Savage Love Mar 30, 2021 at 2:27 pm

Fuck Around and Find Out

JOE NEWTON

Comments

103

The question to ask is why do these young women choose men decades older. And when women go after younger men they have a cat name attached to them.
Politically, older women should seek out younger men. Time to flip this around, because this double standard, apart from baby issues, doesn’t hold up. In the words of our boy Mick, “ hey you, get offa my cloud.”

104

Not in any exploitative way, getting with younger men. Throw off this weird judgement that it is somehow gross, when the reverse isn’t true, and go from there. I once had a young man in his early twenties, come on strongly to me. Seriously mate? It was an instructive & funny experience which no I didn’t take him up on.

105

Target shooting sounds fun.

Which reminds me of my only experience with a firearm. I was about twelve. With a friend with his BB gun. In a very boring California field on a long summer day. Nothing but bushy weeds all around. Nothing to act as a fun 'target'. Up popped a lizard twenty feet away. I pointed the BB gun at it. I am horrified to this day that a tiny part of me wanted to use it as a target. The rest of me remains unforgettably disgusted with that small part of me. I not 100% sure I didn't fire; it's possible that I did and blocked it out, that is the kind of thing that people do with memory. I only know that I was transformed by that moment.

ciods@102
Please don't apologize. I respect where you come from, this time and in the past, on this, and I know your heart is in the right place. Once upon a time I tried to talk to them. That seems fruitless though. And compromise isn't on their table either. So while I want to love and do love them too, I also think it's important to prevent them from holding power. And from propagating themselves into the future; I admit that contemplating implementing any such thing is scary.

And I certainly don't think that everyone isn't flawed. We all are, even those of us that don't have the flaws 'they' have.

106

Feminism for me has never been about jumping on the same treadmill that men were on, and my father’s generation were the ‘breadwinners’ of the family, and mother stayed home. It has never been about choosing any direction, certainly not adhere to capitalistic morals,
‘ whatever you can get away with’.

107

@101 p.s.
"ciods@98
"Should we force them to believe what we believe?"
Nobody said that."

I've recalled that a couple months ago I did say something of that.

As a student of cults and brainwashing, I regard de-programming as something as brutally invasive as the original programming.

Yet, a couple months ago I advocated, to protect the United States as a democracy (and a great numbers of lives from the pandemic), that something should be done to deprogram the brainwashing perpetrated by President Trump. That that hasn't been done, I think has had a cost, and may yet have a much greater one.

108

@ciods: Firts, good to see you (and I owe you a snail mail); second, you are correct: the right wing doesn't have a monopoly on fear. I do believe that generally speaking, and when speaking of groups, as distinct from individuals, the fears that Republicans / conservatives have are somewhat different from the fears that Democrats / liberals have, at least domestically. I expect that everyone has similar fears about war with other countries.

I don't remember whether it was curious or CMD who mentioned the desire for control, but yes, indeed! The gun is the ultimate symbol of control--control over your own safety, control over your ability to eat, and control over someone else.

And despite seeing your point, I can't help it: I do wish that the right would believe what I believe. Hell, I wish everybody everywhere believed the exact same way as I do. I think that's a fairly universal human characteristic. Perhaps not about everything--but certainly about everything I think is important. I mean, I know that's not possible and I'm not hoping for it or trying to make it happen. But it sure sounds nice.

I've never gone target shooting, but I suspect it would be a lot of fun. And yet if I did enjoy that as a form of recreation, I would still be more than willing to give up that source of fun if it meant that far fewer people were killed by gunshots. Non-automatic rifles or handguns exist only as weapons of mass destruction; no one needs an AR-15 or an AK-47 or an Uzi, or whatever to either kill Bambi and eat him for dinner, or to shoot at a bullseye or the silhouette of a person--much less a tin can or a lizard (curious, if it helps, I assume you missed that lil' reptilian target by a mile), and for sure, no one needs an assault weapon for self protection.

Less guns, more bicycles, is my motto.

109

@198: Corrections: that should have been "secnod," not "second," and it should have said, "Automatic rifles . . . ," NOT "Non-automatic!"

110

I feel I could write an essay about what, exactly, bothers me about how the left treats the right in this comment section alone. But I'm not sure that would be a good use of anyone's time >.<

But I will say this, about the single issue of guns. I completely agree, nocute, that a lot of the guns out there aren't needed for hunting or even self-defense. I agree that if we could get rid of the guns here, that would be great. We can't, of course, but if we could it would be nifty, and I vote for that side every chance I get. Guns are a strange American sickness.

What bothers me is the approach behind the usual arguments about it.

I wonder if we can all agree that many of our opinions are, in truth, gut-based and/or culturally inherited, and that the reasoning we use to excuse them is mostly (if not completely) retroactive, a sort of verbal icing on top of a pre-existing emotional cake. In which case I submit that there is a wealth of gun-based experience sitting beneath the surface of much of America which is invisible to the people outside, and which effects the cake of this problem deeply. For one thing, our entire country's origin story has to do with individuals with guns teaming up and beating off the bad old established government. That's how the country started. And no matter how silly it seems to many of us, many gun-owners on the right suspect that could happen again. I personally think this is far-fetched--the differential between personal arsenals and the government's weaponry is too large anymore (although we can note that some well-armed nutjob groups held out for a good long while, e.g., at Waco). But I have to admit that if you look much at history, the left's faith that the government will never turn on its citizens is also pretty hard to defend.

I've heard militia members tell me that they keep themselves well armed because of the Holocaust. Seriously. They believe that if the Jews had been armed, they could have risen up and fought back and stopped it before the whole deal got underway. Now, there are a gazillion issues with this reasoning, and I'm not advocating it, but I'm relating it here to try to point at a major cultural distinction in our country, which is whether or not you trust the government. And if you fundamentally don't, well, then, why the fuck would you give them your guns? Especially if you add this distrust onto a life full of experiences with guns, family interactions around hunting or target shooting or skeet shooting, etc., many of which were pleasant or fun, and none of which were ever fatal--which is still true for the vast majority of gun owners, even with all the crazy shootings we have here.

I'm not even getting into the entire cultural history of the rural west, from trappers to pioneers and on down, in which owning a gun and being capable with it was very often a critical life skill.

My point is, maybe you see people saying they own guns because they want to defend their family in case of a home invasion, but that's just the bullshit icing. They don't really mean that. They say it because you have to have something to say, and the truth is far more complicated and tangled and unreachable. So talking about how owning a gun for protection is a nonsense argument (which it is, for all the reasons folks have mentioned above) is fine, but not the point, nor will it change any minds, since that's not why anyone owns one anyway. The truth is that it's a deeply ingrained cultural thing, and as we've all seen in the last decade, no number of horrible gun-related events is going to undo it.

As for the argument that owning guns reveals a deep fear of other people, well, again, um, duh, of course. Fearing other people is completely sensible. People are horrible and scary and violent and you should absolutely fear them, and you don't even need to look at history to see that, the last thirty years provide plenty of genocidal examples. As it happens, owning a gun probably won't help, but if you can't see where the impulse comes from, you aren't looking very hard.

Not to say American gun culture isn't all seriously unfortunate and problematic. Just to say--it's not that simple, guys.

111

ciods@110
Since, as you point out (in about the same words I've used in the past myself):

"the differential between personal arsenals and the government's weaponry is too large anymore"

it really doesn't matter who trusts the gov't.

"the left's faith that the government will never turn on its citizen"

We have that faith? Not me. Since Trump probably no one.

"rural"

There is an important distinction between places like cities where there's a high population density, and places there isn't. Because with population density comes potential for response time by law enforcement.

There are no shortage of sensible arguments.

"People are horrible and scary and violent and you should absolutely fear them"

How about this. The rightwing is absolutely right that that last sentence is true. But it's mostly true because they exist. When they go to church, it's to hide that they're the worst people, not because they're the good people.

I've talked about the psychological research about rightwingers that I base my views of them on.

112

@92 curious2: Thank you for your concern and kind response.
You are correct. 30 years ago, mentally, physically, and psychologically abused--pushed beyond my limits, burdened with the physical labor of four people, and having a delayed reaction to having been assaulted by my abusive BF (prior to being isolated and trapped into marrying him a year later) a week earlier, I snapped. I had a box knife in my left hand, the retractable blade openly exposed, and was ready to puncture my right wrist. My heartless CPO's stubborn insistence to send me to additionally serve in an Auxiliary Task Force, anyway, despite my pleas for reconsideration of the assignment when the very same conniving female slacker that he and the rest of our department protected didn't have to lift a finger, sitting in the front office was finally the straw that broke the camel's back. It didn't help that I had also developed a severe lumbar strain, and although I was given a doctor's chit to not lift over 10 lbs., the order was willfully ignored. The level of toxic masculinity, harassment, and male chauvinism at my command that I and other women endured there was beyond intolerable.
To this day, I can still hear the corpsman yelling my name, "What the fuck? What the FUCK??" before I was taken by ambulance to Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego for a psychiatric evaluation. It was because of this young man that I am still alive and have no scars on my wrists. I was soon afterward sent home on emergency leave to get my shit together. This was good; once home, however briefly, I was reminded of my beloved VW, my family members, my music, and the civilian life I had left behind to serve my country--and who and what I would have tragically lost had I successfully carried out my plan of suicide. Although things got better after a personnel rotation (including the departure of my CPO and womanizing immediate warehouse supervisor, married with a young daughter), and I left active service with an honorable separation, what had happened in 1991 was Reason # 1 as to why I did not re-enlist past my initial four year commitment.
My chosen suicidal weapon back in 1991 during the Gulf War had been a box knife, largely because it was small and very easily accessible. I can't imagine what would have happened if I had in my possession a gun--a Colt .45 or an M-16 rifle-- as my CPO had so stubbornly and unyieldingly insisted upon. Memories of this and my physical and sexual assault still bring on nightmares, and triggers. I am dealing with this as best I can. Some days are easier than others.

