(Part 3) 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).

>wealth hoarding capitalists

That's not how that works. People do not hoard wealth, there isn't a Scrouge McDuck style swimming pool full of gold somewhere in Trump Tower. People who are millionaires have investments, money moves, so not only is this wrong, it's purposefully ignorant.

>I want the people with power over me to be people I have a hand in choosing to put there.

You do, you vote, your vote puts people there.

You can be as vague as you want, but we both know you are not in favor of a free market and are trying to hide your authoritarian desires behind muddy water.

>With these capitalists I have no freedom.

That's literally a lie.

>Their wealth is so great they can rig the market to generate them more wealth.

Okay, so here's the problem. You do not like there being rich people. Guess what, the only way to level is through violence., typically that's through socialism. Now you avoid any clarifications, and it's clear that's on purpose. It's obvious you are not here to do anything but apologize rather than actually talk.

I've got dozens of friends who grew up in this neighborhood. I used to party in houses all around this area, then we'd walk to Politics and Prose or American City Diner for hangover food in the morning (long before Comet came around). This whole thing is so fucking stupid.

I was reading Casey, about Reagan's director of the CIA, last weekend. After Carter and the Church hearings dismantled the CIA due to the insane over reach and corruption that was taking place, William Casey rebuilt it with Reagan's blessing. It tripled(ish) in size in the early 80's to something like 15,000 employees. There's a quote in there somewhere in which Casey says something like, "Now the CIA would be in the top 5% of all corporations in the US, given the budget and number of employees." That's entirely due to GOP policy and GOP politics.

So is it possible that there are a large number of people affiliated with the CIA in one of DC's nicer neighborhoods in the NW quadrant favored by well paid government workers? Sure. Does that have anything to do with Comet Ping Pong? No.

> 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 remember reading about the Great Deluge in some of the creationists 'textbooks' my mom had lying around when I was little. Their ideas don't actually seem to change all that much. The bulk of creationist arguments I've run into all have a direct lineage to early creationist thinkers.

There's a pretty good book called The Creationists which goes into their history and their ideas. Reading this was a revelation for me. I could recognize almost all of the beliefs I'd been bombarded with growing up.

I mean, pretty much everyone on the Donald thinks Nazis are socialists. They're just profoundly ignorant people and straight up historically illiterate.

I've put like 5 of them in the dirt, irrefutably proven them wrong and they still try to double down on this belief.

It isn't even isolated to the Donald, American conservatives, in general, believe this, which is why books like this are so popular:

https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

It's such a common belief it's likely learned in public schools in red areas, to be honest.

the best is when you hammer them with Paxton, Evans, or Gregor, and they claim they're just liberal historians trying to smear the right.

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.

If anyone ever has doubts about why an absolute monarchy is a shit idea, please read this book...

The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679722033/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_sgLPBb0N603E1

I read it because my gf is Ethiopian and because I'm kinda fascinated by the fact that Rastafarians consider him the Messiah and the living spirit of God. The whole time I was reading it though, I just kept thinking, "Holy shit. Thank God I don't live in a monarchy." The potential (come true in this example) for corruption and dysfunction is truly next level.

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

Remember Good People Beget Good People?

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.

Well...

https://www.amazon.com/Shame-Sin-Christian-Transformation-Antiquity/dp/0674660013

nuh-uh you brought this upon yourself. Buy it buy it buy it buuuyyyy it

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

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

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

Can I just point out that North Korea is a nation with active concentration and slave labour camps, where torture, beatings, rape, starvation, disease and the killing of babies are downright common occurrences? And where not only the children of prisoners, but the grandchildren of prisoners, are continually held as punishment for the sins of their parents? There are people in those camps today, because their grandparents fought against North Korea in the Korean War (also, seriously, just go read Escape from Camp 14 for a firsthand account of this horror).

Which means that these idiots are now trying to work out a way to rationalize how this unfathomable evil doesn't actually exist. It's Holocaust denial by any other name.