(Part 2) Top products from r/TopMindsOfReddit

(continued)

On the other hand, an actual, real-life exit counselor who works with actual walkaways from actual cults has in fact pretty much formally declared MAGAts to be a coercive political cult of personality, using actual characteristics common across pro-Trump groups and comparing to evaluations of groups like Scientology and the Moonies. (It's worth noting here that said exit counselor actually has written one of the more thorough evaluation scales of the "cultiness" of a coercive group.)

And apparently he's not alone on this; the former head of psychological profiling at the CIA pretty much has completely separately identified MAGAtism as a classical political cult, and literally the person who defined the term "brainwashing" in English and wrote the very first book on coercive groups and thought reform tactics has in fact just written a book on political extremism that also in part defines MAGAtism in the exact same framework of being a coercive political cult as Maoists during the Cultural Revolution. (Considering Dr. Robert J. Lifton's initial studies were of persons involuntarily interned in Maoist "thought reform" camps during the Korean War up to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution...yes, as in the guy has literally written the books on the subject--methinks he'd know exactly what he's talking about when he's comparing MAGAts and Trump to the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong). Both Hassan and Lifton have also been contributors to a book that notes that Trump shows all the signs of being a malignant narcissist in the technical sense and which also include OTHER psychologists who have expressed concerns a personality cult exists around Trump (and feel strongly enough on it that they feel an ethical duty to warn a potential target of violence by a person, well, (pardon the expression) trumps the Goldwater Rule). Rick Alan Ross, another exit counselor, has likewise explicitly noted MAGAtism has all the characteristics of a coercive cult of personality--and Rick Alan Ross is actually a Republican (though very much in the "Never Trump" court).

(Pretty much the only major exit counselor that has NOT outright called out MAGAtism as a literal personality cult is Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer, and that's because she's dead.)

And we're just talking the redcaps posting MAGA and KAG memes on Twitter and Facebook--we're not talking members of Certain Subreddits Soon To Exhaust The Reddit Community Patience, or even sub-movements within (like QAnonsense--at this rate, pretty much almost universally regarded as a literal coercive New Religious Movement by every exit counselor that's evaluated it and which heavily cross-recruits with older cults like Ramtha--or the New Apostolic Reformation, which has heavily embraced QAnonsense and which (in a remarkable sea change from even fifteen years ago) is also pretty much universally regarded as an extremely coercive religious group within "Charismatic" Christianity).

This is amazing. I would love to try to convince him he must be color blind or something, while insisting that black people are literally black, and white people are literally white, and he must be seeing something different. A spin-off of the classic mildly-stoned-deep-thought, “how do we know that what I call ‘red’ and what you call ‘red’ actually look the same? We only know what ‘red’ is because we’re taught certain things are ‘red’, like fire trucks and apples. Maybe color is a social construct!”

Which reminds me of a Radiolab podcast about color I heard a few months back, and the mystery of Homer’s “wine-dark sea”- supposedly there’s no mention of color blue in neither the Iliad or the Odyssey . Plus, is the sky really blue?

Now seems like a good time for me to finally read a book about the history of color that’s been on my Kindle for months. That Top Mind who just has apparently just discovered color has inspired me!

The views of the American libertarian party is small government, not the total abolition of the state, as secular government courts have proven effective as neutral mediators. If you want to know more there is a great book called "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff"

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Hurt-People-Their-Stuff/dp/0062308254

> Like what reading? I like to read!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sexing-Body-Politics-Construction-Sexuality/dp/0465077145

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Bodies-Matter-Discursive-Limits-Sex-Routledge-Classics/041561015X/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNDN34DGBXQGMJRNHAEQ

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sexing-Brain-Lesley-Rogers-2000-06-01/dp/B01HC0RD82/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481591782&sr=1-2&keywords=sexing+the+brain

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Delusions-Gender-Science-Behind-Differences/dp/1848312202/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNDN34DGBXQGMJRNHAEQ

http://bennorton.com/gender-is-not-alone-the-social-construction-of-sex/

http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2003/Extreme_Problems_with_Essential_Differences/

would be good places to start, plus numerous other papers, some books and blog posts I don't have quite the google-fu to relocate, and a lot of more tangential stuff. (I originally came to this mostly through the study of the theory of bodies and embodiement in art, as well as my spouse's academic studies in gender and sexuality). In getting to grips with this material and the general position it's important to move away from the facile strawman of the idea that biology is disregarded in a social constructionist view; more profoundly, social constructionists realise that social environment reshapes biology.

