site posted:

Are we talking about authoritarian as being distinct from totalitarianism for the purposes of this thread? Socialism and communism are totalitarian in nature, but for completely different ideological (and ostensibly more altruistic) reasons. But reading through PS' posts, much could apply just the same to that extreme as well.

Shbobdb posted:

Was the "Final battle in the LoTR" a joke comment, since the final battle was a crazy person destroying themselves and the greatest evil that had consumed them?

FourLeaf posted:

This is sort of a weird example Prester John, but I think it represents the ideas you've been talking about on a much smaller and far more impotent scale: the SJW community on Tumblr.

People may remember hearing about how Boko Haram carried out mass killings in a town back in January. For a while the massacre became huge news on Tumblr with certain posts gaining hundreds of thousands of likes and reblogs. At the time I noticed a pattern: on Tumblr the issue was framed entirely around criticizing people in the West for not caring enough about the massacre. There was no interest in examining how Boko Haram came to be or how the corruption of the Nigerian government aided Boko Haram in becoming so powerful. Indeed, there was actually a massive amount of misinformation going around, including graphic images of dead bodies from entirely different countries being falsely associated with the attacks, that only obfuscated the issue further. This deeply angered many actual Nigerians on Tumblr, who were dismayed at how the lived experiences of people in Nigeria were being completely ignored:


After reading this in the OP:


I think I finally understand what was happening here. In SJW communities there are certain groups that have been designated as Victims, no matter how incorrect or irrelevant that label might be in specific contexts. Two of these groups are Muslims and black people. Basically, the idea is that black people and Muslims are always Oppressed, never the opposite. So, when confronted with a case where it's undeniable that the oppressors are black and Muslim, SJWs can't honestly discuss it because it would undermine that narrative. It took a little while for them to reframe the story and center the blame back where they're most comfortable: on the West. Meanwhile Boko Haram's role is downplayed or deflected entirely because their very existence endangers the truth of The Narrative (here's a particularly awful post that illustrates both points perfectly, with criticism).

This is just one example. I know most of the people reblogging these posts are teens and young adults who are just casual users, not hardcore cultists or anything like that, but there are definitely devoted SJWs on Tumblr that create their own toxic communities and lead their followers to harass, threaten, and doxx people that don't toe the line. Sometimes its against outsiders (I can think of at least three artists I followed who were driven off by harassment), but it can also be among their own devoted followers as well, just like the purges Prester John was talking about. And on Tumblr it's ridiculously easy to form a new group of your own after you get purged from your old one.

tl;dr: Tumblr's a bad site and I don't use it anymore

Prester John posted:

I've been working on a big explanation of my view on Cliven Bundy, and I hope to have it up later today. I'm also trying to dig up a bunch of videos of specific things that occurred during the Cliven Bundy affair to demonstrate exactly what I am talking about. If I had to guess though, one of the big reasons for the odd hands off approach has been that there was a real chance of that event triggering widespread civil disorder among Authoritarian's across the country. Those people *OPENLY* talked about putting the women on the front lines so that the world would see them gunned down first. They were not loving around, that was a real attempt to start a real civil war. Honestly I think it was handled pretty well by just refusing to give them their dramatic battle and letting them turn on each other.

Bryan Fischer posted:

quote:

You know how if you train a dog when they're a puppy they'll still obey you when they're 500% the size they used to be because part of them still thinks they're a puppy? That happens to humans to a certain extent too.

Hodgepodge posted:

Why do you think middle America was so terrified of school shooters after Columbine?

Most kids like that probably just learn to keep their heads down until they can leave. Or act out in culturally prescribed ways- self-cutting, etc. Some vanish into education programs that make ACE look like a hippy preschool, though.

McAlister posted:

That is the strength of the human spirit. Our willingness to suffer personally to protect the people we love. The people who rebel - particularly in situations where retaliation will be random and severe - are deficient in this trait. They aren't noble or glamorous. They are tremendous assholes. You have to be a little bit sociopathic to put others in harms way.

Xibanya posted:

Here's a joke they taught me in Sunday school.

Q: How was Paul able to teach The Word in so many different places?
A: Because he was a Roman.

Series DD Funding posted:

But you could say the exact thing about leftists and Democrats.

This is all emanating from the doubtful claim that the final set of gay marriage rulings will cause some cataclysmic event that all the other right-winger defeats failed to cause.

Series DD Funding posted:

There are left-wing groups that lie about their beliefs and hold something similar to a "Grand Narrative", yes.

