Denial, Revisited

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pasayten
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by pasayten »

PAL wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 9:49 am And Ken you like to say nothing...
Nothing of value that is...
pasayten
Ray Peterson
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by PAL »

And Ken you like to say nothing. Do you not pay attention to the direction the Republican party has gone?
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dorankj
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by dorankj »

So, so little knowledge! But you do like to pontificate.
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mister_coffee
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by mister_coffee »

... says the person who got covid multiple times and lost his job and threw away his career because he refused a safe and effective vaccination.
:arrow: David Bonn :idea:
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Re: Denial, Revisited

Post by dorankj »

Hey pot, meet kettle! You can’t possibly be serious?
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Denial, Revisited

Post by mister_coffee »

About the Republican war on reality.

There is a clear pattern to how the right thinks: denying reality when reality proves inconvenient.

You can easily see this with climate change. Denial of climate change makes sense because the only obvious solutions to climate change involve massive government intervention, anathema to the right.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we saw many on the right either downplaying the effects and risks or outright denying that COVID could possibly be a problem. Again this was because any reasonable response involved massive government intervention. COVID also made their leader look bad and therefore could not possibly be actually happening. Many Americans died because of the real consequences of this denial.

When vaccines for COVID were finally available, those vaccines had to be fake as well. Didn’t they already know that COVID was fake? These vaccines were distributed through a government program and they always know that government programs do not work. Again many Americans, mostly supporters of the right, died for this belief.

A similar argument also works with institutional racism. The right can’t even afford to acknowledge its existence because it can’t possibly provide any solution.

With mass shootings, we see many people arguing that these events did not happen, nobody died, and that the witnesses were “crisis actors”. People believe this so passionately that they are willing to dig up graves to prove their point.

As for January 6th, many on the right argue that it was all of the work of “Antifa” or some other mysterious agitators. Because no true patriot would smear feces on the walls of the capitol.

Then we come to “stolen” elections. In their view, the right is perfect and nobody in their right (ahem) mind would vote for anyone else. So their apparent losses must be due to the elections being stolen.

I think the pattern here is pretty obvious. What are the implications?

We need to acknowledge that this behavior is deeply unhealthy and ultimately self-destructive. If you had a friend or family member who was behaving this way in any other context but a political one, you would be moving heaven and earth to arrange an intervention and get them the help they so obviously need.

It is also important to acknowledge that this behavior is working. It allows their movement to both maintain control over their followers and also effectively heal their ideology when any inconsistency or new challenge arises. In our monkey brains behavior that is rewarded is inevitably repeated.

If we look at history, either with the Nazi Party during WWII, the old Soviet Union, or the Chinese under Mao these kinds of stories do not have happy endings. We should expect an ugly denouement and also should expect that our society and political discourse will be scarred by our current situation for generations.

With the recent attack on Paul Pelosi last week, we are seeing a new and frightening development. Within hours of the attack multiple conspiracy theories and narratives of the event were in active circulation, first on right-wing fora, then in the fringes of the right-wing blogosphere, and finally in more or less official organs of the right. What is disturbing is that these narratives were organic and not centrally controlled. What we are seeing here is the mob learning to write its own propaganda. That is a new innovation in the world of authoritarianism and would have been unimaginable to the Soviets or Nazis.

On that comforting note, I leave you all with an even more comforting quote from George Orwell:
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
:arrow: David Bonn :idea:
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