>Yeah it is. If you believe trans women only transition because of quote unquote "gender" which is purely social...you're wrong.

But what is a 'gender role'? If you restrict it to something as facile as 'girls like pink' then you can make anything absurd. It's worth remembering that the term 'gender roles' was originally coined by the sexologist John Money to describe the behaviours inhabited by unassigned intersex individuals trying to express a single binary gender identity. From a performative standpoint, gender roles are the entirety of the behaviour with which we signal the gender identity we wish to and are trained to project towards society. To say such things are not bound up in the trans experience is simply wrong; many trans folk experience feelings of dysphoria at being identified as their wrong gender, and lessening of these feelings or even positive counter-feelings at being identified as their correct gender. This is purely a matter of social perception. Therapeutically speaking, people transition because it helps to alleviate their feelings of dysphoria. Whether the underlying cause of the dysphoric state is genetic, epigenetic, foetal or psychological (or even spiritual) or some subtle combination of factors which differs on an individual basis is immaterial to the benefits provided by transition to the majority of those who seriously seek it. This is, it is important to note, only the medically legitimised narrative of the trans experience.

I mean, technically millennialism as a doctrine has been a common feature of Western religious doctrines since Jewish apocalypticism started to become popular during the intertestamental period (200BCE-100CE) in which writings about looming end of the world started to proliferate across the Jewish diaspora like in communities like the Essenes that sprung up in preparation for the literal apocalypse. Fast-forwarding to the early days of Christianity, the early Christians thought that the day of judgement would be soon - as in within their own lifetimes. Millennialist groups would spring up often over the next two thousand years, such as the Anabaptists of Münster, who claimed that the German city would be the new Jerusalem and started an exceedingly bloody uprising in 1534. Then, as now, millennialist theology provides an idea that someday (hopefully soon), there will be a cosmic righting of wrongs in which the virtuous will be eternally rewarded and the sinners eternally punished. This kind of thinking - which is as much a revenge fantasy as it is a desire for righteousness, can be highly seductive to poor, desperate and unworldly people who feel like they’ve lost their lot in life and must instead rely on a supernatural cataclysm to make their lives “the way it should be”. Eschatology is a really fascinating subject and learning about it makes a lot of the motivations of the religious far right of the Abrahamic faiths clearer.

Here are some great books for further reading:

A History of the End of the World - Jonathan Kirsch

The Pursuit of the Millenium. Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements. - Norman Cohn

Race IS a euphemism for sub-species. Saying "no it's not" isn't exactly a compelling counter-argument. Every species has sub-species within it. Have you really not ever noticed that we don't call anything else on this planet another human sub-species? Do you think we are the one species on earth that is magically not subject to evolution, and that we don't have any diversity? The reason you never hear this is because we use the term race, to de-animalize the language when dealing with people.


And if you don't deny that the African Lion and the Asian Lion have real and meaningful differences between them, then why would you argue that an African Human and an Asian Human have no difference between them. The African Human and the Asian Human are MUCH more distinct than an African Lion and an Asian Lion are from each other.


And humans DID need to adapt. Obviously. Why do you think some groups developed light skin and dark skin? Because in different parts of the world, people needed different melanin levels to appropriately let in the right amount of vitamin D, while also guarding against harmful UV rays. Why do you think some people developed an epicanthic eye fold and some did not? The East Asians, evolving on the desert steppe there in Asia, had to deal with an unusual amount of glare compared to any other human group, which lead to more narrow eyes. You are deeply underinformed if you aren't aware of the fact that the different human groups faced vastly different selective pressures, having traveled to wildly different environments. You think that a Black African moving up to icy Scandinavia wouldn't need to adapt to the new environment? Are you twelve?


And they DO die out, that's how evolution works. The creature doesn't morph like a pokemon. Ones that are maladapted to the new environment do not survive and do not reproduce, and the few that ARE properly adapted bottleneck the genome and reset the species at a new normal, in a relatively quick time.