Morroque posted:

The one thing I'm noticing about Prester's models are that the outcomes they pose are not further normative. All the opposition to authoritarianism can do, given the other variables involved, is prevent regression. If the republican party eventually turns into the authoritarian party, the compaction cycle which does that will likely scare the more moderate (and monied) forces into the democratic party, turning them into the de-facto capitalist party. The republican refugees would probably overwhelm the progressive elements in the party by grouping around the elite centre.

I mean, even if the authoritarians are not fighting any battle to actually win, isn't one of the outcomes of their fighting is a prevention of progressive policy? I mean, what would be the moderate reaction to them? Would the Americans of a more leftist bent have to give up on their own dreams for a better nation, just to help defend the status quo against the tea party? What exactly does one do in this scenario?

Xibanya posted:

In fact, I'd say Gamergater's meticulous study of the rhetoric of amateur Internet activists and deliberate twisting of it shows something else. I would argue that PJ's Authoritarians probably find it imperative to actually or symbolically pervert the enemy's source of strength - hence coal rollers who think they're really sticking it to environmentalists. Internet activists' strength and area of concern was rhetoric itself, so it's only natural that those who saw them as the Enemy in their Grand Narrative sought to coopt their rhetoric. Another example would be that group of open carry guys who held a meeting right outside where a group of mothers whose children had been injured or killed by guns was also meeting. It's only by coincidence that Gamergate's twisting of the lexical toolbox of their enemy resembled the deliberate framing of issues done by cynical grifters, manipulators, and other non-Authoritarian assholes of today's GOP.

David Wong posted:

Now, fans of this site know, I don't be trustin' me no government. I've put in time at various intelligence agencies and at one major government contractor (Kellogg, Brown & Root). I've worked for these people and let me tell you, the government is a mess. And elected officials, don't get me started on those people. They'll do anything it takes to get votes.

But here's the thing. The 9/11 "Truth" guys, the Loose Changers and all the many websites, they don't just think government is corrupt. They think everybody, and I mean everybody, is either evil on a demonic scale, or a mindless sheep.

For instance, how much money would it take to get you to kill 3,000 random, innocent Americans? Or, say you stumbled upon somebody else's plan to kill 3,000 innocent Americans. How much would it take to get you to stay silent afterward?

A hundred dollars? Two hundred? Two hundred fifty?

Well if the conspiracy guys are right, there are people reading this right now who took that deal. No kidding.

Here's why. The entire 9/11 "Truth" movement rests on the idea that the World Trade Center towers were rigged with explosives, a "Controlled Demolition" like you see with old buildings. That's the whole thing. They say the buildings couldn't have come down otherwise.

Forget the fact that no experts on the subject agree with them. That's not the point right now. We're just trying to get inside these guys' heads.

Now, maybe you could keep the plan itself a secret. A few dozen murderous black ops guys, demolitions experts with a grudge against the USA, maybe they've been brainwashed. Who knows. Maybe it could be done. People point out that the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb was kept a secret, so why not this?

But the cover-up. Holy poo poo, guys. Covering this thing up after the fact would be like trying to keep the atomic bomb a secret after Hiroshima. Just wait 'till you hear this.

First, picture the demolitions teams wiring up the World Trade Center towers with explosives prior to the attack. Obviously you couldn't do it during business hours, since it'd be kind of hard to explain to the 100,000 people who worked at or visited the WTC towers on any given day why you had a huge chunk of wall torn out and were wiring up a bomb on the steel beams there.


World Trade Center observation deck. Notice: people are there.

I mean, keep in mind, I don't know how big of a job that would be (no one has ever demolished a building that size before) but a building just half the size of one WTC tower took 4,000 separate charges to bring down. Four thousand.

That job took seven months of prep work... and they had the run of an abandoned building, without having to hide their work from 100,000 people every day. Our demolition crew, on the other hand, can work only at night and has to spend the last bit of every shift carefully repairing the wall and hiding any evidence of charges or detonators as not to be discovered during the day.

Huge teams of demolitions experts, who had no problem wiring a building full of innocent New Yorkers to explode, hired in secret, worked every night for what had to be a year (and that's only if they had a big enough crew) placing maybe 10,000 separate charges in each tower and another few thousand in WTC 7 (the smaller WTC tower that also collapsed, later in the day on 9/11).

And nobody notices.

That's right. That's the theory they're putting out there. 100,000 DVDs they've sold with this.

Truckloads of bombs, dozens of mysterious workers, going in and out of the building, night after night. Security at the building doesn't catch them, Port Authority Police don't catch them, random eyewitnesses who stumble across the operation and call the cops don't catch them, maintenance workers who stumble across wet paint and repaired walls and bits of strange wire don't catch them, security cameras don't catch them.

