Re: [theauthoritarians] Can we introduce ourselves?

[Scot...@aol.com]

I keep wondering with this group, what people's "fields" are.  Most of you seem to be talking psych or sociology talk.  I wonder if we might sort of let each other know interests and credentials. 

 

As you've no doubt figured out, I read a lot and love to play with ideas, although I undoubtedly go off the deep end sometimes.  I'm a Physical Therapist, masters in Clinical Neuroscience and Health Care Management.  Interests in Environmental biology and psych, political stuff, comparative religion, photography, classical music, philosophy.  Old lady who should have retired years ago, but was having too much fun to do that.

Scotty

[bluepilgrim]

Blue}
I'm a generalist -- some of everything with almost no formal college education, and a bit of training in electronics and computers; almost all self-educated, and becoming more aware of my ignorance everyday. I had the thought the other day that it would require 7 brains and at least 20 years of study for each before I might say I know anything, much less synthesize it all into anything that made real sense. If there is anything which comes close to describing what I try to do it's understanding systems and systems thinking/intelligence, and how to integrate all the different concepts, modes of thought, algorithms, and 'metaphors' used to map reality into a useful model, and how and when to map one mode, system, or context to another. Maybe one of the words I want is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience , with another being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology . I'm just trying to figure what existence and all this 'reality stuff' is and how it works. (Help -- I've fallen into this weird dream and can't wake up.)

[Sara Robinson]

I'm a futurist. (Yes, that's a real profession.) Futures is broadly
interdisciplinary, and develops generalists rather than specialists.
There's sociology and social psychology on one hand; but also systems
theory and quantitative modeling; macrohistory; and some research and
analysis methods that are all our own.

I'm almost done with my MS in Futures Studies, with an emphasis on
social futures -- especially change resistance and change management,
which I got into because I was so fascinated with the sociology of the
far right. We've got a tough century ahead of us that's already
challenging a lot of the core paradigms that have governed Western
culture going back to the Greeks. Reworking that is going to be hard
work. And change resistance movements, most of which come from the
authoritarian right, are going to make it all the harder if we don't
learn something about managing the intense backlash they can generate.

I've also blogged on this pretty consistently since 2006. My very
first blog posts, which were front-paged at Kos and otherwise got big
play, were a series on "Conservative Without Conscience" in which I
mined my experiences as a peer counselor for people leaving
fundamentalism to explain why and how people choose to leave
authoritarian thought systems.

Sara

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[Bob]

My background is quite similar to Bluepilgrim's, but with the addition of writing with a neurodivergent wetware set. (Not trying to be cutesy, I just don't wish to write several paragraphs. ) I've settled on "Lay Ethicist" to describe my fascination and focus. I've come to realize that ethics and futurism have significant areas of overlap, inasmuch as ethics are about preventing undesirable outcomes and, should they be inevitable, predicting where they will manafest.

I've been blogging regularly since late 2000, with occasional hit articles, at Graphictruth.com, usually daily, but I'm allowing myself an hiatus from my regular posting activities until March.

The thing that fascinates me and alarms me in equal measure about authoritarians is how moralistic they are, and what little connection they seem to have between morality and ethics. That is to say, "Right Action" is supposed to have "Right Outcome." RWA types here and now seem to see "fallout" and "blowback" as just part of the process, and certainly nothing that can be attributed to them.

If one could assign a mental health diagnosis to a group - it would be something describing the inability to connect cause with effect, coupled with the inability (I think) to see others as real people with feelings.

[Sara Robinson]

One of the lions of the futures field, Draper Kaufmann, famously said
that "there is no morality without foresight." It's been one of the
driving forces in my career.

That said, the past 20 years have seen the field riven with a conflict
between empirical futurists (who believe they have an obligation to
remain neutral, much as journalists do, and simply report the most
plausible alternatives), and normative futurists (who believe the
field has an ethical obligation to work for positive outcomes for
humankind). I was trained at the University of Houston, whose program
is sort of Ground Zero for the empiricist school; and my persistently
progressive stance did give my teachers fits, even when they
personally agreed with my politics.

I'm grateful that they challenged me on this. I'm a journalist by
training, and know how to keep my biases out of the work product
(which always surprised them when they got papers that were far more
neutral than what I'd say in class). But I also believe that
progressivism is the politics of the future -- which is to say that
America has always turned to its progressives for leadership in times
of transformative change. We're the ones who do that stuff. As has
been discussed here, being liberal means being far more open to
change, not usually threatened my new people or ideas, and more
confident that we can manage change and bring about good results.
Conservatives, on the other hand, almost universally believe that
change should be left to Big Daddy (God or your betters), that most
people are not capable of managing change, and that bad things will
almost always happen if we try. (And, again, they're calling it as
they see it: in their world, people aren't taught to deal with change,
and they do in fact tend to handle it badly. My "take them at their
word" principle also applies here.)

But that breach seems to be healing in my generation. The rift between
the two schools was started by a handful of Boomers (who, as a
generation, generally aren't happy unless they're on the outside,
challenging somebody's orthodoxy). Now those guys are retiring, and
the younger crop (like me) are pretty clear that it's not either/or.
Also: there are issues emerging now where the morality is so clear
that one cannot remain neutral: there IS a preferred future, and it's
to choose that humankind will *have* a future.

Yes yes yes on the lack of cause-and-effect thinking on the
conservative side. This is consonant with the fact that they tend to
be cognitively and emotionally stuck at about the age of five, which
is prime time for magical thinking. (That disappears at six or seven,
as literacy makes greater abstraction and reason possible, and people
start to be able to follow a narrative sequence of events.) This is
why they reach for conspiracy theories: at five, pretty much
everything that happens to you is the result of a deliberate choice by
either you or some adult. The idea that shit happens -- or that it
happens due a world based on complex systems, which aren't really
comprehensible until we're 13 or so -- just isn't anywhere on the radar.

Sara

[Gary Williams]

Yes. Seems that would be where the retarded cognitive abilities affect their epistemological efforts, leading to poorly developed intellectual skills.... particularly the inability to think of life from the viewpoint of another person.

And yet it seems that they somehow realized at some level that they're not about to figure out "existence" and such,  and so they instead become wired to get all these more complicated concepts from an outside themselves. This then sees them taking their cosmology wholesale from a "holy" text, their ethics from codified laws, and decisions about what to this very day from a an army Drill Sergeant or Chaplain. Their social ideas and subjects are also taken from the Rush Limbaugh's and Sean Hannity's of the world. All they do that's "original" is react to the world around them, and this they do using as little of the governing influence of the higher brain as they can get away with withouit coming into conflict with their own authority figures.

[Bob]

Yes, that IS better put, as well as being a more useful cognitive model for the behavior. When exposed to the right stimuli, children do grow up.

Although some may take a few more decades than others. I just watched a documentary featuring Robert McNamara looking back upon the Vietnam war. Honestly, I was very proud of him. Few people have the courage to face and admit wrongs of such magnitude with such grace. It was the act of a grownup.

[Bob]

Tragicomically enough, the Words In Red speak mostly about and to such people, about the very problems they are causing themselves, in examples from daily life so absolutely plain and obvious that it takes a heap o' theology to get in the way of seeing it for what it is.

--

[Sara Robinson]

I'd strongly recommend Steven Ducat's "The Wimp Factor" to everybody
in this conversation who hasn't already read it.

Ducat is a psychiatrist who works with men in work, marital, or other
personal distress. Over the years, he was struck by how many of his
clients were strongly authoritarian "men's men" -- and how many of
their problems were rooted in this -- which got him looking into how
authoritarianism intersects with what he calls "anxious masculinity."

He's a sort of modern Freudian, but his conclusions are striking.
According to him, these men get to a place where they're so obsessed
with maintaining their ideal of non-emotional, uncommitted guyness
that they simply cannot allow anything they consider the least bit
"feminine" to exist in their world. They have total contempt for
people who are dependent on others (hence the conservative myth of
rugged individualism -- scratch a "self-made man," and I guarantee
there were government subsidies or contracts involved). They regard
any kind of "penetration" (including the questions of an enquiring
therapist) to be "rape" -- the recent fetish with this metaphor on the
right is a clear sign that they're feeling emasculated. They have no
idea what to do with either their sexual feelings or their emotions,
so they tend to use women as "emotional toilets" whose main function
is to relieve them of both. They will assign gender to every single
idea, very much including political issues. And they're quick to
attack people who value negotiation over violence as "soft," because
they believe that violent display is what manhood demands.

This happens, says Ducat, because men these days have distant fathers
who aren't around to help them integrate the feminine perspective into
their masculine identity as they grow up. All the authority in the
household is held by mom; and all the way until adulthood, their main
task is doing anything necessary to separate from her, until the quest
becomes desperate and rather nuts. Healthy male development does see a
retreat from Mom (and girls) starting around seven; but there's
supposed to be a re-attachment that happens around 13, as the boy hits
sexual maturity and needs to re-connect to the world of women.
Together, mom and dad help a teenager through that. Anxious males
never quite get there. They're stuck in latency. Girls: Yucky.
Anything having to do with girls: Way yucky.

Ducat says that this non-integration is catastrophic for their ability
to experience empathy, which they regard as emasculating.

Sara

[Chris]

On 21 Nov, 19:56, Sara Robinson <srobin...@cosmiccowgrrl.com> wrote:
> One of the lions of the futures field, Draper Kaufmann, famously said  
> that "there is no morality without foresight." It's been one of the  
> driving forces in my career.
>
> That said, the past 20 years have seen the field riven with a conflict  
> between empirical futurists (who believe they have an obligation to  
> remain neutral, much as journalists do, and simply report the most  
> plausible alternatives), and normative futurists (who believe the  
> field has an ethical obligation to work for positive outcomes for  

> humankind). ...

There is a school of thought, held by the Situationists, that by
revealing and explaining a certain situation the people will assume
the correct course of action largely by themselves. Some scope there
for common interest between the empiricists and the normatives.

Perhaps one can say studying a problem sufficient resolution
'resolves' the problem.

[Sara Robinson]

That's pretty much the common ground we're on. Empiricism helps one's
credibility when you're presenting options.

Part of this, as noted, is a shift in the nature of the problems
futurists deal with these days. The early years of the profession saw
most of the serious futures work being done by the Pentagon and the
military-industrial complex. Futurists like Herman Kahn and the boys
at RAND were being paid to Think The Unthinkable, which means standing
up in front of people and talking very dispassionately about the
various alternatives for, say, global nuclear war. "If we do this,
only ten million people die. If we do that, the human race doesn't
survive. Which alternative do you prefer, General?"

The young futurists of that era found the amorality of this rightly
horrifying, which is what launched the split. These days, though, it's
a lot easier to get consensus on the basic morality of the issues
we're dealing with -- peak oil, climate disruption, the loss of
fisheries and topsoil and aquifers. And that changed landscape makes
the tussle pretty irrelevant. We do what we do, and yeah -- we hope
that people will figure out that right course of action implicit in
those alternatives.

Unfortunately, we're also far more aware now that humans are not
rational actors, and any theory of social change or economics that
relies on that is fundamentally flawed. So the whole issue of change
management becomes a lot more complicated at that point.

Sara

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/21/2009 12:07:01 P.M. Central Standard Time, srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com writes:

I'm almost done with my MS in Futures Studies, with an emphasis on 
social futures -- especially change resistance and change management, 
which I got into because I was so fascinated with the sociology of the 
far right.

______

Didn't know there was such a thing, but I'm impressed that there is.

 

Our minister, just tonight, said the Right is resisting admitting to global climate change because they're "slow to change".  Strangely, I don't think that's the problem at all......I think it's a perverse kind of rebellion against anything the Liberals are "for" just for the sake of being negative to Liberals, not liberal ideas.

 

<<<Conservative Without Conscience".

 

I consider that one of the "turning point" books I've read.  Someone mentioned Consiliance.....that was another.

Scotty

 

 

 

 

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/21/2009 1:32:32 P.M. Central Standard Time, graphi...@gmail.com writes:

The thing that fascinates me and alarms me in equal measure about authoritarians is how moralistic they are, and what little connection they seem to have between morality and ethics.

______

For folks who have trouble with ambiguity, they seem to have a lot of things compartmentalized.......like extreme Christianity vs Sermon on the mount when it comes to inclusion vs exclusion.

Scotty

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/21/2009 2:23:27 P.M. Central Standard Time, graphi...@gmail.com writes:

I just watched a documentary featuring Robert McNamara looking back upon the Vietnam war. Honestly, I was very proud of him. Few people have the courage to face and admit wrongs of such magnitude with such grace. It was the act of a grownup.

____

Did you see the thing on Bill Moyer with the conversations of LBJ and various military and cabinet members?  All the things he had to consider about getting further into or out of the Vietnam war.  Sounded just like what any one of us would have worried about......and what is probably making Obama crazy right now (among other things),

Scotty

[Bob]

I may have, I don't recall specifically. I've seen various things over the years about the political calculus involved.

Still, in the end, it all boils down to "why I couldn't do the right thing."

--

[bluepilgrim]

At 05:02 11/22/2009, you wrote:

In a message dated 11/21/2009 12:07:01 P.M. Central Standard Time, srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com writes:

I'm almost done with my MS in Futures Studies, with an emphasis on 

social futures -- especially change resistance and change management, 

which I got into because I was so fascinated with the sociology of the 

far right.

______
Didn't know there was such a thing, but I'm impressed that there is.
 
Our minister, just tonight, said the Right is resisting admitting to global climate change because they're "slow to change".  Strangely, I don't think that's the problem at all......I think it's a perverse kind of rebellion against anything the Liberals are "for" just for the sake of being negative to Liberals, not liberal ideas.

Blue}
There is also a matter of the huge amounts of money being spent by the corporations (mostly oil, I think) to mount propaganda campaigns, including the constant drumbeat of right wing radio, which these people listen to.

[software visualization]

Where is your blog Sara? 

[Sara Robinson]

I was struck by how many times LBJ talked about having to keep Nixon
and Goldwater off his back. He was really afraid of the political
consequences of doing the peaceable thing.

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier today about political
issues getting "gendered." LBJ's manhood was on the line; the
conservatives have made it all about Not Being A Wuss, which
forecloses any kind of rational conversation, negotiation, de-
escalation, or positive overtures toward people the cons think (for
whatever reason) should be our bitches. It's polluted the whole
national character, and our politics.

I'm telling you: how they define "manhood" is right at the core of
this thing. To put it bluntly, the conservative worldview only
recognizes two kinds of people: fuckers and fuckees. And anybody who
isn't the fucker isn't a man, and thus not a trustworthy leader.

Sara

[Sara Robinson]

This one was hard to forget, since it first aired just last night.

Sara

[Sara Robinson]

I'm on sabbatical until the first of January (have been since October
1).

But my regular gigs are:

Campaign for America's Future <www.ourfuture.org>
Orcinus <www.dneiwert.blogspot.com>

I had an article on the front page at grist.org earlier this week, and
my stuff often pops up at Alternet and Truthout as well.

Sara

[software visualization]

I read a book titled "The Murderer Next Door" where the author goes through and  systematically  who murders who and why. He covers everything from fratricide to honor killings to women murdering men to women murdering their children along with all the other "normal" kinds of murders. 

Long story short, people murder to enhance their reproductive fitness. A large part of that involves murdering a cheating spouse, ESPECIALLY for males. The signal they're sending is - "I am not a person to mess with. You cannot copulate with my mate (and thus cut me out of a genetic future) and get away with it THIS is what happens to those who try." He says that men want other men to say about them "he's no one to mess with" because the alternative is to be someone who can be messed with, and such people lose in the copulation game and of course don't pass on their "whatever, dude, I don't care what she did with him" genes to the next generation. 

