A Comment on a Post Below
I know that my standard approach toward right wing nonsense is ridicule, which they richly deserve. Still, I have been thinking about the Renew America post by Sher Zieve which I wrote about a couple of posts ago. Remember that Renew America is operated by Alan Keyes, a man that many Republicans saw as sufficiently responsible to be an opponent to Barack Obama.
Well, for some reason I have been thinking about Zieve's post, and it has been getting me very depressed. Some questions have been running through my mind, and I can't find any answers to them. Remember, please, that I have been watching these right wingers since the days of Carl McIntyre and Melvin Munn, in the mid-sixties. I've had forty years to answer my questions, and here I am still at sea.
What does someone think, while they are writing something like that? How do they feel as they allow such an avalanche of lies and hatred to pour forth from themselves? Is their mind so malleable that they can actually convince themselves that these preposterous, evidenceless claims are true? Is someone paying them a lot of money to be a conduit for this kind of malice? Do they crank this evil, spiteful, contemptible garbage out, just for the fun of it, regardless of the consequences, like some teenage car thief?
What is it? All these years, and I guess I still don't know what it really is that we are fighting.
Well, for some reason I have been thinking about Zieve's post, and it has been getting me very depressed. Some questions have been running through my mind, and I can't find any answers to them. Remember, please, that I have been watching these right wingers since the days of Carl McIntyre and Melvin Munn, in the mid-sixties. I've had forty years to answer my questions, and here I am still at sea.
What does someone think, while they are writing something like that? How do they feel as they allow such an avalanche of lies and hatred to pour forth from themselves? Is their mind so malleable that they can actually convince themselves that these preposterous, evidenceless claims are true? Is someone paying them a lot of money to be a conduit for this kind of malice? Do they crank this evil, spiteful, contemptible garbage out, just for the fun of it, regardless of the consequences, like some teenage car thief?
What is it? All these years, and I guess I still don't know what it really is that we are fighting.
Comments
For example, the DSM doesn't classify a Catholic who sees the face of Mary or Jesus in a tortilla/reflection/whatever as a mental case, but if a Bhuddist were to have such delusions, he'd actually be considered delusional by a shrink.
"Ambassador" Keyes is rabidly Catholic, and Catholics have felt threatened by reality for some time now, especially w/ the rise of officially atheist Communism.
Combine the authoritarian mind-set w/ religious delusion & bingo!!
I don't know what Ms. Z.'s religious background is, but obviously there's a willingness to believe in grand conspiracies there.
Totalitarian regimes have abused psychology and psychiatry to oppress dissent. It is easy to use pop psychology as a means to dismiss and discredit one's opposition, but it has also been used as an instrument of torture and abuse. Even worse, this kind of intellectual abuse can always be turned against you.
Lets not go there. Lets use more honest means to argue our cause. Lets debunk and expose the lies, for sure, but let us avoid the trap used by tyrants to degrade the human spirit.
I've met any number of people who think that if they say something - anything - enough... it will have the force of fact.
The degree to which extremist Right wing rhetoric is disengaged from anything like simple logic leaves very little room for anything other than "they believe it because they want to". Years of listening to and espousing garbage to the point where they have simply invested to much of their mind's output in this crap to ever take a step back and see it for the errant nonsense it is. In other words: faith.
Further, they have conflated this faith with their patriotic fervor for their private version of America is, totally ignoring or despising all the other things that America is. This gives them a bizarre sense of moral entitlement: they are a minority that somehow think themselves representative of a repressed majority. Democracy is not something they can handle.
Debunk and expose, yes. But don't ever expect that to make a dent in the extremism of people like Zieve. That bus left with the tooth fairy a long time ago.
I also think that even if they know what they are saying is a lie, it is still so close to what they want to think that they feel the lie is self-justifying.
Thanks very much for taking the time. Maybe I should get depressed more often.
How do YOU not have answers to these questions?
Not once have you given me a source, and only on occasion are your insults called for.
It's obviously a cult-like deal, & there may be individual psychological problems in play that make people vulnerable to indoctrination beyond mere religious delusion.
I'm w/ (O)CT(O)PUS, we don't want a Soviet style psychiatric Gulag of political prisoners, but when debunking & exposing the lies has no effect beyond making the believers believe w/ more fervor, when the fear of Obama is as much projection as anything else, not much more can be done in ordinary discourse.
We should probably all relax a bit, though. Renew America's typists & lip-moving readers, while obnoxious, are not really that loud a voice. They're preaching to a very small choir, & not likely to change too many minds w/ their delusions.
I tend to agree with you, about the real number of people into this garbage. However, my fear comes from the fact that, forty years ago, I saw people dismissing things as hateful fringe attitudes that have now, thanks to the Republican party and our pathetic press, become acceptable views. In ten or twenty years, who knows how many people will have been trained to see all Democratic party actions as illegitimate. Such a thing happened in the 1920's in Germany, and look where that ended up.
First off, horrible Godwin. Secondly, since when has bastardizing the Constitution beyond repair, or socialism, become vogue? Two years ago socialist was a terrible name to call someone, now we have politicians praising socialism in many forms. The Left is shifting farther and farther left. There are no moderate leaders among them. You talk about fringe become accepted, look at Obama. Many believed he was too far left to win in 2008. He was a nobody, and radical. Now you have people calling him too soft and not liberal enough. Next we will have a Mao in the white house, should the democrats get what they want.
The real 'war' is between competing groups of adults in their prime, Occidental and Oriental, keeping the world from acieving peace.