@93 nocutename: Many thanks, nocutename. It will probably still be about two or three more weeks yet before I can retrieve my beloved Love Beetle out of winter storage due to nippy morning and evening weather forecasted and rain showers. But I am fully looking forward to returning to top down weather conditions and beach drives. Road trips to the San Juans are always uplifting seasonal go-tos. :)

@98 ciods: I know you were responding to BiDanFan @87, but I want to add something here. I brought up a subject of debate from a SLOG comment thread (see my comments @58 and @61 here in this week's SL comment thread). BiDanFan responded to that.
I am NOT saying that I am better than you or anyone else. What I am saying is that I, GRIZ, don't believe that I should have to own, register and use a firearm just because rightwingers, the NRA, rabid sports hunters (I don't mean you, fubar @99--but say, someone who would like to blow up a deer or pedestrian with an AR-15 because he or she thinks that death and destruction is cool), or anyone else so adamantly pushes it, trying to make it a federal law--with no Guv'Mint. What I see happening is, to me, insane. On January 6, 2021, our nation's Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. was attacked by insurrectionists---domestic terrorists--with the sole purpose of overthrowing an otherwise fair and just 2020 Presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Donald Trump ordered heavily armed Proud Boys, Patriot Players, members of QAnon and others to "stand by". Five people were killed, including a Capitol police officer. Six officers from the Seattle Police Department are also currently under investigation for their having attended the attack on Washington, D.C. and any possible involvement in the raid. I, GRIZ, am not saying 'Let's have a second Civil War'. There are dangerously crazy, violent and hateful people who do want exactly that. And they won't stop until the United States is reduced to ashes and rubble while Donald Jackass Trump giggles hysterically from its private swamp in Mar-a-Lunatic, Florida. If allowed, this is total lawlessness. Nobody is above the law.
I quote Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin:"This cannot be our future!"

@100 WA-HOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Congratulations, fubar, on scoring this week's Big Hunsky! Savor your well deserved newfound riches and bask in the coveted glory.:)

113

@108 nocutename: Agreed and seconded. I have this to add: Less guns, more music, Volkswagens and cats! Peace, baby. :)

114

I wonder if we're all talking about the same thing.

I know I've been restricting my comments to the group I know (rightwinger authoritarians, 20% to 25% of any country). I know there's all sorts of others and sound reasons to have and use guns. I myself have seriously considered it, because I believe in protecting other people, and the recent years have both taken a toll on my ability to, and raised new concern about the potential for a breakdown of my society.

I also know I've missed ciods a great deal. I'm feeling pretty bad about my interaction with her today.

nocute@108
"(curious, if it helps, I assume you missed that lil' reptilian target by a mile)"

I feel sure of that; I never could have forgotten having hit the little being.

If my horror about the moment is any guide, I think I might have shot once at it though. In any case, it was a lesson I'll never forget.

115

ciod @ 110
“I've heard militia members tell me that they keep themselves well armed because of the Holocaust. Seriously. They believe that if the Jews had been armed, they could have risen up and fought back and stopped it before the whole deal got underway.”

The argument that the holocaust could have been stopped or even avoided if there was no gun confiscation in order is historically untrue.
Very few ordinary Germans owned guns before the nazis came to power, and far fewer Jews. Once in power they distributed guns to party members and military, while conducting “gun searches” in Jewish homes as part of the terrorizing and confiscation campaign. The most that the few Jews who may have had guns could possibly do is shoot through their apartment window to the street below while noticing the SS about to come up and arrest the entire family. Maybe hurting one or two before shot by a sniper and a well-armed platoon storms the building shortly after.
Considering the prevailing sentiment in Germany at the time it is extremely unlikely that non-Jewish Germans would have considered coming to the rescue.

Sadly, clueless arguments in favor of Jews combined with support for the militant Israeli right wing are often no more than a fig leaf, cynical attempts to diffuse criticism.
Me? Racist? I believe the holocaust could have been prevented, and what’s his name neytanyahoo, isn’t he a damn good speaker?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_argument

116

Just to clarify, the second part of my seen above sentence "Very few ordinary Germans owned guns before the nazis came to power, and far fewer Jews" should have been "and only a handful of them were Jewish."

117

@110: "I feel I could write an essay about what, exactly, bothers me about how the left treats the right in this comment section alone. But I'm not sure that would be a good use of anyone's time >.<"

Actually, ciods, I would welcome such an essay. I really would. I don't need an echo chamber; I need some criticism backed by critical thinking, and I have a feeling that's what that essay would be.

118

Ciods @98, self defense against bears, mountain lions etc is indeed the most legitimate reason to own a gun. I am ok with rifles being legal for people who live in areas with populations below a certain density. The rest of them, melt them down and make them into, I dunno, high-tech wheelchairs.

The left-versus-right debate is not merely a matter of opinion, such as whether pineapple belongs on pizza. People's fundamental right to exist, to basic respect, to equality regardless of their skin color or gender or sexual orientation is not up for debate. Left and right are not moral equals. It is not an insult to say so.

Fubar @99, sorry, but "to train as an assassin" does not strike me as a legitimate justification, fun as it may be. Also, I don't think anyone needs to hunt, but here's me proving Ciods wrong and saying to each their own on this particular topic. (The hunts in the UK, where posh twunts train their dogs to tear a poor fox to pieces, can remain illegal. I'd be far more in favour of hunting if the deer were armed too and stood a fighting chance!)

Griz @112, thank you for your courage in sharing your experiences. I'm so sorry that happened to you. You are far from the only woman -- the only person -- who was bullied and mistreated by the institution of the US Military. Speaking of the government not turning on its citizens. Griz's guns did her a lot of good, didn't they? I'm so glad you're still with us, spreading positivity and VW beeps.

119

nocute@117
"I would welcome...criticism backed by critical thinking, and I have a feeling that's what that essay would be"

I'm sure it would be that. And I think that in that, it would be unique.

Because (as always, according to the psychological research which I'm always happy to repeat a book about), the rightwing doesn't think it's way to it's positions, it /feels/ it way to them. As I've mentioned before, in my lengthy past discussions with rightwingers, I've found it very frustrating how poorly they can make their cases. I offered (but was not take up on it) to switch sides and show them how strong their cases could be made (and I admit demonstrate also how poorly they could make their opposition's case).

I certainly didn't think I could make their cases winning ones, but I was astonished how much there was to learn from understanding them better and at much more depth than they understand themselves.

120

nocute @78 When I was young, my mother would regularly lament the fact that all of the teen boys in Tiger Beat had no facial or body hair. She commented that they seemed "safe", and perhaps that was a large part of their appeal to young girls.

121

@120: I have read an article saying essentially the same thing: that tween and teen crushes on teen idols are sort of practice for real relationships later.

I'm not sure what kind of useful "practice" I got, but I remember having absolutely SEARING, roiling emotions about everything in those days, extending to the hairless boys who inhabited Tiger Beat.

122

CMD @115: Please note that I was not making that argument, merely saying I've heard it made, and that it seems to me to get more deeply at the psychology of the fear/worry of serious gun owners than "home invasion protection."

Bi @118: I agree that the two sides are not morally equivalent at this point. I strongly agree, in fact, and I also agree that's not an insult to point out. But I don't think that means every position the right holds is wrong or irrational, nor do I think it means everyone on the right is an idiot--which /is/ an insult, and it's used far far too often by the left around here. (I don't mean you in particular, Bi, this is a more general observation.) Unless, as I said before, the goal is in fact some sort of civil war, in which case, we should all continue with the hateful rhetoric. (And yes, the right employs a lot of hateful rhetoric, too. I don't excuse them either.) Because once you stop arguing over positions and start arguing instead that your opponents are fundamentally stupid or immoral, there's not a lot of good places you can go from there.

Curious @111: Your interactions with me are fine :) I think we are both trying to understand each other. And of course it helps that we're basically on the same side. I merely feel that the language the left uses to describe the right paints (some of) them with inaccurate brushes (for others, it's spot-on). You're right to ask if we're talking about the same people. I do think there's a nut-job far right in this country (and, um, everywhere) that is past talking to. I don't think that's everyone who leans red. I guess maybe that's my point. So I get touchy about (what feels to me like) hostile generalizations like (if you'll excuse my using your posts as an example): "rightwingers tend to think everyone is an amoral sociopathic piece of shit" or "We don't have to have rightwingers, we could create an educational system which develops people beyond the reptile stage. But rightwingers made sure a half century ago that our educational system now does the opposite."

I currently live in a rural, red area, as some of you know, and there are deep political divisions. I strongly disagree with the political beliefs of many of the people around me. That said, many of those same people have provided me with unasked-for assistance in deeply difficult situations--I have to say, more kindness has been done to me by right wingers here than ever was by left wingers in cities. I think this is situational rather than political--cities are big, it's hard to be nice to a bunch of people at once--but it does make me bristle when then those same people are described as sociopathic.

As for this:
""People are horrible and scary and violent and you should absolutely fear them"

How about this. The rightwing is absolutely right that that last sentence is true. But it's mostly true because they exist. When they go to church, it's to hide that they're the worst people, not because they're the good people."

Be sure to tell that to all the dead people in Cambodia and Russia in the last century.

