Showing posts with label fascism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fascism. Show all posts

Sunday, July 11, 2021

SJA #150 - Anarcho-Britneyism

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Saturday, May 09, 2020

SJA #97A - Beards Mean You Can't Count


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Saturday, March 21, 2020

SJA #91 - Play With Your Butt


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Monday, March 18, 2019

SJA #41 - Christchurch & More






Three anarchists, two cats, one dog, zero fucks.

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Fund for the victims of the Christchurch terror attack

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Monday, March 11, 2019

SJA #40 - Where We Are and How We Got Here






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Monday, January 21, 2019

SJA #33 - Pratchett, Strikes, & Stupid Mean





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Monday, December 17, 2018

SJA #28 - 17 December 2018 - Who is Jordan Peterson? Part 2





One last thing of note to take from the Crimson article, Peterson’s obsession with the Cold War. The second paragraph, “... few may know that Peterson studies aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse and first got interested in psychology by reflecting on the Cold War”.

Talking about his break year between his first and second bachelor’s degrees, “At that time, 1982, the Cold War was still raging madly away and I was curious about how it could be that a group of people could have set up such a strange situation.” But because political science “did not answer his questions”, “I was interested in how individuals could lead a group to commit these atrocities, I was interested in typing to find out why people were so interested in their ideological positions that they would kill to maintain them.”

As has been repeatedly noted, Jeeperson’s home is full of Soviet propaganda. He even has some over his bed. His home is wall to wall Soviet art. The man has a strange obsession. Even though the state-owned, fascist capitalist soviet empire collapsed more than 25 years ago, it was such a huge part of his childhood that he’s unwilling to let it go. That probably says a lot about him. He’s still fighting a war a lot of other people don’t even remember.

And you can hear that in a lot of his fear-mongering. His favorite boogeyman is “postmodern neomarxism”. We’ll get to why that’s a serious problem in a minute. For now, let’s tackle the two words in that phrase.

Postmodernism has long been boogeyman for the right. What postmodernism is is fairly difficult to say, because the movement as a whole is 1) very diverse and 2) opposed to sweeping labels. As for diversity, postmodernism isn’t just a philosophical movement; it’s also an artistic and architectural movement. And those are both largely unconnected to the philosophical movement, and even within philosophy there’s a huge range of diversity. And that’s largely because one of the only things they have in common is rejecting labels, rejecting sweeping narratives and unity.

As for “neo-marxism”... well, that’s not well-defined, but it’s not like it’s a ridiculous word. Schools of thought evolve over time, they collect more evidence, people do more work. If marxism hadn’t changed over the century plus since Marx wrote, that would be a problem. We can just as easily talk about neo-marxism as we can neoliberalism.

But postmodernism rejects sweeping narratives of history, and marxism is a sweeping narrative of history. Marxism posits that strong economic forces drive history, forcing the rulers and the ruled into conflict over and over and over. The ruling class rules by means of a philosophy; that inspires the ruled to develop a counter-philosophy. The conflict between them leads to the creation of a new philosophy that drives the new ruling class.

Postmodernism rejects that sort of grand idea, that there is a unifying force that explains all of history. So trying to claim that something is both postmodern and neo-marxist … that’s kind of asinine.

But we shouldn’t be too surprised that Jeepers doesn’t know what the hell postmodernism is. Fools on the right love to take words and turn them into scary labels absent any meaning other than “BAD BAD THIS THING BAD”. Like “radical feminist” or “gender theory” or “Jew” or “please stop doing that”. So when Jeep says that, he’s not really talking about anything real, he’s just saying “there’s a bad thing and I don’t like it”; it doesn’t have to have an actual reference.

But “postmodern neo-marxist” is actually worse than that. Jeepers took it a step away from another popular phrase floating around the right wing edges of the internet, “cultural marxist”. And that’s bad, because it’s a step removed from “cultural bolshevik”, which was popular in the middle of the twentieth century, and never really went away.

The … hypothesis? Model? The idea at the core of this is that there is some evil force coming in “from outside” that is trying to destroy our “culture and heritage”. In the US today, the focus of this conspiracy theory is on the “left coast elites” and university academics (Jeeperson proposed a rating system for students to use to identify “neo-marxist content” so leftist professors could be disciplined). However, for all the veneer, it amounts to the same thing as it did when it was German Nazis in the 1930s talking about cultural Bolsheviks. The Jews.

Is Jordan Peterson an anti-semite? Yes and no. Well, just yes, not no. Yes. He is an anti-semite.

Jeepers is a far-right wing white guy, and he despises identity politics because he doesn’t want to think of himself has having race or gender; he grew up very comfortable in a culture that took whiteness and maleness as the norm. The push by the modern left to disrupt that narrative, to allow people of all races, genders, etc. to be part of our culture rather than othering most to the profit of a few, has upset people like him.

Anyway, Jeeperson wrote an article, “On the so-called “Jewish Question”” (link in the thingy). Of course, he has to link identity politics on the left to identity politics on the right… that’s horse shit.

Identity politics on the left is a defensive reaction to the identity politics of the right. Blackness wasn’t a thing until white people started enslaving black people. Minority groups defending themselves against genocide by the majority? NOT THE SAME THING.

His link is to say there’s an oppressed group and an oppressor, but he claims the conspiracy theory of right-wing assholes about a Jewish illuminati is the same thing as racism. Or sexism, or homophobia…. God, I hate dishonest right-wing assholes like him.

But he is expressly decrying the far-right wing conspiracy theory, right? He’s saying they’re wrong! Right? Not exactly.

“Jews are disproportionately over-represented in positions of authority, competence, and influence. New York Jews, in particular, snap up a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes, and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities…”

and, to explain that disparity,

“Three well-documented factors appear to be at play:
  • The significantly higher than average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews…
  • The relationship between IQ and Big Five Trait Openness to Experience…
  • The relationship between Openness to Experience and political liberalism…”

Concluding with, “So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ. The effect of this group difference … is magnified for occupations/interests that require high general cognitive ability. Equal over-representation may also occur in political movements associated with the left because high IQ is associated with Openness to Experience, which is in turn associated with liberal/left-leaning political proclivities.”

First, Jeeperson is a race essentialist. Talking about the Ashkenazi as a group, how they have higher IQs… ew. Second, talking about Jews in this way? Really, really Nazi. White supremacists use this and similar talking points about Asians as a way to claim they’re not white supremacists. “I think race X is smarter than white people! I can’t be racist!” Wait a second… Asians… I don’t know if you could hear it, but there were a lot of ellipses in the quotes up there that I used to shorten Jeeperson’s article to something quotable.

“... and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities, where they, along with Asians, tend to be discriminated against…”

For someone who wants to distance himself from fascists and skinheads, he’s doing a really, really good job of throwing out their talking points. Talking about racial IQ and how Jews and Asians are smarter than white people…

And the fact is that it’s really sketchy that Jeeperson is even talkine agrees “We’re measuring something, but we don’t really know what we’re measuring.” Ig about IQ in the first place. IQ is a seriously dodgy method of measuring intelligence. Everyons it a measure of general intelligence, or is just a measure of the ability to take an IQ test? IQ does correlate with later success, but so does class and skin color. There’s also the problem that IQ tests have historically been pretty goddamn racist.

We know that using IQ tests to bolster beliefs about race is garbage (even though that has been their primary purpose for the century of their existence), because people who have been the targets of oppression have been closing the gap in IQ tests steadily ever since we finally put an end to segregation. Hell, you can study for IQ tests and improve your score. Basically, we know that IQ tests have a lot of problems, there’s no guarantee they measure what we want them to measure, they are hugely influenced by social factors.

And Peterson absolutely should know this. He’s supposed to be an expert in this kind of shit. Ever since he landed in Toronto, his whole schtick has been the foundations of personality, and this isn’t even high level stuff. The problems with IQ tests are psych 101. We know he knows about IQ and its relationship to the big five because he mentions that relationship in his anti-semitic cockwaffle about “the so-called Jewish Question”. And yet he’s using IQ to backstop this shit.

In other words, Jeeperson is “the thinking man’s anti-semite”. Like all the other heroes of the dork web, the leaders of the alt-right, his purpose in the movement is to cloak their naked bigotry in intellectual verbiage, to provide a pseudo-scientific basis for their beliefs, a false justification for the things they want to do to minorities. His article claims to be an argument against anti-semitism, but all it does is use anti-semitic, fascist talking points in order to argue that there’s no conspiracy.

Let me repeat that quote from earlier:

“So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ.”

That’s the exact line of reasoning you get out of the new breed of fascists. Richard Spencer, Gavin McInnes, and the other “thinkers” in openly fascist movements try to use those sorts of arguments to “prove” they’re not racist. “I’m not a white supremacist, I think Asians are smarter than white people! If anything, I’m an asian supremacist!” Jeepers is providing pseudo-scientific justification against a conspiracy theory, arguing in favor of fascist race essentialism, the so-called “race realism” of new wave fascists. And it’s tied directly to all the old fascist myths about Jews.

Plenty of people have done excellent work outlining the basics of fascism. Instead of recommending a random search that could turn up who knows what, I’m going to recommend specific youtubers (and link them in the thingy): Thought Slime, Kat Blaque, ContraPoints, Innuendo Studios, ShaunandJen, and Three Arrows have all done a lot of work deconstructing these things. I’m morally certain there are far more, because fascism has been on the rise, but those are the ones I know off the top of my head.

In any event, one of the things fascism uses to define itself is a hated out-group, a way to drum up aggression and emotion in their base of support. They define their in-group, connect it to a mythological past when the in-group was great, then blame the out-group for the present being crap. That out-group is always demonized as morally horrific, and is also simultaneously fiendishly clever but ultimately stupid and weak. Thus the out-group can be blamed for short-term losses (clever) but can by mythologized to ultimately lose (because morally and intellectually weak).

You see that everywhere in 20th century fascist propaganda about Jews. You also see it in 19th and 20th century racist propaganda against Asian immigrants. The intelligence of Asians is central to the white supremacist view of Asian culture, but also built into it is the belief that Asians are physically, morally, emotionally weak, and that they deserve to be dominated (by white people) because of that.

Peterson’s essay only superficially appears to be combating the anti-semitic beliefs of his fascist fans. In reality he’s adding a layer of plausible deniability. Jordan B Peterson is an anti-semitic asshole. And that extends beyond just talking about “the so-called Jewish Question” to all the other races. He had a sit down with notoriously bigoted and hateful YouTuber Stefan Molyneux (link in the thingy), in which they traded racist talking points around IQ and how society is structured the way it is because of MERIT and some people are just better than others.

Know what else they talk about? Women! Well, not really. Molyneux drops a bit about women being dumb, but Jeepers knows the IQ data doesn’t back that up, so he bats it away and keeps talking about race. Still it lets me make the segue because holy hell Jeeperson is misogynistic.

Back in April, an ingrown toenail of a human being drove a van through a crowded marketplace in Toronto; link in the thingy. This sparked a big conversation, because the terrorist was a middle class white dude. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vIBijzg4w) He didn’t claim any strong religious or political affiliation. How could this be? Only muslims kill people!

Minassian identified himself as an incel, involuntarily celibate, a guy who couldn’t get laid. The term originated with a small, early internet community in 1993. Things have changed in the last 25 years. Now it’s a virulently hateful internet subculture dedicated to the hatred of women. I strongly recommend the Incels video by Contrapoints, where she does a deep dive on the topic (link in the thingy).

Long story short, they hate women. A lot. Their personalities are all pretty shit, and hanging out in their incel forums spending all their time talking about how ugly they all are and how women are all shallow evil bitches really, really doesn’t help that. So they don’t get laid, and they channel all their frustration over that into hating women, and occasionally these guys lash out in extreme violence. A young man named Elliot Rodger murdered his three roommates and tried to murder a sorority in 2014 and, unable to get through the locked door of their house, murdered several people on the street before getting in his car and trying to find other victims, shooting some and running over others. All told, he killed six and injured 14 more before killing himself.

And Minassian explicitly praised Rodger online prior to his own attack.

Why bring this up? Because Jeepers had a response, of course!

Citing his quote from the New York Times article referenced earlier, “Custodian of the Patriarchy”: “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him, … The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Now, that sounds pretty goddamn clear. Especially when you hear Jeeperson try to explain it. Why would he have to explain it? Because everyone immediately said, “Wait, these guys can’t get laid and you jump to enforced monogamy… you mean forcing women to have sex with these men?”

Of course Jeeperson walked that back. He doesn’t want anyone to think he’s trying to force people to do anything. I’ma go ahead and link to an episode of Cognitive Dissonance, because 1) they’re hilarious, and 2) they recently took this precise bit of the Jeep’s bullshit to pieces. They said it quite well (1 hour 15 ish minutes in): he’s tried to claim that he meant social enforcement, that humans naturally have a tendency toward monogamy because of children, and we should re-inforce that. But he never actually says “reinforce”.

And the CogDis guys nailed it here: it’s because Jeeperson’s a coward. It’s absolutely clear from everything he’s saying that, if we don’t enforce monogamy, then females will all go for the “high status males”. Yes, he believes in hierarchies, remember? So he thinks that some men are just better, and women (being shallow sluts), will all gravitate to the alpha males, and the alphas will have huge harems. That’s made clear in the clip CogDis responds to, a segment from when Jeepers was on Dave Rubin’s show, where he almost randomly brings up polygamy and how that’s illegal now.

In other words, Jeepers responded to the incel killing by talking about god and enforced monogamy because he agrees with the incels. Incels talk about “Chad” and “Stacy”, alpha males and slutty females. They think they’re not getting laid because the alphas are hogging all the women and women are all sluts and on, and on, and on. Jeepers thinks that society is falling apart because we’re not required to live in the strict hierarchy he advocates, that sexual morality (meaning every individual woman being the property of some particular man) is no longer enforced by law.

But he backed the fuck down from that statement because he didn’t want to face the actual social consequences of openly advocating the vile shit he believes.

And that’s the sort of thing Jeep does all the damn time. He works very, very hard to be unclear. He strives to make his statements vague enough that they can mean different things. He wants his fascist fanboys to understand him when he talks about race, genetics, hierarchies, women, IQ, all that shit, but so that he can back away and pretend that’s not what he was saying when confronted about it.

As when BBC Channel 4’s Cathy Newman tried to interview Jeeperson back in January (link in the thing). She kept trying to say “So you believe misogynist thing X”, and he kept squirming away, denying it, and throwing out his pseudo-science shit-waffles. His fans loved it because they thought it meant he “won” the interview, and centrists dismissed Newman’s efforts as a dishonest smear because “she kept wrongly accusing Peterson of things”.

Make no mistake, though, if you follow Jeepers for long enough, you’ll see that his view of women is dim, and his opinion on where they belong is clear. He sees women as lying sluts who do not belong in the workplace. He’s convinced they’re not very bright, and take advantage of men. He wants to force them to act “properly”.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Before I conclude, something that popped up while I was writing this. Jeeperson defended Nazis. Well, he defended Nazis last year during his interview with Sam Harris. I mentioned this when I called Sam Harris a far right wing douche. It’s just taken until now for the mainstream media to really figure out that Jeepers is fascist as hell. He offered a defense of the Holocaust, describing it as a logical progression of events.

There’s an excellent article in the Independent (link in the thingy) going over this, linking Jeep’s casual apologia with Senator Lindsey Graham’s defense of our own war crimes at the US Mexico border in response to hundreds of Hondurans seeking asylum. As the article’s author, Matt Greene, makes clear, the Holocaust was a logical progression because fascism will take whatever path necessary to get to the end goal of genocide. If the Nazis could have started with gas chambers, they would have.

But is he really defending the Holocaust? Or is he just trying to understand the Holocaust? Taken in isolation, perhaps we could give Jeeperson the benefit of the doubt. But this isn’t the only thing he’s done that indicates he’s defending rather than understanding. He’s explicitly used neo-nazi rhetoric describing the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews (going beyond simply “the Jews” to specifically identifying a certain ethnic subgroup). He also absolutely adores the anti-semitic “postmodern neo-marxist” dog whistle. If I were willing to dig in, how many more examples would I find?

I’m going to leave that there. Jeepers disgusts me and I’m not eager to spend more time digging into his odious beliefs than I have to.

So I’ve tried to talk about different parts of Peterson’s life and career, here. Give a few highlights to try and flesh out who he is as a person and public figure. What can we get out of all of this? Who is he as an academic, a teacher, a public speaker, as a person?

He’s a fascist.

Gotta be honest, I wasn’t expecting to come to that conclusion. I was fairly well aware of Jeeperson and his controversies going into this, but I thought he was a Christian conservative with fascist sympathies. I wrote my intro, the guy who wakes up and realizes he’s mediocre and runs in terror from that realization, because I thought that’s what he was. A guy who thought he’d change the world and was appalled that he hadn’t.

I figured his would be the more prosaic racism of Yer Dad; from Philosophy Tube’s discussion of Transphobia: yer dad has never really thought about these things, is uncomfortable with change, but isn’t hateful or dedicated to bigotry and can change with a little work.

Nope. Peterson has done a lot of thinking about this. He is hateful, and he is dedicated. He has spent a lot of time over the years honing his beliefs, dedicating himself to a view of humanity that essentializes them and connects them to a mythological worldview. He explicitly wants a hierarchy with a certain kind of person (himself) at the top, and people he views as biologically inferior or morally degenerate at the bottom.

And he’s dishonest. Fascism as a system of beliefs is concerned almost exclusively with power, the in-group, and hierarchy, and have no qualms about how they achieve those goals. Fascist will happily work within the system to get to power: Mussolini marched on Rome with tens of thousands of armed men, but Hitler positioned himself within government and manipulated the system to seize control. A simple fascist credo could be stated as “it’s okay so long as I’m the one doing it”.

Peterson’s classes freely mixed fact and fiction so that he could spin a compelling vision of psychology and human nature. His entire program of research in grad school and Harvard was a smokescreen so he could get tenure, securing the freedom to pursue his agenda. His public lectures match his teaching style, pretending to expertise outside his field and telling lies in support of his beliefs. He deliberately strives for ambiguity so that he never has to answer to critics for his beliefs and statements.

Peterson’s entire career has been a campaign of dishonesty, misstatements, lies, and obfuscation for the purpose of, in Peterson’s view, saving the world from the Dragon of Chaos. He believes he has found the central, true narrative of human history. He believes he has the key to understanding everything thanks to his Jungian mythicism, his Christian narcissism, his fascist hierarchism.

Who is he?

Jordan B. Peterson is a mystic. He believes he has unique, special, unquestionable access to the truth about reality and human nature.

Jordan B. Peterson is a quack. His career as a public speaker is dedicated to spreading lies and pseudoscience in order to support his bigotry.

Jordan B. Peterson is a misogynist, a racist, an anti-semite. He believes in an unchanging core of every human being, based partly in biology and partly in the soul, that places them permanently within a hierarchical structure, with himself at the top.

Jordan B. Peterson is an unprincipled zealot. His professional life has been a deliberate falsification intended to put him in a position to preach with credentials so that he can lead young white men to his better world.

Jordan B. Peterson is a fascist.

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Monday, December 10, 2018

SJA #27 - 10 December 2018 - Who is Jordan Peterson? Part 1





Who is Jordan Peterson?
Part 1

One day you wake up. It’s an ordinary day. You have a family, you have a job, you have the things you’re supposed to have. But you’re not famous. You’re not a celebrated intellectual. You aren’t invited on television or radio. You’re not in charge of anything.

Confronted with a lifetime of evidence, you nevertheless insist that you aren’t mediocre. You’re not an average person, with average abilities, in an average life. You’re special. You’re great. But the world hasn’t recognized that.

There’s something wrong with the world.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Who is Jordan B. Peterson?

One of the leading lights of the new Intellectual Dark Web, Jeeperson exploded onto the world stage when he started lying about the Canadian government’s bill C-16, an act which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to provide protections for trans people (link in the thingy to an excellent podcast about C-16 and Jeep’s lies). He has now transitioned into a darling of the far right, traveling the world making largely inchoate pronouncements on difficult issues and earning tens of thousands of dollars a month on patreon from violent fanboys who needed to be told to clean their rooms.

But who was Jeepers before that?

He was a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who also operated a private clinical practice. Before becoming a full professor in Toronto, he was first an assistant professor and then an associate professor at Harvard (1993-1998). He got a BA in political science at the University of Alberta (1982), spent a year in Europe, then returned to Alberta for a BA in psychology (1984), then got his PhD in clinical psychology at McGill University (1991).

His research topics have covered a lot of ground. At Harvard he studied aggression arising from alcohol and drug abuse and, “supervised a number of unconventional research proposals”. That quote comes from a piece written in the Harvard Crimson (the school newspaper, link in the thingy) in 1995. That article is… illuminating. I’ll be referring to it from time to time, because it really says a lot about Peterson.

His wiki article (also linked) provides a long list of wiki-linked areas that Jeepers has researched.

  • psychopharmacology
  • abnormal psychology
  • neuropsychology
  • clinical psychology
  • personality psychology
  • social psychology
  • industrial and organizational psychology
  • religious psychology
  • ideological psychology
  • political psychology (okay, maybe they’re different, but why aren’t industrial, organizational, religious, ideological, and political psychology all just branches of social psychology? And how are religious, ideological, and political psychology not all the exact same thing? Anyway…)
  • finally, creativity psychology

So what about his research? Personally, I’m not a clinical psychologist and don’t really want to read through a bunch of papers where I’d spend half the time looking up the vocab and the other half slogging through statistics. Fortunately, there are other things you can do, like compare him to his peers.

When you hop over to google scholar (linked), you can get a handy list of an author’s publications, as well as how many citations those papers have received. Like any other database, GS doesn’t include every publication (some databases are better for journals, others for conferences, others are only good for a particular field, etc.), and Google Scholar’s particular weakness is pre-1990 publications. However, Jeepers didn’t enter the field until the early 1990s, so this will provide an accurate reflection of his career. Also, since I’m comparing him to his colleagues in the field of psychology, any weaknesses in the database should apply similarly to all of them.

Jeepers isn’t the top of his field. Look into the GS list of people publishing in psychology and you get page after page of people ranked by how many citations they have. This doesn’t necessarily directly reflect how influential a person is in a field; authors tend to pile up citations over time. Various indexing methods that try to measure an academic’s impact and influence tend to suffer from a similar defect. On the other hand, you’re not going to be incredibly influential right out the gate; you have to establish your research, you have to establish that you know what you’re talking about, you have to have something to talk about.

Jeeperson is down on the fifth page. That’s not bad. He’s a solid, top tier researcher with 10,000+ citations under his belt. Given his recent notoriety, you might expect that to have changed, and there’s something to that. You tend to see a positive slope in an academic’s citation numbers; they keep writing newer papers, and those and their old papers keep getting citations, so the number of new citations they get keeps increasing. Jeeperson follows that trend up to 2016, a steady upward growth in citations.

Then he got a bump in 2017. This was the year immediately after he became famous, and it looks like some of his colleagues were curious, saw a little bit in his research, and cited him. But it wasn’t a big effect. His number of citations increased by 77 going from 2013 to 2014, by 71 ‘14 to ‘15, by 92 ‘15 to ‘16, by 217 from ‘16 to ‘17. His total number of citations in 2013 was 841 and it was 1289 in 2017. So it looks like popular celebrity landed him some extra academic attention in 2017, but it hasn’t moved him to the front of the pack.

On the other hand, 2018 doesn’t seem to be shaping up to be a very good year for the Jeep. He’s got 1010 citations as of writing (11/16), which means, depending on how/when the numbers are updated, he’s looking at roughly 1100 or 1200 citations. In other words, a decline. Part of the reason for that is that he’s spent so much time on the road being a famous fascist that he’s not been able to do much research. In fact, he shut down his clinical practice in 2017 and stopped teaching in 2018. You’re not going to get as many new citations if you’re not writing as many papers.

So Jeeperson’s research career looks to be successful, but not legendary. He’s on the fifth page in terms of citation numbers and the various indices meant to indicate a researcher’s impact are all on the same level as others on that page (some a little more influential, some a little less). The other psychologists on page five are also solid researchers, middle-aged men (and they’re all men) at good universities (and one clinic). You should expect people on higher pages to be a) older researchers with more publications, b) better researchers with more influential publications, or c) both.

And that’s what we see. Some of the front-page researchers (which list does include some women) are older, 70+ years of age. Others are a few years younger than Jeepers and clearly eminent in their fields, with very impressive awards and appointments. Not only do they have a large number of citations, but their citations are consistent and the various indices of influence are impressively high.

All of this is to say that, as a clinical psychologist, Jeepers doesn’t look like a crank. He’s not running a paper-mill, churning out worthless research like what happened at Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab under Brian Wansink (link in the thingy). He’s not a top-flight researcher, the darling of the academic conferences, moving the field by leaps and bounds, but he’s also not a plodding dullard, publishing papers pro-forma and achieving nothing.

On the other hand, that list of research topics is troubling. Most researchers settle into a field early in their career. You take a look at their google scholar page and you’ll immediately see a theme to an academic’s publications. This one’s interested in depression and anxiety, this one focuses on recovering from trauma, this one is doing deep research into the formation of personality. Jeepers doesn’t really have that. Personality, social ability, creativity, drug abuse, anxiety… he’s kind of all over the place.

But what that means is that Jeepers might be a brilliant researcher. Ordinarily, you have to devote yourself to a field, learn all about it, and explore the whole structure to find the cracks that you can open up for new research, new insight. And those new insights and developments are what make other researchers want to cite your work, to build on what you’ve discovered. Or it challenges their work and they want to prove you wrong.

Which may be all that Jeeperson has actually done. Instead of a long career of powerful insights and great work, it could be that he’s something of a dilettante, moving into a field for a few years, achieving what he thinks of as an astonishing insight, then prancing along to a new project before anyone can tell him how deeply wrong he was.

So, which is it, is Jeeperson a masterful researcher in psychology, offering fresh perspective and insight into multiple fields thanks to his broad approach, or is he just an asshole who drops a nasty coffee fart in the elevator just before getting off at the second floor?

That’s hard for me to judge. I can’t dig through his citations to find out if they’re supporting or contradicting his work. Not only, again, am I not a psychologist with the training to read the papers, but the overwhelming majority of academic work is behind a paywall and thus inaccessible and I’m definitely not shelling out hundreds of dollars to find a snippet “DeYoung et al. say X, we disagree”.

From my perspective as an outsider, he’s a good researcher, who appears to be respected by his peers (or at least he was before he became the replacement daddy-figure for all the lost boys on the far right). He could be a crank who lacks focus and is unwilling to commit to a field because that would open him up to criticism and the possibility that he’s not the brilliant wunderkind he always thought he was, but I have no way of seeing that.

Where Jeepers definitely shines, no question, is in his ability to speak to an audience. His research work at Harvard got him hired at Toronto, but they might not have looked deeply into his teaching. They should have.

Remember that article I mentioned way back there? It was published in Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, in 1995, two years into Jeeperson’s time there, and it should raise red flags for anyone looking to hire a professor. Let’s go ahead and start with the opening paragraph:

“Harvard students may know Assistant Professor Jordan B. Peterson as the entertaining lecturer with the Canadian accent who taught Psychology 17, ‘Introduction to Personality’.”

That’s not terrible. Being an entertaining lecturer is good. Certainly better than being a boring drone, like Ben Stein’s character in Ferris Bueller. However, here are a few other snippets.

Quoting a senior: “Anyone who’s taking his class can immediately recognize that he’s teaching beyond the level of anyone else.”

A sophomore said the most notable thing about Peterson was “the way he synthesized information. He didn’t just talk about the theories, but he talked about some of his own ideas and different sources of information.”

Another sophomore said “Peterson’s wide breadth of knowledge allows him to create ‘beautiful’ theories linking together ideas from mythology, religion, philosophy, and psychology.”

Finally, quoting the Jeep himself, “The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.”

It might be one thing if you use literature and mythology to illustrate the enduring character of human psychology through the ages, how human beings have universal concerns and drives, and they build these into their beliefs, into the stories they tell and the dreams they have. But that’s not what Jeepers does. Because he’s a Jungian.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, died in 1961 and he looks like the movie villain who hypnotizes you, makes you into his accomplice in grotesque serial murders and rapes, then “cures” you himself through lobotomy before turning your wife and children into his sex slaves and getting away scot free and dying, happily, of old age thirty years later. Is that a movie? Feels like something like that is already a movie.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jung’s work is crap. He and Freud did a hell of a lot to move psychology away from “How are these people evil and how can we Jesus the crazy out of them?” and into a genuine science, but each of them was incredibly wrong about a lot of things. He believed in paranormal phenomena, for example. More importantly, he saw everything as manifestations of his weird spiritual interpretation of human development, what he called individuation, and also as manifestations of archetypes, a sort of platonic ideal of universal values buried deep in the human unconsciousness.

Any individual human being is a complex assemblage of parts and processes, but we all have core similarities, being variations on a powerfully unified central theme. We all have similar psychologies because we all evolved from the same small population of apes, and we all did so on our home planet with its environments, which only appear incredibly different if you don’t compare them to the things the universe as a whole has to offer.

What I’m trying to say here is that, when you study the psychology of human beings, you’re going to find common trends, tendencies, themes. You’re going to find that people as a whole tend to have the same sorts of reactions to the same sorts of situations. And you’re going to make those observations for the same reason you’ll observe that human beings have hair, mammary glands, external genitalia, a skull with a single, now closed fenestra… I’m saying we share an evolutionary heritage.

Jung and his followers do not have that basic understanding of biology. When Jungians talk about the “collective unconscious”, they’re not talking about the culture we live in, whose beliefs and attitudes we absorb without reflection. They’re talking about an actual collective entity that expresses itself through all of us. Jung studied the paranormal, alchemy, and the occult precisely because he thought those methods could provide insight into the collective unconscious.

And Jeeperson is a Jungian. He talks about archetypes and mythology and literature because he thinks they are a reflection not of a deeper biology, but of a deeper spiritual reality. That’s why he said studying myth and literature is more important than studying biology and the other sciences.

Some of the things Jeep has talked about in his many lectures and interviews include mythology and weird snippets of the natural world. He looks at an ancient Indian painting of a pair of snakes in a spiral and he doesn’t see artwork about snakes (there’s artwork about every damn thing in the natural world), he sees a deep archetypal insight into DNA (again, link in the thingy). Jungians think scientific discovery doesn’t happen because of research, but because it’s tapping into the collective unconscious, into this realm of real truths that can only be accessed through dreams.

Jeepers also got a bit of flack for talking about lobsters. Why lobsters? Because they have hierarchies and they use hormones that humans also use, and therefore humans should also live in the strict hierarchies Jeepers wants us to live in. That’s all garbage and any biologist could tear it apart, and many have (link!). But Jeepers isn’t interested in the actual biology; he’s talking about Jungian mysticism, where everything is a reflection of this deeper reality. He wants to talk about lobsters and hormones because he wants to say we’re all reflections of the collective unconscious, we all have to live that way because it’s the true way to live.

If you read his work, if you find out about his love of Jung, and you hear about how he’s tying mythology and literature into his lectures… that’s a matter of huge concern. The fact that he’s not just “teaching the theories”, but also “building his own beautiful theories”, that’s a matter of huge concern. Jeepers is a captivating lecturer because he’s passionate, because he’s not providing the facts, because he’s not teaching, he’s preaching.

If you watch his youtube videos, he bounces from topic to topic, rarely staying on psychology very long. He jumbles up psychology with mythology, literature, politics, pop culture, and science. If you know anything about any one of those, you can easily see how he’s incredibly, entirely, powerfully wrong. But few people know much about any of those, let alone all of them, and because Jeeperson loves to bounce from topic to topic, sometimes within a single sentence, and hates saying anything with clarity, it’s very difficult to construct a coherent response to anything he says. Hell, it’s difficult to construct a coherent understanding of anything he says.

I don’t know if that’s deliberate or not.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Jeep’s first book was Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief, published in 1999, a year after he moved from Harvard to Toronto. It took him thirteen years to write. He was 37. Which means he started it at the age of 24. In 1986, when he was just starting his PhD work at McGill. It purports to be a masterwork, explaining history. It is filled to the brim with Jungian nonsense.

AND DIAGRAMS. He has these… nonsense. They’re just wall to wall nonsense. A whole bunch of labels and arrows. It’s the worst collection of the most inconsequential venn diagrams ever. Let’s see if I can paint a word picture for you. Describe one of these things. Maybe get some coherent information out of it. Probably not.

So here we have a box labeled “YAHWEH: The Spirit of God” (note god’s name is in all caps), then that box is in an oval, because you have to have an oval. Then there’s another box, “THE VOID: Matter and the Deep”, and that box is also in an oval, because the boxes aren’t enough? The ovals make it official?

And there’s an arrow going from YAHWEH to THE VOID… well, from oval to oval, not from box to box. There’s probably something VERY meaningful there, something from the collective unconscious. … Ovals are probably eggs. Boxes are… penises? Maybe? Anyway, there’s another arrow from THE VOID to YAHWEH. Then there’s “Sexual” written above the arrow from YAHWEH to THE VOID… “sexual” is in quotes for some reason. Then between the two arrows there’s “(Creative)” … in parentheses… then below the arrow from THE VOID to YAHWEH there’s “Union”, with neither quotes nor parentheses.

So is “sexual” just for the arrow going from YAHWEH to THE VOID? Are all three words meant for both arrows? Why is “sexual” in quotes? Is it meant to say that YAHWEH’s interest in THE VOID isn’t actually sexual? That it just appears sexual? Is “(Creative)” for both? And how does THE VOID … have Union? Create Union? Do Union? For YAHWEH? To? At? With YAHWEH? And the oval around THE VOID is also an arrow. The oval’s line has a little arrowhead randomly placed on it. Pointing counterclockwise, though who the hell knows if that means anything for Jeepers. But we’ll see soon enough that the arrowhead isn’t an arrowhead. No no no, it’s just a head.

Now, THE VOID and YAHWEH are both inside another oval. With another box! This one labeled “The Precosmogonic “Egg””. “Egg” is in quotes for some reason. “Cosmogony” is the theory of the origin of the universe. So “precosomogonic” means “whatever came before the universe”. So “egg” is in quotes because it’s not a “real” egg, it’s a … metaphorical egg? It’s just a placeholder. Because he has a low opinion of his readers and didn’t want to seem too much like an egghead just saying “the precosmogony”? But YAHWEH and THE VOID are… totes sexual … well “sexual” for each other, even though they exist in the stuff before reality itself actually existed?

Now, there’s an arrow going from The Precosmogonic “Egg” to another oval. But this oval is outside the Precosmogonic “Egg”’s oval. It’s PARADISE: The Walled Garden. Now, this oval is a dashed line for some reason. Probably because it’s even more imaginary than the Precosmogonic “Egg”. The line going from the “Egg” to the Garden is labeled “Creation of Unconscious Paradisal World”.

But wait, there’s more! We also have… The Dragon of Chaos! You may have heard of the Dragon of Chaos. It’s kind of a theme for Jeeperson. Shows up in a lot of his diagrams. This one isn’t called the Dragon of Chaos. It’s just a picture of a dragon and it’s labeled CHAOS. In a box. And now we know why the oval for THE VOID has that arrowhead on it. Because it is also the Dragon of Chaos eating its own tail! And there’s an arrow going from the Garden to the CHAOS labeled Descent and Disintegration and another arrow from CHAOS to the Garden labeled Anomalous Information. And, next to the dragon, we have Eve, naked, holding a baby, and a fig leaf, both quite strategically placed. And Eve is in her own oval. No arrows for Eve, though. She’s just standing there. Naked. Next to the dragon of CHAOS.

Now, because symbolism is useless if it’s not hammered home with all the subtlety of a drag queen, we have MORE OVALS. These last two ovals are in dotted lines. One oval goes around THE VOID, Eve, and the dragon of CHAOS. The other is around YAHWEH and PARADISE. Both ovals are labeled, with boxes made of dotted lines, but outside the dotted line ovals and connected to them with more dotted lines. YAHWEH’s and PARADISE’s oval is “The “Patriarchal World” of Light”, with “Patriarchal World” in quotes. The dotted oval for THE VOID and Eve and CHAOS is “The “Matriarchal World” of Darkness”. Yup, “Matriarchal World” is in quotes.

And this whole diagram is Figure 56: Genesis and Descent.

So, this diagram is clear, right? YAHWEH is totally banging THE VOID, and imagining an Unconscious Paradisal World that is descending and disintegrating into the CHAOS that is feeding it Anomalous Information. Also, there’s some naked chick holding a baby.

No, the diagram doesn’t make any sense. Nor do any of the other diagrams. There are dozens of the damn things. All of them just collections of ovals and boxes and arrows and random clumps of vocab. The Jeep is absolutely garbage at creating clarity.

And you see the bit where it’s full of Jungian archetypal bullshit? He’s positing these as actual structures existing in places, full of serious meaning and value and … they create things and they’re why people do things.

And did you see the part where it is absolutely incredibly sexist? Did you notice the male world of light with the spirit of god and the garden paradise? The dragon of CHAOS, THE VOID, and the random, inexplicable, Eve? Did you notice that YAHWEH totally wants to metaphorically “sexual” the mystical vagina? THE VOID? The female chaotic darkness that destroys the male paradise of light....

And yet Jeeperson expresses confusion that people would think he’s a sexist piece of shit! His work is full of this shit. Male = Order = God = Civilization; Female = Chaos = Destruction = … somehow necessary but we won’t talk about this.

Maps of Meaning is intended to explain all of history, how and why people fall into ideological beliefs and go to war and commit genocide. He spent thirteen years putting this garbage together. It is loaded with pseudoscientific, mystical, debunked Jungian garbage, the sort of stuff that shows up in Hollywood movies because it’s a lot better for building a story than any actual science or medicine would be.

If Jeepers weren’t a faculty member at a real university, would any of this be taken seriously? His lectures combine a few snippets of things he actually knows something about (basic psychology) with mountains of falsehoods in fields where he’s utterly unqualified (politics, science, philosophy, literature, history). Without that PhD, what would he be?

I don’t doubt he’s an engaging teacher. He speaks with a great deal of confidence and assurance. Those who are wrong often do. He offers a universal and universalizing vision that seems to draw from every corner of human thought. The fact that he is as ignorant of all those things as the people listening to him is what makes him so compelling. Not being bound by mere truth is a great boon to passion and conviction.

It’s probably not an accident that he didn’t publish his garbage book until his move to Toronto. Tenure’s a hell of a drug.

So what about his teaching? What about his philosophy? What about his work? How did the hiring committee at U of T not see all this? Probably because Jeeperson was keeping it under wraps. Going back to the Crimson article, his teaching was engaging and full of his personal bullshit, and he let undergrads do all sorts of ridiculous projects (“Lopez notes that Peterson is willing to take on any research project, no matter how unconventional. His lab examines everything from sensitivity to loneliness to aggression among adolescents. “If you have a strange project, [the department] will immediately send you to [Peterson] because they know he’ll take them.”)

But Jeeperson’s own research? Orthodox, orthodox, orthodox. From his time as a grad student at McGill until he left Harvard, all of his publications are standard research into the psychology of alcoholism and aggression. Then he moves to U of T and both addiction and aggression almost completely disappear. The first thing he publishes after moving to Toronto is Maps of Meaning. Everything after that is talking about personality and the search for meaning, and politics. Toronto thought they were getting a good researcher and an engaging lecturer. Instead they got a passionate fruitcake.

It’s not impossible or even unusual for a researcher to be discouraged from following a controversial line of research. Grad students are frequently dissuaded from following lines of thought they find intriguing because it will make it difficult for them to get their doctorate, then to get a teaching position, then to get tenure. In a way, this is in keeping with what tenure is for. It’s there to protect faculty so they can do controversial research. However, it’s somewhat rare for their research to take quite such a dramatic turn.

What Jeepers did was dedicate himself to a single line of research, drug abuse and aggression, for more than a decade, only to abandon it on getting tenure. That’s not unprecedented, but it’s extreme. Academics who want to pursue their passion but are worried about not getting tenure normally pursue more orthodox lines of research related to their passion. For example, a sociologist who wants to study atheism in the United States will be discouraged from doing so because atheism is still largely taboo. So until they get tenure, they’ll study religion and religious beliefs.

What Jeepers did is more like when the occasional creationist stealths their way through a geology or biology doctorate. They spend years doing the work so they can get the degree, then go out and do whatever the hell they want with it. It’s kind of dishonest. Peterson wanted to be a sociologist and political scientist, a cultural anthropologist. Instead he became a psychologist.

To be continued...

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Monday, September 03, 2018

SJA #14 - 3 September 2018 - Go Unions!





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Monday, January 22, 2018

Is the Republican Party Fascist?

Is the Republican Party Fascist? - English


Before we can talk about whether the Republicans are the fascist party in the US, we have to understand what fascism is.

It's a political philosophy of authoritarianism and nationalism. The central condition of fascism is control. Fascists want to control every aspect of your life. They control the economy, the military, marriage, hobbies... Nothing escapes the invasive gaze of the fascist.

The two primary examples of fascism come from the mid-twentieth century: the Nazis and the Fascists (whence comes the name). The centralization of power was easier in Italy, because the central government was already weak. The fascists under Mussolini just took control. It was also easier because the majority of the Italian population was Catholic, and an alliance with the church (sealed by the Lateran Treaties) helped assure the Italians' cooperation. The violence of the Black Shirts against their opponents was also a factor.

The Nazis under Hitler had a harder time because Germany was divided between Catholics and Lutherans. Nevertheless, the Nazis acquired the cooperation of the churches, for example through their own alliance with the Catholic Church. Pius XI didn't like the Third Reich's Roman (and hence Pagan) symbols, but after his death in 1939, the Nazis had the eager cooperation of Pius XII, who liked the authoritarianism of the fascist Axis governments.

I should also note that not all priests were friendly toward the fascists. The Nazis had to promulgate a law against priests speaking against the government for a reason, after all, and some Catholic priests used the functions of their office to protect Jews and other oppressed people just as others used them to help Nazis escape to South America after the war. What's important is emphasizing the use of religion by fascists: they loved and love the Cross and the Bible.

In addition to the fertilizer provided by religion, the ground was already prepared for fascist seeds; the two countries were troubled. Germany was trapped in the post-war recession following WWI, and Italy was never free of chaos following the fall of Rome (the Italian Kingdom of the day was new and weak). The populations wanted certainty and peace. The fascists promised that and, for a time, they delivered.

The other side of the fascist coin is nationalism. Fascists wrap themselves in the flag while they hold up the Bible. Combined with militarism, fascists inevitably fall into war. Italy invaded territories in Africa and Germany famously invaded France. Nationalism seems to demand not just past greatness, but future greatness.
Fascists use the twin demands of religion and war to force their ideas about the correct way of life on others. And their authoritarianism and hierarchism means that everyone must have the same life, in accordance with the fascist view. In this way, every single part of the nation finds itself either under fascist control or destroyed.

Fascism is a method, a system of control characterized by hierarchism, nationalism, militarism, and a major emphasis on religion and racism. Are the Republicans fascist?

Yes.

Once, obviously, this wasn't the case. Once, the Republicans were the... not the progressive party; progressive isn't the right word. During the period when the Republicans were fighting for the rights of blacks, they included progressive elements, but the US parties weren't built around philosophies so much as around groups, around voting blocs. The Republicans were the urban party more than anything else, and urban environments lead to progressive ideas.

The decades of the mid-twentieth century were a turbulent time. The two parties exchanged portions of their ideologies and voting blocs. The Democrats took blacks and progressives from the Republicans; the Republicans took the racists from the Democrats. This change started in 1932 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt formed a coalition to combat the Great Depression, reached its peak when Richard Nixon enacted the Southern Strategy in 1968, and finished in 1994 with the Republican reaction to Bill Clinton's election in 1992.

In other words, it was a 60 year process.

As a result, the Republicans are fascists.

At the same time that they cut budgets everywhere, military spending is untouchable. It's impossible to find a Republican who doesn't cover himself with the flag (and every progressive protest turns into a discussion about their lack of respect for the flag, regardless of their real purpose). In Republican eyes, being American means being an evangelical Christian (they love to talk about "judeo-christian values" so they don't look anti-semitic, but...). And racism? Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy had two parts: be racist, but don't sound racist. The first part was so they could win racists in the southern states (the KKK and Nazis love the Republican Party today), and the second part was so they wouldn't alienate whites in other states who weren't quite as racist as southerners.

It's a little more difficult to explain hierarchism. It's not just the centralization of authority, but also the creation of levels of authorities. There's a group with a leader, who's in a higher group with its own leader, that forms part of a group...

Churches are a perfect example of this. The family forms the nucleus, with the father as the unquestioned head. The family goes to a church led by a pastor (or priest). The church is part of an organization led by, depending on the sect, a congress of pastors, by bishops, by a Pope (or Papa, note the similarity with the family here).

The church also forms part of secular life in the state, led by a governor, or president. In the conservative worldview, there isn't really a separation between religious and secular life; the president is the pastor in chief, a religious figure. A large part of conservative hatred for presidents Clinton and Obama was because they corrupted a sacred office. A negro in the White House perverts the national spirit, according to Christian racists. They want true authority figures, and have to resist (violently, if necessary) illegitimate authority figures.

Racism isn't necessarily fundamental to fascism. Fascism demands foreigners, others, out-groups. Fascism engenders hatred and resentment because it's not possible to create universal happiness (or even general happiness) when you're forcing everyone to assume a single way of life. Aiming this hatred and resentment at other targets simplifies the fascist project. Further, anger makes people stupid. The faculties of reason don’t work when you're angry. Stupid people don't watch their leaders carefully. Finally, the creation of out-groups meshes perfectly with religion, which already has out-groups galore (Jews, Muslims, all other non-Christians, all other Christians of different sects, all other Christians who don't act exactly like you want...).

Republicans aren't missing anything from the definition of fascism. They want to eliminate the ideals of the Republic of the United States and create a Christian Monarchy, a militaristic dictatorship to conquer the world formally, not just through the client states of a hegemonic empire, in the name of Christ, to usher in the Rapture.

How do I know this? They say so openly.

¿El Partido Republicano es fascista? - español


Antes de que podemos discutir si los Republicanos son el partido del fascismo en los Estados Unidos, es necesario entender lo que es el fascismo.

El fascismo es una filosofía política del autoritarismo y nacionalismo. La condición central del fascismo es el control. Los fascistas quieren controlar todos los aspectos de la vida. Controlan la economía, los militares, el matrimonio, los pasatiempos... Ninguna parte se escapa de los ojos invasivos de los fascistas.

Los dos ejemplos primarios del fascismo vienen de mediados del siglo XX: los Nazis y los Fascistas (de donde viene el nombre). La centralización de poder fue más fácil en Italia, porque el gobierno central ya fué débil. Los fascistas bajo Mussolini tomaron el control. También fue más fácil porque la mayoría de la población italiana ear católica, y una alianza con la Iglesia (sellada por los Pactos de Letrán) ayudó asegurar la cooperación de los italianos. Además un factor fue la violencia de las Camisas Negras contra los oponentes.

Los Nazis bajo Hitler tuvieron un trabajo más difícil, porque Alemania fue dividida entre Católicos y Luteranos. No obstante, los Nazis adquirieron la cooperación de las iglesias, con su propia alianza con la Iglesia Católica, por ejemplo. A Pius XI no le gustaron los símbolos romanos (paganos) del Tercer Reich, pero después de su muerte en 1939, los Nazis tuvieron la cooperación ávida de Pius XII, a quien le gustó el autoritarismo de los gobiernos fascistas del Eje.

Tal vez, tengo que hacer notar que no todos sacerdotes fueron amables hacia los fascistas. Los Nazis tuvieron que promulgar una ley contra el discurso anti-gubernamental sacerdotal, por ejemplo, y algunos sacerdotes católicos utilizaron las funciones de sus oficios para proteger judíos y otros oprimidos así como otros las utilizaron para ayudar a Nazis a escaparse a América del Sur después de la guerra. Lo importante es enfatizar el uso de la religión por los fascistas: amaron y aman la Cruz y la Biblia.
Además del fertilizante ofrecido por la religión, la tierra ya fue fértil por los granos fascistas; los dos países fueron agitados. Alemania fue atrapada en la recesión después de la Primera Guerra Mundial, e Italia nunca fue libre de caos después de la caída de Roma (el Reino Italiano en el tiempo fue nuevo, y débil). Las poblaciones quisieron certidumbre y paz. Los fascistas las prometieron y, temporalmente, cumplieron.

El otro lado de la moneda fascista es el nacionalismo. Los fascistas se envuelven en la bandera mientras elevan la Biblia. Combinada con el militarismo, los fascistas inevitablemente caen en la guerra. Italia invadió territorios en África, y Alemania infamemente invadió Francia. El nacionalismo parece exigir no solo una grandeza en el pasado, sino más grandeza en el futuro.

Los fascistas usan las dobles exigencias de la religión y la guerra para forzar sus ideas sobre la correcta forma de vida. Y el autoritarismo y jerarquismo significa que todas las personas deben tener la misma vida, conforme a la visión fascista. De esta manera, todas partes del país se encuentran o bajo el control de los fascistas, o destruidas.

El fascismo es un método, un sistema de control caracterizado por el jerarquismo, el nacionalismo, el militarismo y un gran énfasis en la religión y el racismo. ¿Son los Republicanos fascistas?

Sí.

En otro tiempo, claro, no fue el caso. En otro tiempo, los Republicanos formaban el partido ... progresista no es la palabra correcta. Durante el período en que los Republicanos luchaban por los derechos de los negros, incluían elementos progresistas, pero los partidos estadounidenses no fueron construidos alrededor de filosofías tanto como alrededor de grupos, de bloques de votaciones. Los Republicanos fueron el partido urbano más que cualquier otra cosa, y los alrededores urbanos conducen a ideas progresistas.

Las décadas medias del siglo XX fueron un período turbulento. Los dos partidos intercambiaron algunas partes de sus ideologías y de sus bloques de votaciones. Los Demócratas tomaron a los negros y a los progresistas de los Republicanos; los Republicanos tomaron a los racistas de los Demócratas. Este cambio comenzó en 1932 cuando Franklin Delano Roosevelt formó una coalición para combatir la Gran Depresión, alcanzó su punto máximo cuando Richard Nixon puso en práctica el Southern Strategy en 1968, y se finalizó en 1994 con la reacción Republicana contra la elección de Bill Clinton en 1992.

En otras palabras, fue un proceso de sesenta años.

Como resultado, los Republicanos son fascistas.

Mientras recortan los presupuestos por todas partes, los gastos militares son intocables. Es imposible encontrar un Republicano que no se cubra con la bandera (y toda manifestación progresista se convierte en una discusión sobre una falta de respeto para esa bandera, independientemente del propósito real). En los ojos Republicanos, ser estadounidense es ser un cristiano evangelista (aman hablar de "valores judeocristianos" para no parecer antisemita, pero...). Y el racismo? La estrategia sureña de Richard Nixon tenía dos partes: ser racista, pero no parecer racista. La primera parte era para atraer los racistas de los estados del sur (el KKK y los Nazis adoran el Partido Republicano de hoy), y la segunda parte para no alejar a los blancos de otros estados que no son tan racistas como los sureños.

Es un poco más difícil explicar el jerarquismo. No es simplemente la centralización de la autoridad, sino también la creación de niveles de autoridad. Hay un grupo con un líder, que está en un grupo superior con su propio líder, que forma parte de un grupo...

Las iglesias son un ejemplo perfecto de esto. La família forma el núcleo, con el padre como el líder incontestable. La família asiste a una iglesia liderada por el pastor (o sacerdote). La iglesia forma parte de una organización liderada por, dependiendo del culto, un congreso de pastores, por obispos, por un Papa (note la similitud con la familia en este último).

La iglesia forma también parte de la vida secular en el estado liderado por un gobernador, o presidente. En la visión conservadora, no hay una verdadera separación entre la vida religiosa y la vida secular; el presidente es el pastor de la nación, una figura religiosa. Una gran parte del odio conservador contra los presidentes Clinton y Obama fue porque corrompían una oficina sagrada. Un negro en la Casa Blanca pervierte el espíritu nacional, según los racistas cristianos. Quieren autoridades adecuadas, y tienen que resistirse (con violencia, si fuese necesario) a las autoridades ilegítimos.

El racismo no es necesariamente fundamental para el fascismo. El fascismo exige extranjeros, otros, forasteros. El fascismo engendra odio y resentimiento porque no es posible crear felicidad universal (o incluso felicidad general) cuando estás forzando a todas las personas a asumir una única forma de vida. Apuntar estos a otros objetivos simplifica el proyecto fascista. Además de esto, la ira hace personas más estúpidas. Las facultades de la razón no funcionan cuando estamos enojados. Las personas estúpidas no observan con cuidado a los líderes. Finalmente, la creación de forasteros está encajada con la religión, que ya tiene forasteros en cantidad (los judíos, los musulmanes, todos los no cristianos, todos los cristianos de otros cultos, todos los cristianos que no actúan exactamente como tú quieres...).

A los Republicanos no les falta nada de la definición del fascismo. Quieren eliminar los ideales de la República de los Estados Unidos y crear una Monarquía Cristiana, una dictadura militarista para conquistar formalmente el mundo, no solo a través de estados clientes de un imperio hegemónico, en el nombre de Cristo, para comenzar el Arrebatamiento.

¿Cómo lo sé? Lo dicen abiertamente.

Le Parti Républicain est-il fasciste ? - français


Avant que nous puissions parler de si les Républicains sont le parti fasciste des États-Unis, nous devons comprendre ce qui est le fascisme.

C'est une philosophie politique de l'autoritarisme est du nationalisme. La condition centrale du fascisme est le contrôle. Les fascistes veulent contrôler tout aspect de la vie. Ils contrôlent l'économie, l'armée, la matrimonie, les hobbys... Rien n'échappe le regard invasive du fasciste.

Les deux primaires exemples du fascisme viennent du milieu du vingtième siècle : les Nazis et les Fascistes (d'où vient le nom). La centralisation de pouvoir a été plus facile en Italie, parce que le gouvernement central a été faible en ce moment-là. Les fascistes sous Mussolini ont simplement pris le contrôle. Elle a également été plus facile parce que la majorité de la population italienne était catholique, et une alliance avec l'Église Catholique (scellée par les accordes du Latran) ont aidé à assurer la coopération des italiens. La violence des Chemises Noires contre leurs opposantes a également été un facteur.

Les Nazis sous Hitler ont traversé une période plus difficile car l'Allemagne a été divisée entre les catholiques et les luthériens. Néanmoins, les Nazis ont acquis la coopération des églises, par exemple par moyenne de leur propre alliance avec l'Église Catholique. Pie XI n'aimait pas les symboles romains (et donc païens) du Troisième Reich, mais après sa morte en 1939, les Nazis avait la coopération avide de Pie XII, que aimait bien l'autoritarisme des gouvernements fascistes de l'Axe.

Je devrais noter que pas tous les prêtres étaient accueillants vers les fascistes. Il y avait une raison pourquoi les Nazis ont dû promulguer des lois contre les prêtres parlant contre le gouvernement, après tout, et certains prêtres catholiques ont utilisé les fonctions de leurs charges pour protéger des Juifs et d'autres personnes opprimées de la même manière que d'autres prêtres ont les utilisées pour aider des Nazis à échapper à l'Amérique du Sud après la guerre. Ce qui importe est de souligner l'utilisation de la religion par les fascistes : ils aimaient et aiment la Croix et la Bible.

En plus de l'engrais fournis par la religion, la terre a déjà été préparée pour les graines fascistes ; les deux pays étaient inquiets. L'Allemagne était piégée dans la récession après la première guerre mondiale, et l'Italie n'était jamais libre du chaos après la chute de l'Empire romain (le royaume d'Italie en ce moment était nouveau et faible). Les populations voulaient de la certitude et de la paix. Les fascistes les ont promises et, pendant un temp, les ont produites.

L'autre face de la médaille fasciste est le nationalisme. Les fascistes s'emballent dans le drapeau pendant qu'ils élèvent la Bible. En combinaison avec le militarisme, les fascistes tombent inévitablement en guerre. L'Italie a envahie des territoires de l'Afrique et l'Allemagne a tristement envahie la France. Le nationalisme semble exiger non seulement la grandeur dans le passé, mais dans le futur aussi.

Les fascistes utilisent les exigences jumelles de la religion et la guerre pour obliger leurs idées sur le mode de vie correct. Et leur autoritarisme et hiérarchisme signifient que toute personne doit avoir la même vie, conformément à la vision fasciste. De cette manière, absolument toute partie de la nation se trouve ou sous le contrôle fasciste ou détruite.

Le fascisme est une méthode, un système de contrôle caractérisé par le hiérarchisme, le nationalisme, le militarisme et une grande importance de la religion et du racisme. Les Républicains sont-ils fascistes ?

Oui.

Autrefois, clairement, ce n'était pas le cas. Autrefois, les Républicains étaient... non pas le parti progressiste ; « progressiste » n'est pas le mot correct. Pendant la période où les Républicains luttaient pour les droits des noirs, ils ont inclus des éléments progressistes, mais les partis des États-Unis n'ont pas été construits autour de philosophies, mais plutôt autour de groupes, autour de blocs d’électeurs. Les Républicains étaient le parti urbain, plus qu’autre chose, et les environnements urbains mènent à des idées progressistes.

Les décennies au milieu du XXe siècle ont été une période turbulente. Les deux partis se sont échangés des parts de leurs idéologies et de leurs blocs d’électeurs. Les Démocrates ont pris aux Républicains les noirs et les progressistes ; les Républicains ont pris aux Démocrates les racistes. Ce changement a commencé en 1932 quand Franklin Delano Roosevelt a formé une coalition pour combattre la Grande Dépression, a atteint son point culminant quand Richard Nixon a promulgué la Stratégie du Sud en 1968 et a terminé en 1994 avec la réaction des Républicains à l'élection de Bill Clinton en 1992.

En d'autres termes, c'est un processus qui a duré 60 ans.

En conséquence, les Républicains sont fascistes.

En même temps qu'ils réduisent les budgets partout, les dépenses militaires sont intouchables. Il est impossible de trouver un Républicain qui ne se couvre pas avec le drapeau (et toute manifestation progressiste se change en une discussion sur le manque de respect pour le drapeau, sans se soucier du vrai but). Aux yeux des Républicains, être Américain signifie être un chrétien évangélique (ils adorent parler des « valeurs judéo-chrétiennes » pour ne pas sembler antisémites, mais...). Et le racisme ? La Stratégie du Sud de Richard Nixon avait deux parties : être raciste, mais ne pas sembler raciste. La première partie était destinée à conquérir les racistes dans les états du sud (le KKK et les Nazis aiment bien le Parti Républicain aujourd'hui), et la deuxième partie était destinée à ne pas s'aliéner les blancs dans les autres états qui n'étaient pas tout à fait racistes comme les sudistes.

C'est un peu plus difficile d’expliquer le hiérarchisme. Ce n'est pas simplement la centralisation de l'autorité, mais également la création de niveaux des autorités. Il y a un groupe avec un chef, qui est dans un groupe plus élevé avec son propre chef, qui forme une partie d'un groupe...

Les Églises sont un exemple parfait de ceci. La famille forme un noyau, où le père est le chef incontesté. La famille fréquente une église dirigée par un pasteur (ou prêtre). L'église fait partie d'une organisation dirigée, selon la secte, par un congrès de pasteurs, par des évêques, par un Pape (ou Papa, observez la similitude ici avec la famille).

L'église fait également partie de la vie séculaire dans l'état, lui-même dirigé par un gouverneur, ou un président. Dans la vision du monde conservatrice, il n'y a pas de vraie séparation entre la vie religieuse et la vie séculaire ; le président est le pasteur en chef, une figure religieuse. Une grande partie de la haine des conservateurs pour les présidents Clinton et Obama venait de leur corruption d'une fonction sacrée. Un noir dans la Maison Blanche pervertit l'esprit national, selon les chrétiens racistes. Ils veulent de vraies figures d'autorité et doivent résister (avec violence, si nécessaire) aux figures d'autorité illégitimes.

Le racisme n'est pas strictement essentiel au fascisme. Le fascisme a besoin des étrangers, des autres, des parias. Le fascisme engendre la haine et le ressentiment car il n'est pas possible de créer le bonheur universel (ou même le bonheur général) quand on force tout le monde à adopter un mode de vie unique. Viser d'autres cibles simplifie le projet fasciste. En plus, la colère rend les gens stupides. Les facultés de la raison ne fonctionnent pas lorsqu'on est en colère. Les personnes stupides n'observent pas attentivement les leaders. Enfin, la création d’exclus s'accorde parfaitement avec la religion, qui a déjà des parias en abondance (les Juifs, les Musulmans, tous les autres non Chrétiens, tous les autres Chrétiens de sectes différentes, tous les autres Chrétiens qui n'agissent pas exactement comme attendu...).

Les Républicains ne passent à côté de rien dans la définition du fascisme. Ils veulent éliminer les idéaux de la République des États-Unis et créer une Monarchie Chrétienne, une dictature militariste pour conquérir officiellement le monde, non seulement au moyen des états sujets d'un empire hégémonique, mais au nom du Christ, pour annoncer le commencement de la fin du monde.

Comment je le sais ? Parce qu'ils le disent ouvertement.

O Partido Republicano dos Estados Unidos é fascista? - português


Antes de nós podermos falar de se os Republicanos são o partido fascista nos Estados Unidos, temos que compreender o que é o fascismo.

É uma filosofia política de autoritarismo e nacionalismo. A condição central do fascismo é o controle. Os fascistas querem controlar todos os aspectos da sua vida. Eles controlam a economia, os militares, o matrimônio, os passatempos... Nada escapa à visão invasiva do fascista.

Os dos primeiros exemplos do fascismo vêm de meados do século XX: os Nazistas e os Fascistas (de onde o nome). A centralização do poder foi mais fácil na Itália, porque o governo central já era débil. Os fascistas embaixo de Mussolini simplesmente assumiram o controle. Também foi mais fácil porque a maioria da população italiana era católica, e uma aliança com a igreja (fechada pelo Tratado de Latrão) ajudou assegurar a cooperação dos italianos. A violência dos Camisas negras contra seus oponentes foi igualmente um fator.

Os Nazistas embaixo de Hitler tiveram mais dificuldade porque a Alemanha era dividida entre os Católicos e os Luteranos. Contudo, os Nazistas adquiriram a cooperação das igrejas, por exemplo através da sua própria aliança com a Igrejia Católica. Pio XI não gostou dos símbolos romanos (e portanto pagãos) do Terceiro Reich, mas depois da sua morte em 1939, os Nazistas tiveram a cooperação ávida de Pio XII, quem gostou do autoritarismo dos governos fascistas do Eixo.

Eu deveriam notar que nem todos padres eram simpáticos com os fascistas. Afinal, os Nazistas tiveram que promulgar leis contra padres falando contra o governo por uma razão, e alguns padres católicos utilizaram suas posições para proteger judeus e outras pessoas oprimidas da mesma forma que outros as utilizaram para ajudar Nazistas a escapar à América do Sul depois da guerra. O importante é acentuar a utilização da religião pelos fascistas: eles amam e amaram a Cruz e a Bíblia.

Além do fertilizante proporcionado pela religião, a terra já estava preparada para as sementes fascistas; os dois países eram agitados. Alemanha era presa na recessão depois da primeira guerra mundial, e a Itália nunca se livrou do caos depois da queda de Roma (o Reino Italiano desse dia era novo e débil). As populações queriam certeza e paz. Os fascistas as prometeram e, durante um tempo, cumpriram suas promessas.

O reverso da medalha fascista é o nacionalismo. Os fascistas se envolvem na bandeira enquanto elevam a Bíblia. Combinado com o militarismo, os fascistas caem inevitavelmente na guerra. A Itália invadiu territórios na África e a Alemanha vergonhosamente invadiu a França. O nacionalismo parece exigir não só grandeza no passado, mas grandeza no futuro.

Os fascistas utilizam as exigências gêmeas da religião e da guerra para forçar as suas idéias sobre a forma correcta de vida. E seu autoritarismo e hierarquismo significam que todos devem ter a mesma vida, em conformidade com a visão fascista. Desta maneira, absolutamente toda nação se encontra ou sob o controle fascista ou destruída.

O fascismo é um método, um sistema de controle caracterizado pelo hierarquismo, o nacionalismo, o militarismo e uma grande ênfase na religião e no racismo. Os Republicanos são fascistas?

Sim.

Outrora, evidentemente, esse não era o caso. Outrora, os Republicanos eram o... não o partido progressista; "progressista" não é a palavra correta. Durante o período em que os Republicanos lutavam em favor dos direitos dos negros, eles incluíam elementos progressistas, mas os partidos estadunidenses não foram construídos entorno de filosofias, mas entorno de grupos, entorno de blocos de votação. Os Republicanos eram o partido urbano acima de tudo, e ambientes urbanos conduzem à formação de idéias progressistas.

As décadas de meados do século XX foram turbulentas. Os dois partidos intercambiaram porções das suas ideologias e blocos de votação. Os Democratas tomaram os negros e os progressistas dos Republicanos e os Republicanos tomaram os racistas dos Democratas. Essa mudança começou em 1932 quando Franklin Delano Roosevelt formou uma coalizão para combater a Grande Depressão, atingiu o seu pico quando Richard Nixon pôs em vigor a Estratégia Sulista em 1968 e terminou em 1994 com a reação Republicana contra a eleição de Bill Clinton em 1992.

Noutras palavras, foi um processo de 60 anos.

Como resultado, os Republicanos são fascistas.

Ao mesmo tempo que eles cortam orçamentos, os gastos militares são intocáveis. É impossível achar um Republicano que não se cobre com a bandeira (e toda manifestação progressista se torna em uma discussão sobre sua falta de respeito para a bandeira apesar de seu verdadeiro objetivo). Nos olhos Republicanos, ser Estadunidense significa ser um Cristão evangélico (eles amam falar dos "valores judaico-cristãos" para não parecer anti-semitas, mas...). E o racismo? A Estratégia Sulista de Richard Nixon era em duas partes: ser racista, mas não parecer racista. A primeira parte para que eles pudessem ganhar os racistas nos estados sulistas (o KKK e os Nazistas adoram o Partido Republicano hoje), e a segunda parte para que eles não alienem os brancos nos outros estados que eram um pouco menos racistas do que os sulistas.

É um pouco mais difícil explicar o hierarquismo. Não é simplesmente a centralização da autoridade, mas também a criação de níveis de autoridades. Há um grupo com um líder, que forma parte de um grupo com seu próprio líder, que forma parte de um grupo...

As igrejas são um perfeito exemplo disto. A família forma o núcleo, com o pai como o chefe incontestável. A família assiste a uma igreja chefiada por um pastor (ou sacerdote). A igreja forma parte de uma organização chefiada, dependendo da seita, por um congresso de pastores, por bispos, por um Papa (observa a similaridade com a família aqui).

A igreja forma também uma parte da vida secular no estado, conduzida por um governador, ou presidente. Na visão conservadora do mundo, não há uma verdadeira separação entre a vida religiosa e a vida secular; o presidente é o pastor chefe, uma figura religiosa. Uma grande parte do ódio conservador para os presidentes Clinton e Obama foi porque eles corromperam um cargo sagrado. Um negro na Casa Branca perverte o espírito nacional, segundo cristãos racistas. Eles querem verdadeiras figuras de autoridade e têm que resistir (violentamente, se necessário) à ilegítimas figuras de autoridade.

O racismo não é necessariamente fundamental no fascismo. O fascismo exige estrangeiros, outros, forasteiros. O fascismo engendra o ódio e o ressentimento porque não é possível criar a felicidade universal (ou mesmo felicidade geral) quando você está forçando todo o mundo a adoptar um único modo de vida. Mirar estes outros objetivos simplifica o projeto fascista. Além disso, a raiva faz as pessoas estúpidos. As faculdades da razão não funcionam quando você está zangado. Pessoas estúpidas não observam cuidadosamente os líderes. Finalmente, a criação engrena perfeitamente com a religião, que já tem estrangeiros à beça (Judeus, Muçulmanos, todos outros não Cristãos, todos outros Cristãos de diferentes seitas, todos outros Cristãos que não agem exatamente como você quer...).

O partido Republicano tem todas qualidades da definição do fascismo. Eles querem eliminar os ideais da República dos Estados Unidos e criar uma Monarquia Cristã, uma ditadura militar para conquistar formalmente o mundo, não só através de estados submissos de um império hegemônico, em nome de Cristo, para inaugurar o Arrebatamento.

Como eu sei isto? Eles o dizem abertamente.
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