DocWatts

Sorry, had to sneak this one in here

Also you'll have much more luck engaging in this process with someone you know and have a personal connection with, the mutual respect necessary for this process is going to be harder to establish with a random person on the internet.

That's actually a really good point now that you mention it... Though I think technically it would be the 3.0 version, since the beta version of the red scare launched along with the Soviet Union in the 1910s and 20s.

This sort of Cult of Personality seems to be unprecedented in American Culture, as far as its scope and reach, does it not? The closest analogue I can think of is someone like Jim Jones and the People's Temple Cult, but Jim Jones wasn't President and didn't have tens of millions of followers that were actively destabilizing democratic intuitions. Also unlike Trump, Jones actually believed what he was preaching, and wasn't merely out to grift his followers.

I think it's worth making the distinction between 'normies' who were taken in by a dumb argument but are otherwise sane and reasonable people, and people with a Cult like mentality whose attraction to dumb arguments are based around Group Identity, and use dumb arguments as an ego driven narrative of Personal Empowerment. If it's the latter group, likely nothing you say in the way or logical arguments or appeals to reliable sources of information will make a difference, because their attachment to the ideas you're trying to debunk are emotional, and likely to be taken as a personal attack on their Identity. Which makes getting them to seriously consider a different point of view very, very difficult. Assuming you find it worth the trouble to put the effort in, you could start from a place of identifying something they care about, and in a non-confrontational way try to show them that the argument they're espousing conflicts with one of their core beliefs. If they claim to be a super Patriot who supports the troops, you could try and show them how that belief conflicts with supporting someone who disgraces service members by calling them 'suckers' and 'losers'. Try to approach the issue from their own worldview, and with a degree of empathy, if you can. The more Confrontational approach will almost certainly be met with ego-backlash and defensiveness. The above is assuming that you actually know the person in question; for randos online, honestly I really don't think it's worth the effort.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but the places where psychedelics have been legalized in the States so far are for psychedelic assisted therapy in a clinical setting (as opposed to being able to being able to walk into a place to purchase them on your own).

The QAnon Conspiracy Cult in a nutshell... mind you that these people are still going to be with us after the door hits Trump's ass on the way out of the Oval Office.

If you're looking for something that's a work of art that's actually deep, I'd highly recommend Hellblade : Senua's Sacrifice for its nuanced depiction of living with psychosis, one that was heavily informed by Mental Health professionals working with the Dev Team. The game does an incredible job of weaving the main character's schizophrenia into the game mechanics, and does so in a very intimate way in the hopes that you'll cone out of it with more empathy for people struggling with Mental Illness. On top of that, the game takes place in a beautiful World heavily influenced by Norse mythology, and has well realized game mechanics that involve puzzle solving and melee combat.

Good on you, and agreed. The country would be in a much better place if the Republican Party made room for well meaning people like Arnold to challenge the orthodoxy of the party. And I think Governors are in a uniquely strong position to do just that, as they can't be disempowered to the same degree that a member or Congress that's part of a Voting Block can be for failing to tow the line.

Arnold's an interesting one, as it seems old Arnold is moving more towards Green.

Decades of right wing propaganda have set the stage for roughly a third of the country to be vulnerable to the Cult of Personality that's a necessary ingredient for fascism. That's highly dangerous in a pluralistic Democracy, and something that we will be struggling with as a society for at least a Generation.

Of course. And where you end up in Society is due to a compounding series of advantages or disadvantages that are rationalized in the West by labeling it a 'Meritocracy'. Positions are open to all! Provided you didn't get f*cked by the Birth Lottery, then you just didn't try hard enough. The Terry Pratchett example above was more meant to demonstrate someone who has an intuitive understanding of the Poverty Cycle (being poor is expensive, and makes just about everything in life more difficult); but point well taken.

If pointing out obvious injustices in our society is 'complaining' in your book, I sincerely hope you never end up filing for bankruptcy because you get sick, or end up losing your job and falling into poverty; you might have to develop compassion for other people if you yourself are ever on the receiving end of some of these injustices. The 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' philosophy you seem to be espousing would almost certainly have seen you on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement, the crusade to end child labor, basic workers rights like a 40 hour work week... shall I go on? Because people who make it a matter of pride to obstruct Social Progress almost always have that same mentality.

I'm sure those dictatorships we love to prop up are happy to have a bloated military budget behind them that they don't have to foot the bill for. Much wiser use of our resources than funding education or healthcare or infrastructure; you know, the things that actually help ordinary people?

The Covid-19 death count is 250,000 deaths over seven months, and for as much as Trump brags about how great he is at everything, he'll certainly go down as responsible for more avoidable deaths in America than any other administration over the last century. To put that in context, that's more than the Vietnam and Korean wars combined...over the course of just seven months. By estimations I've seen, at least half of those deaths could have been prevented by a reasonably competent administration who took the pandemic seriously, rather than trying to politicize it for personal gain. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise is just an unwitting sycophant for a sociopath.

Not sure if anyone else here is a Terry Pratchett fan, but his satirical Discworld series comes to mind. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

As for John McCain, I wouldn't have voted for him, but show me a Republican presidential candidate in the last 40 years who's not hawkish on foreign policy, and I'll buy you lunch (the only exception I can think of is Ron Paul, who was more of a Libertarian). Yes he was a military interventionist and I'm not defending that, but nationalism kind of comes with the territory for politicians at stage Blue. He was also willing to work across the isle on issues like campaign finance reform, was relatively moderate on social policy, wasn't a Climate Change denier, and wanted to reform many of the worst excesses of the Bush regime (torture is the most obvious example). He conceded his 2008 presidential campaign with honor and humility, recognizing how momentous an occasion it was for African Americans across the country (and calmed the crowd down when they tried to boo Obama). He wasn't an obstructionist trying to steer the country down the road to fascism, which is something that can't be said for a majority of the Republican Party in 2020.

Of course, I'm not denying any of that. Let's also make sure not to conflate 'exceptional for his time' to someone we would find morally praiseworthy by our standards today. But he was probably as conscious and ethical as it was possible for someone in his time and place to be, considering he was at the helm of an enormous stage Red Empire constantly at war with its neighbors.

Off the top of my head, I can come up with some positive examples of Blue that exemplify this: - Marcus Aurelius : arguably one of Rome's best Emperors, who exemplified Plato's ideal of a philosopher King. He took his duties as Emperor very seriously, and was a wise and just ruler for the era. - John McCain : one of the last principled people in the Republican Party, I'd argue. Saw his political career as one of Public Service, and was an honorable person. Was able to work with people of differing beliefs than his own, and was someone who was generally respected by people on both sides of the political isle in Washington (his opponent in the 2008 election, Obama, was the one to read the eulogy at his funeral). - Hank Hill (King of the Hill) : Conservative guy who was raised by an emotionally abusive father, who nonetheless turned out to be a halfway decent person who works hard, and loves his family. While the comedy of the show comes from Hank being confounded by people of different beliefs that he has trouble relating to, at the same time he is able to respect different beliefs if he discovers that they're coming from a place of personal Integrity.

I wonder if the Libertarianism of the Tea Party movement was really just a smokescreen for Birther-ism and other White Nationalist adjacent ideologies. When I think of the most high profile Libertarian figure in America in recent memory, Ron Paul, there's no way in Hell he would have sat back and blithely accepted the blatant Authoritarianism of the Trump era (regardless of my other disagreements I have with the man, he was definitely principled in his opposition to Authoritarianism, at least within a Libertarian context). Also Ron Paul had no problem working with Progressives on areas with which they agreed; such as protecting Civil Liberties from things like the Patriot Act, and dismantling the American military Empire, to name a few. At least he was operating from a position of Good Faith, something that can't be said for Trump or any of his Cronies.

I think Trump has amplified something ugly in the American psyche that's always existed, but has come more to the forefront in recent years for a host of reasons. I do wonder though that even if Trump never existed, whether something like the MAGA Cult would have arisen eventually as a result of societal trends over the last half century. I refer here to trends such as a collapsing middle class due to Late-Stage Capitalism, racial anxieties dues to changing Demographics, the emergence of online echo chambers, and the like.

This isn't far off from an intuition I've had for a long time now, that Donald Trump is an amalgamation of everything that's bad about America. Trump is what would happen if you were to condense two and a half centuries of narcissism, ignorance, delusion, incompetence, greed, and xenophobia down into one person, with the aim of making that person an Avatar for a lack of virtue. It's pretty incredible really; you have to be a really special person to have literally nothing that can be considered even remotely praiseworthy in your moral character.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Daryll Cooper's amazing six part Podcast Series on Jim Jones and the People's Temple Cult. https://www.martyrmade.com/martyrmade-podcast-11-gods-socialist-prologue/

In under-developed countries with no Social Safety Net to speak of, having lots of children in the hope that at least some of them will be able to take care of you when you're old is the closest functional equivalent.

Pseudo-intellectualism is something that absolutely exists at Red (look to people who use a shallow understanding of Nietzsche to put themselves on an ego-centric pedestal and look down on other people, or to White Supremacists like Richard Spencer who try to build a veneer of a respectable political philosophy around their fascist views). Their incentive for seeing Climate Change as a hoax can be a simple as wanting to be an Edge-Lord Contrarian and offend people Online, or it could be because they fell down a Conspiracy Rabbit Hole and want prove how much smarter they are than everyone else. Both of these are highly ego-centric and self centered in Nature. Keep in mind that much of Conspiracy Culture is heavily Red. Of course Blue can also be opposed to seeing Climate Change as a serious threat, but in Blue's case it has more to do with Group Loyalty than it does for more personal, egoic reasons. Also with Blue often comes a suspicion of Science, and I would argue that at least some degree of Scientific literacy is required to even understand why Climate Change is a serious problem (i.e. someone conflating weather with Climate, and not understanding why cold weather in their city doesn't amount to a refutation that the Planet is heating up). Blue is also traditional and resistant to societal change, so it's no surprise that the widespread structural and societal changes needed to combat Climate Change would rub them the wrong way (i.e. let's just keep mining Coal forever, no need to rock the boat just because of some alarmist environmentalists).