DocWatts

Even if you're right, what's a realistic plan for getting rid of the 400 million guns that exist in the United States?

What people from other parts of the world maybe don't realize is that there are more guns than people in America, so even if there was political will for an Australian or British solution it would prove to be logistically impossible. That's not to give any sympathy whatsoever to Republicans, the NRA, or the far Right who are the most selfish people on the planet and could give a shit less about children being gunned down in schools. That said, one aspect of the issue that's not given nearly enough attention is the toxicity of gun culture within a larger trend of a disintegrating and atomized culture where deaths of despair are becoming increasingly common among men. Then add to this a gun culture in the US that's a wasteland of toxic masculinity that preys upon fear, suspicion, and inadequacy. Is it any wonder that in a culture where lots of men (and it's always men who are doing these mass shootings) aren't socialized in healthy ways and end up feeling hopeless and alienated from society, that some of them will decide to find one of the easy accessible guns in the US and make a mark by going out in a blaze of glory? Gun control may be able to stop some of this, but helping men to live fulfilling and meaningful lives as well as countering the atomization of society from Late Stage Capitalism and Right Wing ideologues will also be necessary.

That about nails it. Fascism is a product of a failed or failing democracy, where a portion of the public feels existentially threatened to the point that they become willing to abandon democratic liberties and take back control of 'thier' country by any means necessary.

Thought I'd share this excellent article I came across about how the rhetorical tricks that far-right ideologues use to indoctrinate 'normies' into white supremacist ideology. I quoted a bit of it below, but the article is worth a full read. Once you become aware of these tactics it's hard not to notice them when they're employed in political discourse. https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-and-tactics-of-white-nationalism-b0bca3caeb84 "How do normal people become Nazis? How can reasonable people be lead to harbor unreasonable and dangerous beliefs? The tactics white supremacists use are effective and working. This is an article that tries to make clear the tactics involved in the subversive manipulation and how their actions of planting the roots of bigoted ideology often goes unnoticed. This is a guide for “normies”, centrists, and everyone else on how to spot the rhetoric in the wilds of the internet. By and large the majority will NEVER admit to holding and espousing neo-Nazis beliefs, the goal is to lead you into the pit until you don’t want to get out and then drop the charade of put upon centrism. This hiding the true ideology under a layer of more acceptable talking points is called “hiding powerlevel”. To deceive and recruit people it is imperative that they can make a connection of trust first, and being outright in their beliefs would mean they get dismissed before they have the chance to recruit. They are going to appeal to you, they are going to use things you like to make you empathize with them, and then over time they will slowly, feed you the Whitaker mantras and white nationalist talking points. Neo-Nazis hide. They usually aren’t going to be obvious about what they stand for when they are trying to woo you. This deception is referred to inside their circles as “hiding your power level”, it is masquerading as something else to lure people in and then slowly expose them to neo-Nazi propaganda. These hiding tactics range from false flags where they attack people while impersonating those they hate in order to drive people towards more radical groups, or silencing methods like telling people false information while pretending to be non-biased, or hiding their identities claiming that they are “normal” / “centrists” / “moderates” / “liberals”. USING ENEMIES TO UNIFY Do you hate SJWs, those nebulous ne’er-do-wells of the internet? They’re ascribed to killing everything from video games to society itself. The term “SJW” is largely useless as it has been applied to pretty much anyone as a means of marking them as “bad” and their points as “bad”, but neo-Nazis are opportunists and have taken use of “SJW” and othering words to rally people to their sides. Use of identifiable enemies is common. Often neo-Nazis steal enemies to build upon other past reactionary movements, catering their sales pitch in order to groom more people in. They find common “enemy”. They find what the intended recruit group hates and then build the bridge from that enemy towards the white nationalists’ identified enemies. When you jump into conversations that you are ignorant about and accidentally defend neo-Nazis you are doing their work for them.

@Fleetinglife For what it's worth, Starship Troopers (the Heinlein novel, not the Paul Verhoeven film) was a philosophical novel that arguably defends and promotes fascism, by imagining a scenario where a fascist society could work. From what I understand when Paul Verhoeven picked up the film for adaptation, he was disgusted by the far Right ideology of the book and decided to use the film adaptation to deconstruct the ideas in the book. As to Warhammer 40k, it was conceived from the outset as a mashup of sci-fi and dystopian settings including Dune and Judge Dredd that was intended to be a somewhat tongue in cheek satire of fascism from the very beginning. Despite the anti-fascist satire being about as subtle as a brick thrown through a window, real world fascists tend to gravitate towards it mostly because they like the aesthetics of the setting and because fascists are the protagonists (regardless of it they're unambiguously villain protagonists).

I'd counter that with "misplaced normalcy syndrome", which describes people shoving thier head in the sand and downplaying large and obvious changes in the social landscape, in the niiave belief that tomorrow will be like yesterday regardless of what's going on at the present moment. Large social shifts can and do happen, and what's been taking place over the last five to ten years in America (ie a fucking coup attempt by a president who lost an election and is highly likely to try again in a few years) is not in any way normal. Yeah we can say that Trump is a symptom rather than a cause, but normalizing what's happening in society right now is extremely dangerous and irresponsible.

@Fleetinglife Speaking of Warhammer 40k, such are the times we're living that a satire of fascism has been unironicly appropriated by real life fascists.

The 'Free Rider' problem from philosophy can be illuminating here insofar as it highlights some of the difficulties around Freedom of Speech. It's the same principle around the notion of to what extent should tolerant societies allow for intolerance. The difficulty being that the intolerant reap the benefits of a society that allows them to express thier own viewpoint, while they are working to undermine those benefits for other groups. Likewise, freedom of expression is only sustainable insofar as the people exercising thier freedom of expression are willing to extend that same Right to others. This includes not only freedom of expression on media platforms like Twitter, but also allowing people to express thier diverse cultural, gender, and sexual identities without being shamed, harassed, and threatened. Now most societies can absorb some amount of Free-Riding, but there's always going to be a limit that will be higher or lower depending on how robust that society is. Beyond that threshold and it starts to become an existential threat to the entire rights and freedoms of everyone in the society. Which is why it's completely justified for democracies to ban facsist political parties, to list just one instance of this. By these metrics, it's quite easy to see that as @trenton points out, almost the entirety of rhetoric around Free Speech on the Right is being used as a Bad Faith smokescreen to roll back rights and freedoms for groups that they don't consider to be 'true' citizens in their eyes. This is easy to see in the reactionary hysteria over things like Critical Race Theory, in attempts to get books which discuss things like racism banned from schools and libraries, and in the outcry over increased visibility for LGBT people and minorities in popular media. 'Freedom for me, not for thee' is as true for freedom of expression as it is for virtually every other freedom when espoused by the Right.

@Fleetinglife Excellent analysis in that article, thanks for sharing

Part of a great urban planning series that compares and contrasts US transportation infrastructure with that of the Netherlands.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the infrastructure in parts of America are that of a developing country. I live around Detroit and roads in the below condition aren't that uncommon around here.

Since there seems to be some confusion what fascism actually is, here's one of the better definitions I've come across for it. And for anyone curious, this definition came from a comparative politics series that gives an in depth analysis on fascism; why it's a symptom of failed democracy, why it has its roots in aggrieved populism, and how it differs from other forms of authoritarianism. https://youtu.be/m6VSdwInpnc

What JP deserves to be ridiculed for is his misplaced and delusional ideas around what he believes the problems facing the world to be; delusions which he platforms to his immense audience. I.e. thinking that younger generations (correctly) assessing that very little is being done to address an unfolding ecological catastrophe is the problem, rather than Climate Change itself. Or that Progressives being unreasonable about pronoun usage is a bigger threat to the world than the rise of fascism as a symptom of failing democracy in the United States and Europe. He doesn't deserved to be ridiculed over fact that he's crying while obviously going through a difficult time in his life. What I'm left with is feeling pity for the guy. Pity, because it's hard to be completely sympathetic for him considering the context where this video took place (a reactionary political rant), and when his tears are also bookended by him shaming others for thier body types and sexual preferences (ala the magazine cover debacle).

If someone votes for a reactionary political party that's actively working to end democracy, they're supporting fascism (regardless of whether they're ignorant of the consequences of their actions).

Not fake, just pitiable that his life purpose is tied to an ideological paradigm that's so out of sync with the current problems facing the world.

Imho most of the insightful aspects about stoicism are also contained within Buddhism, with the main difference being that Buddhism actually has a practical methodology for training the mind to overcome self-destructive tendencies, something that stoicism lacks.

Seems pretty evident that white supremacist terrorism is the logical endpoint for the fReeDuMB (mis)conceptions around freedom of speech. Which primarily entails allowing Bad Actors the 'freedom' to spread toxic and dangerous disinformation (in this case fascist conspiracy theories) without accountability or consequences. Someone like Charles Manson was thrown in jail because of the influence he had over his followers who went on to commit a series of horrific murders, despite Manson not murdering anyone himself. By that same metric, at the very least Civil Litigation against people like Tucker Carlson who are using white nationalist ideology to indoctrinate and radicalize men who go on to commit horrific murders is equally justified (regardless of the odds of actually winning such a case in court)

I would think that a far better indicator of why no one should take JP seriously would be the recent video of him crying crocodile tears over Climate activism. Not over Climate Change mind you, but over people actually being concerned about the unfolding ecological crisis. It's the equivalent of smoking two packs a day for twenty years while being in complete denial about the obvious impact this has on your health, then directing your ire towards the doctor who tells you that you'll be dead in ten years if you don't change your lifestyle.

The sad fact that we have to come to terms with is that white nationalism has moved from a fringe ideology towards becoming (or more accurately returning to) a mainstream narrative on the American Right, thanks in no small part to a for-profit media environment that rewards Bad Actors for radicalizing thier audiences. In an environment where people like Tucker Carlson and Steven Crowder are given a free lisence to broadcast fascist conspiracy theories to tens of millions of people, is it any wonder that some portion of those indoctrinated into a belief that an impending genocide is about to swallow thier race will decide to take action and start killing people?

If you're serious about this question and don't mind putting some work in, the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a very penetrating and insightful explanation of how Time is disclosed to human experience. To grossly simplify a very nuanced work, despite what some philosophers would have us believe, we don't actually experience time as a collection of Nows. This is of course a high order abstraction stemming from our habitual tendency to think of Reality as a collection of 'Things', which is an illusion that we also extend to the notion of Time. Rather, the way we experience time is inextricably coupled to our capacity for Care. Time is innately meaningful to us, because by our very nature we are Temporal Beings. That's to say, time is significant for us because the past and the future form the context and horizons of significance that make our capacity for Caring possible.

Thanks! As far as works that deal with embodied cognition, after The Embodied Mind I'd probably recommend Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff (the quote at the bottom of my posts is from that work). While The Embodied Mind deals more with the science, Philosophy in the Flesh (as might be guessed from the title) deals with the epistemic and ontological implications of embodied cognition. In particular it goes to great pains to demonstrate how mistaken assumptions that the Mind is disembodied (handed down to us from Rene Descartes) have led to epistemic errors that plague philosophy and Western thought to this day. In addition to the above work, though written 70 or so years before The Embodied Mind, Martin Heidegger's philosophy is also a good exemplification of how our embodiment has very important philosophical implications. His work Being and Time is largely about the meaning of Being in light of our embodied nature. Be warned that this one has a well earned reputation for being a difficult read, so having a guidebook handy for this one is almost a necessity. Very much worth it though if you're in to that sort of thing, as Heidegger's system is probably the most penetrating explanations of our embodied experience of the world I've yet to read.

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243436.The_Embodied_Mind @Leo Gura Just curious if you've ever gotten around to reading this, and if you've considered adding it to the Book List. Ken Wilber heavily references this non-reductionist approach to cognitive science in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, and it's definitely worth a read on its own. It's a great example of how science can stand to gain by incorporating contemplative practices as a legitimate method of scientific investigation. It's also valuable as a guide for an enactive approach to cognitive science that pushes back against reductionist notions that cognition is simply a representation of a pre-given world. To everyone else, I'd certainly recommend the book as a great starting point for scientifically minded folks to start questioning some of thier Materialist and Reductionist paradigms. The book is written in palatable language for people still in that paradigm (it in no way comes across as woo-woo or New Age). And even if you've already outgrown that paradigm, the book is still a great example of how questioning science can lead to better science.

Rare life-changing or mystical experiences not withstanding, in my experience most people generally start to question their worldview by degrees. Dropping advanced spiritual or epistemic concepts into someone's lap who doesn't have a sufficient Frame of Reference for it isn't going to be helpful for that individual. Instead, offering someone stuck in a materialist paradigm avenues for a "Soft Landing" away from their entrenched worldview seems far more likely to be effective. Dialectical thinking and applied epistemology would be the logical next steps for someone paradigm locked to scientific materialism, since they both provide Value on their own while also giving that individual the Tools needed to begin deconstructing materialism. In this regard, having clear epistemic understanding of your pre-existing worldview is so important that I'm tempted to call it a prerequisite for productive deconstruction. The book I'd be most likely to recommend to this hypothetical person as a 'first step' would be Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, precisely because it deals with the epistemic roots of science in an accessible way.

Hence the danger of constructing your sense of identity on a political ideology, regardless of what that ideology happens to be. Of course that's not to say that the particular ideology one makes this mistake with doesn't make a difference, as some are far more pathological and destructive in a given context than others. It's also a good demonstration as to why spirituality is important. Since it opens the possibility of becoming aware of the Constructs we use to form our identify, and gives use an opportunity to cultivate more authentic values. Which in turn makes it far easier to relate to our beliefs as something tentative and provisional, rather than an emotional or epistemic anchor.

Also, the problem with labeling ideologies that you have a personal distaste for as 'Totalitarian' or 'Evil' in a reductive way is that it becomes a circular definition which doesn't explain or illuminate anything. Even calling something like fascism Totalitarian and leaving it at that isn't helpful, because it doesn't help explain anything. There are reasons why fascism appeals to people, and there's an internal logic to fascist ideology that can be articulated for the purposes of understanding what role it fills in a community and why certain people are drawn to it. Likewise, socialism is a broad spectrum of ideologies that differ in all sorts of ways, and range from Libertarian to Authoritarian. In this respect it's not so different from Capitalism, in that Capitalism can exist both in democratic and authoritarian contexts. And hybrids can exist between any of these. Taking a Reductionist approach to any of these ideologies is intellectually very lazy.