Its literally just years of compounded dogshit education, which is worse in red states. Thats all it is, nothing biological, its not because they fuck cousins, its not because of lead or microplastics (lead might have an effect actually), its primarily because people weren’t taught how the world works, how our country works, and how to discern media. Couple that with just poor material conditions and poverty and people will believe fascist lies.
It is our job to reach these people, we can’t just laugh at them or call them dumb. That being said, there is always a percentage that will go down with the MAGA ship and will never change their ways, and thats just something we gotta swallow, at least we can make them embarassed again.
It is our job to reach these people
Yeah imagine naming your podcast “The DeProgram” and then coming out with this take
The ReProgram
there’s been some studies on brain shit and i’ve retained the word “amygdala” but not the conclusion of any studies. Plus the people doing that research don’t know the difference between a liberal and a communist.
Also, something being observable at a neural level doesn’t not make it permanent or genetically determined.
The decades of overpowering fossil fuel exhaust is probably also not exactly doing any favors. And all the malnutrition. And the social, psychic, and physiological effects of climate disaster. Coal plants. All sorts of pit mining.
I think gacha games are also part of this, somehow.
i wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some kind of detectable damage from the centuries of gutting schooling and drowning everyone in omnipresent propaganda, but that’s still nurture, not nature
Yes definitely a lot of mental illness but whom amongst us
Would microplastics in brain count as nature?
Scientific socialism came out of the unhealthiest century in human history.
lead pipes?
In utero, yes, and after that it’s nurture for the same reason that diet differences are nurture.
I secretly suspect ADHD is an epigenetic stress response but that’s not what we’re talking about here lol
“Nature vs Nurture” usually means “how they were born vs what happened after,” so one is biological and one is biological + social. Yugopnik is being concerning here, but
he isn’t actually specifying what he means on this axis because both can be biological.Edit: but he isn’t ruling out nurture, as much as I would hope he was past ascribing these problems to “genetics” as a Marxist . . .
Rephrased what I said to be more technically accurate to his bad take
I think infantilisation of americans through their media soup combined with leaded fuel, asbestos and now microplastics is worth considering here.
Maybe this is a uniquely euro way of thinking? I sorta lean towards what yugopnik is saying here and it’s gotta be because we’re both in europe and look at the americans in a kind of fucked up “how the fuck did they get like this?” way.
It’s ok you can call me reactionary for sorta sympathising with what he’s saying, I can definitely see how it’s reactionary. But also like… Wtf america?
Asbestos was all over Europe too (and everywhere else) and has no neurological effects AFAIK.
Leaded fuel in road vehicles was also a thing all over the world too. US banned it in 1996, UK in 1999 and EU in 2000 (though some member countries already had a ban in effect before that).
Even then America is the premier car centric society in rural Czechia you could walk basically anywhere or take an electric tram downtown back in the day without even experiencing a car.
Is that not the case anymore?
Our hometown still is walkable but the town to town trolleys are gone afaik 😔 tbf when I was growing up they were on their last legs but very fun to ride in as a kid
yeah that’s less important in my thing i guess i just threw that in there as yet another way materials poisoned everyone
I believe it doesnt exactly poison so much as mechanically disrupt tissue. It is very small and sharp fibers.
Yeah i didn’t intend to be literal, just the general vibe
Y’all aren’t that different ok or have you willingly dismantled your colonial legacies and ties to the zionist entity when I wasn’t looking?
It really feels very very different from our perspective. Like, european literacy rates are all 98%+ just for a start while the US is at 21% illiteracy.
I can’t really explain it to you, the vibe is different speaking to europeans compared to americans, I can not tell who is a child when I speak to americans whereas I absolutely know who the children are and who the adults are when I speak to europeans online. Americans online are very often indistinguishable to me from like 12-16 year old extremely edgy european kids.
It’s the combination of rampant illiteracy, poor emotional regulation, and insistence on having to react to any stimuli. I’ve seen two Burgerlander fash get into some online argument because Fash #1 made some sarcastic comment about needing more woke movies but Fash #2 didn’t pick up the very obvious sarcasm and accused Fash #1 of being a woket-word, which led to Fash #1 calling Fash #2 some other slur, which led to some long comment thread of them accusing each other of being woke.
woket-word
I know this is besides the point but what is this?
woket-word = woket*rd
It’s definitely the lead and whatever chemicals Dupont is serving in tonight’s dinner
No Child Left Behind, focus on sight reading (just skip words you don’t recognise), standardised testing, extremely long periods without school aka having an entire summer off, malnutrition in schools all combined creates something uniquely American. All of those things exist in a vacuum to some extent elsewhere but America has all of them all at once.
And that’s not even including the bombardment of propaganda and lead.