So this fits in with the idea that these people have not had any kind of cultural overlay or modification of their base impulses, which supposedly would have been acquired from their fathers. This is what the unreconstructed male impulse is. 

I also have to note that all, and I mean every, Republican I know personally  is either an alcoholic or alcohol dependent. 

One effect of any amount of alcohol at all is brain cell death- you drink, they die, the more you drink, the more of them  die, end of story. I have to believe  that long term drinking erodes the higher cognitive processes, the delicate sophisticated stuff that makes people savvy, canny, able to consciously hold contradictions in their minds until they can be properly resolved, able to  take another's  viewpoint, in short it erodes their executive functions and nuanced thinking. 

Has anyone else noticed  this or now that I mention it does it ring true? 

[Bob]

Ah, then I missed it entirely :(

[software visualization]

Well the premise  that we're rational actors is a very big flaw in liberal  thinking and strategy. Essentially liberals assemble a proof of what they think is true , assiduously assembling facts to support their proposition and then are horrified when they see that things like logical reasoning really play no part in persuasion, at least for conservatives. Meanwhile republican leaders can be seen rummaging around in the garbage bin picking out scraps of  racism, fear-mongering and whatnot and stringing them together into a story that conservatives find compelling.  What liberals have to understand is for these kinds of people it's about the  narrative, and not just any narrative but a narrative that stars them and validates them and validates the core things  they've always "known". Anything less makes them feel emasculated. Since as one wag said, reality has a liberal bias, this is not an easy task. 

[software visualization]

software engineer. Studied cog sci. at the University of California. Silicon valley for a number of years then here there everywhere specializing in HCI (human computer interface) main focus on increasing the tractability of very complex, ad hoc systems, specifically creating tools to help us contain and fathom this kind of complexity.

Interested in this group b/c I think time is running out for global warming and about 40% of the people in my country (the US) appear to be more or less permanently and dangerously insane-http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/09/24/wsjnbc-poll-voters-doubt-palins-qualifications-to-be-president/  and "these kinds of people" we very well described in The Authoritarians.

--

[Sara Robinson]

This aligns closely with the observation of global peace negotiators
that people -- both as individuals, and as nations -- only resort to
violence when they are feeling a) disrespected and b) humiliated. In
other words: they're a fuckee, and pissed about it.

Not sure how much of this has to do with breeding; you can easily find
this impulse in men who have no interest in perpetuating their genes
whatsoever. But there's definitely a pride/honor/dignity thing at
stake. And in the people who turn conservative, this idea is a) very
strong and b) very fragile. I suspect the former is a direct
consequence of the latter: its very fragility is why people are so
obsessed with it.

Liberals don't feel that same fragility, mostly because we're pretty
well-integrated (mostly) and feel like we've got strong internal
resources that will guide us through -- as well as a strong sense of
common good that will enable us to rely on others if we can't do it on
our own. As Lakoff noted, in the conservative world, life is hard, and
you can trust no one. In the liberal world, life is good, especially
if you trust others.

It's loops within loops. I can readily see how being told that you're
on your own, nobody will help you, and everybody's out to fuck you
over and thus steal this fragile thing that matters most -- well, that
might make you pretty anxious and quick to strike first. And it would
also make it very hard to shake off even small humiliations, and
instead want to retaliate.

Sara

[Sara Robinson]

I doubt it's as high as 40%. I've been trying to get a handle on their
true numbers for the past few years, using things like Rush's and
Beck's listener base, voting Republicans, membership in evangelical
churches, and so on. Most of what I find pretty roughly correlates to
Dr. Altemeyer's guess that 12-15% of the population are the hard core,
with about that many again capable of going there if sufficiently
stressed.

So -- call it a quarter of the country. Which is enough, when you
consider that Hitler took power with the support of just 28% of the
German people. What worries me more is that these folks are no longer
interested in the processes of democracy. They've been there, done
that, got bloody little to show for it -- and are now gearing up for a
shooting war, which is the only way that small a faction really can
get control over the rest of the culture. (Think of a small Southern
town dominated by the KKK or a corrupt sheriff; an urban neighborhood
in thrall to a gang; or a city ruled by a family of mobsters. If
you're willing to make occasional demonstrations of violence, you can
terrorize everyone into compliance. It ain't democracy, but hey.)

People keep trying to compare this era to the 1930s. And there are
some good parallels to be drawn. But on this front, I'm thinking it
may be more like the 1850s, when the abolitionists -- who had been
pressing their case for 30 years by that point -- started getting
aggressive and pushing the country toward a crisis point on the
slavery issue. The raid on Harper's Ferry demonstrated that they felt
quite justified in to using violence to get their way; the war started
just three years later.

The anti-gay-rights and anti-choice activists very much see themselves
carrying on the work of abolition, and are rapidly pushing the issue
just the same way again. They, too, have already demonstrated that
they're willing to kill over this issue.

And it's happening on the left, too, as general frustration and
desperation over climate change builds. The left is not ready to start
killing, but I don't think things can go on past 2010 before they
start looking outside the system for solutions.

All this stuff is on a J-curve, and we're hitting some kind of
inflection point. From here, my gut feeling (there's a piece of
futures that's just intuition, and mine on this stuff is
extraordinarily good) is that things on all these fronts are going to
start moving faster. But if Altemeyer's right, we'll never see a day
that they're more than 25-30% of the whole.

Sara

[software visualization]

...men who have no interest in perpetuating their genes
whatsoever.....

pursuing this for a moment in good spirit...for evolutionary psychology, no such person exists. We're all descended from people who care about that, a lot, people who didn't care were bred out of the picture long before our ancestors were humans. One of the points he makes in the book is that this macho business really has a compelling evolutionary purpose and no large group of individuals is immune. Let's say that there exists someone who as a freakish occurrence doesn't care about sex, which is the same as saying they have no impulse to procreate, which is of course different from saying they don't want to have kids. That hypothetical person is a genetic freak (and evolutionary dead end) and in no way normative and the rest of us are normative and its our behavior that the author, Dr. david buss is uncovering. His techniques are compelling and convincing and similar to what was done in The Authoritarians with lots of interviews and systematic studying of FBI statistics including those not publicly available.

It's not that at that specific moment in time someone is consciously thinking "I want to look good in front of that redhead in the office", it's more diffuse and pervasive than that; it's the groud the human personality is built on and mostly goes unnoticed because it doesn't need to be noticed to perform it's function. This is just Dawkins et. al. applied to this phenomena- male machismo.

One of the big things that went down in my field was AI. Researchers were sure we would have AI by now. When I got introduced to the problem, through beginner's luck I thought I had a basic insight that saved me from thinking AI was arounod the corner and thus wasting my career (I since found other ways to waste it) and that was this- there's a flotilla of "stuff" that determines the logic of human thought- what makes sense and what doesn't make sense to us- and it has nothing to do with anything except the series of biological-historical accidents we call evolution and how they determine what is "logical" to us.

My goto example is always Romeo and Juliet. It's implicit that Romeo wants to be Juliet and her father is not a suitable substitute for her in this capacity. We all implicitly understand that and things more subtle, like , it makes sense their family's don't approve and would get involved- we "get" that. That kind of sense-making background knowledge is a problem for AI because it's so extensive- how do you teach a computer everything it needs to know .. there are billions of such little "facts". It's called the frame problem in AI.

One approach is to list off more basic facts to the computer and give the computer a set of reasoning rules and then let the computer use those "rules" to derive new facts about the world. That way you dnt' have to teach it everything for every situation- an impossible task.

The problem is that a lot of these "basic facts and rules" just don't make any sense to anything that doesn't share our biology and to ask these rules to derive them is tantamount to saying you can come up with the basic result of millions of years of evolution, distill them into "facts" then predict what creatures who were the resultant product of all that evolution will do in any given circumstance. .

See ya, good luck with that, and be sure to write.

The only way anything is going to understand why a human being is acting like they are in a particular circumstance is if that knowledge-seeking thing shares the biologically-determined and species specific imperatives that constitute the inner life of human beings. The logic is a logic of biology and further a biology as it's realized in a resource seeking creature which exists in a resource-limited world in which it has to negotiate with other creatures of its own kind and similar kind.

Romeo loves Juliet and not only is her father not a substitute, but neither is any other girl. The cannot live without each other. Why? Because, that' the way it is.

So a huge part, and all the interesting stuff,  about the way we act is heavily determined by things like "no one can dis me and get away with it" or equivalently  "I cannot lose face" which have their roots, their logic, in evolution.

[software visualization]

Well your nightmares are my nightmares. I have been saying to everyone that I think they'd love to secede and kill as many liberal as they can. My comfort is that they've always been like that, they've never stopped fighting the civil war (so say my Northern-born now Southern cousins) and they haven't done it yet. But would that 25% do it? Would a large part of the country go along with it? Have you read your Stanley Milgram? Then you know the answer.

My interest is in diffusing the bomb. It can't go well if it goes off, it would be the end of America. Europe wouldn't stand for a right wing fascist state in the US not to mention central and south America so the net result for any such thing would be the 3rd worldization of America and the end of America as a world leader. It's all a fantasy for them, but one that occasionally results in the building being bombed and people being killed. As far as any kind of coup d'etat against the government, they can only wish for it, it's not going to happen, at least not and result in anything they wanted it to result in.

Their chief "power" is to do what they're doing now- making sure things don't change.. they're conservatives! Unfortunately we can't afford that any more. If there is going to be any kind of fascism, it's going to be a kind of eco-fascism imposed against them by the sane part of the US and the rest of the world. Among other things, the rest of the world is not going to put up or forgive the US  should we fail to act. The resultant fall out against us would indeed result in a  rewriting of our basic liberties and not in any way conservatives are going to like- you can have your lights on for 3 hours a night at home. You can drive 50 non-work miles a week. You need a license to run air conditioning. It all sounds extreme, but then billions of people are wandering around with no country, a limited nuclear war hasn't been unleashed in the Indian subcontinent the western US isn't a desert, there isn't mass hunger in the US , the US isn't at war with Mexico over water and most Mexicans aren't living here abandoning Mexico completely (well, maybe that one).

But for a truly scary glimpse into a scary future read some of the CIA's analysis of the geopolitics of global warming. People aren't going to like Americans much. They're be a lot of otherwise civilized people in 1st world nations willing to look the other way as the fissiable material goes missing out of the lab if they think it's headed to the US... on and on.... it's too ugly to think about and to easy to get going thinking about it. We all of us have to do something to limit the effectiveness of "those people" in the political process..... that's the reason I'm here...

[Sara Robinson]

I'm still not really convinced, I'm afraid. There are too many
societies in this world where men don't possess women or children that
way, where communities put all the kids in a pack and rear them
collectively (both dads and moms), where mom owns the house and dad
lives there at her pleasure (this includes a great many, if not most,
of the Native American tribes). I would agree that there's a basic
provide-and-protect impulse that's common across human cultures (and
also found in the males of a great many other species -- quite
possibly, it's simply testosterone that does this). But there are too
many examples where that doesn't involve aggression for me to accept
it as a universal premise.

Hmm: something occurs to me. It's true that the overwhelming majority
of these are indigenous cultures; and that once a civilization gets
beyond a certain level of complexity, the behavior you describe does
in fact become endemic. Clare Graves' progression (which Jared Diamond
outlined in "Collapse") says that when societies take the step that
brings them from small tribal groups into larger warlord-led
territorial structures with city-states (much like we see in, say,
Afghanistan), that's the moment you see this transition from
egalitarianism toward an extremely male-dominated culture. So it's not
a human universal, but does seem to be attached to a given level of
cultural complexity.

In later phases, as complexity continues to increase, it becomes
possible to move past it. Europe has arrived at those latter stages,
as has Canada. The US keeps bumping up against it, but it seems all
too plausible that it may not let go of this macho insanity until it
undergoes the kind of horrific experience with it Europe did in the
first half of the last century. The Europeans learned the hard way
what authoritarian assholes can do to a perfectly decent civilization,
and seem rather determined not to let their national bullies ever get
out of hand like that again. It's a lesson Americans seem quite
determined to learn the hard way as well.

Sara

[software visualization]

It's a lesson Americans seem quite determined to learn the hard way as well...

well isn't that the truth... it's so funny (and not ha ha funny) to watch conservatives go on and on about fascism then their heros Ann Coulter Chuck Norris Shawn Hannity will sit there and talk about killling them all and they don't get it that that's fascism.

As far as the other stuff goes, we have to agreee to disagree. It's not about how cultures are set up. Cultures can do crazy complicated things... whole cults kill themselves...holy cow!  but do we suppose the cult members don't all have the genetically determined impulse to go on living?  There's not a one-to-one between genes and behavior, so much less genes and cultural norms. That's not where the case is made.

Universally, men get angry when "their woman" (sorry!) cheat. If they catch them in delectico flagrante, across cultures pretty much, they're liable to kill one or both of them, or so say the statisitics. But the point is- he feels rage and jealousy, a trait he shares with other species who go to great and ingenious lengths to thwart cheating (and to cheat). People who walk in on the milk man / medicine man / whoever and his wife and don't experience rage and jealousy are  the exception and not the rule and in those cases, wherever they are, it's this fact that distinguishes the culture or person or subculture from the norm, and not just Amercia's norm or 20th century norms or Western civ's norms.

We accept that America is more militaristic than say, Finland. We feel we're coming down on the factually correct side of things when we attribute this to the culture and not the genes. If America were one of the few militaristic cultures in history (were that it were so) , we'd feel further justified in our belief- most nations aren't like that ! , we'd say.

But the same principle has to apply to unsavory aspects of human behavior as well. If there's a culture where males dont' get jealous and there is not the resultant dynamic that sometimes leads to murder as Buss lays out in The Murderer Next Door, then that's the exception and we say that culture has overcome the basic, universal template. That self-overcoming is one of the main purposes of culture, it teaches us to overcome our individual selfish impulses.

David Buss also did work on the politics of love and mate selection earlier in his career. He went across cultures, into Africa Asia Indai Native Amercian culture etc etc asking basic questions like - what do women look for in a man?" It might have varied across cultures... it could have.. why not, every culture is different, right? Beauty is a social construct , right? but, and here's the thing, it didn't. And there tons of baby-data across cultures that says, horrifyingly and unfairly, beauty is not a cultural construct inflicted on children .... faces children like to look at when they're neonates is what adults prefer in mates.

A good read in this direction is his own of course, but people like "Why Beautiful People Have More Baby Daughters". http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-People-Have-More-Daughters/dp/0399533656

What I like about these books is unlike political screeds, you may not like what the person is saying - for instance people,  wrongly, hate Richard Dawkins because they think he's a biolofgical determinist when he's not; there is no biological determinism- - but you are at least treated to some pretty heavy duty evidentiary based thinking, not just some guy's opinion dressed up as theory then presented as a "finding". If you want to refute theory then rebut the findings. Beautiful people have more daughters. Why? He gives a compelling case that it's advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.


Well it's late but I am looking forward to learning how we collectively can think up something we can do locally to get the country going in the right direction.

[Bob]

I've been following all this with some interest. For myself, I've been predicting - as a strong possibility - a second US civil war with the ultimate result being balkanization, or possibly that result in a sense that precludes the violence and gets straight to the geographic separation.

It's too late tonight to assemble my thoughts, so I'll try to remember to do it tomorrow. I don't think I really considered the climate change pressures and the sudden availability of northern resources into the equation, either.

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/21/2009 2:58:51 P.M. Central Standard Time, srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com writes:

Think The Unthinkable, which means standing 
up in front of people and talking very dispassionately about the 
various alternatives for, say, global nuclear war. "If we do this, 
only ten million people die. If we do that, the human race doesn't 
survive. Which alternative do you prefer, General?"

