I love writing long posts that really poke and prod ideas, but holy hell they take a long time to write. And then sometimes I'm at the end and it's like "well, this all fits together, but I'm not sure if it's right or not?"
There's a big problem with this train of thought, and that's the ought-is problem. You can't get to morality from objectivity. There is no such thing as moral truth written into the objective universe. Thus, the phrase "The epistemological foundation of moral law" isn't really something that fits together with reality. There is no epistemological basis for moral law in a rational sense. You might counter that there are commonalities between humans, and to an extent you would be correct, but no particular human is objective, and the human race among all the known races isn't particularly special necessarily. A thing that is not human will have different values, and even different humans may have different values.
You have a morality imparted upon you by the civilization you live in and all the baggage attached to it. You think your morality is self-evident and self-proving to any rational person, but that's because you're a product of your civilization and have been built by those influences. In another society, the idea that an important man can't cut down an unimportant man where he stands would be ludicrous and offensive. In yet another society, the idea that a conqueror can't cut down the conquered would be ludicrous and offensive. There's an island in the pacific islands near India that has a neolithic tribe living there, and any human being who steps foot on their island is immediately murdered, and to do otherwise is considered ludicrous and offensive. In their own ways, they're all right, but they're also all incompatible with the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and thus it is wrong for one man to murder another.
The context here is a discussion where people suggest rejecting religion or fairy tales and other stories because they're "delusion". In that sense, if you reject those things then you're rejecting culture and history on a large scale, which is effectively assuming you can take facts and logic and magic yourself into a value system. The most famous attempt at this still ended up inheriting the values of the culture of the time, and still ended up the most murderous ideology in history. In another post in this thread, I talked about some examples of objective facts we learned from the crazy stories of the past, you can't just assume we know everything there is to know if we wipe all that out.
Objectively speaking, life on earth isn't meaningful. We all live on a tiny speck of dust surrounding an inconsequential star, and we're likely to be extinct within a mere million years or so, but even if we survive that we're going to eventually have to deal with our yellow dwarf star entering the red giant cycle and our planet and everything about it will be swallowed by billions of years of atomic fire until the sun uses up its fuel entirely and becomes an ultradense chunk of matter slowly cooling over millions more years. And we're unlikely to figure out any way out of the inevitable. All traces of the human race will be wiped out, anything you considered good, anything you considered evil, not that anyone or anything will ever even know we existed anyway, on a timeline that is possibly going to see the universe become a slowly dying and dwindling place over timespans we can't even begin to imagine.
Given that fact, and the fact that we'd all die out of despair if we think too hard about that sort of cosmic existential horror, we humans cluster around meaning or value we can find subjectively the same way our ancestors huddled around the primitive fires they learned to create out of nothing but sticks. Pretty it up with fancy words, but we're just trying to figure out the ways to live, and there's no mathematical equation for doing so. But those who came before us had ideas they thought worked, and so they'd pass those messages on through stories. And they also pass messages to us through genetics, where many subtle parts of our genome whisper in our ears about lessons those who came before us learned.
We have the capacity for both violence and peace, both prosocial and antisocial practices, because regardless of our personal desire for a peaceful and prosocial world, the world is an ever-changing place and individuals constantly will be tested with the reality that you can't always make friends, you can't always make peace, and people who are good sometimes or even often die. So we can't assume that one path or the other is written in the atoms of the universe, and we also can't assume that one path or the other has any moral value in the face of a truly nihilistic universe. We realize that, and that's one interpretation for why we stepped out of the garden of Eden when we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil -- once we understand its nature, we can never go back to the dumb primate bravado that we're definitely dong the right thing no matter what we do.
Postmodern man is an idiot. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be committing suicide. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be so depressed or otherwise mentally ill so widely. We're better off materially than many of our ancestors but they would say they're better off in ways that matter than we are. We think we're the most moral humans to have ever lived, but we tried to wipe our slates clean to get there, and that's not how human beings work. We lose our ancient wisdom, we lose the epistemological basis for the few things we think can actually work. Eventually we lose our morality because it's just loose sheets of paper sitting on a table.
I want to make it clear that I'm not necessarily saying that all morality is subjective in the sense of cultural relativism. What I'm saying is that there's a lot more going into a successful value system than we think, and we are arrogant to throw out the basis of our current values to think we'll somehow be able to do better without ancient wisdom trying to just wipe the slate clean and keep writing.
You have a morality imparted upon you by the civilization you live in and all the baggage attached to it. You think your morality is self-evident and self-proving to any rational person, but that's because you're a product of your civilization and have been built by those influences. In another society, the idea that an important man can't cut down an unimportant man where he stands would be ludicrous and offensive. In yet another society, the idea that a conqueror can't cut down the conquered would be ludicrous and offensive. There's an island in the pacific islands near India that has a neolithic tribe living there, and any human being who steps foot on their island is immediately murdered, and to do otherwise is considered ludicrous and offensive. In their own ways, they're all right, but they're also all incompatible with the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and thus it is wrong for one man to murder another.
The context here is a discussion where people suggest rejecting religion or fairy tales and other stories because they're "delusion". In that sense, if you reject those things then you're rejecting culture and history on a large scale, which is effectively assuming you can take facts and logic and magic yourself into a value system. The most famous attempt at this still ended up inheriting the values of the culture of the time, and still ended up the most murderous ideology in history. In another post in this thread, I talked about some examples of objective facts we learned from the crazy stories of the past, you can't just assume we know everything there is to know if we wipe all that out.
Objectively speaking, life on earth isn't meaningful. We all live on a tiny speck of dust surrounding an inconsequential star, and we're likely to be extinct within a mere million years or so, but even if we survive that we're going to eventually have to deal with our yellow dwarf star entering the red giant cycle and our planet and everything about it will be swallowed by billions of years of atomic fire until the sun uses up its fuel entirely and becomes an ultradense chunk of matter slowly cooling over millions more years. And we're unlikely to figure out any way out of the inevitable. All traces of the human race will be wiped out, anything you considered good, anything you considered evil, not that anyone or anything will ever even know we existed anyway, on a timeline that is possibly going to see the universe become a slowly dying and dwindling place over timespans we can't even begin to imagine.
Given that fact, and the fact that we'd all die out of despair if we think too hard about that sort of cosmic existential horror, we humans cluster around meaning or value we can find subjectively the same way our ancestors huddled around the primitive fires they learned to create out of nothing but sticks. Pretty it up with fancy words, but we're just trying to figure out the ways to live, and there's no mathematical equation for doing so. But those who came before us had ideas they thought worked, and so they'd pass those messages on through stories. And they also pass messages to us through genetics, where many subtle parts of our genome whisper in our ears about lessons those who came before us learned.
We have the capacity for both violence and peace, both prosocial and antisocial practices, because regardless of our personal desire for a peaceful and prosocial world, the world is an ever-changing place and individuals constantly will be tested with the reality that you can't always make friends, you can't always make peace, and people who are good sometimes or even often die. So we can't assume that one path or the other is written in the atoms of the universe, and we also can't assume that one path or the other has any moral value in the face of a truly nihilistic universe. We realize that, and that's one interpretation for why we stepped out of the garden of Eden when we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil -- once we understand its nature, we can never go back to the dumb primate bravado that we're definitely dong the right thing no matter what we do.
Postmodern man is an idiot. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be committing suicide. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be so depressed or otherwise mentally ill so widely. We're better off materially than many of our ancestors but they would say they're better off in ways that matter than we are. We think we're the most moral humans to have ever lived, but we tried to wipe our slates clean to get there, and that's not how human beings work. We lose our ancient wisdom, we lose the epistemological basis for the few things we think can actually work. Eventually we lose our morality because it's just loose sheets of paper sitting on a table.
I want to make it clear that I'm not necessarily saying that all morality is subjective in the sense of cultural relativism. What I'm saying is that there's a lot more going into a successful value system than we think, and we are arrogant to throw out the basis of our current values to think we'll somehow be able to do better without ancient wisdom trying to just wipe the slate clean and keep writing.
I'm definitely over-analyzing, it's kinda my thing.
Even if you take a step back and say that religion itself is delusional, I still think that something delusional can tell you something meaningful. Have you ever done dream analysis? Dreams are by definition nothing but delusion, but you can definitely tell things that parts of your mind you don't directly converse with are saying by the imagery and symbolism inside dreams. I've written before about my analysis of recurring dreams about buying old cars to fix up, and how that imagery is to me self-evidently about responsibility, and how at that time I was having those dreams I needed to be careful because I was taking on too many responsibility and like a bunch of used cars hanging out in your garage eventually things are so packed up you can't even do any work anyway and you have such a backlog you've overburdened yourself.
The thing about old stories whether you take them as religious doctrine or just old stories is that they've been around for a long time, and the information contained in such old stories can be very interesting. The story of the seven Pleiades sisters is quite interesting because for all of recorded history, it looked like six stars. However, about 200,000 years ago it would have appeared to be seven Stars. This tells us that this story was telling us about something that happened long before recorded history began. Similarly, there were a wide variety of archaeological finds that were discovered by simply looking at the old Legends such as The Iliad and looking in the places that the story is claimed had certain things happen. That's how they found what they believed to be the city of Troy, and something similar with the story of Theseus helped archaeologists find the Minoan civilization which was previously completely lost and forgotten. In the same way that these symbolic stories were able to tell us about archaeological and scientific facts, many of them can tell stories about moral or philosophical facts that our hyper rational and highly scientific civilization may have forgotten in the same way that we have forgotten about the Minoans.
Of course, you have to balance studies of ancient wisdom with living in the here and now, for a few reasons. For one thing, metaphor is pretty hazy over millennia, and you don't necessarily understand what they're trying to tell you. For example we didn't know about the story of the Pleiades until modern science learned that fact. For another, what was true a millennium ago may not be true today. The Bible tells us a lot about dealing with Romans, but the western Roman empire fell 600 years ago. Meanwhile, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about the Internet.
Even if you take a step back and say that religion itself is delusional, I still think that something delusional can tell you something meaningful. Have you ever done dream analysis? Dreams are by definition nothing but delusion, but you can definitely tell things that parts of your mind you don't directly converse with are saying by the imagery and symbolism inside dreams. I've written before about my analysis of recurring dreams about buying old cars to fix up, and how that imagery is to me self-evidently about responsibility, and how at that time I was having those dreams I needed to be careful because I was taking on too many responsibility and like a bunch of used cars hanging out in your garage eventually things are so packed up you can't even do any work anyway and you have such a backlog you've overburdened yourself.
The thing about old stories whether you take them as religious doctrine or just old stories is that they've been around for a long time, and the information contained in such old stories can be very interesting. The story of the seven Pleiades sisters is quite interesting because for all of recorded history, it looked like six stars. However, about 200,000 years ago it would have appeared to be seven Stars. This tells us that this story was telling us about something that happened long before recorded history began. Similarly, there were a wide variety of archaeological finds that were discovered by simply looking at the old Legends such as The Iliad and looking in the places that the story is claimed had certain things happen. That's how they found what they believed to be the city of Troy, and something similar with the story of Theseus helped archaeologists find the Minoan civilization which was previously completely lost and forgotten. In the same way that these symbolic stories were able to tell us about archaeological and scientific facts, many of them can tell stories about moral or philosophical facts that our hyper rational and highly scientific civilization may have forgotten in the same way that we have forgotten about the Minoans.
Of course, you have to balance studies of ancient wisdom with living in the here and now, for a few reasons. For one thing, metaphor is pretty hazy over millennia, and you don't necessarily understand what they're trying to tell you. For example we didn't know about the story of the Pleiades until modern science learned that fact. For another, what was true a millennium ago may not be true today. The Bible tells us a lot about dealing with Romans, but the western Roman empire fell 600 years ago. Meanwhile, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about the Internet.
"Bank Of America Customers Report Widespread Outage, Zero Balances"
You know, if the bank wants to make my balances 0, I'm willing to make that sacrifice. It's a big hit they'll have to take, they'll have to add a lot of money to a lot of accounts, but it's a tough time and sacrifices must be made.
You know, if the bank wants to make my balances 0, I'm willing to make that sacrifice. It's a big hit they'll have to take, they'll have to add a lot of money to a lot of accounts, but it's a tough time and sacrifices must be made.
I know guys like that. God literally asks them a question and they're like "fuck off, I didn't do nuthin"
Then he's all shocked that God doesn't give him a raise.
Then he's all shocked that God doesn't give him a raise.
I'm with you, internet archive is a great resource (a resource I've personally donated money to because they do great work), but they're gonna get their shit packed in, and it's their own fault.
The problem is that they're the biggest piracy site on planet earth. You can get most movies, many books (not through their library programs), you can download packs containing every single game for virtually every game console they had ever existed, and so much more. If you had a magical memory stick that contained the entirety of the internet archive, you could have a full and happy life filled with new media every single day, because there's that much stuff on there. It's bigger than megaupload in it's heydey.
They should have kept to their core mission, acting as a legal online library and internet archive, perhaps host archives of confirmed public domain files. Instead they've really threatened their mission by playing fast and loose with the rules to the extent that their end is inevitable now, and it'll be a massive loss for the whole internet.
The problem is that they're the biggest piracy site on planet earth. You can get most movies, many books (not through their library programs), you can download packs containing every single game for virtually every game console they had ever existed, and so much more. If you had a magical memory stick that contained the entirety of the internet archive, you could have a full and happy life filled with new media every single day, because there's that much stuff on there. It's bigger than megaupload in it's heydey.
They should have kept to their core mission, acting as a legal online library and internet archive, perhaps host archives of confirmed public domain files. Instead they've really threatened their mission by playing fast and loose with the rules to the extent that their end is inevitable now, and it'll be a massive loss for the whole internet.
I find it odd that in some ways we live in the least symbolic era of all time, where people will pick apart organized religion or fairy tales as if they're scientific fact told with the full intent of expressing the results of a lab test, but in other ways we live in the most symbolic era of all time where everyone chooses their words so carefully because everyone is expected to look at words and actions through more lenses than an optometrist.
It was actually a postmodern instinct I had to shut off because it's a poisonous way of looking at your own life. I mean, try to be a good parent or a good husband or a good brother, and the postmodern mind starts setting off alarm bells that through a literary lens you may be setting yourself up to be killed off-screen or something.
Human beings have always had an instinct for metaphor, but I think the inauthentic deconstruction and critical lensing of the current day is a unique artefact of pop-postmodernism. In that sense, the millennial generation craves authenticity but they've been trained by their media from birth to tear down anything authentic and replace it with 15 layer deep false symbolism.
It was actually a postmodern instinct I had to shut off because it's a poisonous way of looking at your own life. I mean, try to be a good parent or a good husband or a good brother, and the postmodern mind starts setting off alarm bells that through a literary lens you may be setting yourself up to be killed off-screen or something.
Human beings have always had an instinct for metaphor, but I think the inauthentic deconstruction and critical lensing of the current day is a unique artefact of pop-postmodernism. In that sense, the millennial generation craves authenticity but they've been trained by their media from birth to tear down anything authentic and replace it with 15 layer deep false symbolism.
"Pay you to lay there like a dead fish? Forget this!
I'll present you with a new deal like a leftist
Show you my hourly rates in a net twist
Me taking charge it's got you feeling wettest!
