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Captainant

Burnt Ends
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Posts posted by Captainant

  1. 15 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    We talked about this up thread. I’ve noticed it too, but it’s not a gender thing. The male students are also not in great shape. And I absolutely remember going back to campuses in my late 20s and 30s and thinking “wow, all the people are so attractive.”  This is something that has changed. 

    Unfit, lots of weed, SSRIs, and a shit diet is the norm. Not good for the sex drive. 

    I really do wonder how much the ubiquity of micro plastics and PFAS/PFOS in literally every facet of life - even the fucking tap water in Texas. It would not surprise me if 15 or 20 years down the line we all learn just how badly we've been poisoning ourselves. This generations leaded gasoline sorta thing

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  2. 21 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

    Lol, not sure what this has to do with me since I have a long history as an LGBTQ ally, but you do you.

    I do, however, look forward to the day you find out what Fascism is instead of throwing it against the wall hoping it will stick.  

    This is authoritarianism, which I am completely against...to be clear I'm against Fascism too, and while Abbott may indeed be a Fascist, this is just garden variety authoritarian behavior...which exists on (gasp) both sides.

    Maybe this article from The Atlantic will help you.  Spoilered below in case you don't have a subscription.

     

      Reveal hidden contents

    Donald trump’s rise to power generated a flood of media coverage and academic research on authoritarianism—or at least the kind of authoritarianism that exists on the political right. Over the past several years, some researchers have theorized that Trump couldn’t have won in 2016 without support from Americans who deplore political compromise and want leaders to rule with a strong hand. Although right-wing authoritarianism is well documented, social psychologists do not all agree that a leftist version even exists. In February 2020, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology held a symposium called “Is Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real? Evidence on Both Sides of the Debate.”

    An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld—with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

    Published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Costello team’s paper is persuasive, to the point that you have to wonder: How could past researchers have overlooked left-wing authoritarianism for so long? “For 70 years, the lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism was to be found exclusively on the political right,” the Rutgers University social psychologist Lee Jussim, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told me in an email. In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychological makeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster. ” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion.

    The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon. And yet calls to de-platform controversial speakers and online campaigns to get people fired for heterodox views suggest that a commitment to open democratic norms is eroding, at least in some quarters, on the left. Much further along the authoritarian continuum, people purporting to be antiracist or antifascist protesters have set fires and committed other acts of violence since the summer of 2020. These acts stop short of, say, the 1970s bombing campaign by the far-left Weather Underground, but surely call the prevailing wisdom into doubt. (Supporters of revolutionary regimes overseas have demonstrated even more clearly that some people on the left try to get their way through intimidation and force.)

    But one reason left-wing authoritarianism barely shows up in social-psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole. Scholars who personally support the left’s social vision—such as redistributing income, countering racism, and more—may simply be slow to identify authoritarianism among people with similar goals.

    One doesn’t need to believe that left-wing authoritarians are as numerous or as threatening as their right-wing counterparts to grasp that both phenomena are a problem. While liberals—both inside and outside of academia—may derive some comfort from believing that left-wing authoritarianism doesn’t exist, that fiction ignores a significant source of instability and polarization in our politics and society.

    In the research that led to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his colleagues developed an “F-scale” to measure fascist attitudes; Altemeyer later drew on that research to create a scale measuring right-wing authoritarianism by assessing certain personality traits—including feelings of aggression, willingness to submit to authority, and a quality that he called “conventionalism”—not strictly related to a subject’s political conservatism. Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarian (RWA) scale remains “the gold standard for conceptualizing and evaluating all kinds of authoritarianism,” Costello told me. But when Altemeyer later turned his attention to left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), he erroneously assumed it would be identical to the right-wing variety. His LWA scale barely identified any subjects. He either had set the threshold too high or was measuring the wrong attitudes.

    Costello and his colleagues started fresh. They developed what eventually became a list of 39 statements capturing sentiments such as “We need to replace the established order by any means necessary” and “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views.” Subjects were asked to score the statements on a scale of 1 to 7. They showed a trait that the researchers described as “anti-hierarchical aggression” by agreeing strongly that “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom.” By agreeing with statements such as “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech,” they showed an attitude called “top-down censorship.” And they showed what the research team called “anti-conventionalism” by endorsing statements such as “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.”

    Costello and his colleagues administered their new LWA index and Altemeyer’s original RWA scale. Some differences emerged between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians; the former were more open to new experiences and more receptive to science than the latter, for example. Yet the new research documents a large overlap in authoritarian structure—a “shared psychological core,” as the authors put it—between high scorers on their new LWA index and Altemeyer’s original RWA scale, which they also administered. The authoritarian mentality, whether on the far left or far right, the authors conclude, exerts “powerful pressures to maintain discipline among members, advocate aggressive and censorious means of stifling opposition, [and] believe in top-down absolutist leadership.”

    Perhaps the most compelling insight emerged from trying to separate subjects’ political ideology from authoritarianism. They found that your ideology—whether you’re a progressive or a Trumpist—is a secondary matter. Whether your values and beliefs are authoritarian or not is more fundamental. “Psychologically speaking, authoritarianism comes first,” Costello told me.

    I asked Costello whether left-wing and right-wing authoritarians exist in equal proportions. “It is hard to know the ratio,” he said, making clear that a subject’s receptivity to authoritarianism falls on a continuum, like other personality characteristics or even height, so using hard-and-fast categories (authoritarian versus nonauthoritarian) can be tricky. “Still, some preliminary work shows the ratio is about the same if you average across the globe,” he said. In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one. Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada.

    That psychologists have been slow to acknowledge the existence of left-wing authoritarians at all is “puzzling,” Costello and his colleagues write. But here, I would argue, is where the pronounced leftward orientation of researchers in social psychology comes in. “Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years,” according to a comprehensive 2014 review. Universities have long tilted to the left, but that tendency has deepened as education has become ever more highly correlated with political ideology. Whatever its origin, this political imbalance makes truth-seeking harder. Studies have repeatedly shown that investigators’ sociopolitical views influence the questions they ask. What’s more, ideologically concordant reviewers are more likely to rate abstracts and papers highly if the findings comport with their own beliefs, all else being equal.

    Ideological blind spots can indeed affect researchers with a strongly conservative or merely right-of-center outlook, but there just aren’t enough of them to matter. If academic psychology had more viewpoint diversity, the political biases that distort researchers’ work would all counterbalance one another. In American universities today, those biases generally point in the same direction. In psychology, the belief that only conservatives can be authoritarians, and that therefore only conservative authoritarians warrant serious study, has proved self-reinforcing over the course of decades.

    As both left- and right-wing autocracies metastasize around the globe—a “pandemic of global authoritarianism” that has “persisted and deepened” over the past 15 years, in the words of the Stanford sociologist Larry Diamond—and as the speed of radicalization of recruits has hastened, the modest cadre of researchers interested in the subject will likely grow. By recasting left-wing authoritarianism in more specific terms—anti-hierarchical aggression, top-down censorship, and anti-conventionalism—Costello and his colleagues offer other researchers and the general public a new vocabulary for discussing antidemocratic attitudes on that side of the political spectrum.

    The other virtue of the Costello team’s work is its status as a sobering demonstration of how social psychology’s dominant ideological orientation has constrained the scope of inquiry. “The dominant view of RWA as the ‘gold standard’ of authoritarianism writ large is not merely an influential theoretical framework or a historical quirk,” the authors write. “It limits the questions we ask as scientists [and] the types of theories we use to interpret our results.” For many years, what was perfectly obvious to many outside the field—that extremist mindsets exist on both ends of the political spectrum—was at best downplayed by the majority of social psychologists. An ideological monoculture within the discipline has damaged our collective understanding of political psychology—and, by extension, American politics.

    Sally Satel is a psychiatrist, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the co-author of Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. She is a visiting professor at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

     

    Abbott's rule means firing teachers who are or present as gay or non CIS. That is othering and social exclusion, and forcing hardship on people simply because they do not comply with the cultural norm. These people are trying to make it such that you cannot exist in Texas as anything but a cisgender heterosexual person, or else face criminal or civil sanction. 

    You are blind if you cannot connect those dots. 

    7 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

    Path of least resistance isn't about giving up.  It's about small changes and doing things that actually make a difference, as opposed to protesting, destroying property, and bitching on message boards.  Fucking VOTE and convince others to VOTE.  Volunteer for or donate to causes you care about.  Engage in local / grassroots politics. 

    You saying this to someone who's already doing those things is why you're getting the heat you are. I vote, volunteer for local causes, donate to local races on occasion, and have even walked around and knocked on doors for a candidate for days on end. 

    Problem is, I don't have enough money speech to compete with the Texas oil oligarchs that are trying to make my home state into a shit hole. The """pAtH oF LeAsT rEsIsTaNcE""" is you choosing to accept the framing and dance to the tune of those rich oligarchs that want to take away voting and civil rights. For fucks sake, I feel like you wouldn't anything short of Auschwitz "fascism". Do you need me to share Umberto Eco's helpful guide for identifying and characterizing them?

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  3. 58 minutes ago, F250 said:

    Here is an article on Musk's "citizen journalists" regarding the Israeli/Hamas conflict. Most of the accounts mentioned in the article are frequently posted in the DT.

     

    https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/10/20/new-elites-twitter-x-most-influential-accounts-hamas-israel/

     

    @immamac this is the essence of my posting in the national thread. There is an active promotion of fringe content that is getting spammed across everyone's feed, and the folks respamming it elsewhere genuinely believe they're using good sources. 

    They fuckin ain't. Make a rule about it if you want me to stop pointing out that people are using literal propagandists to inform the thread and conversation on YOUR message board. 

  4. 2 minutes ago, immamac said:

    no one is checking their fucking twitter sources stop acting like your obscure fucking knowledge of who is a propagandist and is a shit poster in twitter is widely known or followed by everyone

    It's a problem when the discussion is being led by musks Twitter algo because that's the only thing some folks are capable of posting in this thread. It's important to point out when people are shitting in the punch bowl. 

    If you WANT a good discussion, you should at least be clicking the fucking profile of someone before taking their post and inserting it into the discussion. 

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  5. 11 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

    Looks like Medicaid expansion in Mississippi is going to happen, but with a work requirement of 25 hours per week. Not the best, could be worse. Tate Reeves will most likely veto, house and senate should override. Will be up to Biden admin if they fuck around with work requirements when they have been hot and cold, mostly cold, on work requirements

    Work requirements for social benefits are just another subsidy for wage slave employers

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  6. 7 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

    from the article

     

    The case was dismissed because the court ruled you can't sue "Antifa".  which I will leave to the lawyers to discuss.

     

    3 name assailants didn't show up, with no legal consequence.

    1 settled with Ngo.

    2 found not liable.

     

    So not exactly a vindication of the people who are on video chasing and assaulting Ngo.  

    Your insistence on fellating a wannabe brown shirt is noted. He is a professional provocateur with a history of overstating and occasionally fabricating all the worst things you deeply believe about auntie-pho

    https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-02-08/andy-ngo-new-book-still-pretends-antifa-real-enemy

    https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-ngo-right-wing-troll-antifa-877914/

    From the Stones article:

    In the hours following the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, which took more than 20 people’s lives, Ngo was instrumental in promoting the conspiracy theory that antifa had played a role; when that was thoroughly debunked, he helped perpetuate the theory that the man behind the Dayton, Ohio shooting was a member of antifa, despite the fact that there is no evidence he was involved in local activism or organizing.

  7. 15 minutes ago, PRONG HORN said:

     

    I literally follow 8 profiles on Twitter.  It’s all sex stuff and one band.  And this hippie chick

    https://twitter.com/MuseNews

     

    3 minutes ago, PRONG HORN said:



    The last week or so I’ve been liking all this protest stuff so I could post it here at a later time.  It builds and builds until it’s 99% of my feed.

    I’m actually having to seek out and look for good face sitting clips and random hippie chicks on my own now.  I’m sure when all this settles down my feed will return to normal.

    Credit where it's due that you realize you've made an echo chamber for yourself, but musk has really cranked the dials up on amplifying right wing stuff since his acquisition of twitter. You're gonna continue having trouble to find facesitting vids when the platform continues to invite neonazis and very fine people like alex jones BACK onto his privately owned platform. That's the sort of contributors that musk is hoping for on HIS Twitter. 

    So just be aware of what you're repeating when you're just "posting what you see". 

     

    Andy Ngo in particular has been told he's full of shit by several courts and it is a matter of legal fact that he's a liar and an instigating troll

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  8. 1 minute ago, HotSauce said:

    I am going to love when all of you default to "Russian Propoganda" when Trump wins. You just cant handle that people dont love your agenda. It has to be a psyop because you cant be wrong. But really youre all just brainwashed little fucking bitches. TRUMP 2024. I wonder what Palestine will look like in Nov? Maybe the white lesbians can save it and then go get their heads cut off on a cultural trip after?!

    There it is. Let it out, big fella

    • Haha 2
  9. On 4/26/2024 at 8:12 AM, Make em eat Taco Bell said:

    meanwhile Google fires everybody

    https://apnews.com/article/google-israel-protest-workers-gaza-palestinians-96d2871f1340cb84c953118b7ef88b3f

    Google fired at least 20 more workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war, bringing the total number of terminated staff to more than 50, a group representing the workers said.

    It’s the latest sign of internal turmoil at the tech giant centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.

    Workers held sit-in protests last week at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. The company responded by calling the police, who made arrests.

    The group organizing the protests, No Tech For Apartheid, said the company fired 30 workers last week — higher than the initial 28 they had announced.

    Then, on Tuesday night, Google fired “over 20” more staffers, “including non-participating bystanders during last week’s protests,” said Jane Chung, a spokeswoman for No Tech For Apartheid, without providing a more specific number.

    “Google’s aims are clear: the corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them,” Chung said in a press release. “In its attempts to do so, Google has decided to unceremoniously, and without due process, upend the livelihoods of over 50 of its own workers.”

    So it turns out they may have painted with an overly broad brush

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/30/24145680/google-workers-fired-project-nimbus-protest-nlrb-complaint

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  10. 7 minutes ago, Mikey4 said:

    It's great that you've figured this out. If you were in charge of writing the rule on whether people can conceal their faces on campus, what would you write? "No masks if you're protesting racial integration, but masks are okay if you're protesting in favor of Palestinians?"

    As pointed out by Bolverk, it a bit of a moot point when the university didn't make it a rule until after they riot cop'd everyone last Wednesday.

  11. 36 minutes ago, Mikey4 said:

    I'm not comparing them or offering a "take." I'm asking whether it makes sense to have a law that prohibits people from concealing their faces.

    There is an ocean of context that differentiates a COVID style facemask from the symbol of hate and state sponsored oppression (in the post reconstruction south, specifically) that is a KKK hood. You are literally comparing the two directly and contrasting them as being characteristic to one type of speech or another. 

    The recent 2019 campus free speech law didn't really make sense -it was a solution in search of a problem - and it was signed anyway. And then it was ignored when convenient by the fascist who signed it to force universities to allow white supremacists on campus

  12. Just now, Thermos H. Christ said:

    A feature not a bug. Continued influx of West Coast people and money threatens the evangelical wackjobs’ death grip on this state. They’d much rather Texas be a poorer, more backwards state they can rule than a wealthier more progressive one. 

    As a reminder, the Texas GOP literally made "removing critical thinking from schools" a priority because it "harmed parental control"

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