______

And what if the answer from a significant number of Generals is, "It doesn't matter.....the End Times are near and us good guys are going to Eternal Life?"

 

<<<<Unfortunately, we're also far more aware now that humans are not 
rational actors, and any theory of social change or economics that 
relies on that is fundamentally flawed.

 

Kind of makes you wish there really was a God in charge, doesn't it?

Scotty

 

 

[bluepilgrim]

Blue}
OTOH, economic conservatives (neoliberals?) have been touting the idea of people as fiscally rational, acting in their own best interests to make financial decisions -- which hasn't worked out.  There is a strange mix, and I'm not sure if this is liberal vs conservative and not some other dimension. Some (many?) liberals I've run into are very 'touchy feely' and not logical at all. I've found that logic is hard to find from anyone. Libs and cons both have their stories and can get trapped in them, and there is something to accusations of 'political correctness' -- although exaggerated and exploited by the cons for their agenda. As a progressive or libertarian or anarchist or socialist I can trash conservatives, liberals, conservatives, or any other grouping other than the one I am identifying with at the moment: they all get hung up on narratives and ideology.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum : there seems to be bounds to how ideology can be modeled -- much like all the theories of personality ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology , http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/a/bigfive.htm ).

Note that through all these theories there isn't much seen about logic and rationality as traits -- Mr. Spock and Mr. Data and distinctly non-human, and most computer based androids are depicted as monstrous, dangerous, or deficient in literature and movies, or potentially so. This is a problematic issue in artificial intelligence, and neuroscience/consciousness studies, and even cuts to the core of epistemology. It's a very difficult question, doing useful modeling of various dimensions and forces, much less how best to balance them.

The conservative mind set seems to have been advantageous in certain circumstances -- I guess that's part of the reason it evolved, although it seems to be also an intrinsic part of the possible neural physiology. But circumstances change, and what was once an advantage in some societies dealing some circumstances may become disadvantageous or even deadly in others: it could be just a local optimization which eventually leads to destruction or extinction now that we are not living in relatively small and limited environments with small populations. Humans, as a whole, may not be capable of surviving in a 'globalized' world.

[bluepilgrim]

At 06:55 11/22/2009, you wrote:
>This aligns closely with the observation of global peace negotiators
>that people -- both as individuals, and as nations -- only resort to
>violence when they are feeling a) disrespected and b) humiliated. In
>other words: they're a fuckee, and pissed about it.
>
>Not sure how much of this has to do with breeding; you can easily find
>this impulse in men who have no interest in perpetuating their genes
>whatsoever. But there's definitely a pride/honor/dignity thing at
>stake. And in the people who turn conservative, this idea is a) very
>strong and b) very fragile. I suspect the former is a direct
>consequence of the latter: its very fragility is why people are so
>obsessed with it.

Blue}
As a male I never had much interest in breast feeding babies, but I
still have nipples -- it's just part of the standard equipment for
any human, and doesn't need to be useful or goal directed to be part
of the genotype and phenotype. If this 'pissing contest' stuff ever
improves the odds of gene transmission then it can be passed on even
when it's no longer functional. That's the thing with evolution: it's
just a matter of mindless probability, not teleology or rational
sense. 'Evolution doesn't go backwards' (Dawkins) -- once a species
has a trait it's very unlikely that an alternative implementation
will arise because it would it likely lead to a lessening of
adaptability in the short term which would selected against:
basically the same mechanism as to why we are stuck with qwerty
keyboards even though a Dvorak is more efficient. It's why we
concentrate on short term profits instead of long term gain and
sustainability, even though it's destructive.

[Chris]

For what it's worth, the Right seems to take the same position here in
the UK:

"Analysis by the leftwing website Next Left has shown that the top 10
Tory bloggers are climate change sceptics."

20 Nov, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-denier-roger-helmer-church

On 22 Nov, 05:02, Scotty...@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 11/21/2009 12:07:01 P.M. Central Standard Time,  
>

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/21/2009 11:14:50 P.M. Central Standard Time, graphi...@gmail.com writes:

I may have, I don't recall specifically. I've seen various things over the years about the political calculus involved.

Still, in the end, it all boils down to "why I couldn't do the right thing."

_____

This was on last Fri nite.  That's what it was about.  LBJ wanted to do the right thing......but couldn't figure out what it was.  How would you decide, for example, whether we should or should not get out of Afghanistan, weighing all the possible options?

Scotty

[software visualization]

The conservative bias against climate change is interesting. IMHO their denial  stems from a fear of  losing individual freedom. 

The sort of *rugged individualism* that is their narrative and identity is threatened by the realization that, if global warming is real, then other people have a legitimate claim to controlling their behavior.

But this is what permits societal complexity of the sort that creates the modern world- people give up some aspect of what feels like their  "personal freedom" for something that is more abstract, indirect, and non-obvious kind of freedom and power. 

For example, when the automobile started to really take over from the horse, there were no small number of people who objected to the horse being relegated to second tier status. Roads were  built for cars and at a certain point where you could ride your horse began to be restricted. 

What the conservatives felt was that they were  giving up the power to go anywhere they wanted through whatever route suited them best for whatever reason it suited them. 

Imagine the freedom of  hopping on your horse and going anywhere you wanted across country or whatever. That is a very real freedom that was being  pushed out by the government's pushing the automobile on society. 

It's not surprising that they didn't like it and couldn't see the positive follow on implications of an auto-dominated world (I am not overlooking  the irony in that statement). 

So if global warming is true, they can see clearly enough that the hated green-liberals have a legitimate claim to controlling everyone's behavior. There are so many parts of that sentence they hate they have to froth at the mouth for five minutes before they can start attacking it.

For starters,they hate giving up anything ever; they're greedy and they're selfish. They're Ayn Randers, and proud of it. 

They especially hate giving up anything for the sake of any kind of "larger good" which is just socialism in disguise. 

They despise liberals and greens and giving up anything because of something the greens have been espousing is out of the question and feels like capitulation; conservatives were depressed after Obama won the election- losing hurts your soul, a lot. 

They have staked out a position vis-a-vis global very loudly and defiantly and to concede they were wrong on a matter of such great import, to back down to liberals, to back down to liberals for the sake of the greater good, to concede they were wrong on a matter in which the fate of the nation and indeed civilization depends and admit  liberals were right to demand that they  give something up for the greater good - well, that's never ever ever going to happen. They might as well commit mass suicide. 

So their resistance is rooted in their machismo, in a genetic fear of losing face and status which has combined poisonously with a hatred of anything anyone in the opposing camp says with a fear of change, a fundamentally  selfish approach to life and a refusal to give up something they feel they have (but Google "loss aversion" to see how compelling a force this is). 

Wow. How do we deal with all that?  

Ergo, global warming must be a fraud perpetrated on the world BY the green/liberals FOR THE PURPOSE of establishing an illegitimate power over populations. 

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/22/2009 10:52:19 A.M. Central Standard Time, bluep...@grics.net writes:

Humans, as a whole, may not be capable of surviving in a 'globalized' world.

_____

Then we'd better hurry up and evolve a species that can....

[Sara Robinson]

None of this is surprising when you consider that their definition of
manhood has two core pieces:

1) Men are the penetrators, not the penetratees (with all the control
issue this implies); and
2) Men are never dependent on anyone for anything ever. Other people
are dependent on *them.*

There is no room in that formulation for any sense of the common good.
No, wait: I take that back. There actually IS an authoritarian
definition of the common good; it's just that it's identical to
whatever is good for the patriarch.

This idea was at the core of feudalism. The lord was wholly
responsible for everything that happened to those who were dependent
on him, and had a nominal responsibility to act in ways that furthered
the good of that commons. In return, they were there to be used by
him, body and mind, in any way he saw fit -- whether it was putting
them to work, sending them to war, or submitting them to rape.

Some lords took this obligation very seriously, and exercised it with
tremendous prudence. Others, of course, abused their privileges
terribly. But if you can ever get a far-right winger to admit to any
sense of the "common good," this is about as far as you're going to get.

Since they no longer have the right to control the destinies of the
women, people of color, and low-status men whose service used to be
the big perk of being male, these men don't feel any obligation
whatsoever to them. They're only obligated to their dependents. When
these groups declared their independence, these would-be feudal lords
ceased to have any obligation to them. So be it. Let them make it on
their own, then.

Thing of it is: A lot of far-right-wing men really feel this loss.
They actually want to be able to make a deep commitment to taking care
of something or somebody. Their status as a man depends on this.
That's why they join the service (commitment to country), get married,
have kids. Since domination equals love in their worldview, they're
genuinely hurt when their wives and kids and small foreign countries
won't hold up their end of the deal, and allow themselves to be
dominated in return for this dedicated support and protection.

One fact supporting this is that the men who join white supremacist
movements overwhelmingly do so in the wake of 1) divorce or 2) job
loss. The bitch or the boss didn't need them any more. They're
shattered by this, and they're looking for someone to explain to them
why their devoted service was no longer required. Since self-
examination is one of the most intrusive forms of penetration, they
won't go there -- so explanations that let them project their own
inner demons onto those other lower-status groups are far more
attractive.

Of course, this whole discussion doesn't explain right-wing women, who
are a whole different psychological package.

Sara

[software visualization]

The idea presents itself to me that the basic tenant of being  an adult is to bow to reality .. to vigorously pursue the knowledge of what reality is and then strive to conform yourself, both inwardly in the form of attitudinal changes and outwardly in behavior, to what it is.  The punishment for failing to do this is running up against the brick wall of reality and being disappointed, disillusioned, disengaged, depressed and generally feeling as though you are NOT on top of it all and NOT very effective.. a bit of a failure. 

This is exactly what conservatives refuse to ever feel; they just won't  face these proper  consequences of their wrong thinking. They cheat at life in this very fundamental way. 

They systematically distort reality; they unjustly cut themselves in on a big heaping slice of "feeling good, feeling right !" when they ought to be feeling badly about having being proved wrong, which feelings should  result in them being less fanatical and energetic upon the outer world. Such a person  ought to dedicate energy to reviewing what in their thinking is leading them astray and correcting it.

I am thinking that one thing to do is to never mind trying to get them to buy in by providing a face saving cover and just find an effective way to force them to face how wrong they are so that the self righteousness goes out of them. I am not sure how to do this, but if we could do this, they would undergo, whether they like it or not, the series of emotions that they've been avoiding and in the process defuse themselves. 

What  is it that makes people willing to grow up and face reality? How does that process actually happen in people it does happen in? Is it public shaming or what is it? In the book, he says that many many fundamentalists harbor secret doubts about their beliefs, but they hide it from each other. He also says fundamentalists  suffer a high attrition rate due to the conflict their rigid belief structures create with what they otherwise know about reality... is this a clue to what we can do?  

[Sara Robinson]

I came across something lately -- IIRC, it was something Gary posted
last week or the week before -- that explained very strikingly why
this will never work.

The authoritarian mindset craves certainty above all. That's why
they're so quick to settle on the first explanation that fits into
their worldview -- and, once attached, so loathe to let go of it. They
simply have no skills to deal with ambiguity at all, and will seek
"premature closure" on almost any issue rather than let go, open up,
and entertain other possibilities. Doing that is surrendering to doubt
-- and they experience doubt as a very deep existential crisis.
Confronting that is psychically shattering, even when it's voluntary.

I've blogged at length at how that voluntary attrition happens, since
I've been the escort for several hundred fundamentalists who've made
that treacherous trek via a decade spent on a googlegroup devoted to
people leaving fundamentalism. And yes, you're right: their process is
very rich in clues for what can be done. Several times a year, we'll
get an e-mail -- usually time-stamped in the wee hours of the morning
-- that has this desperation to it. The message is always the same:
"Help. I've had doubts for a year, and they're not going away. I have
told no one. I am a deacon in my church. My parents will disown me. My
spouse will leave me. I will lose my job, my community, everything I
know and own. And yet I have to talk to somebody....."

They're heartbreaking, these notes, because the old-timers on the list
know these people are in for three to five years of ripping up their
whole reality structure by the floorboards and rebuilding their lives
on the new foundation.

I always ask them what the first glimmer was, the first doubt that
simply wouldn't go away. There are only a handful of recurring
answers. Far and away the most common one was finding out that someone
they really loved -- a brother, cousin, neighbor, co-worker -- was
gay, and trying to reconcile their church's teachings with what they
knew of this beloved friend. The contradictions were just too great,
and they finally put the first big crack in the closed logic loop
these people lived in.

A smaller group has the same experience with knowing atheists who are
good, moral people -- again, an impossibility according to their
church's teaching.

A third cracking point is betrayal by leadership. RWAs, pace
Altemeyer, are notorious for accepting all kinds of abuse from their
high-SDO leaders. But for at least some (not all) of the followers,
this loyalty can come apart when the leader does something that
directly, personally humiliates or materially harms the follower. It's
OK when the leader does it to other people (in fact, it just proves
his superior strength and thus his fitness to lead); but if he cheats
*you* out of money, allows *your* children to be harmed, or subjects
*you* to personal humiliation, all bets are off.

Yes, these are clues. The solutions they point to are pretty
straightforward, too. People are empowered to move outside the
authoritarian worldview by education that teaches them to trust their
own internal authority. They can be shaken loose by the kind of travel
that allows them to randomly interact with other cultures (not the
structured tours provided by Christian youth missions or military
service, but genuine mingling). Likewise, living in ethnic
neighborhoods helps. So, interestingly, does becoming competent at a
skilled trade, which develops inner authority as well as sophisticated
analytic abilities that eventually get applied to other areas of life
as well. (Yes, this does imply that a nation of citizens who are
doomed to McJobs is a nation that's inherently cognitively more
susceptible to authoritarianism.)

Public shaming, OTOH, does not work. In fact, it just confirms their
persecution complex and feeds their paranoia.

Sara


Altemeyer has noticed this, too. He told me that he sees thi

[bluepilgrim]

That's what culture is 'supposed to be' for. Along with epigenetics, maybe. Those are probably the two mechanism most capable of rapid adaptation -- but I'm not sure that the selection pressures are working out to meet the changes well. And, after all, almost all past species did go extinct.

[software visualization]

Is there some way I can gain access to any part of this group you're talking about?

It seems to me that what drives people away from extreme 'isms is, broadly speaking,  cognitive dissonance. 

--

[bluepilgrim]

I would look at the theories and praxis of Carl Rogers -- providing a
'safe place' which will not evoke the defense mechanisms -- for clues.

[software visualization]

OK so they get defensive and feel justified and persecuted (which reinforces everything inside them)  when confronted.. that's what I'm getting ... but just as fundamentalists        "convert" when faced with unpleasant truths, why is this not a step in the process, and a necessary one, in converting RWAs?

Imagine an RWA who comes to their senses. What was the full process? How do we know? What if what we see is only a part of the process and there are other parts, including being presented with information (they hate and marshal their defenses against)  which involuntarily induces cognitive dissonance which goes to work on them whether they like it or not....

I am not  saying I know, I don't. There's a very strong phenomena at work here, cog dis., which is in it's very nature as I understand it, immune to your voluntary participation. 

I want to check my cartoonish notion of RWAs here.... they're not a subspecies whose inner life is foreign to me and who possess a superhuman ability to deny reality. 

So my point is- 

what's the FULL process(es) and how do we know and if we don't how do we poke and probe that and see what we can see?

cog dis. is bigger than the defenses against it in it's very nature.. given enough battles, ti will win almost all the time (a hypo to be proven) and RWAs are not in general immune. We need a metric here, a way to measure. 

since I am an  interested actors in all this, I am interested in coming up with a way to unilaterally initiate cog dis. in RWAs in a way that maximizes the chance they'll engage in the  proper resolution of that cog. dis.. I want to act upon them in ways they can't practically evade. 

[Sara Robinson]

On Nov 22, 2009, at 6:50 16PM, software visualization wrote:

> OK so they get defensive and feel justified and persecuted (which
> reinforces everything inside them) when confronted.. that's what
> I'm getting ... but just as fundamentalists "convert" when
> faced with unpleasant truths, why is this not a step in the process,
> and a necessary one, in converting RWAs?

I think it *is* the major wedge in the process. I actually talked to
Dr. Altemeyer about this once. He said he often sees the undergrads at
the U of Manitoba going through this process. A lot of them are
prairie kids from impossibly small towns (Manitoba is North Dakota,
with more winter and fewer big cities and bright lights) whose worlds
have been very, very small and narrow. University life challenges
almost everything. They either make it, or they don't.

I went through this same process myself, coming from a fundie home in
a town that had the only stoplight for 170 miles in any direction to a
university in the middle of the second-largest city in the country.
The campus was four times the size of my whole hometown. "Cognitive
dissonance" does not begin to cover what those first couple years were
like.

Quite by chance, I landed in the Jewish dorm, which was both my exodus
and my salvation. Religion that values reason and doesn't insult the
intelligence -- who knew?

> Imagine an RWA who comes to their senses. What was the full process?
> How do we know? What if what we see is only a part of the process
> and there are other parts, including being presented with
> information (they hate and marshal their defenses against) which
> involuntarily induces cognitive dissonance which goes to work on
> them whether they like it or not....

I wrote a whole series on this. Go to www.dneiwert.blogspot.com, and
look in the sidebar on the left for links to "Cracks In The Wall" and
"Tunnels and Bridges." Most of what I know about this process is
contained in those seven or eight posts.

> I am not saying I know, I don't. There's a very strong phenomena at
> work here, cog dis., which is in it's very nature as I understand
> it, immune to your voluntary participation.

The thing is: it also unfolds at its own rate. I remember being told
things that sat in my head for four or five years, irritating like a
grain of sand inside an oyster, before they actually had any real
effect on my life. You never know what that thing is going to be for
any given person; or how long it will have to incubate before it
hatches into consciousness.

> So my point is-
>
> what's the FULL process(es) and how do we know and if we don't how
> do we poke and probe that and see what we can see?

As I said: I wrote a series on this, which is my best response.

> cog dis. is bigger than the defenses against it in it's very
> nature.. given enough battles, ti will win almost all the time (a
> hypo to be proven) and RWAs are not in general immune. We need a
> metric here, a way to measure.

I'm not sure you can get one without years of research -- but, as I
said below, there are a few things that seem to do the trick over and
over.

I've been struck at how common the "gay friend" and "atheist friend"
themes have been. Education absolutely helps. Exposure to other
cultures absolutely helps. Anything that strengthens internal
authority and confidence helps. These are the handful of silver
bullets we know about.

> since I am an interested actors in all this, I am interested in
> coming up with a way to unilaterally initiate cog dis. in RWAs in a
> way that maximizes the chance they'll engage in the proper
> resolution of that cog. dis.. I want to act upon them in ways they
> can't practically evade.

Spoken like a true AI guy. Unfortunately, programming humans isn't
nearly as reliable as programming computers: the wetware has a nasty
way of generating its own bugs. It's a very stochastic process that
doesn't lend itself well to being codified into a fool-proof routine.

Sara

[bluepilgrim]

There's Rogers' non-directive therapy, and Glasser's reality therapy, and cognitive therapy, and behavior modification, and transactional analysis, and all the rest -- but I keep thinking about the alcoholic or drug addict and what it takes to get them to change at all, and I don't know. I don't know how much a physiological basis there is -- it might be like trying to use talk therapy on a schizophrenic or O/C.
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? 

The other approach is to let them be as they are but get them away from power so they can't screw up everything.  That seems to entail exposing them to the normal people who are befuddled by them -- get them to turn off hate radio, for example, and educate them as to what the right wing is and what they are doing.

[software visualization]

Quite by chance, I landed in the Jewish dorm, which was both my exodus
and my salvation. Religion that values reason and doesn't insult the
intelligence -- who knew?

Amen. Jews are great in this regard. I'm always friends with Jews where ever I live.. they talk about, you know, real things in intelligent ways. 

Spoken like a true AI guy 

But I'm not an AI guy as per my earlier post. The only reason I said I want to impose it on them unilaterally is because that's got to be the practical starting point; they're not coming  over to dinner and they're not asking to be changed. In the book, he mentions that  fundamentalists proselytize  because otherwise their ranks would empty through attrition. Are we proactive like that? No we're liberals and we live and let live. That only makes sense if the other side isn't busy lobbying to destroy the earth. 

there's a LOT fo things we dont' do that they do where it works out that they answer people's needs while we sort of look on and offer no assistance. I'm not talking about charity I'm talking about interpreting reality and giving people a framework in which to think.Conservatives  take all the little daily things up with people and then spin it into a little fundamentalist lesson. have you ever listened to fundamentalist TV or radio? It's all about the little things of  daily life... the problems in living people have... very mundane stuff that they get help with with a dose of Jesus Christ.... this is not insignificant.

Maybe the best way that someone's mind changes has a different starting point, but that's by definition not under anyone's control and anyway we apparently can't rely on it to produce results in a timely fashion. Someones got to DO something that has a SOME beneficial effect, whatever the failure rate or inefficiency of it all as compared to going au natural.  

[software visualization]

I will look at the site you linked to tomorrow, thank you !

[Sara Robinson]

The thing is: all of this requires a basic willingness to self-
reflect, which your average RWA is absolutely terrified to do. I mean:
they have no skills for it. They're out of their depth. They've been
taught that people in external authority are the only valid judges of
their character and performance (a lesson our school system was
deliberately designed to inculcate); and they're often not even quite
able to name a single desire of their own.

One of the things we do with recovering fundies to ease them into
paying attention to their own internal states is "yum and yuck"
therapy (which I devised many years ago). Basically, we give them
permission to find three things in their lives that they really,
really enjoy -- small indulgences -- and indulge. Have a sundae. Spend
an extra five bucks on the really cushy socks. Take as long a shower
as you want. Find your yums, and pursue them.

At the same time, find three things in your life that are minor
annoyances, and excise them from your presence. This can be as small
as fixing the front door squeak or tossing the kitchen tool that never
quite worked right and peeves you every time you use it; or as large
as no longer taking phone calls from that old friend who no longer
adds anything positive to your life.

For people who've never been allowed to express their own wants and
desires or set their own personal boundaries, taking these small steps
can be a revelation. They're the first baby steps in trusting yourself
to make good decisions about your own life -- and once the habit gets
started, most of them find it very hard to go back.

Sara

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/22/2009 7:20:48 P.M. Central Standard Time, srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com writes:

But for at least some (not all) of the followers, 
this loyalty can come apart when the leader does something that 
directly, personally humiliates or materially harms the follower

_______

I have been astounded at the hypocrisy that various mega-church ministers and TV Evangelists have gotten away with, and am particularly fascinated by the "cures" claimed for homosexuality, etc.

Almost seems to me that there is nothing these men can do that will matter a whole lot......short of something like what the Pentacostal minister who joined the Universalists in Tulsa did.

Scotty

[Sara Robinson]

Max Blumenthal plumbed this paradox brilliantly in "Republican
Gomorrah." He points out that a public figure can pretty much get away
with anything in America as long as their "redemption" process
involves making the proper gestures of obesiance to the evangelical
God, preferably with the very public help of his anointed ministers
(who always appreciate the publicity, and will grant indulgences in
return for it).

By the same token, those caught in scandal who don't do the pro forma
redemption ballet are never, ever forgiven. (Teddy Kennedy and Bill
Clinton -- both of whom refused -- could tell you all about this.)
It's not about Democrats and Republicans. It's apparently about making
the right gestures in the right rituals in front of the right people.

Max also talked about the "culture of personal crisis" that's really
central to RWA America. Everybody has to have a testimony of fall and
redemption -- it provides much of the emotional drama that right-wing
culture runs on. That's why Sarah Palin's soap opera of a family was
actually a plus. These people looked at her and saw themselves and
their own family challenges. They figured she understood. God forgave
her, so they were bound to.

Stepping back from that, Altemeyer pointed out that RWA followers
never convict members of their own tribe, who are always forgiven.
It's only outsiders who are held to whatever "moral" standards they're
espousing. I think it also has to do with the core conservative belief
that all humans are fallen; they expect no better, and aren't
surprised, so they forgive each other readily. It's those of us on the
outside, who willfully insist on consistency and consequences, who are
the cruel and heartless ones persecuting the decent folks of the
country -- while at the same time living shameless, unrepentant
libertine lives that drain us of the moral authority to judge.

Twisted, yes, but that's how they see it.

Sara

[bluepilgrim]

It's a good idea, I think. Strangely, it's much like a thing I
preached a few years ago about helping people get organized to oppose
the right wing: start a pinochle club. Organize something -- anything
-- and build a network of people and some organizational and
management skills. But, again, this is to learn basic skills and
habit which authoritarianism has thwarted by training people to feel
helpless (and depressed...). Yes -- authoritarianism is largely a
cheap substitute for real personal empowerment. Zombies and droids...

[bluepilgrim]

Somebody was talking about this -- was it Republican Gomorra? There is the idea of the fallen being forgiven and coming back into the fold as being almost a requisite to be in the fold.

[Sara Robinson]

Uh...you mean like Drinking Liberally, which has become the national
network of weekly meetups for liberals across the country? It's also
spun off Laughing Liberally (which meets in comedy clubs), Living
Liberally (which meets in homes)....and so on. Go ahead: Google it.

We even have a Drinking Liberally for expat Americans here in
Vancouver. Unfortunately for me, it's on the other end of town.

"Authoritarianism is largely a cheap substitute for real personal
empowerment." That needs to be a T-shirt.

Sara

[Sara Robinson]

Yeah, that was me, a couple weeks back.

Sara

[Bob]

Done! http://www.zazzle.com/the_anti_authoritarian_shirt-235978171263940178?group=kids&lifestyle=classic&rf=238308253102024501

I almost gave up on it until I saw it on a kid's t-shirt. That could be all kinds of fun, in certain school districts.

[Nyc Labrets]

My friend, David Schell, is a cartoonist and a lot of his work over the past few years is dead centered on RWAs and he's also had a focus on the 'Manhood' theme you speak of.

You can find his work here:

http://www.mrdrinkwater.com/cartoons/

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Sara Robinson <srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com> wrote:

I was struck by how many times LBJ talked about having to keep Nixon
and Goldwater off his back. He was really afraid of the political
consequences of doing the peaceable thing.

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier today about political
issues getting "gendered." LBJ's manhood was on the line; the
conservatives have made it all about Not Being A Wuss, which
forecloses any kind of rational conversation, negotiation, de-
escalation, or positive overtures toward people the cons think (for
whatever reason) should be our bitches. It's polluted the whole
national character, and our politics.

I'm telling you: how they define "manhood" is right at the core of
this thing. To put it bluntly, the conservative worldview only
recognizes two kinds of people: fuckers and fuckees. And anybody who
isn't the fucker isn't a man, and thus not a trustworthy leader.

Sara

On Nov 21, 2009, at 9:10 PM, Scot...@aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 11/21/2009 2:23:27 P.M. Central Standard Time, graphi...@gmail.com
>  writes:
> I just watched a documentary featuring Robert McNamara looking back
> upon the Vietnam war. Honestly, I was very proud of him. Few people
> have the courage to face and admit wrongs of such magnitude with
> such grace. It was the act of a grownup.
> ____
> Did you see the thing on Bill Moyer with the conversations of LBJ
> and various military and cabinet members?  All the things he had to
> consider about getting further into or out of the Vietnam war.
> Sounded just like what any one of us would have worried
> about......and what is probably making Obama crazy right now (among
> other things),

> Scotty
>
> --
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "The Authoritarians" group.
> To post to this group, send email to theautho...@googlegroups.com
> .
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to theauthoritari...@googlegroups.com
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> .

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--
"We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."  

PirateBay

FTW

[Gary Williams]

There's an expat Vietnam Vet up here in Kamloops who has been very vocal about Canadian Forces involvement in turning over prisoners to Afghan and American CIA knowing they'll be  tortured. John MacNamer?
He's also a member of LAW (Lawyers Against the War) So he writes well enough that his articles have been published in some major media. Google his name for the full story.

Gary

[Nyc Labrets]

As our Über-SD Karl Rove so succinctly pointed out American politics is: 

"Fifty plus One".

Which means that in any given election the SDs can count on roughly one third of the vote being the RWA vote and that's in their back pocket.

Always.

So to get from 33% to 51% all they need to do is pick up about 18% of the voters.

And the SDs have some pretty awesome machinery in their arsenal to get them there.

Do you know anybody that's got a trillion dollar network of satellites hovering in space in low geo-synchronous orbit beaming their signal down 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to 150+ million US households and, on top of that the wherewithal to pay the multi-million dollar salaries of say actors like Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, like Walt Disney/GE/Murdoch/Bill Gates/Time Warner does?

Neither do I.

The last US Presidential Election was insanely close. 

Sarah Palin got 46% of the vote.

46%

By rights, given all that was going on in the US last September/October, there is *no way* that Palin should have gotten more than 35% of the vote.

So where did they pick up that other +10%?

Circle around it as much as you want and the answer always comes back to that damn TV in the living room.

That is pretty much what we're up against, and short of launching our own satellite network, or an EMP burst taking out theirs, I don't really see a way to combat them on their terms.

They own not only the skies, but the MindSpace of the General Populace as well.

Standby, the last 300 days of Tea Bags, Inchoate Purple Faced Town Hall Rage and Death Panels have been nothing more than them clearing their throats. 

If you think 2009 was bad, in the coming year/s, the words of Ronald Reagan, 'you ain't seen nuthjin' yet' will certainly ring true.

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Sara Robinson <srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com> wrote:

I doubt it's as high as 40%. I've been trying to get a handle on their
true numbers for the past few years, using things like Rush's and
Beck's listener base, voting Republicans, membership in evangelical
churches, and so on. Most of what I find pretty roughly correlates to
Dr. Altemeyer's guess that 12-15% of the population are the hard core,
with about that many again capable of going there if sufficiently
stressed.

So -- call it a quarter of the country. Which is enough, when you
consider that Hitler took power with the support of just 28% of the
German people. What worries me more is that these folks are no longer
interested in the processes of democracy. They've been there, done
that, got bloody little to show for it -- and are now gearing up for a
shooting war, which is the only way that small a faction really can
get control over the rest of the culture. (Think of a small Southern
town dominated by the KKK or a corrupt sheriff; an urban neighborhood
in thrall to a gang; or a city ruled by a family of mobsters. If
you're willing to make occasional demonstrations of violence, you can
terrorize everyone into compliance. It ain't democracy, but hey.)

People keep trying to compare this era to the 1930s. And there are
some good parallels to be drawn. But on this front, I'm thinking it
may be more like the 1850s, when the abolitionists -- who had been
pressing their case for 30 years by that point -- started getting
aggressive and pushing the country toward a crisis point on the
slavery issue. The raid on Harper's Ferry demonstrated that they felt
quite justified in to using violence to get their way; the war started
just three years later.

The anti-gay-rights and anti-choice activists very much see themselves
carrying on the work of abolition, and are rapidly pushing the issue
just the same way again. They, too, have already demonstrated that
they're willing to kill over this issue.

And it's happening on the left, too, as general frustration and
desperation over climate change builds. The left is not ready to start
killing, but I don't think things can go on past 2010 before they
start looking outside the system for solutions.

All this stuff is on a J-curve, and we're hitting some kind of
inflection point. From here, my gut feeling (there's a piece of
futures that's just intuition, and mine on this stuff is
extraordinarily good) is that things on all these fronts are going to
start moving faster. But if Altemeyer's right, we'll never see a day
that they're more than 25-30% of the whole.

Sara

On Nov 21, 2009, at 10:53 PM, software visualization wrote:

> software engineer. Studied cog sci. at the University of California.
> Silicon valley for a number of years then here there everywhere
> specializing in HCI (human computer interface) main focus on
> increasing the tractability of very complex, ad hoc systems,
> specifically creating tools to help us contain and fathom this kind
> of complexity.
>
> Interested in this group b/c I think time is running out for global
> warming and about 40% of the people in my country (the US) appear to
> be more or less permanently and dangerously insane-http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/09/24/wsjnbc-poll-voters-doubt-palins-qualifications-to-be-president/
>   and "these kinds of people" we very well described in The
> Authoritarians.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 10:04 AM, <Scot...@aol.com> wrote:
> I keep wondering with this group, what people's "fields" are.  Most
> of you seem to be talking psych or sociology talk.  I wonder if we
> might sort of let each other know interests and credentials.
>
> As you've no doubt figured out, I read a lot and love to play with
> ideas, although I undoubtedly go off the deep end sometimes.  I'm a
> Physical Therapist, masters in Clinical Neuroscience and Health Care
> Management.  Interests in Environmental biology and psych, political
> stuff, comparative religion, photography, classical music,
> philosophy.  Old lady who should have retired years ago, but was
> having too much fun to do that.

[software visualization]

I read about it in the Authoritarians... it's the fact hat because these religions have built in, ritualistic automated forgiveness mechanisms they permit the adherents to do the WORST things knowing all the while they have only to pull the forgiveness lever, actually feel bad (for a little while) and they'll be made all right with the world.  

Most recently in the news this applies to the creeps in C-Street,  Sen. Ensign and Sen.  Sanford, both of whom are about to lose their positions. For anyone who doesn't know about this merry band of psychopaths here's a  back-grounder and in-depther and also you can learn about them from Rachel Maddow's show if you've an video type. 

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-26/conspiracy-on-c-street/ 

http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060560053

[software visualization]

OK so what I am understanding is, you may be able to induce cognitive dissonance in them, but they'll never figure out how  to resolve it properly because they lack the skills.

I once saw a TV expose in which a faith healer was caught red-handed pretending to know things about his followers and their ailments through the "power of the lord" when in reality it was being fed to him through  an ear piece by his wife who was working from a database filled with information about  the people who was seeking his services. It's a famous case and maybe you  can name this guy, I've forgotten his name. 

The expose team  interviewed one of his believers postmortem, showing her the tape of what the husband and wife were doing as they were actually doing it , and this believer just looks into the camera and says "I know he's a man of God.. yadda yadda yadda...." 

End of expose.

At the time I remember thinking , "Well, that's that. I couldn't do better than they did and, damn, it didn't work ! These people  are just incorrigible.".

But think about this- how do I know "that was that"? It's not like the expose did a longitudinal on this woman to see if the dart she got stuck with had effects that played  out over the long term. In fact, I don't  know that what I thought was true, but worse, I've been harboring and acting upon that false knowledge for years.

I have to admit I had no idea there was anyone in this world doing it the inestimable favor of shepherding "fundies" away from their destructive lifestyle. I have  a million questions  and will attempt to self answer them by pursuing the links you provided. It doesn't need to be said that you have in depth experiences and  detailed knowledge while I have only my limited personal experience combined with conjecture combined with a strong impulse to "do something" - a known-to-be-fatal brew. So in these circumstances the right thing for me to do is to apply the scientific method as much as I understand it.

In that spirit, my project for myself is to start out by asking myself ' what do we know and how do we know it? '. Altermeyer's book is the first and only book I've seen that directly addresses this as a matter of science as opposed to speculation or philosophy. I'll take whatever it is you're doing as a source of data now.

Have you though that perhaps there's a sampling  bias at work in your observation? So in other words you have an accurate picture of people  you've work with , but they're a  self  selected group. They report truly on their inner process (let's assume) and more, those inner processes are shared with others of their kind, but what knowledge do we have about fundies in the wild who self-heal and never report it to anyone, another "self selected" group in a sense? 

If I have a representative sample of a target population and I dose that sample with an unqualified :( and unquantified amount of :( cognitive dissonance, what happens? What's the distribution of say, people who get worse, people who ignore it, people who self-heal and people who show up to your doorstep (or whatever). We know they attrit owing to "just things that happen in the world".. hypocrisy of their leaders, or that Oprah show they saw, or that book they read, or that friend they met. Things effect them, they're not in a bubble, not really. We need to effect those things or effect the world so it effects those things. 

If I were the Association of the Wicked Witches of The West , one thing I'd be grateful for is anyone who spread the rumour that we're immune to glasses of  water. 

But this is something of what I am hearing from our side- they're immune to reason and they cannot be influenced through any activity we undertake unilaterally. 

If that's true, then this phenomena stands alone among all other natural  phenomena in this regard. I don't buy it. 

I am not saying I know anything special, in fact I'm openly admitting my ignorance which is probably shot through and  through with false assumptions, biases, prejudice and personalizations,  and I am not saying anyone else is wrong about what they've learned. I'm saying I don't  believe we can't influence this terrible situation through and influence it without securing their active cooperation. 

* and now, a moment of geek* --> In the Matrix, there's  a scene where Neo accepts that they're going to try to get Morpheous  out of the secure building where he's being tortured by the Agents. He thinks for a minute about how to execute and finally says, "Guns. We need lots of guns".   

Knowledge. We need lots of knowledge.

[software visualization]

If you want to switch to a phone carrier that contributes a percentage of their profits to liberal causes (and stop funding your enemies in the process) there's www.credomobile.com 

[Sara Robinson]

Satirist "General J.C Christian" at the blog "Jesus' General" also
does a magnificent send-up of this.

Sara

> "We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would
> rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the
> ashes."
>
> PirateBay
>
> FTW
>

[Sara Robinson]

Let's not overstate the case. Sarah Palin got probably 20-25% of the
vote -- the crazy right part.

The rest John McCain already had nailed down on his own. That includes
fiscal conservatives and military conservatives -- which are
considerably lower in RWA concentration than Sarah's bloc -- and
independents, many of them over 50, who simply liked the old guy.

He had enough support from these people to win the nomination, but the
religious right *hated* him. Nominating Palin was throwing them a
bone, and it turned out not to be a big enough bone.

So I think it's really inaccurate to say that "Sarah Palin got 46% of
the vote." Probably better than half of McCain's supporters didn't
like her at all.

BTW: the number of Americans who self-identify as Republican right now
is down around 20-22% in polls over the past couple months. Palin's
base is noisy and way too large for a fringe movement; but trust me,
I've been counting, and they're nowhere near 30% of the population.

Sara

> "We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would
> rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the
> ashes."
>
> PirateBay
>
> FTW
>

[Sara Robinson]

On Nov 23, 2009, at 6:57 58AM, software visualization wrote:

> OK so what I am understanding is, you may be able to induce
> cognitive dissonance in them, but they'll never figure out how to
> resolve it properly because they lack the skills.

Not exactly. It's just that there's tremendous variance -- in which
issues will induce the dissonance, in how quickly it soaks in, in how
they deal with it when it finally does. These are individuals, and
they all process it in their own way.

And yet the fact remains that two-thirds of people raised in
fundamentalist homes are no longer fundamentalist by the age of 40.
So, obviously, this process works for a majority of people.

Again (I keep saying this, but I don't know that you're hearing me) --
there *are things that work*, and fairly reliably, too. Travel,
education, exposure to people from feared groups, and learning a
skilled trade. All of these set up the conditions that both induce
dissonance, and also induce people to learn new skills to deal with it.

> I once saw a TV expose in which a faith healer was caught red-handed
> pretending to know things about his followers and their ailments
> through the "power of the lord" when in reality it was being fed to
> him through an ear piece by his wife who was working from a
> database filled with information about the people who was seeking
> his services. It's a famous case and maybe you can name this guy,
> I've forgotten his name.

There have been a couple. Marjoe Gortner was one. I think another was
named Peter Popiel.

> But think about this- how do I know "that was that"? It's not like
> the expose did a longitudinal on this woman to see if the dart she
> got stuck with had effects that played out over the long term. In
> fact, I don't know that what I thought was true, but worse, I've
> been harboring and acting upon that false knowledge for years.

Exactly. You don't know if she didn't harbor that seed in her heart
for years, and remembered it the next time some televangelist blew up
publicly. Though, as noted, it works better if they think the betrayal
is personal.

> In that spirit, my project for myself is to start out by asking
> myself ' what do we know and how do we know it? '. Altermeyer's book
> is the first and only book I've seen that directly addresses this as
> a matter of science as opposed to speculation or philosophy. I'll
> take whatever it is you're doing as a source of data now.
>
> Have you though that perhaps there's a sampling bias at work in
> your observation? So in other words you have an accurate picture of
> people you've work with , but they're a self selected group. They
> report truly on their inner process (let's assume) and more, those
> inner processes are shared with others of their kind, but what
> knowledge do we have about fundies in the wild who self-heal and
> never report it to anyone, another "self selected" group in a sense?

I'd never claim that my observations constitute "science" of any kind.
It's absolutely true that my sample, while large, is self-selected.
I've known a fair number of self-healers and checked my findings with
them, and it seems to corroborate, though -- or, at least, there's
scant evidence that their process is any different.

The other validation is that I've also given a lot of thought to how
people join religions -- both fundamentalism and other minority
religions -- and the inbound trip has some marked similiarities to the
outbound trip. This is true across various religions, age, and ethnic
groups, which suggests that there are some core events that make
people amenable to this kind of deep onotological shift.

> If I have a representative sample of a target population and I dose
> that sample with an unqualified :( and unquantified amount of :
> ( cognitive dissonance, what happens? What's the distribution of
> say, people who get worse, people who ignore it, people who self-
> heal and people who show up to your doorstep (or whatever). We know
> they attrit owing to "just things that happen in the world"..
> hypocrisy of their leaders, or that Oprah show they saw, or that
> book they read, or that friend they met. Things effect them, they're
> not in a bubble, not really. We need to effect those things or
> effect the world so it effects those things.

To me, it's not a coincidence that the rise of authoritarianism has
coincided with the decline in American education, the de-skilling of
the workforce, and the fact that Americans are less likely to have
passports than any other people in the industrialized world. (American
passport holders vote liberal three to one.) So, if you're going to
change the world, you need to 1) give kids a real education that
includes critical thinking skills; 2) empower small business ownership
and improve trade education (I'm in favor of a European-type system);
and 3) greatly increase the number of exchange student and
international study programs, which used to be common in the 50s
through the 70s.

It would take a decade, but these are the kinds of efforts that seem
to inoculate a culture against authoritarian thinking patterns.

> If I were the Association of the Wicked Witches of The West , one
> thing I'd be grateful for is anyone who spread the rumour that we're
> immune to glasses of water.
>
> But this is something of what I am hearing from our side- they're
> immune to reason and they cannot be influenced through any activity
> we undertake unilaterally.
>
> If that's true, then this phenomena stands alone among all other
> natural phenomena in this regard. I don't buy it.

You shouldn't. This belief is an artifact of short-term thinking. We
liberals like to think that one well-reasoned argument should be
enough to dispel clouds of ignorance, prejudice, and fear. And we get
very frustrated when people hold onto beliefs in the face of our most
rational arguments.

But this is a very short-term view. These people didn't get where they
are in the span of a half-hour conversation, and they're not going to
get out of it that way, either.

College works because it takes kids out of their familiar contexts and
forces them to deal with an ongoing set of new situations that are
designed to improve their critical thinking skills, along with piles
of new information that challenge their narrow worldview. They're
forced to open their minds to deal with it all. (Some of them don't,
and end up packing it in after the first semester -- but one wonders
if a lot of those go home too much changed as well.) The university is
designed from the get to get people out of parochial thinking, and
after all these centuries, it still works.

The solutions include anything that get more people into situations
that challenge their narrow assumptions and (perhaps more importantly)
teach them to get comfortable with ambiguity. It's pretty much that
simple.

Sara

[Daryl Northrop]

Hello!

I am currently a grad-school student at George Washington University
in Washington DC. I am in the Graduate School of Political Management,
www.gspm.org , studying organizing and campaign management.

I have been active with the Green Party since 2000, and have worked
with the Greens in organizing, and ran for U.S. Senate in 2004 (Iowa).

After graduation, I am interested in further helping Green Party
candidates in the northern VA/MD/DC area, along with advancing Instant
Runoff Voting/Ranked Choice voting as a solution to the "spoiler
problem."

Happy Holidays to all!

Daryl Northrop

[bluepilgrim]

Just to toss another voice into the mix, there is this
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/23-2
Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Those Who Follow Sarah Palin are Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Destruction
The former Alaska governor represents thwarted aspirations and brooding resentment. But she backs policies which would increase them
by Gary Younge

In the film, The American President, the president's speechwriter Lewis Rothschild (played by Michael J Fox) appeals to the commander-in-chief to take a firm, clear stand against the Right. "People want leadership, Mr President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone." he says. "They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."

The president (played by Michael Douglas) retorts that the American electorate's problem is not a lack of leadership but an undiscerning palate.

"We've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight," he says. "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."
[...]

I don't know -- it's hard to figure. I've always had a hard time dealing with sheer stupidity in people -- it's like trying to operate some machine that has the control mechanisms busted or listen to a radio that has an intermittent volume control and keeps cutting out every few seconds: if I can't fix I want to just trash it.

I told a guy early on that what Bush said made no sense, and he told it was just he started out in New England and then went to Texas so he has a strange accent.  I feel like Charlie Brown in http://www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/youre_a_good_man_charlie_brown_soundtrack/little_known_facts-lyrics-226047.html
LUCY
Do you see that tree?
it is a Fir tree.
It's called a Fir tree because it gives us fur,
For coats,
It also gives us wool in the wintertime.
[...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqkA3HtsUx4

Lucy Van Pelt -- Sarah Palin -- how do you tell them apart?
We got an archetype here which Jung missed?

This is not a unique thought: 
http://www.undiplomatic.net/2008/10/06/i-knew-lucy-van-pelt/
On Friday, Atrios made the following observation:
Am I the only one who thought Palin was channeling Lucy Van Pelt last night?
[...]

Of course, all of those Peanuts characters are supposed to be little kids, and Peanuts is supposed to be entertainment while politics is not (supposedly).  We got trouble, right here in River City! We need a BOYS' BAND!

Maybe it's time for some better art and culture to sway the masses.

[bluepilgrim]

At 17:57 11/23/2009, you wrote:

On Nov 23, 2009, at 6:57 58AM, software visualization wrote:

> OK so what I am understanding is, you may be able to induce 
> cognitive dissonance in them, but they'll never figure out how  to 
> resolve it properly because they lack the skills.

Not exactly. It's just that there's tremendous variance -- in which 
issues will induce the dissonance, in how quickly it soaks in, in how 
they deal with it when it finally does. These are individuals, and 
they all process it in their own way.

And yet the fact remains that two-thirds of people raised in 
fundamentalist homes are no longer fundamentalist by the age of 40. 
So, obviously, this process works for a majority of people.

Again (I keep saying this, but I don't know that you're hearing me) -- 
there *are things that work*, and fairly reliably, too. Travel, 
education, exposure to people from feared groups, and learning a 
skilled trade. All of these set up the conditions that both induce 
dissonance, and also induce people to learn new skills to deal with it.

Blue}
There is an interesting video available:
http://www.youtube.com/stanford#p/search/1/NOAgplgTxfc
Stanford's Sapolsky On Depression in U.S. (Full Lecture)
From: StanfordUniversity | November 10, 2009 | 4,943 views
Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky, posits that depression is the most damaging disease that you can experience. Right now it is the number four cause of disability in the US and it is becoming more common. Sapolsky states that depression is as real of a biological disease as is diabetes.

I'm thinking there are some parallels between depression (belief in not being able to make a difference is part of it, as is inability to feel pleasure), and AP -- not the same thing, but maybe with similar structures. Sapolsky talks about depression as being part genetic and part repetition of trauma -- being triggered at maybe the 5th or 6th significant loss, and also about the biological mechanisms involving neurotransmitters. Watching this, and pretending he is talking about AP instead of depression leads to some interesting ideas.

On the other hand, there is also the thought that repeated crises of cognitive dissonance may eventually trigger a change away from AP.  It's possible to 'spontaneously' recover from depression too.

To me, it's not a coincidence that the rise of authoritarianism has 
coincided with the decline in American education, the de-skilling of 
the workforce, and the fact that Americans are less likely to have 
passports than any other people in the industrialized world. (American 
passport holders vote liberal three to one.) So, if you're going to 
change the world, you need to 1) give kids a real education that 
includes critical thinking skills; 2) empower small business ownership 
and improve trade education (I'm in favor of a European-type system); 
and 3) greatly increase the number of exchange student and 
international study programs, which used to be common in the 50s 
through the 70s.

It would take a decade, but these are the kinds of efforts that seem 
to inoculate a culture against authoritarian thinking patterns.

Blue}
I suspect it is not just education, per se, but the emotional and sociological lessons snuck in as part of the authoritarian structures so often found in public education. Carl Rogers also wrote a book On Learning which also dealt with the issues of personal empowerment and B-values, and self-directed education. For me, public school was a soul-killer, and I've met lots of people who seemed to have been struggling with the same thing. It's not just lack of critical thinking but the spirit to think and fell for oneself, outside the propaganda boxes.

Education is one of the recurring themes Arthur Silber discusses at http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/ -- a treasure trove of intelligent analysis on all of this (and the proof of the quality may be that he is barely scraping by from month to month -- when he should be well paid as a national treasure).

Check out http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html (and the bathtub story) Pure gold!

[Bob]

I just ran into this and add it to the pile of fact in evidence.

http://ampedstatus.com/the-critical-unraveling-of-us-society

It's a pretty damning record and stems from policy changes that date back to Regan.

However, in terms of the rise of RWA mindsets, I would have to suspect the ongoing sabotage of public education, in part due to a covert policy by Theocons dating back to the eighties. People who are desperate, angry and stupid are much more likely to pay a (up to) thirty percent tithe while bitching about taxes that those who might just whip out a calculator and do the math. :>

[Sara Robinson]

I adore Arthur Silber, and am honored that he's linked to my stuff on
a few occasions.

I'm also stunned at your facility with academic research. If I ever
write a book on this stuff, can I hire you?

Sara

[bluepilgrim]

At 20:28 11/23/2009, you wrote:
>I adore Arthur Silber, and am honored that he's linked to my stuff on
>a few occasions.
>
>I'm also stunned at your facility with academic research. If I ever
>write a book on this stuff, can I hire you?
>
>Sara

I'm not allowed to make money. I'm on SSI disability and anything I
get reduces the SSI and other benefits, and the paperwork is
horrendous. I'd have to make a huge amount to offset the
disadvantages -- and I'm not really up to that much work anyway.
I can work for free, however -- although all I know is what I can
read on the internet (and fully half my brain is spelled g-o-o-g-l-e). :-D

Now Silber ... he could really use some money (and so could his cats,
which may be more important, being a superior life form)! And he
seems to be better at it than I am. You might even want to
collaborate with him on a book.

[Gary Williams]

I think that was Peter Popoff, and the one doing the expose' was James Randi and his team. What gets me about that event is how Popoff could be exposed as a con artist yet continue to appear on our TV sets performing the identical fraud (faith healing) on his TV audience. You or I would have a tough time working the till at a gas station  after such a public display of creepiness, yet he is allowed by our legal authorities to continue his fraud using the public airwaves! What gives with that?

Anyhow, James Randi is of course an interesting person in his right. He makes his living exposing beliefs that have no foundation in reality.  He has a "sceptics" website and e-list called JREF.

[software visualization]

I keep saying this, but I don't know that you're hearing me) --
there *are things that work*, and fairly reliably, too. Travel,
education, exposure to people from feared groups, and learning a
skilled trade

I hear you ! 

Thanks Sara!

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/23/2009 11:31:50 A.M. Central Standard Time, srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com writes:

BTW: the number of Americans who self-identify as Republican right now 
is down around 20-22% in polls over the past couple months. Palin's 
base is noisy and way too large for a fringe movement; but trust me, 
I've been counting, and they're nowhere near 30% of the population.

_____

Hard to say......depends on what poll you trust.

I'm having a heck of a time keeping up with this list......ideas flying all over the place.....and so little time to try to catch them all.

Scotty

[Bob]

And (though it may not SEEM to be the case most days) - the Internet. Making it cheap, fast and ubiquitous is possibly one of the most powerful ways of cracking the mindset. Which reminds me of things I've read about Google Chrome - which is a thin web/OS which is designed to make it possible to do most things most people do on laptops and desktops into a device cheap enough to package with low-end wi-fi/phone plans.

One thing that probably frustrates all of us here is the persistent stupidity of RWA rank&file proponents. But this reminds me of something. Do you recall that up until 2004ish, there were rather a lot of people on the net who were fairly articulate and skilled in presenting arguments for the Bush Agenda, that general viewpoint and mindset, and doing so in a relatively respectful way? After that, they disappeared one by one (In inverse order to potential compensation, one suspects.)

Now.... well, there are a few cynical exploiters, a great number of overt tools, and meanwhile, public opinon on HRC with a public option is hovering around 70%, and climbing. This is despite it being utterly in opposition to even mainstream US conservative thought (Not that such a stream exists at the moment).

In essence, it seems that the Internet has become the progressive media; one that by it's nature makes passive interaction less likely than newspapers, books and television. One is less likely to be able to take in one viewpoint and walk away feeling informed - and of course, the transaction costs of becoming informed are plummeting, which brings us back to Google.

Direct arguments on an individual, case by case basis are generally not conclusive. But the cumalative effect of pesuasive and *predictive* argument, followed by those predictions coming true in a year or so... that seems to be having a powerful transformational effect.

We should remember that at this point in time, we are not generally engaging with people who would (or even could) genuinely express a thoughtful Conservative perspective. Indeed, those folks have been ruthlessly driven from the echo chamber. Christopher Buckley, for instance.

As a result, the "echo chamber" - which used to actually sharpen the ability of conservatives to communicate on message - has now become so intolerant of nuance that it excludes any possibility of discussion, and now serves to reinforce conformist views - which are now to be taken as matters of faith.

This trend may well predispose these folks toward violence, which is sad and tragic, but the more violently delusional the movement becomes, the less attractive it will be, until it's discredited, for a generation or two.  And I think a growing, pervasive impatience with such behavior is provoking a lot of re-examination that is probably long overdue.

What exactly IS wrong with Socialized Medicine? What's so inherently bad about Socialism? Does it actually mean giving up rights? In theory? In practice?

My hope is that a lot of people have fallen silent in confusion, having realized that many of the things they thought they could be sure of were not true at all.

[Ron Braithwaite]

On Nov 23, 2009, at 9:57 AM, Sara Robinson wrote:
<snip>

> And yet the fact remains that two-thirds of people raised in
> fundamentalist homes are no longer fundamentalist by the age of 40.
> So, obviously, this process works for a majority of people.

Well, since the title of this thread is "Can we introduce ourselves?", I might as well chime in.

At 58, I can no longer claim to be a "child of fundamentalism", but I am still - and will always be - a product of that environment. I won't go into my full pedigree, but my mother was a founder of Child Evangelism Fellowship and, along with Anne Caffrey, started the whole Vacation Bible School thing. The majority (well over 50%) of my father's side of the family were/are missionaries in South or Central America. My mother was going to be a maiden missionary to India until she caught rheumatic fever and stayed home to do evangelism locally. My father was brutal to his children, but since he could pray in gothic letters, no one was willing to challenge him.

How I escaped that, I'm really not certain, but I have some theories.

Professionally, I was a software engineer for 30 years, but I'm now playing field service engineer on Mac OSX Server based machines. I'm also developing apps for mobile devices, primarily the iPhone.

I am driven to try to understand the RWA and SD personalities and to try to neutralize them where I can. I can't hope to undo their mindset, but perhaps I can confound them a bit. At some point, I intend to write on this subject, targeting the "self-healed" survivors of RWA families. I've written stuff, but it takes so much out of me to get clarity in words on this subject, I need to do it when I have the psychic room to spread the whole thing out on the table of my mind and soul.

> Again (I keep saying this, but I don't know that you're hearing me) --
> there *are things that work*, and fairly reliably, too. Travel,
> education, exposure to people from feared groups, and learning a
> skilled trade. All of these set up the conditions that both induce
> dissonance, and also induce people to learn new skills to deal with it.

I want to agree, but my family has traveled extensively (my cousins in their 70s regularly go to Morocco on lay missions, while other cousins are in Bolivia and Peru) without it opening their minds. Also, I was there at the beginning of Scientific Creationism when Dr Donald Chittuck and my uncle started the Newberg, OR rod & gun club. Chittuck was one of the original Intelligent Design apologists.

So education and travel aren't enough.

It takes, I am convinced, exposure to others who are both literate in the fundamentalist culture and who have a clear and articulate comfort with their own beliefs that will discuss without being drawn into argument is the one absolutely essential piece of the puzzle.

>> I once saw a TV expose in which a faith healer was caught red-handed
>> pretending to know things about his followers and their ailments
>> through the "power of the lord" when in reality it was being fed to
>> him through an ear piece by his wife who was working from a
>> database filled with information about the people who was seeking
>> his services. It's a famous case and maybe you can name this guy,
>> I've forgotten his name.
>
> There have been a couple. Marjoe Gortner was one. I think another was
> named Peter Popiel.

I knew Marjoe before the film and decided he was a fraud within 15 minutes of meeting him. I guess I wasn't good RWA material.

<snip>

>> Altermeyer's book
>> is the first and only book I've seen that directly addresses this as
>> a matter of science as opposed to speculation or philosophy. I'll
>> take whatever it is you're doing as a source of data now.

Me too, even though I had been looking for stuff like this for years.

> I'd never claim that my observations constitute "science" of any kind.
> It's absolutely true that my sample, while large, is self-selected.
> I've known a fair number of self-healers and checked my findings with
> them, and it seems to corroborate, though -- or, at least, there's
> scant evidence that their process is any different.

It's pretty hard to be "scientific" with this crowd. I suppose I'm a self-healer, but the damage was extensive and I still hear my father's voice in the back of my head condemning me to hell for whatever I am up to at that moment.

> It would take a decade, but these are the kinds of efforts that seem
> to inoculate a culture against authoritarian thinking patterns.

I dunno about a decade. Sounds kind of a short time frame to me. But you're right, those sorts of things will slowly roll back the tide.

> But this is a very short-term view. These people didn't get where they
> are in the span of a half-hour conversation, and they're not going to
> get out of it that way, either.

Amen, sister!

I used to try to use Scripture to prove to RWAs that they had strayed far from Jesus' teachings. I could take it just so far, but whenever I got too close to home, they would just shut down. I have had people put their hands over their ears and flee as they shout, "Get behind me, Satan!"

Now, I just revert back to: "I don't care what you say you believe, the only thing I am interested in is how you treat other people." They have a hard time answering that.

> The solutions include anything that get more people into situations
> that challenge their narrow assumptions and (perhaps more importantly)
> teach them to get comfortable with ambiguity. It's pretty much that
> simple.
>
> Sara

And that's the real problem. The average RWA is absolutely TERRIFIED of ambiguity. They *need* certainty and if they step too close to the abyss they shut down and run off with their hands over their ears. Starting small and working for incremental change is the key.

Incidentally, Sara, I have been going back through posts and I am very excited about the quality of discussion here. You, especially, seem to have both the gentleness and the firmness of belief that the RWA will respond to. I also very much appreciate Gary Williams' invitation on another newsgroup that we are both on to this one. I look forward to following the discussion.

Going back into lurk mode.

Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again.
-Ron

[bluepilgrim]

At 04:24 11/24/2009, you wrote:
>On Nov 23, 2009, at 9:57 AM, Sara Robinson wrote:
><snip>
> > And yet the fact remains that two-thirds of people raised in
> > fundamentalist homes are no longer fundamentalist by the age of 40.
> > So, obviously, this process works for a majority of people.
>
>Well, since the title of this thread is "Can we introduce
>ourselves?", I might as well chime in.
>
>At 58, I can no longer claim to be a "child of fundamentalism", but
>I am still - and will always be - a product of that environment. I
>won't go into my full pedigree, but my mother was a founder of Child
>Evangelism Fellowship and, along with Anne Caffrey, started the
>whole Vacation Bible School thing. The majority (well over 50%) of
>my father's side of the family were/are missionaries in South or
>Central America. My mother was going to be a maiden missionary to
>India until she caught rheumatic fever and stayed home to do
>evangelism locally. My father was brutal to his children, but since
>he could pray in gothic letters, no one was willing to challenge him.
>
>How I escaped that, I'm really not certain, but I have some theories.

Blue}
Pick a few diseases at random. Look up the prognosis. Most all them
give some percentage of cure (along with survival for some time
period), including odds of spontaneous remission or cure. I would
surely expect that there are probabilities of getting past RWA, PA,
fundamentalism, etc. depending on individual differences and personal history.

When therapies are discussed for diseases studies are cited saying
this thing or the other shows various result probabilities, and if
one doesn't work than another is tried (goes for mental difficulties,
such as depression, also).

Nobody currently working is about to cure the world -- we aren't at a
stage like eliminating smallpox or having a sure cure for scurvy from
vitamin deficiency. There are three objectives regarding RWA, then:
'curing' those we can, preventing new cases as possible (education,
better child rearing and such), and minimizing the damage which RWAs
do. This requires a variety of approaches, and some sort of 'triage'
or strategy to optimize efforts and results with limited resources.
It's probably good to break down these strategies and goals
explicitly for planning purposes.

BTW, one thing I don't recall being mentioned recently is how raising
public education and awareness level can increase cultural peer
pressure to put RWAs in a bind, such as how use of some drugs, or
spousal and child abuse became more socially unacceptable as time
went by, causing number of incidents to drop -- the offenders being
secondary targets of the work to shift public opinion. I'd like to
see a culture where people making out a list for a party say "don't
invite Tony -- he's a right winger".

[Sara Robinson]

On Nov 23, 2009, at 8:59 13PM, bluepilgrim wrote:
>
> Blue}
> Pick a few diseases at random. Look up the prognosis. Most all them
> give some percentage of cure (along with survival for some time
> period), including odds of spontaneous remission or cure. I would
> surely expect that there are probabilities of getting past RWA, PA,
> fundamentalism, etc. depending on individual differences and
> personal history.
>
> When therapies are discussed for diseases studies are cited saying
> this thing or the other shows various result probabilities, and if
> one doesn't work than another is tried (goes for mental difficulties,
> such as depression, also).

