Cults of personality in governance have the Great Leader’s face and sayings splashed all over public places. Think Mao’s China, Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Germany, Kim's North Korea...
My mother (1913-2012), a pretty smart lady, used to say that it must be nice to put your brain in park and let other people do the thinking. Unfortunately frightened folks who want “answers” will look for vast conspiracies to explain their problems. And if their leader is appointed by a higher power, then as followers they are automatically the chosen people. The fact that none of this is not logical is beside the point; faith is not based on observable facts.
For example, if “Q” was really a hidden ally dropping “breadcrumb” hints about what is going on, why doesn’t the powerful Secret State just find and kill this person? Or why doesn’t Q go public, putting the evidence out on a thousand channels? Not everything is controlled by “them”. Those who believe in Qanon will, of course, have answers for these questions, not that they are logical. Being one of the elect “in the know” and expecting final victory are what matters.
Ultimately the problem is that desperate people whipped up by a new faith cannot be talked to in any sensible fashion. The YouTube interviews of Jordan Klepper talking to Trump supporters shows this pretty clearly: Facts don’t matter. In fact, experts (and by implication well educated people) are suspect and not to be trusted. What they say is irrelevant or worse as they may be part of the conspiracies claiming that that COVID or climate change are real concerns. Such assertions can make people feel powerless and thus should be ignored. Some followers will come to their senses, but when guns become involved the situation is far more toxic. Trump won’t live forever, but damage he has done and what he has tapped into will keep marching on.
The phenomenon that educated people are suspect is one of those age-old tropes. A lot of it is garden-variety anti-Semitism, but a lot is gut-level underclass resentment of privilege. My mom was the first college grad in her family, and it was poison. They were real proud of being salt-of-the-earth righteous folks, and she, lacking insight, but also eldest sister, did act like The Smart One. Disaster.
Thank you for sharing, and I agree there are a lot of issues here. The media doesn't help when it portrays professors as unworldly, arrogant or dangerous. But certainly back to at least the 19th century there were expressed fears that too much education would make people turn away from religion. On the positive side, I teach at a university which has a strong online outreach program for non-traditional students, which is what I do. We got a lot of people such as spouses of those in the military, ones who are isolated, or are in middle age and working full time, and they really want to further their educations. Most of them do quite well. So that is a positive anyway.
I don't follow it, but the top-secret information Q used to transmit seems to have stopped since the Trump team left office, so I suspect it was someone who lost their security clearance when the administration changed?
Your rant parallels my rant for today. About 3 this morning, I was up hoping to see the cougar in the arroyo, drank too much coffee, and started philosophizing (is that a word?)
I realized that We are all extremists by nature. Our lizard brain is caged within our civilized brain, but the lizard is FAST, so it grabs emotions before civilization catches up.
I was pondering the latest impossible conspiracy fantasy from maggot relatives. They raved about how horrible Biden was. I found myself thinking that they were such fools that they don't deserve to breathe our oxygen, when they are actually decent people. Then I listened to Sirius Progress channel and heard outraged rants about how horrible Trump is. It woke me up.
Trump is a mentally slow, illiterate person who literally knows almost nothing about anything but avoiding jail. He's also a superb performer and reads a crowd better than a tent preacher. He's not evil, nor wonderful, for his actions, most of which I doubt he understands, he's just doing what Putin told him to do and Ivanka wrote down while listening in, (perhaps sitting on his lap?).
Yet, my side, and myself at times, think, view, and speak of him as evil incarnate, while maggots gaze wistfully at him with joy and worship.
My point is that anyone with celebrity is exaggerated by their audience. You are an example yourself. When I point people at your books and show, about half reply with (paraphrased) "He's superman" or "He's Lex Luther". Nobody says "I like his shows because he works his tail off to verify everything".
While I agree that we all have a tendency to extremism and hyperbole sort of "built in" to our psyches, I also think it's necessary to identify evil for what it is. Trump and those who support him may individually be ignorant and even have decent intentions in some (few) cases, but the collective they create is evil, and not to identify it as such is irresponsible and negligent, and the results of it can be disastrous.
I don't buy the concepts of good, evil, and human race. I would argue with you on "decent intentions", until you said "only in a few cases", to which I fully agree.
Don't forget (I think maybe I forgot in my comment) that 100% of NaziRepublican Party politicians are corrupt, and all the Democratic Party politicians as well, except the Progressives. What this means, said another way is
The NaziRepublican Party is lining their pockets by destroying the USA for bribes, while the Democracy Party is lining their pockets by selling laws for bribes to industry.
The key point is that until the Kremlin/NRA quit handing out Ruble stuffed envelopes, the NaziRepublican Party will continue destroying the USA for bribes.
The Democracy Party leadership are as corrupt as NaziRepublicans, but they don't want to destroy the USA. I'm sure they would if the Ruble stuffed envelopes slid under the door more often.
i.e., you absolutely NAILED the solution, end the corruption.
I don't get the human "race" thing either. Human species, perhaps? But I think one of our problems is equivocation on identifying evil as evil. Some of the terms you used, like NaziRepublican Party, are identifiers of evil. I don't disagree that the Democratic Party is as corrupt as the Republicans, and have been as supportive in practice, if not speech, of the NeoLib agenda as the Republicans. I maintain that there are a cadre of younger Democrats that is emerging with much more egalitarian views and advocacy for the kind of government that will take care of all the people and break the tyranny of billionaires and the elite on our entire system, and the old-school Dems need to get out of their way and let them bring about a real transformation. There is always relativism in human affairs, and no one is completely pure and above reproach, but what the Republican Party stands for and promotes and attempts to legislate is evil, and their leadership is evil, and I don't shrink from identifying it as such
Funny: I just told the Nelson contributor that I like Thom's shows because he works his tail off to verify everything. I compared the Daily Stack to academic footnotes. Response was to diss footnotes as evidence of homogenous agreement, apparently to be distrusted either way. Huh.
Yep, well just ask my maggot relatives. They ganged up on me and argued that you can't trust documents published on a government website.
I smiled and said I only trust what I can download from government sites where they are stored electronically, and asked where they get government documents from, actors reading scripts written in Moscow?
I reminded them that all government documents are numbered and easily downloaded unless classified.
They did have an answer, they asked what about Hillary Clinton eating children under a pizza parlor slab, over a thousand miles from where she lives.
The use of footnoting may reveal that an author put in a lot of work. However the use of footnoting doesn’t necessarily prove the truth of one’s arguments. Footnotes may support one’s ideological bias but just because people use a rash of footnotes isn’t evidence of fact. I have all kinds of books that use an abundance of footnotes. For example I have a book that is designed to reveal George Soros’ profound intent and power to destabilize western culture. The author uses close to a 1000 footnotes. If I apply your principle, the book proves the malevolent intentions of George Soros. But no doubt Thom would accuse the author of being anti semitic for attacking Soros.
I’d suggest that footnoting is only one of many things that support one’s arguments. The disciplines of Rhetoric, Writing and Communications remind that there 100s of strategic tools that people use to persuade audiences to agree with the author’s thesis … and ideological conclusions. Footnotes, almost by definition are definitely one of those tools.
Believe me, Thom understands. I have led international technical conferences in an industry that has relatively few players, so we all know each other. Despite that, I've accepted papers that were BS and even quoted them, fooled because they were well written. The statement "It must be true because I read it on the internet" isn't just a joke, we tend to trust what we read. I've found some times Thom was off target, almost always when dancing on the edge of his expertise. We all do it, though few try.
Good point, absolutely true. I remember in college my wife did a paper for her historiography class that lowered her grade a lot. It's been 45 years so I won't have everything perfect, but I know the story.
She looked up an early Roman Empire event, and found that while there were about 100 books on the topic, there were only 3 existing records of the event, and all three had gaps.
Roughly 20 of the authors had made up a plausible story about whatever was missing, and mentioned that fact.
The other 80 books argued about which of the made up gap filling stories was right. She found authors saying "well, 12 books agree" and arguing the most common EDUCATED GUESS was correct.
Her paper was about how you can't accurately write about history unless you restrict your source material to actual history, not professors creating a perhaps accurate, perhaps not, history.
Unfortunately her professor had done a lot of "extrapolating" and didn't like being exposed.
While Garland's hesitancy to bring charges before the midterms is understandable, I expect to see those charges almost immediately after. If not, then Liz Cheney's remarks are true - he's in a position where he's above the law.
On a side note, have others noticed that when Trump is belittling or condemning someone, his speech delivery changes, to where he mimics Marlon Brando from The Godfather? Rather than a cult leader, I think he sees himself as some kind of all-powerful mob boss.
The key is for the DOJ to indict and convict Trump, not doing so is evidence to his followers that everything is OK, and they will continue to act out, as will Trump. It is outrageous that Garland has not indicted Trump at this point. The excuse now will be the midterms, the excuse after will be 2024, what is it going to take? It seems they are afraid of something, possbly a civil war? The longer they wait, the worst things are likely to play out.
