Tag: politics

Don’t Scare Kids with Political Fears

Kent McManigal

I remember the panic I felt about tornado warnings as a child. It didn’t matter whether my family was in danger; I wasn’t informed enough to know whether we were. I didn’t understand that worry isn’t helpful, and I wasn’t able to change things. There was nothing meaningful I could do.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard of local children scared that World War III had begun. They’ve overheard adults talking about it and were worried. I did my best to explain things and calm the fears of one kid; hopeful that she’d calm her friends.

It would be great if adults would stop acting like scared children; overreacting about politics, science, and other things they don’t understand as well as they imagine they do.

This pattern repeats both locally and on a global scale.

In recent months an angry Swedish teen gained attention because she believes the planet is being destroyed by carbon dioxide. She’s scared … and she blames you.

All because she has been shown one side of a debate by people who don’t want dissent. Their political agenda — their power and position — depends on the narrative going a particular way. She is being used as their political pawn.

I’m not even claiming she’s necessarily wrong. Regardless of what you’ve been told, no one knows. Climate predictions about the long-term are not much better than a guess. But the way she has been frightened and used is wrong without question. Do you really want to ruin a young person’s life based on speculation?

Political events may even be worse. To pretend you know for certain that one politician having another politician killed is going to cause a world war — and scaring children with this kind of talk — is irresponsible. Or worse.

If you want to worry, go ahead. But to scare kids with this kind of thing isn’t right.

I’m not saying to keep them ignorant. You can discuss the facts without sharing scary doomsday conclusions.

It’s different to educate a kid on the dangers of getting into a stranger’s car. They have control over this. None of us can save or destroy the planet, and politicians are going to do what politicians do. In fact, you can’t be certain which path results in destruction and which one comes out better in the long run. You can guess. You can apply your beliefs. But you can’t know.

To scare children over things no one can know for certain is child abuse.

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Democracy: Holy Mob Rule

Kent McManigal

Holy Pole Quilt isn’t the only vulgar thing considered holy by “American” government supremacists.

Many have joined the international cult of democracy worshippers.

They worship Holy Mob Aggression.

The Holy Hive Mind or the Holy Mindless Mob. However you want to describe it.

Some try to hide this uncomfortable truth by claiming America is a “constitutional representative republic”, not a democracy. This is evidence that many worship the Holy Slave Documents as well.

It’s also a denial of the fact that all republics will devolve into democracies– given time and politics.

But in practice— Right boot, left boot, crushing the throat… what difference is there?

I don’t need to be ruled, nor do I need you to be ruled on “my behalf”. Not by a dictator nor by a dictating mob.

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Mind-Reading? No, Behavior-Reading

Kent McManigal

You and I may not be able to read minds, but it doesn’t matter. You can usually tell what someone is thinking by what they are doing— their inner thoughts and beliefs become outward acts.

Even in those cases where their behavior conflicts with what they think, you’re better off responding to how they act rather than wondering what they might be thinking. How someone acts is more important than what’s in their mind.

It comes down to this simple truth:

I don’t care what someone believes as long as they act like an anarchist.

Which most people do, most of the time. As long as they don’t try to control, rule, rob, attack, etc. others– including me– that’s what really matters.

And really, isn’t that what everyone– even every statist– wants from others?

I don’t see people behaving as though they like being bullied and robbed, even when that’s what they advocate, politically. That’s because politics is self-contradictory and internally inconsistent. It fails everywhere it is tried, and always has.

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It’s Not Just Trump Supporters: Politics is a Pile of Shared Psychoses

Thomas L. Knapp

Dr. Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist affiliated with Yale University, posits a “‘shared psychosis’ among just about all of Donald Trump’s followers.”

Her claim came in the context of a discussion of Alan Dershowitz’s use of the word “perfect” to describe his sex life, mirroring Trump’s use of that word regarding a well-known phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Dershowitz has complained to Yale about the claim. He considers it an ethical violation of psychiatrists’ duty not to diagnose conditions absent personal examinations.

This particular version of the claim has a pretty thin basis, but it’s not incorrect. The big problem with it is that it’s too narrow. Donald Trump isn’t some lone Typhoid Mary of “shared psychosis,” nor are his supporters its only victims. Politics as we know it is made up almost entirely of shared psychoses.

The National Institute of Mental Health defines “psychosis” as “conditions that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality. … Symptoms of psychosis include delusions (false beliefs) and hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that others do not see or hear). Other symptoms include incoherent or nonsense speech, and behavior that is inappropriate for the situation.”

If that doesn’t sound like the daily grind of American politics to you, you haven’t been paying attention to Trump’s Twitter timeline, the Democratic Party’s presidential primary debates, or Congress’s perpetual bickering.

The primary delusion of politics is the notion that someone out there is more qualified to run your life, or at least your neighbor’s life, than you or your neighbor.  In the advanced stages of the psychosis, the victim becomes convinced that he or she IS that someone and decides to seek political office.

By any measure, the psychosis is pandemic. In the US, more than  45%  — at a bare minimum, the entire adult population minus the half who don’t vote and the tiny percentage who vote Libertarian — clearly suffer from it.

To make a bad situation worse, the American political system is set up to ensure that the most delusional patients get put in charge of running the asylum.

While I’m a partisan Libertarian, I have my doubts that we can vote our way out of this epidemic by electing my fellow partisans to office and having them re-jigger the system to stop spreading the contagion and exacerbating its symptoms.

Perhaps we should consider adding clozapine to the water supply.

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“Human-Made Weapons”

Kent McManigal

I recently saw an anti-gun bigot on Quora make the desperate claim that there can be no right to human-made weapons because those weapons didn’t even exist until a few hundred years ago. He doesn’t believe anyone has the right to own and to carry a gun, and is apparently ignorant of human prehistory, as well.

What is so different about a human-made weapon or any other human-made artifact? How does its history bear on this issue?

And does he mean all human-made weapons, or only guns? Does the fact that it is carried instead of being a physical part of the body make the difference?

Does a rock count since it can be used as a weapon without being altered? What of pointy sticks? Or fire? What if I carry an antler with me all the time?– it’s a deer’s weapon.

Humans don’t (generally) grow horns, antlers, claws, hooves, or fangs. People of his sort believe we should be punished for “only” having a brain, instead. A brain that allows us to design, make, and use weapons which don’t grow on our bodies. He’s insane.

Want to bet he still believes there’s a right to health care or justice? Both of those only exist because humans created them– just like guns.

Does he believe you have the right to not be a slave? The recognition of the right to not be enslaved is a relatively recent discovery. Would he toss that one, too, because it’s not “old enough”?

You know he’d whine it’s not the same thing.

And, the fact remains, the real issue is that there is no right to forbid weapons to anyone under any pretext. That “right” doesn’t exist and can’t be created. Not by legislation or majority opinion.

You just can’t reason with bigots. They hate what they hate because they hate it. Politics makes people stupid.

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Crazy People Work on the Most Interesting Stuff

Isaac Morehouse

Think of the most exciting possible inventions and discoveries you can imagine.

Deep space travel. Telepathy. Wireless electricity. Anti-gravity. Cold fusion. Terraforming. etc.

If you poke around YouTube or podcasts or badly designed websites, you’ll find people working on them. Devoting years to research and experimentation. You’ll notice their passion and conviction. But you’ll also notice something else: most of them are kinda crazy. Whether or not they are discovering anything true, you suspect they would be the last people on earth capable of bringing their idea to market or even credibly explaining it outside their niche circles.

But if you poke around places full of high achieving people with sharp minds, big vision, and lots of ability, you won’t hear them say stuff like, “I’m working on faster than light travel. I think the current model of physics is all wrong, and I suspect it’s possible so I want to prove it.”

Most of the best, most respected minds seem to be employed on the more mundane stuff. Sure, they’re doing cool valuable stuff (except when they go into politics), but how often does it question the most fundemental assumptions?

We know so very little about reality. We don’t even know what we don’t know, or whether what we know is actually true. And the most fundamental stuff – the nature and origin of the universe, our planet, our species, the basic rules of the physical strata, consciousness, death and beyond – is the stuff most of us spend the least time on.

Except the crazy people. They live there.

Part of the crazy label comes because they are working on this stuff. To examine widely accepted beliefs is often considered crazy. Part of the label is because most of the time these people are crazy. So it feeds itself. People who don’t know how to be normal are more likely to go into crazy stuff because they have less to lose. The more they do, the more the belief that “only crazy people study that” is re-enforced and better minds are repelled.

I’m not trying to place blame or cast judgement. I’m trying to understand this phenomenon. It’s the same thing that causes most conversations with neighbors and acquaintances to be so boring. Most of us – myself included – are not willing to dive into crazy stuff most of the time. If your reputation is shot, say, because you’re crazy, it’s easier.

Conformity is a powerful force. I try to do a little something every day to combat it. A world of crazy questions is much more interesting than a world of probably wrong answers no one wants to talk about.

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