Curious @111, again: "it really doesn't matter who trusts the gov't." Oh, it matters intensely. The right in this country relies heavily on the fact that their constituents do not trust the government--they play this up all the time, and it's why they win elections. It's why it's in their favor to stop all good government from happening, in the way that the Republican-held senate tried to put the kibosh on everything the left wanted to do for the last thirty years--it plays into their argument that government is useless, and that wins them votes. It's why so many people won't take the vaccine. I suppose we've all noticed that the stats on people refusing the vaccine are high both in rural red areas and among Black people--the reason is the same, they don't trust the government /and they have historical reasons not to/, which make it pointless to mock their distrust or say they should just believe the CDC. I expect most of us would hesitate to tell a Black person they should just trust the government and get over their shit, but we're all fine saying that to the right. Geographically, most of this country has cultural bases which don't believe there is such a thing as good government--the exceptions tend to be New England and the West Coast. (Note that the west coast was heavily populated by people from New England, including missionaries, when it was first settled by white people, so this isn't a coincidence.) The feeling is more strong in some places than in others, e.g., in the south the distrust is strong. And I guess my point is there are good historical reasons for this which have nothing to do with how smart the people there are, or if they are empathetic or sociopathic or personally disturbed. It's cultural, it transcends individuals, and if you grew up there you would be much more likely to agree with them or at least see their point.

Nocute @117, Without attempting an entire essay right now, I guess that last bit of my response to Curious expresses one aspect of my objection, namely, that we ignore huge cultural influence on our differences and act like it's all about individuals and how everyone over there is wrong due to some personal failure of empathy or understanding.

And I'll note that so far as I know, almost everyone on this board who is American and who is making these super-left arguments is, in fact, from New England or the West Coast. There are some exceptions, but I think there aren't very many, and that's kinda my point. Our opinions are basically regional cultural opinions, and they has far less than we'd all like to think to do with our superior intelligence or how much more thoroughly we thought things through.

As it happens, those two regions have a deep cultural history of education--which is why, I think, the set of opinions do end up being, in many senses, "better," as Bi was pointing out. (And let's be clear that at the start, the push for education was not for what we, now, would consider moral grounds, but purely to ensure that citizens could read the Bible. That's why the Puritans were all over education. Of course, to them that was the epitome of moral.) But the fact that we all benefited from that culture of education needs to be acknowledged as a form of privilege, and generally speaking, just as fortunate and unearned as other forms of privilege.

I'm all for being angry at the Powers that Be on the right. For instance, a long cultural tradition of desiring to be, for all intents and purposes, an aristocracy, permeates much of the south and the southeast, and it is easily traceable to the cultures that settled there. For those people, there's no advantage to educating your masses--education is for the people at the top. Perhaps we can all have some sympathy when we read those stats about how Alabama education is awful when we realize that /that's what they want/. The top classes in Alabama are not trying and failing to educate their people. They are trying /not/ to, and succeeding. And if that had been the case in the Bay Area for the last 200 years, you, too, might own some guns.

123

ciods @122, Your 4th paragraph brings up something important that I’ve been struggling with my whole life. I grew up in a very rural area in the Midwest that’s still 99.9% white Christians. In my area, I don’t feel like the helpfulness and kindness you encounter was extended equally to people who weren’t white. When it was, it was viewed more as charity, not as helping a neighbor. And don’t even get me started on the way gay people were treated. Are you able to get a sense of this in your current location? Do you feel it may be better there now than where I grew up.

124

Zinaida @123: I don't think you (or ciods) can presume that all rural people are cut from the same cloth. Here in Ontario, and on the east coast of Canada, we have rural communities are are relatively liberal, progressive, and artsy; even more so on our the west coast (BC). The flyover provinces are (such as Alberta) more like your midwest (i.e., Pence territory).

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@124 P.S. Not that I disagree with /anything/ ciods has written, but I went to a university in the rural midwest US in the late 1970s, and was stunned that white people and Black students simply did not socialize with one another, and quickly learned that the place was soaked in racism. And the town's gay bar was an anonymous fortress with a steel door and peephole.

126

ciods@122
"I don't think that's everyone who leans"

I've been talking about the wing, not those who simply lean.

"a rural, red area...many of those same people have provided me with unasked-for assistance"

I'm not at all surprised to hear that. You see, one of the fundamental psychological characteristics of the far right is that they have developed to care about a much smaller circle of people, say in their tribe or neighborhood, than people who have developed/evolved further.

"I think this is situational rather than political--cities are big, it's hard to be nice to a bunch of people at once"

I agree it's situational, but I think it's far more than that cities are big.

Humans are large dangerous predators.
As are grizzly bears. Naturally the bears give each other a very wide berth, keep a great deal of space between each other. But during the salmon run, they crowd into an unnaturally small area; this forces them to make a very unnatural effort to try to ignore each other to avoid disastrously costly harm to themselves.
I think something like that is happening, and needs for the same reason to happen, between humans in cities.

I expect that you will not find that rural leftists are any less helpful than rural rightwingers.

"but it does make me bristle when then those same people are described as sociopathic."

OK that's fair. They do care about, as I just acknowledged about, a circle of people, just a far and to that degree sociopathically smaller circle.

"Be sure to tell that to all the dead people in Cambodia and Russia in the last century."

I believe the point you are making stems from a very large misunderstanding of who perpetrated those atrocities. They were rightwing authoritarians, it's just that the society they found themselves in forced them to manifest their personalities within a political/economic structure makes it easy to mistake that there is a symmetry between the two sides.

I think you would find the book I mentioned reviewing the psychological studies interesting.

"again: "it really doesn't matter who trusts the gov't." Oh, it matters intensely."

You missed my point (my fault for not elaborating sufficiently). Which was that because of the asymmetry we agree about between gov't's weaponry and private weaponry, this sentence by you @110 was moot:

"But I have to admit that if you look much at history, the left's faith that the government will never turn on its citizens is also pretty hard to defend."

By which I just mean that our having guns can have no useful purpose vs. the gov't, so as regards gun ownership to overthrow the gov't it matters not whether or not you're right that the left trusts the gov't and that this undermines our non-existent ability to protect ourselves against the government.

So as to /my/ point everything you went on with starting with "Oh, it matters intensely." was irrelevant. But all very politically interesting and very important (I'll circle back to this at the end).

Though some of it was a bit overstated. For example, "It's why so many people won't take the vaccine." It's a foundation of why, yes. But more significantly, the research about rightwing authoritarian followers shows that they absorb like sponges whatever the leaders they choose to follow tell them. So Donald Trump could have extremely drastically changed the outcome of the pandemic in every way, including rightwing acceptance of Covid vaccination. Regardless of the predisposition you rightly note.

Here's a quote that's helpful in understanding authoritarian followers:
"Many of them would attack France, Massachusetts, or the moon if the [conservative] president said it was necessary 'for freedom'."

And I do know that level of intelligence does not determine who becomes a rightwinger.
Though I do think there's something to:

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." --John Stuart Mill

Because it's just mentally easier to be a rightwinger. Because--as I said--they feel their way to their opinions instead of thinking their way to them, their positions are just much simpler to understand. And thus decide to adopt for a person who has a low IQ.

I do totally agree that people--I can easily see that WRT black people--have strong cultural reasons to be extra distrustful of gov't. I don't blame them for it, but I'm sure we're both concerned with effects like lowering the vaccination rate below the rate necessary for herd immunity.

"For instance, a long cultural tradition of desiring to be, for all intents and purposes, an aristocracy, permeates much of the south and the southeast, and it is easily traceable to the cultures that settled there."

That's priceless (as was your whole contribution to this discussion), thanks! As is evident, my primary frame in social analysis is psychological. The frame you present is I think also entirely valid and extremely useful. I think that together our frames give a complementary and far more complete picture of the situation.

If I go dark for a bit, it would only be that I had my 2nd shot of Pfizer 2.5 hours ago and I'm getting quite tired. Though a bit energized too. So far I've enjoyed my jabs surprisingly much!

127

Fubar @124, Oh, I don’t presume all rural people are the same. Not sure how I gave you that impression. I used to be a rural person and I know and love enough of them to know they’re very different. I’m even from a (barely) liberal county. Perhaps I was unclear, my previous comment was more about the community than individuals. An area doesn’t stay 99.9% white by accident. I was asking ciods if, in their opinion, “unasked-for assistance in deeply difficult situations” is something that is given to everyone in the community equally regardless of race or religion.

Side question: are these liberal small towns in Canada college towns or just regular towns, because they sound lovely?

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ciods @ 122
I didn’t think this is your position, it was clear that you are quoting others. Just wanted to put it in context, admittedly the way I see it, since it was brought up.
Maybe the militia man will be interested to hear a different view next time the subject comes up.

129

Curious @126 “I expect that you will not find that rural leftists are any less helpful than rural rightwingers.”

Great point!

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Zinaida @127: I should have written "rural people /from different regions/ are cut from the same cloth." I suspect that the regional differences between people are bigger than the local urban and rural differences.

The liberal small towns in Canada aren't college towns, but the ones I've spent time in were within an hour or so drive from a city, and while my friends were usually refugees from city life, their friends were local people. Towns get a reputation for being artsy, and people migrate there.

131

Ciods @110 Really great comment. Especially the part about how most gun owning families don’t experience fatal accidents or even any gun accidents of any kind. I never thought of it like that.

132

Zinaida @123: I’d love to tell you I think things are better now than what you experienced, but I really don’t know. I live in the rural west, not midwest, and like fubar says, I think that makes a difference. The west is far less committed to their religion than the midwest or the south—I think they mostly still identify as Christian (or LDS), but in my experience it’s a much less important part of their identity (for the Christians—for LDS, it’s huge), and for instance, many people here don’t attend church (maybe most).

The place I live is pretty white, so I can’t even make guesses about race issues. There are some Hispanics and so far as I know they are treated all right, but I’m not sure I’d know if they weren’t, so my observations here don’t count for much. My suspicion is that individuals are mostly treated well but larger racial stereotypes are still held and applied in generality (e.g., when trying to understand BLM). But I don’t really know.

That said, I can honestly say very positive things about how gay people here are treated. My small town has numerous out gay people—several married gay couples, both male and female, a trans couple, and a number of out kids at the high school, two of whom might even qualify as rather flamboyantly out—by which I mean to say they are not trying to pass as straight. I have talked to folks in town about this because my friend has a young gay son and he wondered how he might be treated by school mates. Everyone in town said he would have no problems here, and so far as I know, he hasn’t. Again, it may be that the rural west is less concerned with religion and its less-fun consequences, like anti-gay sentiment, than the rural south or rural midwest.

I also lived in rural Appalachia for a while, and my impression was that it was hard to be gay there. Although that was over a decade ago, and I hope things are shifting.

People are inherently tribal, I believe, and I don’t think it’s surprising that we tend to extend help to those who are more like us or more familiar to us. (That our society might even hope for people to offer help and assistance “equitably” is so modern an idea as to be almost inconceivable, although it’s admirable.) In my opinion, that means the more we can mix ourselves up, the better. I don’t mean that it’s anyone’s job to be a martyr to other people’s education, but I do think there are plenty of people in the middle who benefit from getting to know people who are different and seeing that they are, in some ways, just regular folk. Vicious haters will always hate, but many people are just unfamiliar with differences, and only have their media portrayals to go on. I think lots of people in my town were anti-trans just by default—the idea was weird and scary to them, and all they’d heard about it was upsetting. Then some trans people moved here. A lot of people changed their minds. It does happen. But it happens through pleasant exposure, not through moralistic browbeating.

Disclaimer: Even so, I think it’s rare for people to change their mind. On either side.

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curious @126: Ah, I see that I did miss your point re: trusting the government. Sorry to go off into an aside there.

As for this response to my Cambodia/Russia snark:
"I believe the point you are making stems from a very large misunderstanding of who perpetrated those atrocities. They were rightwing authoritarians, it's just that the society they found themselves in forced them to manifest their personalities within a political/economic structure makes it easy to mistake that there is a symmetry between the two sides."

I may be misunderstanding it, my knowledge of this history is pretty minimal. I agree that we would now categorize those atrocities as incited by authoritarians. I don't think we can call Bolsheviks right-wing, though, can we? I think that's about as far left as you can get. I guess what I was trying to say is that I think it's possible to engage and incite the most violent tendencies from either direction. Maybe any successful such mass movement might later be declared authoritarian, since that's sort of an attracting equilibrium for human political movements, even ones that start out with "for the people"-type goals. But I don't believe the left in this country is immune to that sort of rhetoric, or that the people who get all riled up and start chopping up their neighbors are always on the more conservative side of the local political spectrum.

And if you think the left is immune to authoritarian tendencies, note the current cultural movements towards censorship, be it through language wars or cancel culture or what-have-you, which is a pretty standard first-step in the direction of authoritarianism. Much--maybe even most--of the left mean well and want people to have safe spaces, etc., and I say that without mocking. But some percentage absolutely enjoy enforcing their values, calling down the vengeance of the internet, etc., upon people they perceive as wrong--all this with borderline militant glee and little regard for nuance. I don't think that percentage of people is as large, in this country, as the percentage of the right that I consider dangerous right now. But neither do I consider it a trivial percentage.

I will agree with you, however, that, very broadly speaking, conservative positions are often "easier" to take, in an intellectual sense; mostly because they tend to prefer a status quo, and change is harder to think about. But I don't think most liberals think that much about it, either; I think they inherit their beliefs from their peers and regional culture, too. Maybe that experience includes a few university classes, so they can feel like they really did think about it. And some did, but plenty didn't. Personally, I'm more impressed by people who hold some beliefs from both sides of the aisle, because that at least indicates some actual thought went into at least a couple of the beliefs.

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Bi @118: I missed my chance to say that I completely agree with you on sport hunting, like fox hunting. I also am not a fan of people who hunt purely to get beautiful trophies. But hunting for meat is something I have no problem with, and many people I know feed their families all year from a single elk or deer (one ungulate is a lot of meat). Given the horrors of our industrial meat complex, I'm not sure this isn't a more moral choice than buying meat at the store. And if it makes you feel better, it's not at all easy, even though we're armed and the deer aren't :) Finding an animal in the wild is already difficult; sneaking up on them is also tricky. That's assuming you get a hunting tag to begin with, and they are mostly on a lottery system in order to control the exact numbers, and not everyone who applies gets one. In addition, the times/areas/etc. in which you are allowed to hunt are seriously restricted. You may get a tag for a particular week for a particular region of land, and if the deer aren't there at that time, oh well. I know plenty of people who have hunted all their lives who still don't get a deer every year--they spend a week in the wild hunting and just never get a clear shot. For the vast vast majority of people, it's not like the images we've all seen of assholes shooting wolves from helicopters!

135

Bi @118: Oh, and one more thing: I know it's a little inconvenient for our usual arguments, but the standard weapon for defense against predator animals is a handgun, not a rifle. This is partially for speed of access to fire--if you come around a corner and in the process anger a bear, you don't have time to set up a rifle shot, probably, unless you're pretty badass. Personally I don't trust myself to accurately aim and shoot in that circumstance at all, but I can imagine firing into the air, which would scare off a decent percentage of bears and most mountain lions. I do know one guy who successfully killed a black bear who was charging him. But even there I feel a bit meh about it--I almost think if you're hiking, you should take the risk of being bear-dinner. It's their area, after all.

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ciods @135: I would say that a bullet from a handgun would simply piss off your average bear, but I suppose it depends on the type of bear.

I saw a photo of a sign, ostensibly from a BC park, that advised hikers to carry pepper spray and a whistle in case they should encounter a bear. It further advised hikers should know how to differentiate black bear poop from grizzly bear poop. The former being full or berries, and the latter being full of whistles and smelling like pepper.

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ciods @132: Imagine no religion.

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Fubar @135: Totally depends on the caliber and, as you say, the type of bear. Completely agree for small-caliber weapons. A .45 would probably do the trick on most black bears. A .38 special might. Really, if you run into an angry grizzly, you're probably dead no matter what, unless you can shoot it right through the eye or something.

Also, alol to your last line.

For what it's worth, what I actually carry most of the time around here is a "bear banger," which makes a super loud noise (like a gun) but doesn't fire a bullet. Would work for any bear who wasn't already pissed off. Bears who were pissed off, I don't like my chances no matter what. And mountain lions are mostly invisible until you're dead, anyway.

And fubar @137: Amen. So to speak.

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ciods@133
"Sorry to go off into an aside there."

I loved every word!

"I don't think we can call Bolsheviks right-wing, though, can we?"

If you're re-read the paragraph you quoted of mine, I was trying to point out that it doesn't matter for my psychological point what the government was. My point is that (for example) Stalin was a rightwing authoritarian personality that didn't have a rightwing political structure to dominate, so he dominated the political structure which was available to him in his nation.

And in doing so, deeply harmed a proper understanding of what the essence of his gov't was.
Or that's what the research says.

But I think people are more complicated than that. I see some foolish centrists and leftists with the kind of flaws that lead them to be authoritarian followers too. But they are relatively weird exceptions I think. But unlike the research, I see they exist.

"And if you think the left is immune to authoritarian tendencies..."

Ah, I see I already acknowledged that the research is wrong on that.

I think the thing that bugs me most here in my liberal bastion is when I see smoking OUTSIDE outlawed.

But I don't have much trouble with political correctness/cancel culture. A lot of things are wrong; I don't mind noxious bigots needing to hide their toxicity. It might even help change them.

"But some percentage absolutely enjoy enforcing their values, calling down the vengeance of the internet, etc., upon people they perceive as wrong--all this with borderline militant glee and little regard for nuance."

Yes I'm sure you're right. People are very complicated, there's a million metrics of development. Just because someone evolves on the ones that create political positions, doesn't mean they can't still be insecure cruel assholes.

"easier" to take...mostly because they tend to prefer a status quo"

(Well, I think the analysis I suggested is more powerful, but...)

LOL, sure:

Q. What would you like to happen?
A. Exactly what is already happening, no more no less.

Is pretty dang single.

"But I don't think most liberals think that much about it"

True. But I think that to take the positions at all is harder with liberal views. The positions themselves are just not as simple. Someone can almost be a rutabaga and say "Exactly what is already happening".

"Personally, I'm more impressed by people who hold some beliefs from both sides of the aisle, because that at least indicates some actual thought went into at least a couple of the beliefs."

I know a really dim centrist who thinks centrism is right about everything because it's in between. (In actuality, he's afraid to disagree with anyone, and seeks to minimize that as a centrist.) But while that just popped into my head, I know that has nothing to do with what you said.

Yes, one sign among many of actual thinking is not always being on one side.

But there are deeper metrics of the few (a psychological researcher once told me 10%) of people who are inner-directed, instead of motivated to think what other people think.
Being in that 10% is kinda frustrating. I don't believe in any -isms. Economics for example: I have a totally improvised hybrid of various economic systems, and a plan for implementing them, that even I am not sure could be implemented IRL. So I could borrow a lamp from Diogenes and walk the whole world and never get anyone to sign onto my whole plan.

And ya know, one of the thing that drives me most crazy is how little anyone agrees with anyone else about anything substantial. As bad as it is that people don't think, I'm actually more frustrated when they do!

ciods@135
"I do know one guy who successfully killed a black bear who was charging him."

He probably killed that bear for no reason out of ignorance of that it was almost certainly a 'bluff charge'. I'm not impugning that kind of ignorance. I had already spent a huge part of my life wilderness backpacking and mountain climbing, and was equally ignorant until I got scolded by a National Park ranger friend and ordered to read "Bear Attacks" by Herrero, and learned that with black bears the fact is that one is safe if neither menstruating nor small child. Oh, and if one behaves properly. I admit that even having learned this, I got pretty scared while the giant black bear who 'owned' one of the most beautiful and most popular backcountry campsites in the Sierra Nevada (and was thus probably one of the most aggressive black bears in the world) bluff charged us. My companions believed me, but they also stayed behind me lol. I was really happy when the charge stopped. The purpose was simply to get us to run, and abandon our food to it.

But admittedly, if someone is ignorant they might need to kill the bear to avoid getting themself killed. But my view is that people have a responsibility not to be ignorant and lead to the unnecessary death of the animals that live around us in many parts of the country.

This is why I only cited grizzly and polar bears as arguments for firearms.

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fubar@136
With all bears, backing away slowly (be calm, no quick movements) is good practice; looking large because one is wearing a backpack or standing up straight for a moment probably is good too; staring at them threateningly probably isn't. BC has grizzly bears, so wearing a bell to let them know you're coming is a good practice. As would be spray. As would be a powerful handgun if one is well-trained.

141

Okay, but say you're in Jellystone Park and Yogi Bear and Boo Boo come up behind? Do you toss a pic-a-nic basket as a decoy to distract Yogi whilst shooting your pistol at Boo Boo? Or would you need to bring in Mr. Ranger and his big guns?

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@118 BiDanFan: Thank you and bless you. Agreed and seconded, too, on your stand on guns. I have never liked fox hunters, hound dogs, or the practice of sports hunting, either.
Sending big cyber hugs, positrons, and VW beeps. :)

@137 fubar.." ..imagine all the people living life in peace..."
Rest in peace, John Lennon.
Sending big cyber hugs, positrons, and VW beeps. :)

@139 & @140 curious2: Your comments offer further testimony that, especially now during a global pandemic, we are all in this together.

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@141 nocutename: Not to mention Cindy Bear's reaction if Yogi and Boo-Boo ended up getting shot for being attracted to the contents of that pic-a-nic basket.

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@144, Endless_Ork, in terms of what is better by capitalist standards, yes they do. Generally, as humans prospering with health & happiness, No, men stuck in their lanes which yes I see the damage done, suicides, depression. I don’t understand what happens to men, to our boys.
I have sons, four living and one deceased. I grew up in a four daughter family, went to Catholic all girl schools from age seven. That public school for first couple of years saved me. I knew nothing about boys outside my dad and boys on the ferry to school.
Rearing sons has been much tougher for me, than rearing my daughter.
I’ve often here pointed to how boys are emotionally repressed in their more vulnerable emotions, from birth, thru family, school etc and allowed aggression & anger only. This is a gross description, because many parents/ caregivers teachers etc let emotions be freely expressed. However, from the gun carnage, by men, in the US, it appears many many are still trapped in toxic masculinity and it’s twisting of the human soul.

146

It’s not only the US, here in my country, women murdered each week by a present or ex partner. What is that anger about? Why does it get to that for some men?
No simple answer, because violence is woven thru our culture, from the way we rear our babies to how we tend our old people.

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Ciods @134-@135, thank you for enlightening me. Upon reflection it doesn't make much sense to carry a rifle when you are going on a hike. I like the idea of scaring a bear off rather than shooting her. As for hunting, this vegetarian can't disagree on the ethics of hunting meat versus buying factory-farmed meat. This is why I'm taking an agree-to-disagree stance on hunting. I wish people didn't want to kill animals, but as long as they do so ethically-apart-from-the-killing-bit I support their right to do so. (And I hope there are situations when killing an animal is ethical, as I had to euthanise a pet last year.)

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curious @139: You are probably right about the bear, but I have to admit it would take a lot of balls to just stand there and confirm it was a bluff charge! I'm impressed that you managed it. As you say, I'm more a fan of the jingle-bells-on-your-boot-laces theory. Most predators have zero interest in seeing a human, much less attacking one. Although I will add re @140 that I've been told several times to NOT try to make yourself look big around a grizzly. Then you're in the "play dead/climb a tree" set of advice. Although the advice to climb a tree always befuddled me. I've only ever seen grizzlies in forests full of ponderosa and Lodgepole pine, and I couldn't climb a tree there if someone gave me a boost up and a half hour to work on it.

Bi @147: I will add one more thing. In poor parts of rural America--like here--hunting may be the only way people can afford to eat meat. A tag, if you get one, isn't expensive, and then if you get your animal, you can eat meat all year. My best friend, e.g., grew up in a family that couldn't otherwise afford to eat meat very often, and it's not that uncommon. (Now we can talk about whether that's a good moment to go vegetarian... :)

All re guns: I was thinking over the gun-control discussion and I ended up with one other thing I wanted to add, if you'll all be patient with me a bit longer.

I was talking with my friend about it, and we were discussing how difficult it is to explain cultural traditions to people outside the culture. How little sense it must make to someone outside that we would persist in engaging in behaviors that are so obviously harmful and dangerous--and sure, maybe we have some reasons, but they seem clearly outweighed by the dangers, no? Why would we keep doing that? Of course, when you grow up in a culture, you think its norms and customs are typical. And it's natural to resist outside attempts to point out that your customs are wrong or stupid. But still, how can we justify how stubborn we are about this?

And then she made a nice comparison point: alcohol.

For most of us, alcohol is part of our culture. This despite the fact that it's clearly harmful, that it kills people, ruins relationships, ruins lives. I don't have the stats but I wouldn't be surprised if alcohol is responsible for far more deaths in this country than guns. (Quick Google search, not bothering with nuance, says 95k deaths annually for booze, 39k for guns, of which 61% are suicides.) We all know our cultural obsession with booze is risky and problematic and that it destroys lives--just as a thinking point, how many rapes are facilitated by alcohol? More than by guns, you can bet--but most of us do it anyway. If some teetotaling culture showed up and started pointing out how stupid drinking alcohol is, how it harms us far more than it benefits, would we all sit down and say, "You know, you're right, we'll stop drinking"? Not a chance.

Maybe that helps make sense of the reaction? I thought it did a decent job of explaining what I was trying to get to when I said it was cultural and you can't just undo that.

(Humorously, guns are so cultural that this country has actually succeeded in making a decent attempt to get us to all stop drinking, but never once succeeded in an attempt to get us to stop having guns. Which tells you something about how deep it goes.)

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ciods @148: "I couldn't climb a tree there if someone gave me a boost up and a half hour to work on it."

You'd be surprised what can be accomplished with a dose of adrenaline.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the USA is different than other countries. It was born free of government, and since its inception, its (white) people granted power to its governments. The rest of us live in countries that were ruled by monarchs and upper classes who, over the last 100 or so years, have slowly granted us various rights. (Canada didn't get a constitution until 1982.)

We tend to lack the attachment to rights that Americans seem to have. Perhaps guns are representative of those rights?

151

Neither the left or the right is healthy or moral. Because I think it's most moral to have compassion for everyone, not just "our own side". And hatred for no one, not even the "other side". It's healthy to be cautious about changes and conservative. And it's healthy to try to change to better policies and grow and be progressive. Both anarchy and fascist extremes have major problems, the correct side is a centrist who uses the strengths of both sides.
:p

Taking away everyone's guns and a major means of self defense would be bad, we still have unpopulated areas in the US and the police aren't going to take care of the bears, and it's convenient to hunt for food as long as we're doing it sustainably.. Easy access to guns for everyone would be bad, very crazy or angry people hurt a lot of others with guns in cities. Restricted access is the correct move, and yes we already have it, but maybe we can tweak it and improve it.. We'd have to listen to both sides without insulting each other to develop a better plan.. Those who insult are the only ones on the wrong side, inhibiting change while maintaining the worst part of the status quo!

When one loses patience with others, it's not helpful to blame them, but to figure out what our own shortcoming is, why we can't be patient with teaching, why we give up or get mad..

The snooper should not blame her bf for snooping, but work on her trust issues to be in better working order for her relationship, learn to stop snooping bf and focus on building a better life or relationship.

And there is risk with sex. Pregnancies, stis, and it often intensifies the emotional risk of betrayal and disappointment which is part of trusting others. It's not smart to have sex impulsively, it's smart to follow impulses cautiously. To take the time to establish trustworthiness, and to figure out how you will deal with possible pregnancy or stis or betrayal, just in case. It mitigates risk to demand condoms, sti tests, and to get to know the character of the person you're trusting to be cautious with you. It is emotionally safer not to trust, to consider sex as winning over someone else, but that sort of sex isn't sustainable and doesn't sound fun.

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nocute@141
I see that thanks to a 2010 federal law, guns are now allowed in US National Parks. So I imagine that scenario is completely plausible. And worse, in such an incident dozens of park visitors could pull out their guns and end up doing a lot of harm to each other.

griz@142
A particularly appalling form of gratuitous animal slaughter are those yahoos who let loose a pack of dogs, and hours later drunkenly stumble upon the pack to kill the animal the dogs have treed. Some "sport".

ciods@148
Even though I knew what I was doing and knew that I was right, it was scary to have a six hundred pound bear running at me at full speed, like 35 mph, only ending within a few seconds of having reached me. I don't know if we could train many people to do that.

My friends were only 15' behind me, and I'm proud that they knew and trusted me enough to not run either. I pontificate here on a lot of subjects, but on none of them am I more knowledgeable and skilled than being in the Western wilderness.

"I've been told several times to NOT try to make yourself look big around a grizzly."

You're right. Maybe just stand upright for a fraction of a second so he knows your size?

"Then you're in the "play dead/climb a tree" set of advice."

Oh lord, I'm so glad I've never gotten to the "play dead" stage with a grizzly. Because when that doesn't work you need to shift to the final 'fight like hell' stage. I wish I hadn't lost the really nice knife I would have used at that probably-futile stage.

From what I know of the range of the grizzly, I wouldn't be surprised to hear it might overlap with where you are. I'm glad you're smart and well-informed!

/// Break ///
Here's a some words about gun violence.
Last I heard a few years back, the USA averaged a school or other mass shooting daily.

(I don't know what the average is now; unless there's something dire like a POTUS who wants to make a needless war or make the USA a dictatorship or cause mass death in a pandemic, I avoid following the 'news' super carefully.)

