologue’s, aka mindless masses are the listeners. Easy peezy this aint cheesy lemon squeezy.

And undoubtedly there is a memetic viral nature to the utilization of extremes as badges of dishonor in the enemy camp.

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PopeBeanie wrote:

The purpose of my response here is not to further the discussion on the specific statements above, but to zoom out to a more general observation: How two ideologically super-charged sides do repeatedly hyper-focus on harping about extreme examples that exist in the opposite camp, while enabling (or even promoting) stereotyping of the whole opposite camp as co-conspiracists. Triggering escalated counter-responses in both camps… in a never-ending feedback loop of offenses and defenses.

If I had a point of contention, it’s the term ‘ideological’. It’s not wrong, per se, I think much of the ‘ideology’ is manufactured.

In recent school board elections in Ontario and British Columbia, we saw a number of school board races that became polarized along two fronts: SOGI and “CRT”. SOGI stands for ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’. I’ve put ‘CRT’ in scare quotes because I’m fairly confident that’s not what schools are actually teaching.

With regard to SOGI, the conversation often ends up polarized around gender identity specifically. It’s often characterized as a matter of conflicting ideologies. But SOGI course materials aren’t any more ideological than anything else in schools already.

And opposition to SOGI may seem like it is strongly ideological, but a lot of it isn’t actually that extreme. A lot of it comes from people who’ve been lied to about what programs like SOGI 123 actually do, what it means to be transgender, what the materials are actually intended to deliver to students and why. It comes from people who believe there is a campaign to erase male and female, to erase homosexuality, to perform surgeries and hormone therapy on kindergarteners, and a number of other things that no one is trying to do in reality, but bad actors are lying about persistently. So when many of these people say they are trying to protect children, they may very well be sincere. In fact, they may overlap more with supposed “trans-activists” than they realize.

This is not to suggest that no genuine ideological extremism exists in various groups. It does. In any movement that gets sufficiently large, you’re going to see it to at least some degree. But I think you’re more on the mark with the rest of the post. There is manufactured conflict from people who seek to benefit either by gaining platform, getting clicks, leveraging wedge issues, and putting up smoke screens. It’s amazing how many times we end up viciously at odds in society over shit almost no one is fucking saying in the first place.

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