I don't know if this has anything to do with anything, but here's a
thought. Tell me what you think.

Alice Miller's research has found that the kids who survive difficult
or abusive childhoods and come through them intact have one thing in
common that seemed to make the difference. That is: almost all of them
had an adult in the their lives who provides a "normal" perspective --
who could validate the confusion they felt, who gave them refuge and
respect, who honored their boundaries, who reinforced their
personhood. In short: someone who accepted them for themselves.

This person can be a family member (often an aunt, uncle, or
grandparent), neighbor, coach, or the proverbial "teacher who made a
difference." Often, the child has only a few of contact with them. But
this person offered a lasting model of a different kind of adult to
be, honest and wise and functional. It gave the kids something more
human to aim for in themselves, and thus provided a model for later
self-healing.

I don't know if it's fair to extrapolate this observation about kids
who are abused or raised in war zones to kids who are raised in
authoritarian homes. On the other hand, our new member mentions abuse
in his home; and in our ex-fundie group, we've found some kind of
psychological, physical, or sexual abuse to be actually pretty much
the norm amongst those of us who were raised in that environment. (Yes
- me, too.) So it's not a far stretch to suggest that maybe Miller's
observation might apply to us, too.

I'm inclined to think that my exodus was a lot easier than it is for a
lot of people because I had a few of these sane folks in my immediate
family to model better ways to be. And I knew I'd rather be like them
when I grew up than like anyone on the more authoritarian side of the
family.

I also know with more certainty that when the moment of exodus comes,
it's pretty common for doubting fundamentalists to find "permission
givers" -- usually more liberal members of their own faith (Christian
college professors and counselors often play this role) who encourage
the doubter to pursue their doubts, and not keep trying to deny them.
These people are unique and rare, because they're anointed as official
Authorities by authoritarian culture; but they also have a more
humanist sense of what life might be. While these people are typically
purged from the culture as soon as they're discovered, they can boost
scores or even hundreds of people over the wall before they're put out
of commission.

Does any of this ring true for anyone else? Am I onto something here?

> There are three objectives regarding RWA, then:
> 'curing' those we can, preventing new cases as possible (education,
> better child rearing and such), and minimizing the damage which RWAs
> do. This requires a variety of approaches, and some sort of 'triage'
> or strategy to optimize efforts and results with limited resources.
> It's probably good to break down these strategies and goals
> explicitly for planning purposes.

I've never seen it put so concisely, but yes, I agree that this is the
mission.

> BTW, one thing I don't recall being mentioned recently is how raising
> public education and awareness level can increase cultural peer
> pressure to put RWAs in a bind, such as how use of some drugs, or
> spousal and child abuse became more socially unacceptable as time
> went by, causing number of incidents to drop -- the offenders being
> secondary targets of the work to shift public opinion. I'd like to
> see a culture where people making out a list for a party say "don't
> invite Tony -- he's a right winger".

I think (no, wait, I *know*, because I asked him once) that John Dean
had exactly this in mind when he wrote his book. He wanted Americans
to be aware of these folks, so we could be more scrupulous about
keeping their grubby paws off the levers of power.

Though I'm pretty sure social marginalization is not the answer. Right
now, the authoritarian right has sealed itself off into its own
cultural bubble -- and they're moving away from the consensus reality
at the speed of light. This is not helping them, and it's well on its
way to dooming the rest of us to a civil war.

I'm already part of a subculture where right-wingers are not welcome
as social companions. We are not helping, either.

We've got to find ways to engage them if we want to get some of them
back. No, it's not going to be fun -- or pretty.

Sara

[Sara Robinson]

Hi, Ron. Welcome.

> At 58, I can no longer claim to be a "child of fundamentalism", but
> I am still - and will always be - a product of that environment. I
> won't go into my full pedigree, but my mother was a founder of Child
> Evangelism Fellowship and, along with Anne Caffrey, started the
> whole Vacation Bible School thing. The majority (well over 50%) of
> my father's side of the family were/are missionaries in South or
> Central America. My mother was going to be a maiden missionary to
> India until she caught rheumatic fever and stayed home to do
> evangelism locally. My father was brutal to his children, but since
> he could pray in gothic letters, no one was willing to challenge him.

That's some pedigree.

The abuse, I'm afraid, seems to be standard issue.

> Professionally, I was a software engineer for 30 years, but I'm now
> playing field service engineer on Mac OSX Server based machines. I'm
> also developing apps for mobile devices, primarily the iPhone.

My husband could have written the above paragraph. Same background,
same present.

> I am driven to try to understand the RWA and SD personalities and to
> try to neutralize them where I can. I can't hope to undo their
> mindset, but perhaps I can confound them a bit. At some point, I
> intend to write on this subject, targeting the "self-healed"
> survivors of RWA families. I've written stuff, but it takes so much
> out of me to get clarity in words on this subject, I need to do it
> when I have the psychic room to spread the whole thing out on the
> table of my mind and soul.

Yeah, I know this one. Everybody who spends a lot of time studying the
right wing does. We've got a wire loose somewhere that allows us to
look into the abyss of the human soul and not fall in ourselves. It's
weird.

> I want to agree, but my family has traveled extensively (my cousins
> in their 70s regularly go to Morocco on lay missions, while other
> cousins are in Bolivia and Peru) without it opening their minds.
> Also, I was there at the beginning of Scientific Creationism when Dr
> Donald Chittuck and my uncle started the Newberg, OR rod & gun club.
> Chittuck was one of the original Intelligent Design apologists.
>
> So education and travel aren't enough.

This corroborates my sense that it has to be a certain kind of travel.
Being surrounded by a bunch of people who believe the same thing you
do, and will thus mediate your interactions and help you interpret
them in the "correct" way, seems to neutralize the benefit of travel.
I mean: Youth With A Mission is sending kids abroad for years and
years, and they're not flocking home with their heads on straight,
either.

Military travel isn't great, either -- but it may be a bit better.
There are quite a few troops coming home from the Middle East now who
do have a much more nuanced sense of the world than they had when they
left home.

I think the more you're thrown in head-first without mediating
influences, the more likely the travel cure is to take. Exchange
students, for example....

> It takes, I am convinced, exposure to others who are both literate
> in the fundamentalist culture and who have a clear and articulate
> comfort with their own beliefs that will discuss without being drawn
> into argument is the one absolutely essential piece of the puzzle.

This seems to connect with my previous post, in which I talked about
having sane, rational "escorts" to give permission and model mature
adult behavior.

>> It would take a decade, but these are the kinds of efforts that seem
>> to inoculate a culture against authoritarian thinking patterns.
>
> I dunno about a decade. Sounds kind of a short time frame to me. But
> you're right, those sorts of things will slowly roll back the tide.

I reckoned that kids who are eight or ten now will be 18 or 20 in ten
years, so that's about the soonest you'd start seeing results in adults.

> And that's the real problem. The average RWA is absolutely TERRIFIED
> of ambiguity. They *need* certainty and if they step too close to
> the abyss they shut down and run off with their hands over their
> ears. Starting small and working for incremental change is the key.

It really is. Once they realize they put a toe over the line and
weren't struck dead, they become a little bolder.

> Incidentally, Sara, I have been going back through posts and I am
> very excited about the quality of discussion here. You, especially,
> seem to have both the gentleness and the firmness of belief that the
> RWA will respond to. I also very much appreciate Gary Williams'
> invitation on another newsgroup that we are both on to this one. I
> look forward to following the discussion.

Oh, right. I need to go join that group. Thank you for the kind words.

> Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again.

May the circle be open, but unbroken.

Sara

[rosenhw]

Isn't this equivalent to what "they" are doing now?

> -------Original Message-------
> From: bluepilgrim <bluep...@grics.net>
> Subject: Re: [theauthoritarians] Re: Can we introduce ourselves?
> Sent: 23 Nov '09 23:59
> I'd like to
> see a culture where people making out a list for a party say "don't

> invite Tony -- he's a right winger".��

[Bob]

You know, I was deep into the first activism regarding sexual abuse within families (And the whole Ritual Abuse thing) and, all controversial aspects of that time aside, RWA and "Cult" goes together like ham and cheese. When the church or family didn't do the abuse, it was a set up for the cult experience.

I just wish we'd had this research at the time, it would have helped understand the people we were dealing with.

BTW - over on the autism front, the RWA sorts are thick on the ground; those are the ones who are sure that autism is the result of a conspiracy to conceal the effects of mercury in vaccines, or who are trying to demonize autistics as some sort of horrible plague are speaking in RWA/SD terms using typical RWA/SD appeals.

That is to say, it's a xenophobic, fear based response to that which they don't understand. And, aside from ALL the other obvious issues, it makes even the ones who are trying to do the right thing utterly useless.

I attribute a great deal of my immunity to my autistic-spectrum features. The emotional aspects of it simply don't process, the group appeals aren't appealing and there's simply not a lot else there. To quote Jon Stewart, IRT Sarah Palin - when you peel the onion ... there's no ONION!"

That, and my mother was a religious junkie, so I had multiple inoculations, and as mentioned elsewhere, the occasional sane adult role model.  

[bluepilgrim]

At 05:21 11/24/2009, you wrote:

>On Nov 23, 2009, at 8:59 13PM, bluepilgrim wrote:
>
>
>I don't know if this has anything to do with anything, but here's a
>thought. Tell me what you think.
>
>Alice Miller's research has found that the kids who survive difficult
>or abusive childhoods and come through them intact have one thing in
>common that seemed to make the difference. That is: almost all of them
>had an adult in the their lives who provides a "normal" perspective --
>who could validate the confusion they felt, who gave them refuge and
>respect, who honored their boundaries, who reinforced their
>personhood. In short: someone who accepted them for themselves.

Blue}
First, I think anything Miller has to say is significant. I think
I've heard that elsewhere too from other people, and maybe there were
some studies on it.

Beyond that I have seen studies about conformity -- famous stuff,
which I guess most anyone looking at the subject has seen -- where
just one dissenter in a group can make a huge difference to others
'coming out' and disagreeing with the 'official line' -- or in this
case, which line of the graphic is longer or not.

>This person can be a family member (often an aunt, uncle, or
>grandparent), neighbor, coach, or the proverbial "teacher who made a
>difference." Often, the child has only a few of contact with them. But
>this person offered a lasting model of a different kind of adult to
>be, honest and wise and functional. It gave the kids something more
>human to aim for in themselves, and thus provided a model for later
>self-healing.

Blue}
A story:
I was taken aback some time ago. Years before I was a scout leader,
and also a group of the kids, and one their fathers, and some
friends, hung out at my house (played D&D and such). One of them had
a father who was a drug addict, and abusive, and we provided a bit of
a haven and 'area of normalcy' for him. He was getting into some
nasty stuff for a while, but he was always welcome when came by. I
knew that I was trying to be nice to kids and teacher them some
stuff, but was aware of being a 'savior' -- but that's what turned
out. He told me a few years ago that I was like a father to him, and
saved him from a life of crime and misery, or an early death (along
with the other man in the group -- also with the scout troop). He
told me I once slipped a piece of paper under the door when he was in
the bathroom with a Ram Dass quote on it "It's all grist for the
mill". Turns out he carried that note in his wallet for 20 years
(until he was pickpocketed in Tailand wile going around learning
Eastern Mysticism). Who knew!? I was really just being myself,
trying to be generally helpful to people -- and often screwing things
up -- I was even pretty messed up myself at the time.


[...]

>I also know with more certainty that when the moment of exodus comes,
>it's pretty common for doubting fundamentalists to find "permission
>givers" -- usually more liberal members of their own faith (Christian
>college professors and counselors often play this role) who encourage
>the doubter to pursue their doubts, and not keep trying to deny them.
>These people are unique and rare, because they're anointed as official
>Authorities by authoritarian culture; but they also have a more
>humanist sense of what life might be. While these people are typically
>purged from the culture as soon as they're discovered, they can boost
>scores or even hundreds of people over the wall before they're put out
>of commission.
>
>Does any of this ring true for anyone else? Am I onto something here?

Blue}
Yes -- I'd say it's true. But I don't know when it might 'take' and
when it wouldn't, or why. I think of it as the Jonny Appleseed
approach -- scatter seeds and some might sprout. But it's important
to provide an alternative world view to give people a chance.

[...]

>I'm already part of a subculture where right-wingers are not welcome
>as social companions. We are not helping, either.
>
>We've got to find ways to engage them if we want to get some of them
>back. No, it's not going to be fun -- or pretty.
>
>Sara

Blue}
Maybe. I'm unsure -- but, personally, I no longer have the patience
to deal with them. I tax the patience I have in rooting out and
dealing with my own idiocy. Still, I don't think it's a bad thing for
them to hear 'that's not acceptable' even if it will drive them into
defensiveness and their own tight circles, at least for a while.
Perhaps those who never emerge never would in any case -- or with the
resources available to work with them (assuming that they would
tolerate that). But there is a study that says that arguing with them
logically makes them even more stubborn and extreme -- something like
trying to coax or chase an oppossum out of a hole it's hiding in:
opossums are not known for being too bright, and that stupor reaction
(playing possum) they have is physiological. The only way I know of
to get an opossum out of your garage where it wants to nest is make
the environment uncomfortable for them, maybe annoying them now and
then, and then leaving alone for a 1/2 hour or hour until they decide
it's safe enough to make a run for it. Opossums are fundamentalists.

[Nyc Labrets]

I went to college with black conservative that after school went to work for Newt Gingrich. I looked him up last year expecting him to have voted for McCain, and to my surprise he hadn't.

He's one of the more level-headed ones and for the last 6 months I've been begging him to do something about the mainstreaming of the fringe, and find a way to bring the saner elements of the Republican Party, (see: Buckley, Christopher, Ex-Communicated Heretic), so they can begin the work of rebuilding their Party.

This has been an absolutely fruitless endeavor.

It's a Blind Force that's at play here, and at this juncture I'm afraid it's going to have to finish running its course.

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[Gary Williams]

Now that...we can agree on !<g>.

I've been trying to figure out how I can get this list's mail forwarded to my POP server so I can DL through it thru Thunderbird. I don't have any problem following  those lists because they all show up separately  with an hour/minute time-stamp.

Or maybe...just maybe... gmail can be configured to separate each one out from the other, and present them that way instead of these.... multi-reply, cascading Puzzle Emails I've seen so far. (back in a bit! )

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 3:47 PM, <Scot...@aol.com> wrote:

I'm having a heck of a time keeping up with this list......ideas flying all over the place.....and so little time to try to catch them all.

Scotty

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[rosenhw]

With the activity explosion here I almost missed this one!

> From: Sara Robinson <srob...@cosmiccowgrrl.com>
> Subject: Re: [theauthoritarians] Re: Can we introduce ourselves?

> Sent: 24 Nov '09 00:21

> This person can be a family member (often an aunt, uncle, or��
> grandparent), neighbor, coach, or the proverbial "teacher who made a��
> difference." Often, the child has only a few of contact with them. But��
> this person offered a lasting model of a different kind of adult to��
> be, honest and wise and functional. It gave the kids something more��
> human to aim for in themselves, and thus provided a model for later��
> self-healing.

A 2nd grade teacher in my case. A string of 9 mentors took over from there
to the point were I became a mentor myself.

> Does any of this ring true for anyone else? Am I onto something here?

Yep to the above and below

> > There are three objectives regarding RWA, then:
> > 'curing' those we can, preventing new cases as possible (education,
> > better child rearing and such), and minimizing the damage which RWAs
> > do. This requires a variety of approaches, and some sort of 'triage'
> > or strategy to optimize efforts and results with limited resources.
> > It's probably good to break down these strategies and goals
> > explicitly for planning purposes.
>
> I've never seen it put so concisely, but yes, I agree that this is the��
> mission.