The bomb-sniffing dogs who were brought in from time to time (remember, these buildings were bombed by terrorists in 1993) who are trained to find even one bomb, fail to notice the 10,000 bombs lining their building.

If you're saying that nothing could possibly be more retarded than that, you're wrong.

No, they're just getting started. It's at this stage of the hypothetical plot when the 9/11 conspiracy guys say the real cover-up began. This is when all of the many, many people who could have blown the lid off the whole thing chose to stay silent because they were paid off by the government.

That includes hundreds of private researchers and government employees who prepared gigantic reports about the collapse of the towers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Also, officials in the New York City Fire Department.

All were written fat checks, say the conspiracy guys, to cover up the murder of 3,000 New Yorkers. Keep in mind, some of them were New Yorkers themselves - all of the FDNY guys were - and some of them had friends who died in the towers. The theory even says it was the commander of the FDNY itself who detonated one of the buildings, and therefore he was in on the decision to kill 343 of his own firefighters and 60 police officers.

For money. If that were you... how big would that check have to be? These are people he saw every day, worked with every day. He went to weddings, birthday parties, to baseball games with these guys. In the mind of the 9/11 conspiracy, he'd kill them all for a big enough pile of cash.

Would you?

There's more. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of reporters and writers who researched the collapse, including the nine reporters and dozens of experts for the huge Popular Mechanics article on the subject.

They were paid off, too. And paid enough to walk away from the story of a lifetime, a chance to blow the lid off the conspiracy. Paid enough to refuse a sure Pulitzer and a lifetime of fame and riches as one of history's greatest heroes. And paid in such a way that no other reporters would notice and get jealous or ask questions. These people do tend to be the curious type, you know.

We're getting a nice sized payroll here. Now let's add in the hundreds of people from a dozen different agencies and police departments who claim to have helped clean up flight 93 wreckage, including 300 volunteers. The conspiracy guys say there was no plane, therefore they were paid to lie, along with all of the witnesses in Pennsylvania who claim to have seen the plane go down.

But wait, there's more. Because there are hundreds of thousands of civil engineers and structural engineers in the world (people who are experts in what makes buildings fall down) and lots of demolitions experts. Approximately zero of them say the 9/11 attacks looked like bombed buildings. All of them either say outright that the demolition theory is asinine, or are silent in the face of what the Loose Changers say is video proof of mass murder so obvious even an uneducated jackass off the street can spot it.

The conspiracy guys' explanation?

You guessed it. They were paid to stay silent. Hey, why not? Probably half a million people there, but, you know. Since we've got the checkbook out anyway...

Also, think of all of the friends and family of these paid conspirators, who suddenly see all this mysterious wealth...


Artists' Rendering

...Wouldn't some rumors get started?

You've got some hypothetical professor who was about to write a paper proving the towers were demolished, suddenly coming into Powerball-sized wealth and abandoning the paper at the same time... his wife never let it slip? His kids didn't object? All his jealous colleagues who noticed the sudden new cars and new home and elaborate vacations, nobody asked questions? Nobody made an anonymous call to the IRS, just out of spite? All the bank employees who noticed thousands of mysterious deposits, all of which have to be reported to the IRS, that didn't leave a trail?

I mean, we're up to a sizeable portion of the US population here. Odds are you've passed some of these people on the street.

Today.

And keep in mind, this can't be chump change. Even in a world where every structural engineering desk jockey is okay with mass murder, they're still not going to risk jail and career ruin and walk away from a huge book deal for ten grand. Oh, no, it's got to be millions, per person, just to make it worth it. Even a dedicated conspirator would need to know he or she was set for life.

Let's say they wrote 500,000 checks (hell, you've got more than 120,000 people in the American Society of Civil Engineers alone, and they'd be the first ones to speak out). Say the average payout was ten million (barely enough to live rich the rest of your life, but let's just say). So that's 500,000 times ten million which is...

...Five TRILLION dollars.

That's about half of the value of all goods and services produced in the United States last year. Therefore the 9/11 conspiracy was, in terms of payroll, the single largest employer in the history of the world.


The board of directors of the 9/11 conspiracy gather to await instructions (artists' rendering)

And here's the kicker...

100% of the people who were offered the deal, took it.

After all, we don't have a single person who has come running into the offices of the New York Times, waving a check and saying, "look! Here's a check for ten million smackers that the government gave me to be silent about 9/11! Can you believe these assholes? Now give me my book deal!"