Bitch!"
And this is why I never became a rapper.
I'll present you with a new deal like a leftist
Show you my hourly rates in a net twist
Me taking charge it's got you feeling wettest!
Bitch!"
And this is why I never became a rapper.
Smart to go on strike right before the election. Isn't like they're going to shut down the strike right before they ask for the union votes.
But that would be pretty funny too.
But that would be pretty funny too.
The Thief and the Cobbler is one, it was massively expensive and destroyed the studio, but it was the animator's magnum opus he worked on for 30 years.
Showgirls was one of the movies Paul Verhoven pushed for as a personal project, and it literally destroyed the careers of some of the people who were part of the project (and gave many of us a chance to see tits on basic cable at 15, so your sacrifice will not be forgotten)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a first of its kind, a photorealistic movie, but the cost and the fact that the movie just wasn't very good basically destroyed the studio after one picture.
Disney's Treasure Planet was intended to be the magnum opus of its creators, but ended up being a nail in the coffin of disney animated movies.
Cameron's Avatar is an example in the other direction, where it was this weird movie about blue aliens he really wanted to make that ended up making all of the money. His movie Titanic is another weird one, where you have a 3 and a half hour historical romance that became the top movie on earth.
Christopher Nolan's Inception was also mind bendingly popular, and one of the films he used his clout to create.
I also heard about a movie from 1980 called Heaven's Gate which destroyed the director, the studio, and essentially ended the era of director-led movies because studios were too gun-shy after that bomb to let that happen again.
So as you can see, these sort of risky auteur films can either be the biggest flops or the biggest home runs, it really depends on the film and the world around it in that moment.
Showgirls was one of the movies Paul Verhoven pushed for as a personal project, and it literally destroyed the careers of some of the people who were part of the project (and gave many of us a chance to see tits on basic cable at 15, so your sacrifice will not be forgotten)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a first of its kind, a photorealistic movie, but the cost and the fact that the movie just wasn't very good basically destroyed the studio after one picture.
Disney's Treasure Planet was intended to be the magnum opus of its creators, but ended up being a nail in the coffin of disney animated movies.
Cameron's Avatar is an example in the other direction, where it was this weird movie about blue aliens he really wanted to make that ended up making all of the money. His movie Titanic is another weird one, where you have a 3 and a half hour historical romance that became the top movie on earth.
Christopher Nolan's Inception was also mind bendingly popular, and one of the films he used his clout to create.
I also heard about a movie from 1980 called Heaven's Gate which destroyed the director, the studio, and essentially ended the era of director-led movies because studios were too gun-shy after that bomb to let that happen again.
So as you can see, these sort of risky auteur films can either be the biggest flops or the biggest home runs, it really depends on the film and the world around it in that moment.
Keep in mind as you read that I'm not a Trump voter, and Gabriel isn't a Trump voter. We're both Canadians. We've got our own political system to worry about. My analysis is from a third party observer, not a participant.
What I'm seeing is that you seem frustrated that your mental model isn't matching the behavior you'd expect, and you think the only explanation is that it's a cult. Maybe there's some global cult where people all around the world are praising one asshole American, but I think your models might be fairly low resolution, and you assume people are stupid, when the reality is with a higher resolution model you'd come to understand that people's views are more nuanced.
In the Republican primaries the main contenders would be DeSantis and Hayley, both of whom were neolib/neocons so go ahead and vote for them if you want but that's not what the new right is about -- Neolibs and neocons are typically part of an establishment the new right calls "the uniparty", not friendly. DeSantis had some decent policies in Florida, but it seems like he sort of slipped into them by accident rather than by any magical wit, since on culture war stuff he overplayed his hand(such as taking the big win of going "no talking about sex to kindergarteners" and starting to turn it into exactly what his progressive enemies accused him of doing in the first place), and in the primaries he made some big mistakes (he handled the Trump conviction really poorly which hit him hard) suggesting he was just another establishment candidate. Vivek was a great candidate and I liked him but it was literally his first time in the political arena. I think he'll be a heavy hitter in the coming years as long as he doesn't screw anything up (and that's the key here, he needs to build trust with people because we've all had candidates come in and say the right things but no matter how beautiful the words Obama didn't close down gitmo and he didn't pull out of Afghanistan), but given that he still needs to build that trust I can understand why between the two people would choose Trump, even with the latter's mistakes.
And it's easy to say from a keyboard "oh, he's obviously too stupid to realize what happened", but reality is that the political machine is incredibly clever when it comes to lying baldfacedly to get you to support the thing they want to do. If I remember right, you yourself have railed against neoliberalism, but what is postmodern neoliberalism but a lie -- they claim they're shrinking the size of government while making it grow but taking social programs away from the people and selling the public goods to the highest bidder. Many entire political establishments around the world fall for the Machiavellian machinations of the establishment machine, I don't think there's a huge cognitive dissonance in assuming sometimes an imperfect political neophyte will fall for their tricks now and again.
It isn't like we can see anyone who's done any better, and it's obvious to Trump voters that he has at least part of the machine scared as hell given that they're putting everything they have into corrupt lawfare against him. And as I mentioned before, Trump voters who are the most concerned about the covid vaccines *do* routinely criticize him for what he did with the vaccines, which is again not in line with an infallible cult of personality. They see this as a tactical error on his part, and one of many -- many people who want to see a second Trump term will tell you straight-up that the first Trump presidency was really lacking in a lot of ways, he didn't succeed at a lot of the things he tried to do. The thing he has going for him is the fact that he appears to be the only one doing the things he's doing, which gives him a competitive advantage.
If we're gonna start talking untruths, perhaps we should.
You believe that a riot that happened after Trump said "peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" was caused by him, and he is responsible for that riot despite immediately telling his supporters "go home". By contrast, the other candidate in this election said after 6 months of violent riots that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, killed dozens of people, and forced the president of the United States to hide in a bunker during a particularly violent night, "they're not gonna stop[...] And they should not" so do you hold them to the same standard?
Do you also believe the Russia Russia Russia hoax, confirmed misinformation generated by the Hillary Clinton campaign for which her campaign was charged a large fine?
Do you believe in the "very fine people" fraud which snopes has confirmed false?
Do you actually know what Trump was convicted of? No, not what you think he was convicted of, what he was actually convicted of. It was mislabeling a line item on an accounting document. He mislabeled a line item. So they convicted him of a felony. Because he was also running for president at the time. It wasn't even a felony if you weren't running for president. And that's not an accusation or a conspiracy theory, that's the legal theory officially presented in the case by the New York prosecutor. Mislabeling a line item is a misdemeanor when most people did it, it's a felony because Donald Trump did it while running for office. That's weird, isn't it? Most people don't realize that he mislabeled a line item on an accounting document, they think it was something far more salacious because it was presented as such. Hey, quick question: Are you sure every single line item on every accounting document you ever had created is correct? Are you sure?
Do you believe trump has refused to denounce neo Nazis and white supremacists, which he did explicitly in the very same video that debunks the "very fine people" fraud?
Even if you knew all of these things now, do you think that perhaps your view of someone might be skewed when certain elements of the media are 93% negative on Trump and 100% positive for Harris, as one Newsbusters analysis of ABC found? That's a lot of negativity and positivity to independently think through. There was a young lady from North Korea who came to the west, and she was shocked when she got out. She and everyone in NK "knew" the news was wrong and figured the most egregious stuff said about Kim Jong Un was wrong, but it wasn't until she left that she realized just how much of the news was totally false, particularly about the west.
Trump is doing better than any Republican presidential candidate in 50 years with black voters, cutting the previously expected 50 point lead held by democrats in half with Kamala Harris. He's doing very well with latino voters. He's doing better than any candidate since Reagan with union voters. Are all these people cultists who only like Trump because he's the head of a cult of personality? Maybe, but I think you'd do well to tread lightly and consider maybe these people just have a different viewpoint that you're not considering.
Finally, have you seen the "sharp as a tack" video about Joe Biden? It's showing all the TV commentators talking about how fit he was to run for president this election, every one saying he's "sharp as a tack", or "better than he's ever been". Gentle reminder that Joe Biden is not the candidate for president because it turns out he's a doddering old man and he was forced out in a palace coup after winning the democrat primaries. See? That's what a cult looks like. Or the least popular vice president ever being hailed as not just the great hope for the party, but the living personification of joy. Now that's pretty fuckin culty. I'm not making a "whataboutism" argument here, I'm contrasting what the supposed cult of Donald Trump looks like compared to something I think looks a lot more like a cult.
While looking at an actual cult, note that coalitions with internal disagreements are inherently different from cults where a single, unquestionable authority is held in reverence. unquestionable statements like "Joe Biden is sharp as a tack" kept getting repeated and like scientologists if you dared question the cult you would be destroyed as a person, crushed. And make no mistake, the cult is going to switch to new targets once it's done with Trump. I mean, just look at the mayor of NYC. Do you think he's getting charged because he did something wrong, or is he getting charged for making Biden look bad when a bunch of illegal migrants showed up in NYC?
Anyway, I'm not expecting to change your mind here, but maybe you might get a slightly higher resolution view of why people support who they do. Considering there's a good chance Trump wins the next election, understanding why anyone would vote for him, let alone about half the country that votes, is probably not a bad exercise whether you want to like him or not. The one good thing for everyone is that 4 years from now, he'll be done in office anyway.
And no, he's not going to seize control of the government, because his coalition would crucify him if he did, because it's not a cult. If you'd like evidence that his coalition won't allow it, just look to January 6th itself, which even if you took it at its least charitable and it was 100% a coup, nobody stood behind that. The Republicans liked it the least of all, and even many Republican voters were outspoken in their disdain for what had happened.
What I'm seeing is that you seem frustrated that your mental model isn't matching the behavior you'd expect, and you think the only explanation is that it's a cult. Maybe there's some global cult where people all around the world are praising one asshole American, but I think your models might be fairly low resolution, and you assume people are stupid, when the reality is with a higher resolution model you'd come to understand that people's views are more nuanced.