You think meaningful evolution takes millions of years? At least learn something about the subject before attempting to speak with some authority. Evolutionary changes happen very quickly, they are just usually few and far between due to the relative stability of environments. As soon as a massive environmental shift happens, evolutionary adaptation to that change will happen very quickly. An animal species can change core attributes within a very short time, as humans have proved through breeding wolves into all the different dog breeds we have today. Or by experiments where we put creatures in certain environments, and find that they can physiologically adapt within decades.


"Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time"


http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the-fast-lane


"Instant" Evolution Seen in Darwin's Finches, Study Says


https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/07/060714-evolution.html


"Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island"


https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080421-lizard-evolution.html


Watching Evolution Happen in Two Lifetimes


https://www.quantamagazine.org/watching-evolution-happen-in-two-lifetimes-20160922/


Lastly, interbreeding and producing fertile children in absolutely NO WAY interferes with the fact that the different human populations are all branching evolutions of the species Homo Sapiens. By definition, sub-species of the same species can of course interbreed with each other and produce fertile offspring. That's what makes them sub-species, and not different species.


Two animals are considered sub-species of the same species, when they could interbreed and produce fertile offspring, but are still distinguishable from each other with over 80% accuracy. So the African Lion and the Asian Lion are both obviously Lions, they could both obviously breed with each other and produce fertile offspring, but they are also distinct enough from one another, than humans can tell the two breeds apart with over 80% accuracy.


Now ask yourself. Can African Humans and Asian Humans interbreed and produce fertile offspring? Yes, they can. Which means we know that they are the same species. Now ask yourself, can you distinguish between an African Human and an Asian Human with over 80% accuracy? Then you know that by the rules of science, African Humans and Asian Humans are both members of the species Homo Sapiens, and are two different sub-species of that species.


Also, your implication that there aren't major genetic differences between the races is false. Scientists, forensic anthropologists, and other important fields regularly use DNA evidence to determine the race of a subject. The race of a person can be determined from their DNA with extreme accuracy, and can even tell what race the father was (by checking the Y chromosome), and what race the mother was, (by checking the Mitochondrial DNA).


You really should read a book called "The 10,000 Year Explosion" by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.


https://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465020429


This book details how humans have evolved a great deal over the past 10,000 years. I really hope you take a look, because your idea that evolution is a slow process that takes millions of years is just patently wrong, and your idea that humans didn't evolve and adapt to wildly different environments in isolation from each other over a long enough period to become distinct enough from each other to be worth mentioning is ridiculous.

Just gonna post this book here, in case anyone is interested in learning what the Weimar Republic was like from a huge collection of primary source documents. Americans use stories about the rise of fascism to shape political debate and this is a great tool that I think can nuance and illuminate a broad array of topics.

That's a real shame then. It's too bad that the term "conspiracy theorist" covers someone who is spreading facts. As I stated above, Phillip Corso's book is excellent (because of his credentials) but another good book is https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Officials/dp/0307717089. This book was written by one of the people involved with breaking the NYT story. Unacknowledged on Netflix is a great introductory resource too.

If you aren't aware of any of this information then you will become a victim of the MSM narrative without being aware of all the facts.

> 2nd research its not hard do it and you will find I'm right

Yeah, no. I've read books by people who know what they're talking about, like Peter Heather. Feminism ain't got nothing to do with it.

Feminism also doesn't explain why the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until 1453.

And the connection between feminism and Babylon is pure, unadulterated bullshit--pretty much what I expect from somebody who tells people to "research" instead of supporting their position.

A good book to check out: https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Secret-Story-Protocols-Elders/dp/0393328600/

https://www.amazon.com/Trump-Art-Deal-Donald-J/dp/0399594493/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505431279&sr=8-1&keywords=trump+book

4.5 stars.

Stop acting the victim, because people can easily look up that you are lying.

Edit: Honestly, 4.5 stars is astonishing to me. I feel like they aren't removing enough reviews, but I guess you are okay with that.

America Again: Re-becoming The Greatness We Never Weren't ^1

Well...

Read one fucking book you illiterate numbnuts: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839

This is the book they're talking about.

Quick primer on the whole Chronic Lyme deal.

Sherry Shriner could wipe out "alien high tech weapon satellites" with her mind. This guy needs to up his game.

Obvious disingenuous take by /r/Libertarian, but it's not entirely wrong. The Civil Rights movement relationship to self defense and violence is a lot more complicated than most give it credit for.

Recommended reading

This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement