sintrenton

“I'm a social anarchist, not only as a political conviction, but I truly believe it is the only choice for mankind to have a chance of survival. As long as we have capitalist societies, the lizard brains will always win and destruction of life will only be ushered in faster.” — Fox Trenton

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” — Frank Wilhoit

Intro

It is not taken out of air, and while it can probably be phrased in much nicer ways, I'm not bothering with that part. It is based on actual, scientific research, political psychology and other aspects. And it is not only about the right amygdala.

The Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) & Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

Research of people that display RWA tendencies and score higher on SDO have more than once found particular traits in these personalities. Here is a rather comprehensive list, based on that research.

They

• tend to divide the world in us versus them, the in-group vs. out-group thinking
• have trouble deciding what facts are valid or irrelevant
• have trouble making logical deductions
• tend to hold stubbornly to their beliefs even when presented with evidence that suggests their beliefs are wrong. This is especially true for beliefs that underpin the identity of the group
• tend to hold contradictory beliefs in their minds to a degree far greater than what is average
• tend to be able to suppress these cognitive dissonances to a larger extent than is average
• have the instinct to not think for themselves but to conform to the belief system of their group, with particular deference to what the leader tells them to believe
• most of the time base decisions on emotions, not reasoning
• have no problems breaking or ignoring rules when it empowers the group or the leader.
• see power superseding principles

Altemeyer's research

Authoritarians tend to hold stubbornly to their beliefs even when presented with evidence that suggests their beliefs are wrong. This is particularly true concerning beliefs that underpin the identity of the group. If anything, when confronted with contradictory evidence, their beliefs are often reinforced.

The ideas in authoritarians' minds are poorly integrated. They tend to hold contradictory beliefs in their minds to a degree far greater than what is normal for humans. High-RWAs simply absorb ideas from their peers without thinking about how they fit together.

According to Altemeyer, the above-mentioned reasoning flaws prevalent among authoritarians are all connected to their instinct to not think for themselves but to conform to the belief system of their group, with particular deference to what the leader tells them to believe.

Altemeyer has observed that authoritarians are often very ignorant when it comes to both general knowledge and current events.

Authoritarians also are often unaware of just how different they are from most people. They tend to believe they are very average. Altemeyer has found that authoritarians in America underestimate how prejudiced and conformist they are compared to the majority of Americans.

Other psychological research

Liberal vs. Conservative: A Neuroscientific Analysis with Gail Saltz (YouTube, Big Think)

The influence of social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism on environmentalism: A five-year cross-lagged analysis (Samantha K Stanley, Taciano L Milfont, Marc S Wilson, Chris G Sibley)

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Reactionism

Reactionism is an illogical and emotional worldview that is based in fear and a sense of displacement. It is often authoritarianist, populist, relativist, anti-intellectualist, nationalist, conspiracy-oriented and phobic. In the reactionary mind there has been a radical break in history, a change in the past, when the natural way of life was broken by an enemy. Who the enemy is varies on context, liberals, feminists, immigrants, cultural Marxists, LGBTQ+, blacks, Jews and so on. The reactionary white man laments the loss of his authority over what he sees as his god-given right over these groups. It is the same as when John C. Calhoun developed the invention of racial hierarchy, that simply by the virtue of the white skin, no matter how poor or powerless, every white man was given a sense that he is an aristocrat.

Other links

How to build an authoritarian regime — and how to stop one with Timothy Snyder (YouTube Big Think) This is worth listening to if you have the 3 minuets.. The Tony Michaels Podcast

Mark Lilla: The Shipwrecked Mind (book) https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-shipwrecked-mind?variant=16634265671 (YouTube) https://youtu.be/ea0f_wCYW7Y

Will America’s disregard for science be the end of its reign? (Several scientists, YouTube, Big Think)

The Alt-Right Playbook

Introduction

Always a Bigger Fish

The Origins of Conservatism

White Fascism

To quote Keegan Tatum

What makes people conservative; fear, tribalism, close mindedness, ingroup thinking, simplistic black and white thinking, inability to see individual cognitive dissonance, low emotional intelligence.

These are the qualities of our primitive past, it is unevolved baggage. Conservatives are simply less evolved.

“Prefigurative politics”

This is very much a work in progress, and creating a culture of democracy among people who have little experience of such things is necessarily a painful and uneven business, full of all sorts of stumblings and false starts, but—as almost any police chief who has faced us on the streets can attest—direct democracy of this sort can be astoundingly effective. And it is difficult to find anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result. It’s one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible’. It’s another to experience it, however momentarily. Perhaps the best way to start thinking about these organizations—the Direct Action Network, for example—is to see them as the diametrical opposite of the sectarian Marxist groups; or, for that matter, of the sectarian Anarchist groups. Where the democratic-centralist ‘party’ puts its emphasis on achieving a complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological uniformity and tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian future with extremely authoritarian forms of organization in the present, these openly seek diversity. Debate always focuses on particular courses of action; it’s taken for granted that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point of view. The motto might be, ‘If you are willing to act like an anarchist now, your long-term vision is pretty much your own business’. Which seems only sensible: none of us know how far these principles can actually take us, or what a complex society based on them would end up looking like. Their ideology, then, is immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their practice, and one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay this way.

Finally, I’d like to tease out some of the questions the direct-action networks raise about alienation, and its broader implications for political practice. For example: why is it that, even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to its project consists of artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives—particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap.

This would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftsmen—or even more, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftsmen—who actually overthrow capitalist regimes; and not those inured to generations of wage labour. It would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people’s struggles in the new movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth. Now that new communication technologies have made it possible to include them in global revolutionary alliances, as well as local resistance and revolt, it is well-nigh inevitable that they should play a profoundly inspirational role.

From David Graeber: The New Anarchists

What is Reactionism and why does it differ? Is your raging uncle, while supporting fascists, a fascist himself? Or is he a reactionary?

https://todon.nl/@sintrenton/110547554248859957

I have had Mastodon as my main resource for some time now, but even before that, I joined the Disroot online community.

“Disroot is a platform providing online services based on principles of freedom, privacy, federation and decentralization.”

They have several services available, and I use a couple of them; mail, Akkoma (similar to and compatible with Mastodon, i just started using that one as well), Cryptpad and Nextcloud.

In addition, paper.wf, a Write Freely driven blogging site with a clean, minimalistic interface, works as my 'public window', an address that would likely be the first to share, outside the fediverse. And then Session, which, as I have mentioned in my profiles, is a great messaging tool, forked from Signal, which is sadly underused.

“A good percentage of my friends are Nazis. That percentage is zero; that’s a good percentage of Nazi friends to have.”

@[email protected]

We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it. by Dan McQuillan

https://www.danmcquillan.org/chatgpt.html

Dan on Mastodon: @danmcquillan

Sometimes i am not able to check in or log in somewhere, and maybe having this place as a 'known' (cf. people, memory, attention span, goldfish) point where i can leave updates.