The thing is with the United States, they have a ton of very smart people that both empower and “hide behind” the ignorant on a societal level, and you always hear about the ignorant and almost never hear from the very smart people, at least that’s what I feel as a non American. The right wing political movement in the US is actually a perfect example of this. You always hear about the latest idiotic thing Trump or one of his cronies said, you almost never hear about the people actually running things behind the scenes and keeping it all together. The US military is another example, you always hear about the latest foolish thing they did, and almost never about all the higher ups with multiple master’s degrees and even doctorates.
Yeah this feels like it’s straying too far into “IQ debate” territory. It’s no mystery, it’s all nurture, hell I’ve met people with fucking degrees believe some heinous or outrageous shit. We are social animals and we pick up on the cues left to us by our peers, family, friends, neighborhood etc. It’s a cop out to just say “well the american people have brain damage”, no, we have societal decay damage my man.
biological
Yeah….I feel my misanthropy leaving my body in one big shudder after reading that.
Nobody wants to believe their brain can be mushed, too.
You really don’t need anything beyond settler colonialism to explain America, you don’t gotta do shit like this. A lot of people don’t want to grapple with that though
europeans especially do not get that. I’ve seen some terrible takes on settler colonial conditions from europeans on this website
One of the worst parts of the internet is that it has completely erased the concept that some thoughts you should just keep to yourself
All across the world communist movements and even communist nations have formed even in places with various mental disabilities linked to malnutrition, antenatal/childhood disease or severely toxic environment conditions. It’s a dog shit take.
I remember one of the cumtown boys saying something like I’m a dumb piece of shit but I know healthcare is a human right. Etc
Hakim lent Yugo his skull measuring calipers.
*Taps copy of Masses Elites and Rebels *
Key points:
In the final analysis, no matter how radically anti-system the thinker appears to be, understanding society in terms of on the one hand rebels and on the other masses controlled by elites turns out to be a particular instance of a more general tendency: liberalism.
As it turns out, we can derive the entire logic of colonial history from this tiny axiom. Liberal rhetoric does not stop at an uncompromising, one-sided, and absolute defense of (a set of) individual rights. It transitions seamlessly and with equivalent passion into a defense of the family, the business enterprise, an economic class, a race, a nation, an empire. When we proudly assert that we are for the individual over the collective, we’re essentially saying that some people count as people, and some don’t. At the heart of liberalism lies dehumanization; we should not forget that slave ownership was one of the original “individual rights” that was so fiercely fought for by American revolutionaries.
yeah look, I like to make fun of the “yankoid brainpan” as much as anyone but this seems a little too far along the “i actually believe this” scale to be simply making fun
genzedong has a thread too
this take is obviously reactionary, but it does give me a question to pose.
how do we work with people who are emotionally reactionary about all of their insecurities, many of which they have connected to their ideological reactionary tendencies? this is emblematic of most online conversation, people tend to be very willing to express their most volatile and defensive thoughts online without a second thought in a way that they never would if body language was involved, but there’s a real throughline here to certain kinds of reactionary behavior in reality too. conservative boomers who have to convince themselves that trump is helping everyone. liberals who have to convince themselves that the party cannot fail it can only be failed. the ignorant who are too embarrassed at their ignorance to be willing to work on learning. i work with early high school students and their disinterest in engaging with the basic idea of learning is a very similar psychological phenomenon to all of these. a repulsion at introspection. genuinely, does anyone have tips here? i feel like a thing i’m truly missing is a good understanding of how the vanguardists actually convinced people to support them, how the soviet education system got so successful in encouraging student efforts. this particular reactionary take from yugo is also a similar common sin of
: casting their own frustration at emotionally immature and proudly unintrospective people as a form of mental illness.Do you mean specifically how to handle it online? If so, I think some of it can be simplified very easily: If you’re actually trying to agitate or something like that, you need to abandon any ideas of moralizing and treat them gently so as to discourage them from acting defensively, make an effort to understand whatever dogshit worldview they are propounding, and then patiently try to explain things to them from the standpoint of seeking to help them, which is part of what the goal should be. They are unlikely to listen to you until you have won their confidence, and if you view things in terms of what they “deserve” then you will never get anywhere.
The actual execution is very complex, but I think the organizing principle for what type of response to have is genuinely that simple most of the time.
no, i’m already with you on what it takes to genuinely dissuade someone from reactionary beliefs and insecurities. i’m more focused on getting people to be willing to engage at all. what’s required of them in what you laid out about how to help these people work through their reactionary beliefs is emotional vulnerability and honesty. i have no idea how to prompt this out of them, and it seems to me that we live in times where people feel less and less able to actually genuinely socially connect in a way that builds up more resilient and well-developed humans. and that’s online and in person. maybe my sample just sucks though, y’know?
I see . . . Yeah, if I knew about how to do that one then my life would be completely different. Exhibiting a mild degree of emotional vulnerability yourself can be helpful and so can expressing interest in what they have to say, but I don’t really have any good suggestions for you that you haven’t already though of. Sorry about that.
Ok, we’re on the same page. Fair enough purpleworm. I’m with you entirely, don’t worry about it.