A daily mass shooting can't be just conservatives.
I believe the solution is one that no politician can say, and most Americans can't even think.

A friend who worked with Michael Moore says that he's an ass. But I think Moore's 2002 film "Bowling for Columbine" is an important one, and his best. In it, he points out that Canadians per capita had as many guns as Americans. But had nearly no problem with gun violence. So why the difference?

For one, American leaders have long modeled violence as the way to address problems; and as the saying goes a fish rots from the head down.

Apparently in Canada (unlike in the USA), even in cities, it was very common for people to not even lock their front doors.

A thesis of the film is that a key difference is the news media in the two countries. (No thanks to telecommunications 'reform' which freed news from a responsibility to serve the public good, enabling them to prioritize profit alone.)

In Canada, news was relatively healthy and reality-based. Whereas in the USA, news marinated people in fear, near-constantly. Be afraid, a theme is for example, of those darker-skinned people.

Not much more about Moore's film's thesis comes to mind. But I think it also went to the empty materialism which fails to feed one's 'soul' in American culture. (Which incidentally goes back about 110 years.)

In short, American culture is sick. But show me a people who can or want to admit that they are sick. Show me a politician who wants to tell people something they don't want to be told. But if we want to solve our problem with violence, we must stop being a very sick society.

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Ms Ods/Skr Curious - Aren't the liberals now in the centre by default? The right may still be making hay by conflating liberal with leftist, but one of the few almost universally agreed leftist ideas is that Liberals Get the Bullet Too. Unfortunately, I've heard enough leftists mention on streams that they're going to trick liberals by pretending to be nice to them that I don't know if leftists are at all to be trusted.
xxx
Ms Ods - I offer a gentle but highly important correction. There exists considerable variety in the not-trying-to-hide-it set. The Flamboyant are only one end of the spectrum. In some ways, those who seem able to pass for straight but who by nature live so quietly, basically living as if they assume everyone knows, that people mistakenly think they're trying to pass have things harder than anyone. It's also important to distinguish between Open and Flamboyant, who can sometimes look indistinguishable. Open gays can be similar to either quiet or flamboyant gays. The flamboyant ones are deliberately going over the top; some open ones are just naturally like that.
xxx
General Rant - An article mistakenly claiming that, pre-transition, Renee Richards reached the semifinals of the US Open, has not been corrected four days later. (The USO semifinalist was Cliff Richey, whose sister, Nancy R Gunter, also was a regular in grand slam later rounds and could give Chris Evert a match on clay.) This is an Unforced Error.
xxx
Ms Lava - When my radio alarm went off this morning, I caught the tail end of an interview with the authoress of How to Raise Feminist Sons. The bit I caught was going quite well at first. She stopped playing certain games when he was young because he gave cues he wasn't enjoying them any more, modeling for him to pick up cues from others. And after his recent heartbreak, she accepted that his friends would be more helpful to him than she would (although in retrospect I wonder how hard she pressed for details). Sadly it ended with her gloating over how much her son and his friends miss their mommies in a way that invited the inference that she would not approve of their missing their daddies equally.

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Mr. venn@153
"Aren't the liberals now in the centre by default?"

I could not possibly agree more. The centrists have appropriated the term 'liberal', in an attempt to define the left out of existence. (I of course find it infuriating that the other major USA party is dominated by their wing, while the Dems are free to ignore their left wing.)

155

ciods - I won't dispute your assertion that country folk are simply delightful and that guns are their culture.

What I do take issue with is the insinuation that it is somehow "wrong" for anyone living in "elite" America to judge them or their beliefs. The NRA wouldn't have the power that it does without its vast and mostly rural membership. By continuing to support the NRA, your wonderful neighbors are tacitly supporting the NRA agenda. And the NRA agenda is what I have a problem with.

The fact is that we effectively have a national arms race on our hands - all thanks to the gun lobby and the havoc they have wreaked on any and all rational gun laws for the last 40 years. The right is more effective at riling its base because hate and fear are easy sentiments to fit on bumper stickers.

Take a look for yourself. A good start would be The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 (signed by Reagan) which made it illegal to establish a national firearm registration database. In fact, many of the records the government did have to that point were destroyed - in order to comply with the new law.

The NRA is also opposed to any regulations with regards to ammunition. This is why we don't have a way to trace ammo. How hard would it be to stamp shell casings with lot numbers? We don't have restrictions on armor piercing bullets, or hollow points, or exploding bullets. And the restrictions on high capacity magazines are limited to a very few places. Before Virginia closed its loopholes on straw man purchases, a very high percentage of weapons used in NYC were traceable to Virginia. If one state regulates ammo, it's effectively useless as the odds are that the neighboring state doesn't.

The NRA opposes laws meant to prevent domestic abusers from owning guns. They oppose laws banning silencers! Their absurd defense for that position? To protect the hearing of the gun owner. They oppose closing the gun show loophole, and effective and universal background checks. The NRA has effectively prevented the CDC from studying the effects of gun violence on national health. This is especially insidious as it prevents any meaningful federal study of the effects of all the insane gun laws the NRA has rammed down our throats over the years.

They aren't against everything though. They do support: the unfettered private sales of guns, the use of lead bullets on federal lands, the legalization of the killing of hibernating animals in their dens. The open carry of weapons everywhere.

I'm sure I missed a bunch but you get the idea. It's like they say about Trump. He might not be a white supremacist (he is) but a whole lot of his supporters just happen to be white supremacists.

156

@155: JibeHo, I could never have said that as well as you did. Thank you.

157

JH @ 155
Joining nocute. Thanks!

158

venn @153: I apologize; I didn't meant to conflate the two groups. I am aware that there are plenty of ways to be out and not-attempting-to-pass that aren't flamboyant. I mentioned the flamboyant because I imagined someone might say "Well, maybe people don't know those kids are gay."

JibeHo @155: Your points about the NRA are all excellent, and I agree with them. I would absolutely love it if we could dismantle the NRA completely and get reasonable gun laws in this country. (While we're at it, I'd like to dismantle a lot, if not all, of the big-money lobby groups.) I do know plenty of gun owners who don't support the NRA, but your point that most NRA members are rural is absolutely true. Also, I don't think an objection to guns makes anyone elite, for the record. Nor do I feel that "urban" and "elite" are synonyms. Or that "elite" is an insult. Or, while I'm at it, that it describes much of the left.

I also did say, several times, that gun culture is hugely problematic and that it's an American sickness and that I think the positions held by the left are, in general, better. In case you missed those bits. My main point was that when people who are pro-gun-control--like myself--sit around at tell each other how unreasonable it is for anyone else to own a gun because that just makes them more likely to get killed in the case of a home invasion anyway, they are completely missing the point.

That said, since I'm feeling pretty juicy about my point @148, can I ask how many of you are also riled up and pushing hard to bring back prohibition? Since alcohol kills far more people than guns? Or--and I'm going on on a limb here--maybe that doesn't bother you so much because it's also part of your ambient culture? Since drunk drivers kill other, sober people at decidedly nontrivial rates, the reason can't be because guns hurt more people than just the gun owners...so...thoughts?

159

One more point of clarification--I'm a big fan of judging other people's cultures. More than your average lefty, I'd say, I'm happy to assert that I think this cultural aspect or that one is problematic and wrong and should be done away with. What bothered me about the conversation that was going on when I popped into the comments yesterday (and to be fair, this is the way I've seen the conversation go many times, I'm not meaning to poke at all of us in particular) is not the judgement, it's the way the judgement is framed, namely, as if it is primarily about individuals rather than entrenched cultures with historical roots.

For instance, I believe that they way certain parts of the Islamic world treat women is abominable. But I don't think it's because every single man over there is inherently stupid or immoral, or that each single man made a conscious decision to reject the obviously correct alternative choice about his behavior. I think the problem is deep in the entire culture--and I don't expect them to suddenly go, oh, you're right, we should change! just because we point it out.

If you really want to change other people's cultures, you'll probably need a war to do it. At least, that seems to be true historically. Changing your own culture is more possible, although also difficult. The problem we have in America is we think we should be able to fix things like this together because we're one country, so we must therefore be one culture. But we're not.

160

I live in Alaska and own guns, which I use for hunting. I save a lot of money by eating a lot of moose, and I also think that consuming game is healthier and more ethical than eating commercial beef (which I mostly avoid.) A lot of people in my conservative town think that any gun control measure is an attack on our innate human rights, as well as a liberal conspiracy to take away our guns. There is a group that likes to go around carrying their semi-automatic weapons in public, to make some sort of point -- (I really think the only point they are making is that we may have too many gun rights, if this is ok, but that's not their point.) Conversely, however, a few years ago, I was at a bar in Seattle and guns came up. I admitted to owning guns and was informed that I was a bad person. The individual who called me such did not care when I tried to explain that I own hunting rifles, which I use to shoot animals that I eat. As far as he was concerned, people who own guns are bad. End of discussion. So, I think that Ciods brings up a fair point that people on both the right and the left can be too extreme, unfair, and unwilling to accept any nuance on a particular issue.

161

ciods@148
"guns are so cultural that this country has actually succeeded in making a decent attempt to get us to all stop drinking, but never once succeeded in an attempt to get us to stop having guns."

ciods@158
"since I'm feeling pretty juicy about my point @148, can I ask..."

Since you ask: I'm not sure what 'feeling juicy' about it means, but I think it might mean you like that point more than I do.

The only thing prohibition proved is that it's impossible to keep people from altering their consciousness', and if you try the winners are the criminals. (In other words, I wouldn't characterize that as "a decent attempt to get us to all stop drinking".)

Now take guns. Sure, a person can manage to own illegal weapons. But doing so is so difficult that I think there are very few illegal operational battle tanks (for one example of an illegal weapon) in private hands in the USA.

I think the best way to handle the societal cost of alcohol is to give people better access to better substances (which weed certainly is).

If our politics were anywhere close to sane, I don't think that sane gun control would be anywhere near as difficult as prohibition demonstrated it is to keep people from taking drugs they want to take. Your frame is right that one of the reasons our politics is not sane is cultural, and I think my frame is right that that cultural insanity manifests itself in psychological issues. As for "an attempt to get us to stop having guns", I haven't anywhere supported no one having guns, so I'll leave that alone.

162

Curious @161: First, thanks for playing :)

I agree that people everywhere like to mess with their consciousness. So far as I know, there are a number of Islamic countries which have fairly successful alcohol prohibition laws. Perhaps the people there smoke grass or something else, but they don’t drink. So why couldn’t America successfully enact laws to stop people drinking? I offer as reasoning that it’s because drinking, in particular, is part of our culture, and you can’t change culture easily, if at all, /even when you know it’s harmful/.

(Oh, and by “decent attempt,” I didn’t mean “at all successful,” I just meant they actually tried. It didn’t work at all, but they tried.)

I am not sure what the battle tank bit of your post was meant to mean, curious, I’m sorry, I think I missed something there.

I should say, Curious, that although I haven’t been addressing your psychological points, I think a lot of them are valid. I also strongly agree with your point @152 about the way media in the country handles things. I think I read once that the reason our news is so much more fear- and scandal-based than Canada and the UK is that they have news programs supported by taxes, rather than commercials—meaning their news can just be news, it doesn’t also have to “attract viewers.” Is that true, do you know?

—

Nonetheless, I think my point was not addressed—perhaps because I didn’t make it very clearly. I’ll try again, although I strongly suspect I’m boring everyone now


Question: If what bothers us about guns is how many people die as a result of them, why aren’t we also bothered about booze, which kills even more people?

Conjectured answer: Because in general the people upset about guns are pointing at a problem which exists outside their culture, whereas the problem of alcohol exists within their culture as well, so they don’t really want to mess with it.

(One more time: this is NOT a statement that I think our gun culture is healthy or good.)

—

Ah, fuck it, just ignore me. I do hope we can get many more reasonable gun laws. I do.
I can just leave it on that note of agreement.

163

Curious @126

"I believe the point you are making stems from a very large misunderstanding of who perpetrated those atrocities. They were rightwing authoritarians, it's just that the society they found themselves in forced them to manifest their personalities within a political/economic structure makes it easy to mistake that there is a symmetry between the two sides."

@139 "I was trying to point out that it doesn't matter for my psychological point what the government was. My point is that (for example) Stalin was a rightwing authoritarian personality that didn't have a rightwing political structure to dominate, so he dominated the political structure which was available to him in his nation. And in doing so, deeply harmed a proper understanding of what the essence of his gov't was. Or that's what the research says."

So wait, are we now retrospectively calling any mass-murdering political leader a "rightwing authoritatian personality" regardless of their actual politics? That sounds... convenient. What does a leftwing authoritarian personality look like? Or is that not possible by definition, according to the "research"?

It wasn't just Stalin, by the way. That's a "very large misunderstanding" of Russian early 20th century history, unfortunately pretty common among left-leaning Westerners. It was also Lenin, and Dzerzhinsky, and pretty much every other major player in Russian revolution. And they didn't "find themselves" in a certain political structure, they created the structure. That entire period from about 1917 (October revolution) to about 1953 (Stalin's death) was extremely brutal. There were no good guys there, on any side.

164

@142 curious2: Agreed and seconded right back (your turn!). :)

@155: YESSSSsssssssss!!! JibeHo for the Guns Down WIN! :)

I know we have now started a new Savage Love thread this week, but is anyone still hungry here for a Double Whammy (Lucky @69 + Big Hunsky @100 = Double Whammy @169)?
Tick...tick...tick...

165

ciods@162
" So far as I know, there are a number of Islamic countries which have fairly successful alcohol prohibition laws. Perhaps the people there smoke grass or something else, but they don’t drink. So why couldn’t America successfully enact laws to stop people drinking? I offer as reasoning..."

Maybe it's that we weren't willing to do whatever the Islamic countries do to punish offenders? (I have no idea. Do they chop hands off or something?)

"I just meant they actually tried."

I thought you might mean that; I shouldn't like to debate so much. It's true, we have not tried (and few even want to, despite what the cultural paranoia says; I like that phrase, as it acknowledges both that it's cultural and that it's paranoia) to abolish all guns.

"and you can’t change culture easily"

I'm warming up to this frame.

I mean you can't change an individual easily either. But a whole group of like-cultured individuals jointly reinforce each other's status quo, so to change them all at once you need to change everyone at once. I guess that's as much more difficult than digging a hole a shovelful at a time, compared to needing to do it in one go with one giant hole-sized shovel.

"I am not sure what the battle tank bit of your post was meant to mean"

I don't really know where our current laws draw the line, so I had to pick something I was pretty sure I couldn't own, as an example of a weapon we've very successfully prevented anyone from owning. (This was just part of the argument I was trying to make that whereas we couldn't stop anyone from drinking, we have stopped people from owning some kinds of illegal weapons. But of course it is more difficult if you can conceal them under a coat.)

"Canada and the UK is that they have news programs supported by taxes, rather than commercials—meaning their news can just be news, it doesn’t also have to “attract viewers.” Is that true, do you know?"

fubar and BDF probably know. I just know that the reason I have heard for the Canadian difference isn't tax-related, but that it must legally actually be news (by which I mean true and important) in the public interest, like it used to be here.

And of course little of USA news is what I would call news. Even that which isn't false (and thus on extremist sources like Faux News and outlets to the right, and very marginal nutjob ones on the left) tends to have little relevance to the deep and important issues we should be grappling with to fulfill our responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.

Thank you for presenting your Question in a way that doesn't tempt me to argue with it for sport. I think your "conjectured answer" is broadly a good one.

I think that booze doesn't really /by/itself/ kill people. I imagine that the main way it kills people is when mixed with driving. While we already take measures to stop people who have already been caught driving drunk, I think you're right that it's notable that no one is talking about putting breathalyzers on every car in the country. Whereas proactive measures against guns /are/ offered. (Some might remember my position that I won't be driven by anyone with a drop of alcohol in their system. So I'd fully support making /that/ the legal limit. And making it electronically impossible to drive a vehicle with a drop in one's system.)

In other words, I think this you gave an excellent example of people being more inclined to limit the behavior of people not in their subculture. (As though a slew of rightwing agendas such as religion abolishing abortion, and the USA drug war didn't already provide a great example of that from the other side.)

166

Lost@163
I know I've been running on, so I just want to remind you that I've already said that

"a leftwing authoritarian personality...[is] not possible by definition, according to the "research""

But in my long ramblings I also said that my personal observation is that there are authoritarians who aren't rightwing. (The ones I'm thinking of are very dim centrists.)

I can't really offer an opinion on the personalities of those leaders, I just shared what I've read about them. (By them I just mean their psychology, remember.)

167

@166 p.s.
Oh, and most authoritarians are followers, not leaders. I do see authoritarian leftwing leaders in the City Council in Berkeley, California. But their nanny-tendencies are nowhere near as dangerous as a rightwing authoritarian's desire for totalitarian dictatorship.

But it is still sad that there are non-rightwingers happy to blindly follow their leaders.

168

Ciods - I’m happy to address the issues you raise. I’ll post something tomorrow if you’re still interested.

169

JibeHo @168: If you find yourself in the mood, I'd be interested. But no pressure.

Curious @165: The page I found says more than half the annual deaths attributed to alcohol are due to health effects of long-term drinking, e.g., liver disease. (Nor is the rest all car crashes--it's also alcohol poisoning, combining booze with pills, etc.) So yeah, drinking by itself, not counting car crashes, kills people--more people than guns, even. It takes a while, so I guess that's less dramatic and therefore less interesting, but it does do it. And we're not really even getting into all the people whose lives alcohol ruins without outright killing them.

170

@169 ciods: WA-HOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Major congrats on scoring double prizes for this week's Savage Love comment thread, by hitting the Double Whammy (@169)! Savor your newfound good fortune, and bask in its glory. :)

171

ciods@169
"more than half the annual deaths attributed to alcohol are due to health effects of long-term drinking"

Thank you for correcting me!

But there's an important distinction between gun deaths and those other alcohol deaths. They are mostly self-inflicted, and I'm sure we all feel that people should be granted a degree of freedom to make choices which harm themselves.

I'll grant you in advance that there are all kinds of effects upon other people from those self-inflicted alcohol deaths, including I bet many times more costs to the healthcare system. I'm just saying that I think your correction causes the analogy to break down a bit because of the self-harm factor in the alcohol deaths.

172

Okay, fair enough--but then we have to discount also the self-inflicted gun deaths, which account for 61% of annual gun deaths in the US. In both cases we're talking about more than half, but not way more. So that still leaves us with about the same relative percentages, i.e., alcohol kills more than twice as many people per year as guns do (in the US--if we expand out to the world, it'll be way way more).

And I point out again that there are lots of ways alcohol fucks up people's lives without killing them. On that front, alcohol is far far worse than guns. With guns, it's pretty much fine right up until someone is dead. There's no insidious year-long middle ground full of lying and struggling with addition and embarrassing your partner at parties and having affairs you don't remember and getting fired and having your family try to get you into rehab so on.

173

ciods@172
"but then we have to discount also the self-inflicted gun deaths, which account for 61% of annual gun deaths in the US."

Thank you for enlightening me again!

I agree this strengthens your analogy. And does so considerably since self-inflicted gun deaths are probably mostly intentional (suicide) and self-inflicted alcohol deaths are probably (consciously anyway) not intentional.