[bluepilgrim]

Blue}
Yes. It is shifting public perception, and it works, apparently...

[bluepilgrim]

At 05:35 11/24/2009, you wrote:

>Yeah, I know this one. Everybody who spends a lot of time studying the
>right wing does. We've got a wire loose somewhere that allows us to
>look into the abyss of the human soul and not fall in ourselves. It's
>weird.

Blue}
I don't if I want to say I've seen to deeply into the abyss and the
'evil which lurks in the hearts of men', but just now brought up the
Flashpoints mp3 while I roll some cigarettes, and realized I often
listen to that show to get away from it, relax and lighten my mood...

[Sara Robinson]

This is what keeps me up nights. As a futurist, I've always got one
eye on the worst-case scenario, which in most cases is a pretty long
way from wherever you happen to be standing. It's not something I
generally have to worry people about unless they ask me.

But I've been watching the right emerge for all these years, and I
know where this goes. I've studied where the history takes us, where
the behavioral patterns take us, where the historical cycles lead,
what the sociology projects....

And step by step by step, I'm more and more convinced that the
dominant trend line right now is heading for a civil war. We've got a
subculture that's dropped out and digging in, and has chosen a very
different future from the rest of us. They've identified their
enemies, mapped their locations (literally: google "spiritual
mapping"), and worked up all the rationalizations they need to start
killing for their cause -- including a theology in which God blesses
the killing. All of this is a clear sign you're getting damned close
to a tipping point.

The only hope at this point is that it goes like the Oklahoma City
bombing, which sort of stunned the whole white nationalist movement
back into better behavior for several years. At the time, even they
thought it was overreaching. But my sense is that they are so much
bigger now, and are feeling the strength in their numbers. Their
rhetoric isn't about lone wolves, but armies. They've also completely
checked out of consensus reality, as anybody who listens to FOX's
version of the world can attest. This is a whole different level now
-- and they've crossed lines beyond which people don't generally back
down again.

These people are gearing up to start a shooting war. They're in the
last stages, and they're closing in toward the end fast. At this
juncture, I'd agree that is indeed going to have to run its murderous
course -- and a lot of good people on both sides are going to die --
before America comes to its senses and really, truly groks how anti-
civilization this whole worldview is.

Five years. Seven tops.

Sara

[Alastair McGowan]

Regarding the mentors, the change agents who save us, and classifying
how they do it. I think this is profoun d. It seems very much like a
key part of the solution. I have had many of them. Sometimes they
merely sowed seeds of humanity in me and at other times they gave me
the keys to inner strength in order to avoid clinging to the
'security' of authoritarian responses. Some of these teachers are no
longer around and I only knew them through text (buddha, maslow,
ghandi) and others I knew personally and familialy. The qualities of
inner authority these people express/exude I try to display to my own
children.
However, how do we classify this kind of leadership. Indeed if we did
classify it would we hand the keys over yet again to the APs as
happened in neo-bhuddism/christianity when Jesus' teachings of inner
power and selflessness were codified and then translated into
something right wing, hierarchically authority-riddled and downright
nasty towards those who are out-group.
Alastair

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[rosenhw]

Ditto on the intro here

Conceived in a box car called home, and raised in it the first 13 years of my life, I wanted nothing more
than a "stuck in house." My father was the guy whose job it was to fix the wash outs, weak bridges, and ailing real
estate up and down the line. My mother passed on as I turned seven a TB victim. My family was not dysfunctional,
but their AP streaks came out at critical times that left me with a pair of lifelong hang-ups I feel to this day. In my
82nd year I have some peace at last doing what I want to do.

I left the desert at 23 never to return for more than a visit. Mentor after mentor appeared just in time to boost me
along one step at a time. A bad marriage preceded a good one that ended 5 years to astrocytoma. Caring for Kris at
home was life changing in more ways than one. A new spouse accepts me for what I am. She laughs where others
cried, asks what is wrong almost before I realize it myself.

Between those events I worked my way through college, became a metallurgist, an inventor really, then on to
management posts, a PhD at the age of 43, and a founder of a company that immediately set the standard for the
product we made. One of my partners turned our to a near sociopath which drove us to sell the company for a song
seven years later.

I was forced to retire at 72. Before I could adjust to the lazy life, 0/11 came along. Since 9/12, my life has not been
the same. When I asked Kris. a psychologist, why anyone could do such a thing, she suggested I start with Adorno.
The following April roadtopeace.org was born, and like topsy, has been growing ever since.

But like a trained monkey, I can't shake my heritage. I have a company exploring a new way of producing metals and
alloys. Now 5 years old we at last understand what we are up against. 2010 will be a boom, bust, or more likely
something in between.

> -------Original Message-------
> From: Ron Braithwaite <r...@braithwaites.net>
> Subject: Re: [theauthoritarians] Re: Can we introduce ourselves?

> Sent: 23 Nov '09 23:24

[Alastair McGowan]

Yes, peer-to-peer communication (the internet as we currently know it
- if it stays unconstrained) is a key way to undermine the
blah-blah-blah of authoritarian control. Telecommunication was deeply
hierarchical for a century and now ourr kids can research whatever
they like without anyone telling them which way to think. Ibrecently
saw some evidence (sorry can't recall the sourse) that showed the
current generation has a sophisticated and unfiltered information
exploration habit whereby they seek out multiple sources of
information (foraging) and then judge whatks most likely true from
multiple contexts. They are breaking free! I hope. And I hope the
internet stays as it is, uncontrolled by service providers and
unchannelled, uncategorised so that my kids can work out the truth for
themselves. This is all very scary for RWAs (your sons and your
daughters are beyond your control - the times they are a changing,
Whoa, my sons and daughters will do as I say goddamit or I'l. Whip
them back into line). So we can expect strong AP backlash against free
to explore information structures.
Alastair

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[Bob]

Noting with irony the fights over Digital Rights Management, The Pirate Bay and Net Neutrality. Things that have radicalized youth in ways similar to authoritarian over-reaction to hippie culture, civil rights and the anti-war movement radicalized my generation. Or perhaps "skepticalized" would be a better, if uglier word.

Meanwhile I've heard some rumblings about hacking up a parallel "undernet" - something on the order of a peer-to-peer wifi based network with no reliance on
"The Backbone."  No way to tap or moniter, because there would be no one point that all the packets of a message or a stream would go through.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it didn't already exist. Come to think of it, an thin build of linux with UUCP could probably run as a smartphone app. (Wait, isn't that essentially Google Chrome?

And probably created by those very kids. I feel a slight twinge of hope.

[bluepilgrim]

At 07:40 11/24/2009, you wrote:
>Yes, peer-to-peer communication (the internet as we currently know it
>- if it stays unconstrained) is a key way to undermine the
>blah-blah-blah of authoritarian control. Telecommunication was deeply
>hierarchical for a century and now ourr kids can research whatever
>they like without anyone telling them which way to think. Ibrecently
>saw some evidence (sorry can't recall the sourse) that showed the
>current generation has a sophisticated and unfiltered information
>exploration habit whereby they seek out multiple sources of
>information (foraging) and then judge whatks most likely true from
>multiple contexts. They are breaking free! I hope. And I hope the
>internet stays as it is, uncontrolled by service providers and
>unchannelled, uncategorised so that my kids can work out the truth for
>themselves. This is all very scary for RWAs (your sons and your
>daughters are beyond your control - the times they are a changing,
>Whoa, my sons and daughters will do as I say goddamit or I'l. Whip
>them back into line). So we can expect strong AP backlash against free
>to explore information structures.
>Alastair

Blue}
The awesome -- almost scary -- thing about the internet, for me, is
when I think back on my misspent youth -- much of it reading garbage
in the small public library, trying to figure things out, and getting
almost nowhere while also picking up a fair bit of misinformation.
Much of my time was spent trying to find sources. I was still in the
'perfectionist' game then, using knowledge as a weapon, and not just
struggling against ignorance, but denying I W#AS ignorant -- which is
the worse thing to do when trying to learn. But with the meager books
available, it was hard to pretend I knew almost everything.

Now everything has changed. Not only have I matured enough to not be
ashamed of being a beginner and ignorant of things, there is this
world I have access to, which I never had before -- I can get stuff
for free which I could never get even from the colleges I couldn't
afford to go to. In a lot of areas I've easily doubled my knowledge
over the past few years -- and I'm well past the peak learning stage.

Then I imagine a bright kid who has managed to get the time and
energy, and has access to the internet -- I imagine him becoming
competent in calculus, group theory, topology, social psychology,
history, physics, chemistry, linguistics -- any and every thing, so
that in his teens he knows much more than the teachers and college
instructors I did manage to get some teaching from. I mean, MY GOD!
he can listen to the series on physics from Standford and MIT by the
time he is 12. He can chase through wikipedia for days on end, and
access open-source journals, which are becoming more numerous. He can
get on discussion lists with actual researchers. He can read the
Bible in a dozen different translations, or find the text in the
original languages. For FREE! I think of the massive intellect which
could be unleashed before a kid -- a genius -- even sets foot in a
college. IQ scores don't mean that much, really, but figure an IQ of
150 or better -- say 1 in 10,000 even: out of 300 million people in
the US that's 30,000 people! But now, potentially, educated instead
of stuck 'down on the farm' or limited to mediocre public school
education mostly designed to keep people dumb and controlled. Not to
mention those with creative and non-'academic' orientation and
abilities. And a lot of those will be perfectly capable of hacking
and geeking, and may even be required by the corporations and
government to run the darned net, and might insist on keeping it
open, as computer geeks often do -- and might end up running the
whole country by that. What would a technocracy look like? This
could be the intellectual equivalent of the invention of electric
lighting or the repeating rifle (for good or bad). Pity the poor
futurerists, trying to predict such things!

[Bob]

Out of curiosity, why has it been unfruitful? Has he been shunned by the faithful? There are a few relative islands of sanity - The New Whig Party, of all things.

But I share your concern that Obama is actually going to need all those powers he's been reluctant to give up.

[Gary Williams]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:34 PM, Bob <graphi...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is to say, it's a xenophobic, fear based response to that which they don't understand. And, aside from ALL the other obvious issues, it makes even the ones who are trying to do the right thing utterly useless.

Which I see as also behind a great deal of the inexplicably harsh treatment society inflicts on those willing to experiment with drugs. Sure, some have problems with them, just as some have problems with most anything capable of proiding escape or pleasure. But the trillions spent incarcerating people relative to the actual numbers who succumb to drug abuse is sickening and one of the primary things motivating my desire to somehow excise, suppress, de-fang, destroy, rehabilitate or "cure" their asses right out of my own and everyone existence!  :-)

Over on the blog of that freak who kidnapped and held that girl for 14 years I found RWAs hovering about, ranting and raving about all the things they would do to Garrido if they could get their hands on him. The detail many go into however reveals many take a great deal of pleasure thinking of ways to torture him to death.

Now...I'm not defending him at all, but there was one girl who commented to the rest that she was worried this own LSD use  would make the sort of people posting their hostility for him also turn their hatred onto people like her because she too had had problems in the past with mental illness and had also done drugs like LSD.
But she explained how it had helped her to escape many of the fears that came with the illness she had by broadening her awareness and allowing her to find a place in the bigger picture that she could get comfortable in.

Her new worry came as a result of Garrido having also used acid when he was younger....but which his conservative- sounding father told reporters was the cause of his son's wacked out behavior.

But she explained all this in perfectly reasonable language, none of which I could see as bizarre or so unreasonable as to elicit the response she got from the rest. They unloaded on her as if she was the next Garrido...soliciting any law-enforcement who might also be reading there to track her down and do something  before she too snapped and did something awful.

 I couldn't believe what I was reading! I guess the twin threat (drugs & mental illness) she represents to their need to know what others are thinking threw them into the mental state that the neocons were going for when they kept  upping  DHS's terrorism alert levels before elections or votes on bills needed for funding new weapons systems, etc. They were equatng her with Garrido directly.....and stating that they were doing so because she had actually defended doing LSD. It didn' matter that she also said it should be used in certain, limited ways!

In fact they are so off-the-wall over there that I now strongly suspect that the website is still up and taking posts from others after all this time because someone at DHS , or a major university asked them to so they can observe the personalities who show up there screaming and pontificating at others with their own warped ideas on right and wrong.


Gary

[Gary Williams]

"Kaufmann speculated that demography may expose a contradiction, first cited by Nietzsche, between liberalism's practical need to defend itself and its inability to legitimate the illiberal policies that may be required to do so."

 Demographic Projections Predict Fundamentalist Populations Surpassing Secular Counterparts
http://tinyurl.com/ye5us5p

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/23/2009 6:54:44 P.M. Central Standard Time, graphi...@gmail.com writes:

As a result, the "echo chamber" - which used to actually sharpen the ability of conservatives to communicate on message - has now become so intolerant of nuance that it excludes any possibility of discussion, and now serves to reinforce conformist views - which are now to be taken as matters of faith.

______

How aptly you put it.  The R Right IS functioning very much like a fundamentalist religion, where there are black and white answers, all unquestioningly accepted as matters of faith.  No mights or maybes....just declarative statements, often fabricated and repeated again and again in the litergy....as in "government run media", "Obamacare", etc.

 

<<<< And I think a growing, pervasive impatience with such behavior is provoking a lot of re-examination that is probably long overdue.

 

Impatience is just what I'm not seeing in this neck of the woods.  Here, it's become very acceptable.

 

<<<What exactly IS wrong with Socialized Medicine? What's so inherently bad about Socialism? Does it actually mean giving up rights? In theory? In practice?

 

Don't know if you ever read Atlas Shrugged, but it's the second Bible for those who want to argue the virtues of capitalism, much quoted by Talk Right, and thus by the parrot mob.  If you haven't read it, you might give it a shot.......and if you have, recall how it grabbed you way back when.  Never mind that the money manipulation and Blackwater monopolies are not the sort of entrepreneurial heroics she lionized. 

 

I wish I could be more hopeful.....but what I see of the Right around here is almost the perfect storm.....an energized lynch mob, filled with righteous indignation, determined to do God's work in the spirit of American patriotism.

Scotty

[Scot...@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/23/2009 10:24:47 P.M. Central Standard Time, r...@braithwaites.net writes:

I knew Marjoe before the film and decided he was a fraud within 15 minutes of meeting him. I guess I wasn't good RWA material.

______

LOL......Interesting brat, he was.  My favorite, that I instantly knew was a fraud was AAAllen, who used to cast out "Devil Demons", and then people who saw them leaving the victem were to send him pictures of how they saw the DD's.  I was moved to create a hellish drawing and send it to him.  Never got even a "thank you".

Scotty

[Nyc Labrets]

Speaking of Futurism, MacArthur Grant beneficiary, the writer Octavia Butler called all of what you write about below in her speculative fiction novel 'Parable of the Talents':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Talents_(novel)

Save for she set the book primarily in in the 2030s decade. Oops. Looks like we're way ahead of that schedule now, especially with the rise of a Mike Huckabee who very closely resembles the Fundy that is the American President in that book. Butler does a great job of extrapolating what life would be like were the text of the Holy Bible were to be implemented in a Modern Society, the least of which is the establishment of Christian Rape Camps to teach Heathen women a lesson. A real jaw-dropper for me after Palin got nominated last year is that a good section of the book is set in Alaska during a war that we get into with... Canada. Chilling stuff and I highly recommend it.

If there is now one gun for every man, woman and child in the USA, and each has a minimum of at least 6 rounds, and the majority of those gun-owners are RWAs, then, well, I think that math speaks for itself.

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