In the Republican primaries the main contenders would be DeSantis and Hayley, both of whom were neolib/neocons so go ahead and vote for them if you want but that's not what the new right is about -- Neolibs and neocons are typically part of an establishment the new right calls "the uniparty", not friendly. DeSantis had some decent policies in Florida, but it seems like he sort of slipped into them by accident rather than by any magical wit, since on culture war stuff he overplayed his hand(such as taking the big win of going "no talking about sex to kindergarteners" and starting to turn it into exactly what his progressive enemies accused him of doing in the first place), and in the primaries he made some big mistakes (he handled the Trump conviction really poorly which hit him hard) suggesting he was just another establishment candidate. Vivek was a great candidate and I liked him but it was literally his first time in the political arena. I think he'll be a heavy hitter in the coming years as long as he doesn't screw anything up (and that's the key here, he needs to build trust with people because we've all had candidates come in and say the right things but no matter how beautiful the words Obama didn't close down gitmo and he didn't pull out of Afghanistan), but given that he still needs to build that trust I can understand why between the two people would choose Trump, even with the latter's mistakes.
And it's easy to say from a keyboard "oh, he's obviously too stupid to realize what happened", but reality is that the political machine is incredibly clever when it comes to lying baldfacedly to get you to support the thing they want to do. If I remember right, you yourself have railed against neoliberalism, but what is postmodern neoliberalism but a lie -- they claim they're shrinking the size of government while making it grow but taking social programs away from the people and selling the public goods to the highest bidder. Many entire political establishments around the world fall for the Machiavellian machinations of the establishment machine, I don't think there's a huge cognitive dissonance in assuming sometimes an imperfect political neophyte will fall for their tricks now and again.
It isn't like we can see anyone who's done any better, and it's obvious to Trump voters that he has at least part of the machine scared as hell given that they're putting everything they have into corrupt lawfare against him. And as I mentioned before, Trump voters who are the most concerned about the covid vaccines *do* routinely criticize him for what he did with the vaccines, which is again not in line with an infallible cult of personality. They see this as a tactical error on his part, and one of many -- many people who want to see a second Trump term will tell you straight-up that the first Trump presidency was really lacking in a lot of ways, he didn't succeed at a lot of the things he tried to do. The thing he has going for him is the fact that he appears to be the only one doing the things he's doing, which gives him a competitive advantage.
If we're gonna start talking untruths, perhaps we should.
You believe that a riot that happened after Trump said "peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" was caused by him, and he is responsible for that riot despite immediately telling his supporters "go home". By contrast, the other candidate in this election said after 6 months of violent riots that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, killed dozens of people, and forced the president of the United States to hide in a bunker during a particularly violent night, "they're not gonna stop[...] And they should not" so do you hold them to the same standard?
Do you also believe the Russia Russia Russia hoax, confirmed misinformation generated by the Hillary Clinton campaign for which her campaign was charged a large fine?
Do you believe in the "very fine people" fraud which snopes has confirmed false?
Do you actually know what Trump was convicted of? No, not what you think he was convicted of, what he was actually convicted of. It was mislabeling a line item on an accounting document. He mislabeled a line item. So they convicted him of a felony. Because he was also running for president at the time. It wasn't even a felony if you weren't running for president. And that's not an accusation or a conspiracy theory, that's the legal theory officially presented in the case by the New York prosecutor. Mislabeling a line item is a misdemeanor when most people did it, it's a felony because Donald Trump did it while running for office. That's weird, isn't it? Most people don't realize that he mislabeled a line item on an accounting document, they think it was something far more salacious because it was presented as such. Hey, quick question: Are you sure every single line item on every accounting document you ever had created is correct? Are you sure?
Do you believe trump has refused to denounce neo Nazis and white supremacists, which he did explicitly in the very same video that debunks the "very fine people" fraud?
Even if you knew all of these things now, do you think that perhaps your view of someone might be skewed when certain elements of the media are 93% negative on Trump and 100% positive for Harris, as one Newsbusters analysis of ABC found? That's a lot of negativity and positivity to independently think through. There was a young lady from North Korea who came to the west, and she was shocked when she got out. She and everyone in NK "knew" the news was wrong and figured the most egregious stuff said about Kim Jong Un was wrong, but it wasn't until she left that she realized just how much of the news was totally false, particularly about the west.
Trump is doing better than any Republican presidential candidate in 50 years with black voters, cutting the previously expected 50 point lead held by democrats in half with Kamala Harris. He's doing very well with latino voters. He's doing better than any candidate since Reagan with union voters. Are all these people cultists who only like Trump because he's the head of a cult of personality? Maybe, but I think you'd do well to tread lightly and consider maybe these people just have a different viewpoint that you're not considering.
Finally, have you seen the "sharp as a tack" video about Joe Biden? It's showing all the TV commentators talking about how fit he was to run for president this election, every one saying he's "sharp as a tack", or "better than he's ever been". Gentle reminder that Joe Biden is not the candidate for president because it turns out he's a doddering old man and he was forced out in a palace coup after winning the democrat primaries. See? That's what a cult looks like. Or the least popular vice president ever being hailed as not just the great hope for the party, but the living personification of joy. Now that's pretty fuckin culty. I'm not making a "whataboutism" argument here, I'm contrasting what the supposed cult of Donald Trump looks like compared to something I think looks a lot more like a cult.
While looking at an actual cult, note that coalitions with internal disagreements are inherently different from cults where a single, unquestionable authority is held in reverence. unquestionable statements like "Joe Biden is sharp as a tack" kept getting repeated and like scientologists if you dared question the cult you would be destroyed as a person, crushed. And make no mistake, the cult is going to switch to new targets once it's done with Trump. I mean, just look at the mayor of NYC. Do you think he's getting charged because he did something wrong, or is he getting charged for making Biden look bad when a bunch of illegal migrants showed up in NYC?
Anyway, I'm not expecting to change your mind here, but maybe you might get a slightly higher resolution view of why people support who they do. Considering there's a good chance Trump wins the next election, understanding why anyone would vote for him, let alone about half the country that votes, is probably not a bad exercise whether you want to like him or not. The one good thing for everyone is that 4 years from now, he'll be done in office anyway.
And no, he's not going to seize control of the government, because his coalition would crucify him if he did, because it's not a cult. If you'd like evidence that his coalition won't allow it, just look to January 6th itself, which even if you took it at its least charitable and it was 100% a coup, nobody stood behind that. The Republicans liked it the least of all, and even many Republican voters were outspoken in their disdain for what had happened.
It might not be a peer-reviewed study, but it can be convincing enough evidence. What's interesting is that my brother helped disprove a lot of ideas that I had about what might make someone successful or at least happy in life.
From very early on he was a very successful hedonist, but a lot of people that live that lifestyle end up miserable...
From very early on he was a very successful hedonist, but a lot of people that live that lifestyle end up miserable...
I ask you to consider the idea that the reason that you don't understand Trump when looking at him through the lens of a cult is that it's not a cult.
You're not going to find that many Trump supporters who don't disagree with him on something. A lot of Christian conservatives don't like his stance on abortion and think it's too permissive. A lot of libertarian conservatives dislike a lot of what he did and didn't do -- a lot of people think that he should have pardoned Assange and Snowden which was totally in his power. A lot of fiscal conservatives don't like just how much money he spends. A lot of people deeply criticized him for hiring John Bolton as well as many of his other appointments. Many of his supporters are disaffected liberals who think the Democrats are acting authoritarian. A lot of people don't like how he talks online. A lot of people criticizing how he's running this campaign. Some people even think that his decisions during covid including project warpspeed were bad. They don't directly blame him for the vaccines being dangerous, but he let them get their Trojan horse into the city. I see it on my feed all the time, people on the right reminding other conservatives about that fact as a warning not to get complacent and not to put Trump onto a pedestal of infallibility.
The guy has built a coalition of a bunch of different disparate groups, and none of them think that he is a perfect person or a perfect candidate. It's a misconception that you only support a politician when you pretend you would marry them, but that isn't something among his supporters. That's something that the left does. They say that you need to fall in love with a Democrat. People fell in love with obama, they fell in love with kennedy, they fell in love with clinton, but you don't need to fall in love with Trump to support him. All you need to think is that he's going to steer things in generally the right direction and he's going to do his best.
It's possible to think project warpspeed let a Trojan horse in the gates and it was a bad call but still think he's the better bet for running the country. When cults see their all powerful leader make mistakes it causes anguish and cognitive dissonance, but if you think the guy you support is a human and he makes a mistake frankly anyone could have made and their opposition is destroying cities for 6 months at a time, forcing people to take experimental drugs or lose their livelihoods, taking pot shots at political candidates, denying people food to homeless people based on race or other overtly evil things, it puts mistakes in context.
A lot of his current allies are people who previously spoke out against him, including his current vice presidential candidate. There are people who used to support him who now speak out against him. That isn't the actions of a cult of people, it's the actions of a fragile alliance built from political horse trading.
Given the reality of the situation before you, I would ask you to consider where all of your narratives come from. Are you the one who thought that Trump's following was a cult, or did someone tell you that, and you picked it up, but you're finding it kind of frustrating the fact that it doesn't really seem to fit the facts?
You're not going to find that many Trump supporters who don't disagree with him on something. A lot of Christian conservatives don't like his stance on abortion and think it's too permissive. A lot of libertarian conservatives dislike a lot of what he did and didn't do -- a lot of people think that he should have pardoned Assange and Snowden which was totally in his power. A lot of fiscal conservatives don't like just how much money he spends. A lot of people deeply criticized him for hiring John Bolton as well as many of his other appointments. Many of his supporters are disaffected liberals who think the Democrats are acting authoritarian. A lot of people don't like how he talks online. A lot of people criticizing how he's running this campaign. Some people even think that his decisions during covid including project warpspeed were bad. They don't directly blame him for the vaccines being dangerous, but he let them get their Trojan horse into the city. I see it on my feed all the time, people on the right reminding other conservatives about that fact as a warning not to get complacent and not to put Trump onto a pedestal of infallibility.
The guy has built a coalition of a bunch of different disparate groups, and none of them think that he is a perfect person or a perfect candidate. It's a misconception that you only support a politician when you pretend you would marry them, but that isn't something among his supporters. That's something that the left does. They say that you need to fall in love with a Democrat. People fell in love with obama, they fell in love with kennedy, they fell in love with clinton, but you don't need to fall in love with Trump to support him. All you need to think is that he's going to steer things in generally the right direction and he's going to do his best.
It's possible to think project warpspeed let a Trojan horse in the gates and it was a bad call but still think he's the better bet for running the country. When cults see their all powerful leader make mistakes it causes anguish and cognitive dissonance, but if you think the guy you support is a human and he makes a mistake frankly anyone could have made and their opposition is destroying cities for 6 months at a time, forcing people to take experimental drugs or lose their livelihoods, taking pot shots at political candidates, denying people food to homeless people based on race or other overtly evil things, it puts mistakes in context.
A lot of his current allies are people who previously spoke out against him, including his current vice presidential candidate. There are people who used to support him who now speak out against him. That isn't the actions of a cult of people, it's the actions of a fragile alliance built from political horse trading.
Given the reality of the situation before you, I would ask you to consider where all of your narratives come from. Are you the one who thought that Trump's following was a cult, or did someone tell you that, and you picked it up, but you're finding it kind of frustrating the fact that it doesn't really seem to fit the facts?
I think for someone like that, it isn't about the money, it's about making your artistic vision happen, using the clout you built elsewhere to push through a project that was never financially viable but it's your dream as a filmmaker.
Sometimes those stories end up becoming some of the biggest movies of all time, but often they just end up being a big waste of money except for the guy who gots to make his dream movie.
Sometimes those stories end up becoming some of the biggest movies of all time, but often they just end up being a big waste of money except for the guy who gots to make his dream movie.
Furthering the metaphor, I bet there is a sort of ideological immune system that will eventually tap the brakes most of the time, but for something that doesn't have that immune system by design and just keep on getting eaten up.
To be honest, you're not entirely wrong. Lol
It's been enjoyable for me to watch but I get it lol
It's been enjoyable for me to watch but I get it lol
https://youtu.be/I5g_7AtUzQg
These two have some interesting things to say, and this episode is about the "pod people" effect of wokeness.
Given what happens every time, inauthentic people injecting themselves into hobbies so they can eat them from inside, you can see the pod people actions, and also why we might have an instinct against such people -- like a brachnoid wasp, they lay their eggs inside your favorite properties, and when they think they can get away with it those eggs hatch and they start to devour those properties from the inside out.
You can see from there why normalish people get the heebie jeebies from such people, because you can sense their inauthenticity. "As a little girl I always loved Warhammer 40k!" No you didn't.
But here's a further take: thinking about it this way, I'm not sure progressive ideology is itself inherently pod peopleish or even inherently woke the way we think about it. I kind of think that default liberal ideology was super powerful (a famous study around 2007 showed 75% of millennials agreed with it), and so the pod people were drawn to it. It looks like the cause of the disease, but it's just the current carrier, like a zombie beetle carrying around wasp larvae. I'm not even sure it's "patient zero", I think those pod people ate up organized religion before they caused it to collapse, and now they're eating stuff like opposing racism and the like, but they'll jump to a new host once this one is dead (and make no mistake, it's dying). The pod people also force others to conform or be expelled, so that explains why some people who used to be cool seem to have stopped and started acting like pod people full-time.
I can't predict what the next host will be, but it'll be something super popular. It may even be "anti-wokeness" seeing how badly progressive ideology has been destroyed, where they'll inject themselves into it, take power for themselves, make it totally insufferable with pod people, and people will start to hate this thing too. I can imagine something wholesome like anti-pedophilia being taken over, because then you get the power to accuse individuals of horrific crimes due to your movement, and they'll even eat that host so badly people just won't care anymore.
These two have some interesting things to say, and this episode is about the "pod people" effect of wokeness.
Given what happens every time, inauthentic people injecting themselves into hobbies so they can eat them from inside, you can see the pod people actions, and also why we might have an instinct against such people -- like a brachnoid wasp, they lay their eggs inside your favorite properties, and when they think they can get away with it those eggs hatch and they start to devour those properties from the inside out.
You can see from there why normalish people get the heebie jeebies from such people, because you can sense their inauthenticity. "As a little girl I always loved Warhammer 40k!" No you didn't.
But here's a further take: thinking about it this way, I'm not sure progressive ideology is itself inherently pod peopleish or even inherently woke the way we think about it. I kind of think that default liberal ideology was super powerful (a famous study around 2007 showed 75% of millennials agreed with it), and so the pod people were drawn to it. It looks like the cause of the disease, but it's just the current carrier, like a zombie beetle carrying around wasp larvae. I'm not even sure it's "patient zero", I think those pod people ate up organized religion before they caused it to collapse, and now they're eating stuff like opposing racism and the like, but they'll jump to a new host once this one is dead (and make no mistake, it's dying). The pod people also force others to conform or be expelled, so that explains why some people who used to be cool seem to have stopped and started acting like pod people full-time.
I can't predict what the next host will be, but it'll be something super popular. It may even be "anti-wokeness" seeing how badly progressive ideology has been destroyed, where they'll inject themselves into it, take power for themselves, make it totally insufferable with pod people, and people will start to hate this thing too. I can imagine something wholesome like anti-pedophilia being taken over, because then you get the power to accuse individuals of horrific crimes due to your movement, and they'll even eat that host so badly people just won't care anymore.