Not one. Even with the lure of fame and fortune and a chance to go down in history as The Guy Who Saved American Democracy, even with the crushing guilt of seeing thousands of bodies hauled out of the rubble, even seeing the horrors of a nation turned inside out by war and paranoia that was completely manufactured as a gruesome hoax, some of these people having their own friends and families and colleagues die in the attacks, not one turned down the money... or took the money and came forward anyway.

And that, is the conspiracy mindset.

It's not a belief in corrupt leaders. Hell, we all believe in corrupt leaders. It's a belief in a corrupt everybody. It's driving around in a world where every single person you see out of your windshield is utterly bloodthirsty and amoral, all except for you and a few, brave friends. What could make you feel more important than that?

You can see the attraction right away. Most people, to feel special, have to actually do something special. But why not do what these guys do, and just make the rest of the world out to be wretched? Hell, once we've painted everyone else as mindless or murderous, all we have to do to feel superior to them is roll out of bed.

Remember what I said earlier about Dylan Avery and how it was probably just a desire for fame that drove him to do all this? Look at the parallel here. At the heart of all this is that basic human need to feel special somehow, twisted in the most warped and corrosive way imaginable.

In conclusion, the 9/11 Conspiracy Guys aren't evil and they aren't liars. They're merely filling a basic human need, using their imaginations and paranoia to elevate themselves to a level the real world will never elevate them to. Also, they're retarded.

site posted:

I get what you mean, but I would say that coming up with an idea and shoveling money to people to come up with an idea are two different things. Like, the US government didn't create the rocket, von Braun did and the US brought him over through Paperclip. DARPA and NASA do tread a line, though. Stuff like the computer circuitry and the internet did come them, but no way would the US government be releasing the iPod, for instance.

Wolfsheim posted:

I'm genuinely surprised that freep didn't immediately throw the Duggars under the bus as covert liberals.

FaustianQ posted:

Diving into WMG, but Auth maybe a remnant of when we were hunter-gatherers, nomads, when small tightly wound groups made sense. As agriculture began to flourish, it was easier for less Authoritarian types to flourish - less danger, more time to develop ideas, and more need for just people as a rule. As time has marched on (not trying to be Hegelian here) and the importance for large scale communities has been stressed to achieve dominance, so too has the Auth been progressively pushed further and further to the fringe. Societies breakdown under such uh, paranoid?, stress as to identify so much to safeguard against, and societies which don't do that are much more adaptable and competitive. Authoritarians haven't disappeared because it's still a legitimate, at a small scale, way to survive.

That's my dumb idea though, maybe it's got a seed or two someone grounded in academics can plant a much better idea with.

southpaugh posted:

You know what? This reminds me of when I was reading The Handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood. (For those that haven't read it, it details a kind of future America where a militarized christian theocracy is in control and fertile women are commodified as handmaidens to help old white dudes and their wives have kids. )

I always wondered how the type of society described by the author could come to pass. And these videos make me feel like I'm looking at a prologue to the book.

FourLeaf posted:

Typically in Quiverfull/ATI families the oldest daughter is expected to take on a caretaker role to her younger siblings to help her mother (since there are SO MANY kids it's hard to have only one maternal figure to take on all the responsibilities). This can eventually lead to the daughter having more of a parental relationship to her youngest siblings than a sibling relationship. Here's a blog post from a woman who left a similar family who was also the eldest daughter taking care of younger siblings. She explains how taking on this role makes it even harder to leave because it's like abandoning your children, and the policy Quiverfull/ATI/Conservative Christian subculture parents have towards "rebellious" children is always cutting off contact between family and child completely. For the author, she has to pretend she's still religious and will raise her own children within the subculture in order to have any visiting time with her brothers and sisters.

If you're (not you specifically PJ, the entire thread) interested in learning more about the Duggars and their lifestyle I would recommend reading through all her blog posts.

Deep Thought posted:

Hey 'sweetie', you're telling him to get help but the help you got was a load of harmful pills and bad psychiatry that led you to drop out of being the man you were well equipped to be. Think a willfull person is going to 'get help' in light of that? This might sound terrible to you and frankness like this is why you shouldn't dig yourself into deep holes, but you are really deluded, a dead end, whereas he isn't. I'm only saying this because it's loving remarkable that Christians have become the crazy ones in this new weirld order. Even if I think you're FUBAR, that guy apparently doesn't think so, yet he's crazy, he's evil, he's a wacko paranoid that is twisting your posts into 'an emotional cudgel' to be used against you. I'm sorry for your condition but you can't get away with talking such poo poo without getting a reaction.

Now who seems worse to you, me or him?

Exclamation Marx posted: