Idiocracy

[Zack Morris]

Mike Judge was absolutely prescient.

H9sykU5RI1Q

sGUNPMPrxvA

[Doc]

New York Times and "experts" calls for Biden to create a Ministry of Truth.

But it could be and probably is worse:

These experts were heartened that the Biden administration had already announced a “comprehensive threat assessment” of domestic extremism after the Capitol riots. But they cautioned that categorizing these extremists as “domestic terrorists” — while understandable, given the damage they’ve caused — could backfire. They noted that counterterrorism efforts had historically been used to justify expanding state power in ways that end up harming religious and ethnic minorities, and that today’s domestic extremism crisis didn’t map neatly onto older, more conventional types of terror threats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/tech ... ation.html

How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis

These steps, experts say, could prod more people to abandon the scourge of hoaxes and lies.

Credit...Derek Brahney

Kevin Roose

By Kevin Roose

Feb. 2, 2021Updated 9:09 p.m. ET

Last month, millions of Americans watched as President Biden took the oath of office and, in a high-minded Inaugural Address, called for a new era of American unity.

But plenty of other Americans weren’t paying attention to Mr. Biden’s speech. They were too busy watching YouTube videos alleging that the inauguration was a prerecorded hoax that had been filmed on a Hollywood soundstage.

Or they were melting down in QAnon group chats, trying to figure out why former President Donald J. Trump wasn’t interrupting Mr. Biden’s speech to declare martial law and announce the mass arrest of satanic pedophiles.

Or maybe their TVs were tuned to OAN, where an anchor was floating the baseless theory that Mr. Biden “wasn’t actually elected by the people.”

Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that Covid-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.

The muddled, chaotic information ecosystem that produces these misguided beliefs doesn’t just jeopardize some lofty ideal of national unity. It actively exacerbates our biggest national problems, and creates more work for those trying to solve them. And it raises an important question for the Biden administration: How do you unite a country in which millions of people have chosen to create their own version of reality?

In the past year alone, we have seen conspiracy theorists cause Covid-19 vaccine delays, sabotage a wildfire response and engineer a false election fraud narrative. We have also seen that if left unchecked, networked conspiracy theories and online disinformation campaigns can lead to offline violence, as they did during last month’s deadly Capitol riot.

I’ve spent the past several years reporting on our national reality crisis, and I worry that unless the Biden administration treats conspiracy theories and disinformation as the urgent threats they are, our parallel universes will only drift further apart, and the potential for violent unrest and civic dysfunction will only grow.

So I called a number of experts and asked what the Biden administration could do to help fix our truth-challenged information ecosystem, or at least prevent it from getting worse. Here’s what they told me.
Assess the damage, and avoid the ‘terrorist’ trap.

The experts agreed that before the Biden administration can tackle disinformation and extremism, it needs to understand the scope of the problem.

“It’s really important that we have a holistic understanding of what the spectrum of violent extremism looks like in the United States, and then allocate resources accordingly,” said William Braniff, a counterterrorism expert and professor at the University of Maryland.

Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, suggested that the Biden administration could set up a “truth commission,” similar to the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the planning and execution of the Capitol siege on Jan. 6. This effort, she said, would ideally be led by people with deep knowledge of the many “networked factions” that coordinated and carried out the riot, including white supremacist groups and far-right militias.

“There must be accountability for these actions,” Dr. Donovan said. “My fear is that we will get distracted as a society and focus too much on giving voice to the fringe groups that came out in droves for Trump.”

These experts were heartened that the Biden administration had already announced a “comprehensive threat assessment” of domestic extremism after the Capitol riots. But they cautioned that categorizing these extremists as “domestic terrorists” — while understandable, given the damage they’ve caused — could backfire. They noted that counterterrorism efforts had historically been used to justify expanding state power in ways that end up harming religious and ethnic minorities, and that today’s domestic extremism crisis didn’t map neatly onto older, more conventional types of terror threats.