And I consider suicide a right. (Though I also consider it a right that mostly should not be exercised before proper mental health measures are taken. (The relevance here is that maybe we /should/ at first take away a right that shouldn't be used before other measures are taken.) But if I put that aside (and I certainly should, since guns are not the only way to kill oneself) I like how your new stat strengthens your analogy.

In any case, IIRC I conceded your theoretical point about the effect upon one's positions of whether or not they target one's own subculture or not. So I didn't even need the analogy to agree with you. And I hate to take up you valuable time just because I like to volley.

174

curious @166

Thanks for clarifying, and you're right, I didn't read your previous posts very closely. I usually just skim the uber-long comments on here, unless it's a subject I'm particularly interested in. In this case, I was only peripherally interested in the Soviet Union tangent, and only because I think this period of Russian history is both misunderstood and misrepresented on both sides of the right/left divide in the West. It happens a lot, and it's nearly always agenda-driven.

I thought @ciods made some good points wrt the Bolsheviks and socialist dictators in general. I didn't see any "large misunderstanding of who perpetrated those atrocities". I could also see how it related to their other point about "trusting the government". Most folks on the left and liberal side are in favour of "bigger government", whether they realise it or not (unless we're talking about anarchism, but for the purposes of this discussion I'll put that aside for now). To have socialist policies on a country-wide scale, you generally have to sign off on the idea that the government or some local authority will take a significant chunk of money from individuals and private companies and redistribute it in a fair and beneficial way. This requires a certain level of trust in the government and government institutions, as most people don't really understand the ins and outs of their country's economy (not because they're stupid, but because these processes are generally too complex for a layperson to grasp). So "left-wing policies" usually do go together with "bigger government", at least to some extent. And you do see a higher level of trust in the government in the more successfully socialist Western economies, such as the Nordic countries, where people are willing to pay high taxes because they believe the government is on their side and will spend this money wisely. In Soviet Union, the idea of big socialist government extended beyond taxes, as there was basically no (legal) private business at all and the only employer was the state. As we all know, this system was severely abused by those in power, in incalculable different ways.

All this to say that I get ciods' general point. Your own point about right- and left-wing authoritarian personalities is less clear to me. If you are saying that this is purely psychological and has nothing to do with actual politics, and you just want to distinguish someone like Stalin from a politician who has "nanny tendencies" but is not otherwise authoritarian, why not just call the former an "authoritarian personality" and the latter an "overprotective personality" (or "non-authoritarian controlling personality" or whatever other neutral term)? Why use political terms at all? It just sounds like an intellectually dishonest and historically false attempt to retrospectively align socialist dictators with the "rightwing" camp (please note that I'm not calling you personally intellectually dishonest, but I do have some serious misgivings about the sources behind this "research").

175

Lost@174
Other than the anarchists we've put aside, I guess there are many different types and degrees of trust in government.

Yes, I would like to trust in and see realized quite a bit of beneficial redistribution; I would like to see someone other than centrists do it, but having centrists do it seems better than no redistribution to me.

When it comes to trust in government, what really takes the cake is the very significant voting block that wants a totalitarian rightwing dictatorship. (20% to 25% of every nation.) That degree of trust dwarfs the degree of trust inherent in letting the gov't take some money from the rich to give to the general welfare.

Thankfully anarchists (who are in my view not sane many levels) are a tiny fraction of a percent.(1)

"left-wing policies" usually do go together with "bigger government"

As you've narrowly framed it yes. But fascism (sometimes defined as a marriage of corporations and government) is in practice as big as gov't can get. Unless we're talking a totalitarian dictatorship.

"overprotective personality"

Thanks, I love it! (In that it supports my understanding of authoritarianism as at least far more consistent with and manifest in rightwingers than in leftwingers.

"I do have some serious misgivings about the sources behind this "research"""

I've only read about it, I have not vetted it.
I hear that you have misgivings, but I don't hear that they are serious enough for you to want to know more. If that changes I can point to info.

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-and-percentage-of-anarchist-ideology-by-US-regions_tbl2_248966741

176

I'm not positive I'm right here, but I think maybe part of what is going on is curious is talking more about the personalities of the people at the top--the would-be dictator, say, who may well not care so much about the particular party he takes over, so long as he can take over. Whereas I was (way back) trying to talk about how afraid we might be of our neighbors, namely, whether the mass of people who cause the violence (perhaps in response to convincing scary dude-at-the-top) are always on the right. That's where I was trying to say I thought people on both sides were pretty scary; maybe the sort of violence they enact has different flavors or is aimed at different people: right wing masses may be more likely to rise up and kill people of a different race or religion, whereas on the left wing it may be more likely that the people being removed from their heads are the rich or something like that. But I think both sides have the tendency within them. But if curious is trying to say that the motivations of the authoritarians who incite that type of mass violence are similar and really exist independent of the political situation, I'm willing to buy that.

177

Although Mao, Lenin....eh, I dunno!

178

ciods@176@177
Yes that is a wonderful overview!

I admit I know little of the individual leaders (that's just not something that interests me enough, and I don't know enough about that history; alas, one can't do everything), I was just repeating what I've read.

Now if instead of talking about a would-be dictator, but if we are instead talking about someone whose role was as a thinker, who say developed a leftwing economic system, I can't see a rightwinger faking /that/!

179

curious @175

"When it comes to trust in government, what really takes the cake is the very significant voting block that wants a totalitarian rightwing dictatorship. (20% to 25% of every nation.)"

Er, what? 20 to 25% of EVERY NATION wants a totalitarian rightwing dictatorship? Do you have a reference for this? I don't see how this can be true, unless we're either using a very creative interpretation of totalitarianism, or looking at offocial survey data from North Korea and extrapolating to the rest of the world. If this is true, 20-25% of every nation is not being democratically represented, which doesn't sound like a sustainable situation. Even fringe far-right parties in the UK, vile as they are, aren't calling for a "totalitarian rightwing dictatorship".

"fascism... is in practice as big as gov't can get. Unless we're talking a totalitarian dictatorship."

Indeed. The horseshoe theory.

"I hear that you have misgivings, but I don't hear that they are serious enough for you to want to know more."

You're quite right. Like most Russians, I have very painful family history connected to Stalinism (my greatgrandfather and great uncle were both killed in Stalinist purges, and the family didn't find out what happened to them until the 1980s, when my grandmother managed to bribe enough officials to get to their records). I know about Stalin, both his personality and his politics. I don't enjoy reading speculative psychological research trying to put him in another camp because "the left" wants to wash their hands of him. I've seen enough of that already.

180

ciods @176

"maybe the sort of violence they enact has different flavors or is aimed at different people: right wing masses may be more likely to rise up and kill people of a different race or religion, whereas on the left wing it may be more likely that the people being removed from their heads are the rich or something like that"

Yeah, I agree, but only to an extent. Like, I'm amazed at how strong anti-semitism still is on both the right and the left, how it continues to mutate and adapt. You've probably heard about allegations of antisemitism against the Labour Party in the UK and its former leader Jeremy Corbyn (who is politically further left than Bernie Sanders, and not a 'centrist' by American standards). It's bad. I was sad to see so many left-leaning folks immediately jump to "Corbyn isn't an anti-semite, he's just critical of Israel!". Yeah, no. I've read the EHRC report, and this defense doesn't pass the sniff test. He's critical of Israel AND he's an anti-semite. The former is a fig leaf for the latter.

181

Lost@179
"Er, what? 20 to 25% of EVERY NATION"

That was a reference to something I said upthread in my blathering.

The body of research studies you have demonstrated no interest in, shows that 20 to 25% of the population of every nation are rightwing authoritarian personalities.

But it is not just them that are authoritarian followers. About 80% of the German people got indoctrinated into the Nazi cult.

That's where the sound body of research came from. A serious need starting in the early 1960s to understand what the hell happened to Nazi Germany. Who invited it. And who else is susceptible to brainwashing. So that humanity would be better equipped to prevent such things in the future (not that hardly anyone has listened to what was learned even now that Trump has run a similar playbook here, brainwashing millions).

I am sorry that you have family trauma. However

"speculative psychological research"

you're the one speculating here, Lost. And choosing to; sound psychological studies are not speculation. I understand why you're speculating (that the research was speculative) instead of informing yourself. But it's willful ignorance. To which you are welcome if you wish it.

182

Oh get over yourself, curious.

183

And thus endeth the lesson.

184

Dan wrote: 'Whether you had sex on the first date or sex after dating for three months, if the sex was bad and you didn't enjoy it—if the guy was inconsiderate or unhygienic or not invested in your pleasure or all of the above—never having to see that guy again would definitely count as "things going right."'

I think I've incorporated this as my goal in being a good lover: considerate, clean, and communicative. Sometimes I think I suck in bed, but seeing this in print reminds me that I'm on the right track. Even when someone doesn't appreciate these qualities, I feel good about myself, more than a little sexier, when I strive for these standards.

185

I dont have much opinion on gun ownership but where I live there is a breakin in my neighborhood about once a week. Before the recent covid downturn of economy I did not think to buy a home protection gun even though I'm not anti gun (grew up in a family of hunters and know how to use guns but I dont like hunting because deer are cute so I dont own one). Since covid there are more break ins, it's getting like they dont even try to hide it now and a woman was stabbed recently during a break in. I wouldn't kill someone to protect my property but I would maybe to protect myself so I disagree that people dont own guns for this reason, sounds like you never lived in a bad neighborhood. Only reason i haven't bought a gun yet is covid has also increased my depression and I know what the stats say about that. Also not true that the gun thing is a left v right battle always. there are left wing gun clubs too, insert marxist no pretext quote, and also many Democrats are hunters like in my family, also my area is mostly liberal but I know many people here with guns precisely because they fear home invasion. For myself so far having a dog makes me feel safe but if I do buy a gun it will be because I fear being kidnapped and taken to withdraw money from atm then stabbed as happened to someone here not because I say this for a cover for some other reason.


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