Thank you Thom for the providing the “inflation rate” chart link in today’s “Daily Stack.”
To others: next time one of your right-leaning acquaintances complains that Biden is responsible for inflation, you can tell them that there are 101 countries that have the same or higher inflation rate than the U.S. Ask them if Biden is responsible for those countries too.
One in a hundred people are psychopaths, but how many in a hundred are willing to follow one? I think it is more than we ever thought possible. First they would have to understand what a psychopath IS and then understand how they are manipulated by them. Thom, you, Dr. Lee, and other pros have said a mouthful. It's very hard for people to grasp and accept these facts, but thank goodness you all keep trying.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a freakin' hero! In one sense, she has paid a price for telling the truth. Someone should make a movie about that, it's fascinating.
The people that have been trying to educate the rest of us about these subjects are what give me hope. The mystery of our brains and behavior must be solved so we can evolve.
The mustard seed falls on fertile ground. A long-held speculation of mine is that the self-selected European early white migrants to North America represented a concentration of authoritarian DNA. It is hardly obscure that religious fanatics were prominent. Misogynist extremists: witch trials and The Scarlet Letter ring a bell? And this strain of inheritance held itself apart from wave after wave of The Other: pure blood unsullied by Irish, Poles, Italians; God forbid coloreds. This is the Last Stand of the Breed, but it's a mental predisposition in the chromosomes. Well. That's my theory.
Another way to see this is as a move in evolution. Where before despots were successful in their takeovers, as Trump gets crazier his support diminishes. We wouldn't kill Indians now, we don't hold slaves anymore, we wouldn't create internment camps like the ones our Japanese citizens were removed to, and now we are averting the Trump black hole that let's hope is the end of succumbing to dictatorships. Let's also hope that wiser heads will become more pro-active to speed up our evolution, where we get it that we are one humanity before we use our awesome destructive power to create our extinction before our enlightenment.
My mother (1913-2012), a pretty smart lady, used to say that it must be nice to put your brain in park and let other people do the thinking. Unfortunately frightened folks who want “answers” will look for vast conspiracies to explain their problems. And if their leader is appointed by a higher power, then as followers they are automatically the chosen people. The fact that none of this is not logical is beside the point; faith is not based on observable facts.
For example, if “Q” was really a hidden ally dropping “breadcrumb” hints about what is going on, why doesn’t the powerful Secret State just find and kill this person? Or why doesn’t Q go public, putting the evidence out on a thousand channels? Not everything is controlled by “them”. Those who believe in Qanon will, of course, have answers for these questions, not that they are logical. Being one of the elect “in the know” and expecting final victory are what matters.
Ultimately the problem is that desperate people whipped up by a new faith cannot be talked to in any sensible fashion. The YouTube interviews of Jordan Klepper talking to Trump supporters shows this pretty clearly: Facts don’t matter. In fact, experts (and by implication well educated people) are suspect and not to be trusted. What they say is irrelevant or worse as they may be part of the conspiracies claiming that that COVID or climate change are real concerns. Such assertions can make people feel powerless and thus should be ignored. Some followers will come to their senses, but when guns become involved the situation is far more toxic. Trump won’t live forever, but damage he has done and what he has tapped into will keep marching on.
The phenomenon that educated people are suspect is one of those age-old tropes. A lot of it is garden-variety anti-Semitism, but a lot is gut-level underclass resentment of privilege. My mom was the first college grad in her family, and it was poison. They were real proud of being salt-of-the-earth righteous folks, and she, lacking insight, but also eldest sister, did act like The Smart One. Disaster.
Thank you for sharing, and I agree there are a lot of issues here. The media doesn't help when it portrays professors as unworldly, arrogant or dangerous. But certainly back to at least the 19th century there were expressed fears that too much education would make people turn away from religion. On the positive side, I teach at a university which has a strong online outreach program for non-traditional students, which is what I do. We got a lot of people such as spouses of those in the military, ones who are isolated, or are in middle age and working full time, and they really want to further their educations. Most of them do quite well. So that is a positive anyway.
When you add the project of Putin and Russian Intelligence to feed the paranoia, it increases Thom's concerns exponentially.
Who is Q? Is "he" a real person, or a cabal of Russian hackers? I suspect the latter!
I don't follow it, but the top-secret information Q used to transmit seems to have stopped since the Trump team left office, so I suspect it was someone who lost their security clearance when the administration changed?
Thom,
Your rant parallels my rant for today. About 3 this morning, I was up hoping to see the cougar in the arroyo, drank too much coffee, and started philosophizing (is that a word?)
I realized that We are all extremists by nature. Our lizard brain is caged within our civilized brain, but the lizard is FAST, so it grabs emotions before civilization catches up.
I was pondering the latest impossible conspiracy fantasy from maggot relatives. They raved about how horrible Biden was. I found myself thinking that they were such fools that they don't deserve to breathe our oxygen, when they are actually decent people. Then I listened to Sirius Progress channel and heard outraged rants about how horrible Trump is. It woke me up.
Trump is a mentally slow, illiterate person who literally knows almost nothing about anything but avoiding jail. He's also a superb performer and reads a crowd better than a tent preacher. He's not evil, nor wonderful, for his actions, most of which I doubt he understands, he's just doing what Putin told him to do and Ivanka wrote down while listening in, (perhaps sitting on his lap?).
Yet, my side, and myself at times, think, view, and speak of him as evil incarnate, while maggots gaze wistfully at him with joy and worship.
My point is that anyone with celebrity is exaggerated by their audience. You are an example yourself. When I point people at your books and show, about half reply with (paraphrased) "He's superman" or "He's Lex Luther". Nobody says "I like his shows because he works his tail off to verify everything".
While I agree that we all have a tendency to extremism and hyperbole sort of "built in" to our psyches, I also think it's necessary to identify evil for what it is. Trump and those who support him may individually be ignorant and even have decent intentions in some (few) cases, but the collective they create is evil, and not to identify it as such is irresponsible and negligent, and the results of it can be disastrous.
I don't buy the concepts of good, evil, and human race. I would argue with you on "decent intentions", until you said "only in a few cases", to which I fully agree.
Don't forget (I think maybe I forgot in my comment) that 100% of NaziRepublican Party politicians are corrupt, and all the Democratic Party politicians as well, except the Progressives. What this means, said another way is
The NaziRepublican Party is lining their pockets by destroying the USA for bribes, while the Democracy Party is lining their pockets by selling laws for bribes to industry.
The key point is that until the Kremlin/NRA quit handing out Ruble stuffed envelopes, the NaziRepublican Party will continue destroying the USA for bribes.
The Democracy Party leadership are as corrupt as NaziRepublicans, but they don't want to destroy the USA. I'm sure they would if the Ruble stuffed envelopes slid under the door more often.
i.e., you absolutely NAILED the solution, end the corruption.
I don't get the human "race" thing either. Human species, perhaps? But I think one of our problems is equivocation on identifying evil as evil. Some of the terms you used, like NaziRepublican Party, are identifiers of evil. I don't disagree that the Democratic Party is as corrupt as the Republicans, and have been as supportive in practice, if not speech, of the NeoLib agenda as the Republicans. I maintain that there are a cadre of younger Democrats that is emerging with much more egalitarian views and advocacy for the kind of government that will take care of all the people and break the tyranny of billionaires and the elite on our entire system, and the old-school Dems need to get out of their way and let them bring about a real transformation. There is always relativism in human affairs, and no one is completely pure and above reproach, but what the Republican Party stands for and promotes and attempts to legislate is evil, and their leadership is evil, and I don't shrink from identifying it as such
I like to distinguish it as "The Remnant Republican Party." Evaporation concentrates impurities.
Funny: I just told the Nelson contributor that I like Thom's shows because he works his tail off to verify everything. I compared the Daily Stack to academic footnotes. Response was to diss footnotes as evidence of homogenous agreement, apparently to be distrusted either way. Huh.
Yep, well just ask my maggot relatives. They ganged up on me and argued that you can't trust documents published on a government website.
I smiled and said I only trust what I can download from government sites where they are stored electronically, and asked where they get government documents from, actors reading scripts written in Moscow?
I reminded them that all government documents are numbered and easily downloaded unless classified.
They did have an answer, they asked what about Hillary Clinton eating children under a pizza parlor slab, over a thousand miles from where she lives.
The use of footnoting may reveal that an author put in a lot of work. However the use of footnoting doesn’t necessarily prove the truth of one’s arguments. Footnotes may support one’s ideological bias but just because people use a rash of footnotes isn’t evidence of fact. I have all kinds of books that use an abundance of footnotes. For example I have a book that is designed to reveal George Soros’ profound intent and power to destabilize western culture. The author uses close to a 1000 footnotes. If I apply your principle, the book proves the malevolent intentions of George Soros. But no doubt Thom would accuse the author of being anti semitic for attacking Soros.
I’d suggest that footnoting is only one of many things that support one’s arguments. The disciplines of Rhetoric, Writing and Communications remind that there 100s of strategic tools that people use to persuade audiences to agree with the author’s thesis … and ideological conclusions. Footnotes, almost by definition are definitely one of those tools.
I guess I insulted Thom's documentation of sources by comparing it to footnotes. I apologize to Thom.
Believe me, Thom understands. I have led international technical conferences in an industry that has relatively few players, so we all know each other. Despite that, I've accepted papers that were BS and even quoted them, fooled because they were well written. The statement "It must be true because I read it on the internet" isn't just a joke, we tend to trust what we read. I've found some times Thom was off target, almost always when dancing on the edge of his expertise. We all do it, though few try.
Good point, absolutely true. I remember in college my wife did a paper for her historiography class that lowered her grade a lot. It's been 45 years so I won't have everything perfect, but I know the story.
She looked up an early Roman Empire event, and found that while there were about 100 books on the topic, there were only 3 existing records of the event, and all three had gaps.
Roughly 20 of the authors had made up a plausible story about whatever was missing, and mentioned that fact.
The other 80 books argued about which of the made up gap filling stories was right. She found authors saying "well, 12 books agree" and arguing the most common EDUCATED GUESS was correct.
Her paper was about how you can't accurately write about history unless you restrict your source material to actual history, not professors creating a perhaps accurate, perhaps not, history.
Unfortunately her professor had done a lot of "extrapolating" and didn't like being exposed.
While Garland's hesitancy to bring charges before the midterms is understandable, I expect to see those charges almost immediately after. If not, then Liz Cheney's remarks are true - he's in a position where he's above the law.
On a side note, have others noticed that when Trump is belittling or condemning someone, his speech delivery changes, to where he mimics Marlon Brando from The Godfather? Rather than a cult leader, I think he sees himself as some kind of all-powerful mob boss.
The key is for the DOJ to indict and convict Trump, not doing so is evidence to his followers that everything is OK, and they will continue to act out, as will Trump. It is outrageous that Garland has not indicted Trump at this point. The excuse now will be the midterms, the excuse after will be 2024, what is it going to take? It seems they are afraid of something, possbly a civil war? The longer they wait, the worst things are likely to play out.
Thank you Thom for the providing the “inflation rate” chart link in today’s “Daily Stack.”
To others: next time one of your right-leaning acquaintances complains that Biden is responsible for inflation, you can tell them that there are 101 countries that have the same or higher inflation rate than the U.S. Ask them if Biden is responsible for those countries too.
One in a hundred people are psychopaths, but how many in a hundred are willing to follow one? I think it is more than we ever thought possible. First they would have to understand what a psychopath IS and then understand how they are manipulated by them. Thom, you, Dr. Lee, and other pros have said a mouthful. It's very hard for people to grasp and accept these facts, but thank goodness you all keep trying.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a freakin' hero! In one sense, she has paid a price for telling the truth. Someone should make a movie about that, it's fascinating.
The people that have been trying to educate the rest of us about these subjects are what give me hope. The mystery of our brains and behavior must be solved so we can evolve.
So much crazy, so little time!
I’m not a leader, but I can certainly assert my connection to divinity:
https://addapinch.com/divinity-recipe/
The mustard seed falls on fertile ground. A long-held speculation of mine is that the self-selected European early white migrants to North America represented a concentration of authoritarian DNA. It is hardly obscure that religious fanatics were prominent. Misogynist extremists: witch trials and The Scarlet Letter ring a bell? And this strain of inheritance held itself apart from wave after wave of The Other: pure blood unsullied by Irish, Poles, Italians; God forbid coloreds. This is the Last Stand of the Breed, but it's a mental predisposition in the chromosomes. Well. That's my theory.
Another way to see this is as a move in evolution. Where before despots were successful in their takeovers, as Trump gets crazier his support diminishes. We wouldn't kill Indians now, we don't hold slaves anymore, we wouldn't create internment camps like the ones our Japanese citizens were removed to, and now we are averting the Trump black hole that let's hope is the end of succumbing to dictatorships. Let's also hope that wiser heads will become more pro-active to speed up our evolution, where we get it that we are one humanity before we use our awesome destructive power to create our extinction before our enlightenment.
Although Trump built privatized camps for asylum seekers...
Are you in the right place? Although ... compared to what?