Instead, they suggested using new and narrower labels that could help distinguish between different types of movements, and different levels of influence within those movements. A paranoid retiree who spends all day reading QAnon forums isn’t the same as an armed militia leader, and we should delineate one from the other.
Appoint a ‘reality czar.’

Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a “reality czar.”

It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant. But let’s hear them out.

Right now, these experts said, the federal government’s response to disinformation and domestic extremism is haphazard and spread across multiple agencies, and there’s a lot of unnecessary overlap.

Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford’s Internet Observatory, gave the example of two seemingly unrelated problems: misinformation about Covid-19 and misinformation about election fraud.

Often, she said, the same people and groups are responsible for spreading both types. So instead of two parallel processes — one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aimed at tamping down Covid-related conspiracy theories, and another at the Federal Election Commission, trying to correct voting misinformation — a centralized task force could coordinate a single, strategic response.

“If each of them are doing it distinctly and independently, you run the risk of missing connections, both in terms of the content and in terms of the tactics that are used to execute on the campaigns,” Ms. DiResta said.

This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems. (For example, it could formulate “safe harbor” exemptions that would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theory communities with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws.) And it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.
Audit the algorithms.

Several experts recommended that the Biden administration push for much more transparency into the inner workings of the black-box algorithms that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other major platforms use to rank feeds, recommend content and usher users into private groups, many of which have been responsible for amplifying conspiracy theories and extremist views.

“We must open the hood on social media so that civil rights lawyers and real watchdog organizations can investigate human rights abuses enabled or amplified by technology,” Dr. Donovan said.

One bill introduced last year by two House Democrats, Representatives Anna G. Eshoo of California and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, could help contain some of the damage. The Protecting Americans From Dangerous Algorithms Act would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to remove large tech platforms’ legal immunity for violent or violence-inciting content that their feed-ranking and recommendation systems amplified, while preserving their immunity for other user-generated content.

But you might not even need legislation to get these companies to open up. Last year, under the threat of a forced breakup, TikTok pledged to allow experts to examine its algorithm to prove it wasn’t maliciously manipulating American users. Given their current antitrust issues, other social networks might respond to a similar nudge in the direction of transparency.
Enact a ‘social stimulus,’ and fix people’s problems.

The experts I spoke with warned that tech platforms alone couldn’t bring back the millions of already radicalized Americans, nor is teaching media literacy a silver bullet to prevent dangerous ideas from taking hold.

After all, many people are drawn to extremist groups like the Proud Boys and conspiracy theories like QAnon not because they’re convinced by the facts, but because the beliefs give them a sense of community or purpose, or fills a void in their lives.

“Clearly there’s a public safety issue, but there’s also very much a public health issue,” said Micah Clark, a program director at Moonshot CVE, a counterextremism firm in London.

One effective countermeasure, Mr. Clark suggested, could be a kind of “social stimulus” — a series of federal programs to encourage people to get off their screens and into community-based activities that could keep them engaged and occupied.

Encouraging offline gatherings would, admittedly, be easier after the pandemic. But there are interventions that seem to work on a smaller scale, too — like a series of “de-escalation” ads that Moonshot CVE ran on Google and Twitter, targeting high-risk potential violent extremists with empathetic messages about mental health and mindfulness.

Most of the experts agreed that the most effective thing the Biden administration could do to fix our national reality crisis, and possibly even de-radicalize some of those who have been lured into extremist groups and conspiracy theory movements, would be to address the underlying problems that drove them there in the first place.

“A lot of the barriers to re-entry are very pragmatic and boring,” said Mr. Braniff of the University of Maryland. “They’re not necessarily about changing someone’s ideas. They’re about giving them access to different circumstances that allows them to disengage.”

Christian Picciolini, a former skinhead who now runs the Free Radicals Project, an organization aimed at pulling extremists out of hate groups, agreed. He said it was impossible to separate people’s material conditions from their choice to sign up for an extremist group or follow a deranged conspiracy theory like QAnon.

“We have to treat this like we would any other social service,” Mr. Picciolini said. “We have to destroy the institutional systemic racism that creates this environment. We have to provide jobs. We have to have access to mental health care and education.”

In other words, if President Biden wants to bring extremists and conspiracy theorists back to reality, he can start by making that reality worth coming back to.

[Simple Minded]

Watching the DC partisan elites point fingers at the other party:

As Gramma would say "that's the pot calling the kettle black!"

[Doc]

Watching the DC partisan elites point fingers at the other party:

As Gramma would say "that's the pot calling the kettle black!"

More like Karens

4wUQxjG9PAg

[Simple Minded]

Watching the DC partisan elites point fingers at the other party:

As Gramma would say "that's the pot calling the kettle black!"

More like Karens

4wUQxjG9PAg

this has to be some sort of bizarre generational thing among the "yutes."

"I'm gonna film you with my smart phone and you can't expect me to act like an adult. You gonna hafta treat me like a baby you're trying to get to stop crying."

[Doc]

Watching the DC partisan elites point fingers at the other party:

As Gramma would say "that's the pot calling the kettle black!"

More like Karens

4wUQxjG9PAg

this has to be some sort of bizarre generational thing among the "yutes."

"I'm gonna film you with my smart phone and you can't expect me to act live an adult. You gonna hafta treat me like a baby you're trying to get to stop crying."

I think these are pathetic people that are over compensating for their vast inferiority complex.

I think just about everyone on the left is a karen.

Latest email from Reddit r/AntiHateCommunities

When you call out hate, be prepared for backlash! This cissy continued his transphobic rant and even tried to dox the mods!

Now what was this the hateful transphobic rant that caused this? That is so bad you have to affirm that you are 18 years old and are able to handle such hateful speech? Then have to click to a second time to see the "NSFW" image of the offending post?

Presumably Because metaljerky posted this:

hey sweaty please include a trigger warning before linking such triggering discourse

Here is the horribly offensive post. Please make sure you are sitting in your safe space holding your teddy bear before you read it !!!



Which begs the question --Are we, the posters of "OnTheNatureofTHings", members of a hate group or are we members of a terrorist organization?

And do note that the original poster mis-indentified a cissy as a male

This cissy continued his transphobic rant

In NYC that can result in a fine of $250,000 dollars for misidentifying someone's sexual identity

[Doc]

Watching the DC partisan elites point fingers at the other party:

As Gramma would say "that's the pot calling the kettle black!"

More like Karens

4wUQxjG9PAg

this has to be some sort of bizarre generational thing among the "yutes."

"I'm gonna film you with my smart phone and you can't expect me to act live an adult. You gonna hafta treat me like a baby you're trying to get to stop crying."

I think these are pathetic people that are over compensating for their vast inferiority complex.

I think just about everyone on the left is a karen.

Latest email from Reddit r/AntiHateCommunities

When you call out hate, be prepared for backlash! This cissy continued his transphobic rant and even tried to dox the mods!

Now what was this the hateful transphobic rant that caused this? That is so bad you have to affirm that you are 18 years old and are able to handle such hateful speech? Then have to click to a second time to see the "NSFW" image of the offending post?

Presumably Because metaljerky posted this:

hey sweaty please include a trigger warning before linking such triggering discourse

Here is the horribly offensive post. Please make sure you are sitting in your safe space holding your teddy bear before you read it !!!



Which begs the question --Are we, the posters of "OnTheNatureofTHings", members of a hate group or are we members of a terrorist organization?

And do note that the original poster mis-indentified a cissy as a male

This cissy continued his transphobic rant

In NYC that can result in a fine of $250,000 dollars for misidentifying someone's sexual identity

Though AOC Smolett's near death experience in the US capital building where she almost died at the hands of domestic terrorists give one pause when considering karen's

AOC.jpg (186.8 KiB) Viewed 2639 times

I would just point out that the office of AOC in the house of reps office building is connected to the US capital by not only a 300 years long tunnel but by Internet and Telephone as well. Perhaps all she is trying to do is get "Trump Supporters" banned from the internet and the telephone system for trying to kill her.

Its a shame AOC Smolett didn't have her cell phone handy at the time she nearly died so she could have recorded it and posted it on the World Wide Web of outrage for the world to see. Imagine the outrage !!

It will be just like cages for children !!

[Simple Minded]

I think these are pathetic people that are over compensating for their vast inferiority complex.

I think just about everyone on the left is a karen.

Latest email from Reddit r/AntiHateCommunities

When you call out hate, be prepared for backlash! This cissy continued his transphobic rant and even tried to dox the mods!

Now what was this the hateful transphobic rant that caused this? That is so bad you have to affirm that you are 18 years old and are able to handle such hateful speech? Then have to click to a second time to see the "NSFW" image of the offending post?

Presumably Because metaljerky posted this:

hey sweaty please include a trigger warning before linking such triggering discourse

Here is the horribly offensive post. Please make sure you are sitting in your safe space holding your teddy bear before you read it !!!



Which begs the question --Are we, the posters of "OnTheNatureofTHings", members of a hate group or are we members of a terrorist organization?

And do note that the original poster mis-indentified a cissy as a male

This cissy continued his transphobic rant

In NYC that can result in a fine of $250,000 dollars for misidentifying someone's sexual identity

This is IMSMO, actually a good thing. A virtual, online insane asylum has to be cheaper than building hundreds of brick and mortar insane asylums.

It would be a great court case to see NYC try to collect on one of those fines.

The cool part is now you can turn around any insult by claiming the verbal antagonist is not respecting your chosen identity that is not reflected in your appearance! Checkmate!

Infinite number of specialized group identities will lead inevitably back to the concept of individuals. Might take a another generation or two.

[Simple Minded]

Though AOC Smolett's near death experience in the US capital building where she almost died at the hands of domestic terrorists give one pause when considering karen's

AOC.jpg

I would just point out that the office of AOC in the house of reps office building is connected to the US capital by not only a 300 years long tunnel but by Internet and Telephone as well. Perhaps all she is trying to do is get "Trump Supporters" banned from the internet and the telephone system for trying to kill her.

Its a shame AOC Smolett didn't have her cell phone handy at the time she nearly died so she could have recorded it and posted it on the World Wide Web of outrage for the world to see. Imagine the outrage !!

It will be just like cages for children !!

AOC is just following the Obama/Smollet/Kennedy/Kerry format. Once you become successful and/or rich and/or powerful in America, the way to keep the mindless self-destructive minions from coming for your head on a pike is to claim America is such a horrible place, that even though you are now one of the elites, you are still a victim in your heart, mind, soul, and body!

Life is so unfair, you are dedicating your life to fix it.

gotta hand It to AOC though, Nonc was right, she is a professional actress.

[Doc]

Though AOC Smolett's near death experience in the US capital building where she almost died at the hands of domestic terrorists give one pause when considering karen's

AOC.jpg

I would just point out that the office of AOC in the house of reps office building is connected to the US capital by not only a 300 years long tunnel but by Internet and Telephone as well. Perhaps all she is trying to do is get "Trump Supporters" banned from the internet and the telephone system for trying to kill her.

Its a shame AOC Smolett didn't have her cell phone handy at the time she nearly died so she could have recorded it and posted it on the World Wide Web of outrage for the world to see. Imagine the outrage !!

It will be just like cages for children !!

Se is just following the Obama/Smollet/Kennedy/Kerry format. Once you become successful and/or rich and/or powerful in America, the way to keep the mindless self-destructive minions from coming for your head on a pike is to claim America is such a horrible place, that even though you are now one of the elites, you are still a victim in your heart, mind, soul, and body!

Life is so unfair, you are dedicating your life to fix it.

gotta hand ot to AOC though, Nonc was right, she is a professional actress.

Indeed !! Indeed!!

Look at John Kerry's victim hood. He works so hard because he knows what to do with the lives of others who are not among the elites. Because he is so busy of course he has to take a private jet to Iceland to accept an environmental award !!! Yet people whose lives he is working so hard to do what is best for them complain just because a private jet emits 40 times more CO2 per passenger that a commercial flight. Not only that John Kerry bought the carbon offsets in order to have no net effect on the environment. John Kerry said that is so, so it must be true!!

[Simple Minded]

....

[Doc]

....

Oh yeah? It goes way way beyond laughter....

My 7-Year-Old Cousin Is a Sexist Bully
How do I change his ways before it’s too late?
By Emily Gould
Jan 25, 202111:09 AM
Boy reading with woman on a bed.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by ~UserGI15613517/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

How do I approach a 7.5-year-old boy who makes sexist jabs at me? Some context: I am his 23-year-old cis-female cousin, and I’ve been watching him full time since August. I adore him, but I am loath to tolerate another “Yeah but you can’t use a drill because you’re a girl” comment. My current approach has been cool puzzlement, “Hmm … why would you think that?” followed up with, “I can see why you would think that but there aren’t such things as ‘boy and girl things,’ and it hurts my feelings when you tell me I can’t do something because I’m a girl.” And then maybe some follow-up discussion about how making that kind of boy/girl distinction can hurt our friends. It is not getting through.

[Simple Minded]

....

Oh yeah? It goes way way beyond laughter....

My 7-Year-Old Cousin Is a Sexist Bully
How do I change his ways before it’s too late?
By Emily Gould
Jan 25, 202111:09 AM
Boy reading with woman on a bed.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by ~UserGI15613517/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

How do I approach a 7.5-year-old boy who makes sexist jabs at me? Some context: I am his 23-year-old cis-female cousin, and I’ve been watching him full time since August. I adore him, but I am loath to tolerate another “Yeah but you can’t use a drill because you’re a girl” comment. My current approach has been cool puzzlement, “Hmm … why would you think that?” followed up with, “I can see why you would think that but there aren’t such things as ‘boy and girl things,’ and it hurts my feelings when you tell me I can’t do something because I’m a girl.” And then maybe some follow-up discussion about how making that kind of boy/girl distinction can hurt our friends. It is not getting through.

Too rich.

IMSMO, the NRA has been wrong for decades in talking about the Second Amendment as the legal protection of gun rights. A better answer to the question of "why do people need to own a gun in the first place?" is "Cause people like you don't know how to mind your own f**king business and not try to control other people's lives!"

No point in beating around the bush!

[Doc]

....

Oh yeah? It goes way way beyond laughter....

My 7-Year-Old Cousin Is a Sexist Bully
How do I change his ways before it’s too late?
By Emily Gould
Jan 25, 202111:09 AM
Boy reading with woman on a bed.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by ~UserGI15613517/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

How do I approach a 7.5-year-old boy who makes sexist jabs at me? Some context: I am his 23-year-old cis-female cousin, and I’ve been watching him full time since August. I adore him, but I am loath to tolerate another “Yeah but you can’t use a drill because you’re a girl” comment. My current approach has been cool puzzlement, “Hmm … why would you think that?” followed up with, “I can see why you would think that but there aren’t such things as ‘boy and girl things,’ and it hurts my feelings when you tell me I can’t do something because I’m a girl.” And then maybe some follow-up discussion about how making that kind of boy/girl distinction can hurt our friends. It is not getting through.

Too rich.

IMSMO, the NRA has been wrong for decades in talking about the Second Amendment as the legal protection of gun rights. A better answer to the question of "why do people need to own a gun in the first place?" is "Cause people like you don't know how to mind your own f**king business and not try to control other people's lives!"

No point in beating around the bush!

I once witnessed a 30 year old woman telling a 8 year old how that girls can do anything that boys can do after he said something to the effect that that is "a boy thing."

My thought on hearing that was "what an durian." and perhaps given the circumstances a light form of child abuse.

A lot of "woke culture" seems to come from making children aware of the danger of child kidnappings . IE making the paranoid about strangers when a total of 500 children per year are kidnapped by non relatives. Mind you one is too many but making all children fearful of being kidnapped when that is something so rare around 0.0000004% per year and 0.000068$ per their entire childhood, is fear mongering amount a population that is defenseless against it. That damages them to one degree or another for at least a large part of their lifetimes. That fits the definition of child abuse. They have in effect victimized two generation of child and counting

[Simple Minded]

A lot of "woke culture" seems to come from making children aware of the danger of child kidnappings . IE making the paranoid about strangers when a total of 500 children per year are kidnapped by non relatives. Mind you one is too many but making all children fearful of being kidnapped when that is something so rare around 0.0000004% per year and 0.000068$ per their entire childhood, is fear mongering amount a population that is defenseless against it. That damages them to one degree or another for at least a large part of their lifetimes. That fits the definition of child abuse. They have in effect victimized two generation of child and counting

My paraphrase: A lot of woke culture comes from making children afraid of life. Therefore it is not much of a surprise when the 20, 30, and 40 somethings SJW's have the emotional maturity and the reasoning capability of an adolescent.

[Doc]

A lot of "woke culture" seems to come from making children aware of the danger of child kidnappings . IE making the paranoid about strangers when a total of 500 children per year are kidnapped by non relatives. Mind you one is too many but making all children fearful of being kidnapped when that is something so rare around 0.0000004% per year and 0.000068$ per their entire childhood, is fear mongering amount a population that is defenseless against it. That damages them to one degree or another for at least a large part of their lifetimes. That fits the definition of child abuse. They have in effect victimized two generation of child and counting

My paraphrase: A lot of woke culture comes from making children afraid of life. Therefore it is not much of a surprise when the 20, 30, and 40 somethings SJW's have the emotional maturity and the reasoning capability of an adolescent.

That's pretty much it.

A story that I may have told here before.

When I Sister was in High School she had a boyfriend that drove a white WV bus that was always breaking down. One day he broke half way between my parents house and the local grade school that was three blocks away. He was working on his van when school got out and said "Hi" to some kids walking home from school. For the next week the teachers in the school warning all the kids daily to "watch out for the white van" Some of the parents got upset with the school because their children were afraid and they all knew what happened with the VW Bus because it was broken down for three days and they all knew my sister(who baby sat for many of their kids) and what had happened.

But what the parents said went in one ear and out the other of the teachers in the school Seemed to me at the time like it was not about keeping kids safe but teachers exercising their power over the parents through their kids. At least that is what the parents said.

[Simple Minded]

That's pretty much it.

A story that I may have told here before.

When I Sister was in High School she had a boyfriend that drove a white WV bus that was always breaking down. One day he broke half way between my parents house and the local grade school that was three blocks away. He was working on his van when school got out and said "Hi" to some kids walking home from school. For the next week the teachers in the school warning all the kids daily to "watch out for the white van" Some of the parents got upset with the school because their children were afraid and they all knew what happened with the VW Bus because it was broken down for three days and they all knew my sister(who baby sat for many of their kids) and what had happened.

But what the parents said went in one ear and out the other of the teachers in the school Seemed to me at the time like it was not about keeping kids safe but teachers exercising their power over the parents through their kids. At least that is what the parents said.

Hmmm, white van, white people, great white sharks, polar bears...... am I the only one here who sees a pattern?

[Doc]

That's pretty much it.

A story that I may have told here before.

When I Sister was in High School she had a boyfriend that drove a white WV bus that was always breaking down. One day he broke half way between my parents house and the local grade school that was three blocks away. He was working on his van when school got out and said "Hi" to some kids walking home from school. For the next week the teachers in the school warning all the kids daily to "watch out for the white van" Some of the parents got upset with the school because their children were afraid and they all knew what happened with the VW Bus because it was broken down for three days and they all knew my sister(who baby sat for many of their kids) and what had happened.

But what the parents said went in one ear and out the other of the teachers in the school Seemed to me at the time like it was not about keeping kids safe but teachers exercising their power over the parents through their kids. At least that is what the parents said.

Hmmm, white van, white people, great white sharks, polar bears...... am I the only one here who sees a pattern?

Jaws. The summer that came out it destroyed tourism for a lot of beach towns. Fear. -- It came from hollowood. Or at least California. How many stories has hollowood told that we really didn't need to know the details of? The Exorcist. How many people were fearful of demonic possession before that movie came out? I actually skipped school to see it laughed all the way through it. At the other people watching it anyway.

[Simple Minded]

Jaws. The summer that came out it destroyed tourism for a lot of beach towns. Fear. -- It came from hollowood. Or at least California. How many stories has hollowood told that we really didn't need to know the details of? The Exorcist. How many people were fearful of demonic possession before that movie came out? I actually skipped school to see it laughed all the way through it. At the other people watching it anyway.

The most fascinating aspect to me is the herd animal lack of thinking that individuals attempt to substitute for virtue or wokeness. Got into an absolutely fascinating, yet ridiculously insane conversation with a 75 year old retired engineer I've known for 20+ years. Climate change, COVID, this is how black/white/republicans/democrats think, the country is going in the wrong direction, domestic terrorism is the greatest threat, yada, yada, yada.

I understand getting older and weaker makes one more fearful, but he was afraid of everything. He kinda lost it when I told him I thought COVID and Climate Change hysteria were overblown. Of course, his response was that "I needed to listen to the experts" and because I had differing opinions, my opinions didn't count and someone should silence me.

When he got into what white people think and how that differs from what black people think, I couldn't resist and told him that was racist projection. Of course he responded with he actually talks to black people and obviously I don't.

He got a bit upset, yet remained calm. Afterwards I could not help but think that perhaps he is declining mentally due to age. Bizarre to listen to someone who at least used to be intelligent state that their observations of the world should be canonized and any other opinions ignored or viewed as dangerous.

[Typhoon]

Humans evolved experiencing actual risks, extreme adversity, and often death on a daily basis.

Now that most people in industrialized nations are "safe as houses" by comparison,
it may due to our nature that imagined risks and adversity are created to fulfill a need driven by our evolutionary history.

Thus leading to the elevation of and obsession with trivial "1st world problems".

[Simple Minded]

Humans evolved experiencing actual risks, extreme adversity, and often death on a daily basis.

Now that most people in industrialized nations are "safe as houses" by comparison,
it may due to our nature that imagined risks and adversity are created to fulfill a need driven by our evolutionary history.

Thus leading to the elevation of and obsession with trivial "1st world problems".

Amen. I have long suspected the same. After the real dragons are slain, those who self-identify as dragon slayers, lose both a sense of purpose and a sense of accomplishment. Perhaps due to both biological hardwiring and the need to achieve social rank thru virtue signaling.

Doublely true for our political leaders. After starvation due to poverty is overcome, one can focus on the pandemic of obesity due to "food deserts." Maybe they really meant "food desserts."

[noddy]

wolvez, big cats, bandits etc all used to be real world problems and a heightened state of paranoia kept you safe from them.

i bang my shoes put every morning, paranoid for some, sensible practice in much of australia

[Simple Minded]

In retrospect, the conversation I described above was very similar to the 20 something, white, elite, college kid who self-identifies as enlightened and woke, lecturing the lower class black person on how black people should behave if they want to be perceived as "genuinely black" and therefore "earn" the approval of their woke superiors.

Not sure which bothered him more. That I disagreed with his woke superiority, or that he could not "fix" me.

[Apollonius]

Humans evolved experiencing actual risks, extreme adversity, and often death on a daily basis.

Now that most people in industrialized nations are "safe as houses" by comparison,
it may due to our nature that imagined risks and adversity are created to fulfill a need driven by our evolutionary history.

Thus leading to the elevation of and obsession with trivial "1st world problems".

Amen. I have long suspected the same. After the real dragons are slain, those who self-identify as dragon slayers, lose both a sense of purpose and a sense of accomplishment. Perhaps due to both biological hardwiring and the need to achieve social rank thru virtue signaling.

Doublely true for our political leaders. After starvation due to poverty is overcome, one can focus on the pandemic of obesity due to "food deserts." Maybe they really meant "food desserts."

This exchange reminded me of a passage in Ross Douthat's recent book. There's a long discussion of socio-political movements and the arts, especially, from being a sometime film critic, movies, and how they haven't gone anywhere in sixty years because great revolutions needs something great to rebel against:

The boomers were the last rebellious generation to come of age not only with various traditional edifices still standing but also with a sense, in the Eisenhower fifties, that those edifices had actually been strengthened by the experiences of the Depression and World War II. This gave the rebel culture of the sixties a real adversary to struggle against: the old bourgeois norms refreshed by suburbanization and prosperity; a Christianity that had just experienced a sustained revival; a patriotic narrative of history that had been burnished by victory in the Second World War; a common culture that had become more binding through the influence of radio, television, mass-market periodicals, and movies. The old men of that world, the father figures to be wrestled with and overcome, were war heroes and giants-- literally so in the cases of Lyndon Johnson and Charles de Gaulle. The old forms were still powerful and vital, and so to subvert or overthrow or replace them, the new forms had to be powerful as well.


... But Nisbet writes in the same essay that this kind of antimony doesn't last forever, and when the older order crumbles too quickly and dramatically, golden ages give way to ages of iron easily. If there is no community," then,"there is nothing to challenge, nothing to fuel the dynamism" required for a golden age, and if there is nothing but transgression, there is nothing to give acts of transgression the "purpose, substance, and meaning" that make them something more than just self-justification.

Both problems haunt our age. Everyone still fancies themself a rebel, and corporate titans posture as countercultural and revolutionaries. But the traditional forms and structures that once gave rebellion purpose and clarity persist only as inertial holdovers that nobody explicitly defends-- or else as shadows of themselves in the unfashionable hinterland, their remaining strength a purely negative force that exists mostly to persuade the cultural elite that they haven't won yet; that they're still the same rebels they were in 1968.


-- Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (Avid Reader Press, 2020)

[Simple Minded]

This exchange reminded me of a passage in Ross Douthat's recent book. There's a long discussion of socio-political movements and the arts, especially, from being a sometime film critic, movies, and how they haven't gone anywhere in sixty years because great revolutions needs something great to rebel against:

The boomers were the last rebellious generation to come of age not only with various traditional edifices still standing but also with a sense, in the Eisenhower fifties, that those edifices had actually been strengthened by the experiences of the Depression and World War II. This gave the rebel culture of the sixties a real adversary to struggle against: the old bourgeois norms refreshed by suburbanization and prosperity; a Christianity that had just experienced a sustained revival; a patriotic narrative of history that had been burnished by victory in the Second World War; a common culture that had become more binding through the influence of radio, television, mass-market periodicals, and movies. The old men of that world, the father figures to be wrestled with and overcome, were war heroes and giants-- literally so in the cases of Lyndon Johnson and Charles de Gaulle. The old forms were still powerful and vital, and so to subvert or overthrow or replace them, the new forms had to be powerful as well.


... But Nisbet writes in the same essay that this kind of antimony doesn't last forever, and when the older order crumbles too quickly and dramatically, golden ages give way to ages of iron easily. If there is no community," then,"there is nothing to challenge, nothing to fuel the dynamism" required for a golden age, and if there is nothing but transgression, there is nothing to give acts of transgression the "purpose, substance, and meaning" that make them something more than just self-justification.

Both problems haunt our age. Everyone still fancies themself a rebel, and corporate titans posture as countercultural and revolutionaries. But the traditional forms and structures that once gave rebellion purpose and clarity persist only as inertial holdovers that nobody explicitly defends-- or else as shadows of themselves in the unfashionable hinterland, their remaining strength a purely negative force that exists mostly to persuade the cultural elite that they haven't won yet; that they're still the same rebels they were in 1968.


-- Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (Avid Reader Press, 2020)

thanks for posting Apollonius. Explains the lack of good protest music and/or art.

Interestingly from my perspective, all the disgruntled Woklings are all children of white collar privilege. Difficult for blue collar types to consider them as anything other than spoiled brats who were never spanked or never had to get their hands dirty or exert physical effort to earn a buck.

Thinking back, I remember years ago thinking that the guy who lectured me the other day, that he seemed from an aristocratic family.