Posted on 01/19/2013 6:13:45 AM PST by AnonymousConservative
I was emailing with a reader, who has noticed the same things about Liberal debating tactics that I have. His perception was that every interaction must have a component which will shame the Liberal. It must have some aspect which the Liberal will not want anyone else to see. Of course the reason that such a component would be shameful, is due to the fact that if it became widely known, the Liberal would be out-grouped. It is the threat of being out-grouped which motivates the Liberal to abandon Liberalism. However, there may be more to it, and there may be subtleties that we may want to examine.
Of course, from an evolutionary, and r/K standpoint, shame will only carry Darwinian consequence in a K-selective environment. Only in such a resource-limited environment will one need to belong to a group. If conditions are r-selecting and resources are everywhere, then being ejected from a group will have less consequence on survival, and may even be advantageous, since you will no longer be sacrificing for the good of the group. Under r-selection, shamelessness may be highly adaptive, even as it will get you killed in a K-selective environment.
As the reader and I compared notes, and I reviewed his arguments and mine, one thing I noticed was the most effective shaming tactics may incorporate an opening with a subtle intimation that we are in a violent, K-selective environment. The opening may even personalize the threat this poses to the Liberal. This may be a necessary foundation which greatly enhances the effect of the subsequent out-grouping. If the Liberal has a slight frame in their head that they are threatened, and could get hurt, it may lead the Liberal to feel that they need a group to hide behind, if they are to survive. Because let’s face it, none of these characters would last a minute in a K-selective state of nature.
This introducing a threat frame prior to your argument may be important, given how we seem programmed to respond to these cues subconsciously. If threats are not everywhere, and violence is not seen as real, people may not be shamed as easily over their shameful behavior, since they may not care if they are part of a group or not. I think this is why a civilized, highly productive society will be afflicted with Liberalism to begin with. Under these conditions, being out-grouped may actually be advantageous evolutionarily, and they may embrace it. Just look at how shameless our society is today. I suspect if violence returns in the coming collapse, shame will as well.
This observation of the effectiveness of providing a threat frame, before making your case is supported by scientific research, as well.
John Jost noted that when examining adherence to ideological opinions,
Situational variables—including system threat and mortality salience… affect the degree to which an individual is drawn to liberal versus conservative leaders, parties, and opinions.
Much as the Great Depression precipitated rightward shifts in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Japan, and other nations, heightened perceptions of uncertainty and threat in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, generally increased the appeal of conservative leaders and opinions
Since the publication of our meta-analysis, several additional studies have demonstrated that reminders of death and terrorism increase the attractiveness of conservative leaders and opinions.
Landau et al. (2004) demonstrated that subliminal and supraliminal 9/11 and death primes led college students (a relatively liberal population) to show increased support for President Bush and his counterterrorism policies and decreased support for the liberal challenger John Kerry. These effects were replicated by Cohen et al. (2005) immediately prior to the Bush–Kerry election in 2004. A Spanish study found that in the aftermath of the Madrid terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004, survey respondents scored higher on measures of authoritarianism and prejudice and were more likely to endorse conservative values and less likely to endorse liberal values, compared with baseline levels calculated prior to the attacks (Echebarria & Ferna´ndez, 2006).
An experimental study by Jost, Fitzsimons, and Kay (2004) demonstrated that priming people with images evoking death (e.g., images of a funeral hearse, a “Dead End” street sign, and a chalk outline of a human body) led liberals and moderates as well as conservatives to more strongly endorse politically conservative opinions on issues such as taxation, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research, compared with a standard control condition in which participants were primed with images evoking pain (e.g., a dentist’s chair, a bandaged arm, and a bee sting removal). This finding is particularly important because it demonstrates that death reminders increase support for conservative opinions as well as leaders and therefore rules out charismatic leadership as an alternative explanation for the results (see Cohen et al., 2005).
A recently conducted study of the political attitudes of World Trade Center survivors provides further support for the notion that threat precipitates “conservative shift” even among people who were not initially conservative (Bonanno & Jost, in press).
Thus, if presented fearful/threatening “mortal salience stimuli,” individuals reflexively became more Conservative on subsequent questionnaires, and they do so across all measures of Conservatism. Perhaps he was presenting what should be a foundational structure of an out-grouping attack, and noting an openness to Conservatism motivated by a reflexive desire to avoid out-grouping.
It is important to note, this isn’t a threatening presentation, which the Liberal could use to out-group you as violent and unstable. It is not telling the Liberal you are going to kill him. That only works if you are able to, and about to swiftly follow-up on it (in which case, the Liberal will immediately agree with you). Rather what I am describing here is merely a wholly unemotional aside, pointing out impartially, that the environment that everyone inhabits is violent and dangerous, and the Liberal may have to face that danger, like everyone else.
Of course, I immediately see Colonel Connell when he began his brilliant out-grouping attack on Mike Wallace by saying,
“Two days later they (the reporters – Jennings and Wallace) are both walking off my hilltop and they’re 200 yards away, and they get ambushed and they’re lying there wounded. And they’re going to expect I’m going to send Marines out there to get them.”
You can’t create a perception of a K-selective environment much better than by creating an image of dead and dying Liberals, strewn across a battlefield, desperately screaming and begging for their lives, like the pathetic pansies they are – their only chance for survival being the group of K-selected Warriors they have just pissed off.
This was doubly beautiful, since it combined this violent threat frame with a Diminution of Stature attack, portraying the Liberal to the crowd as weak, helpless, and pathetic.
Is the presentation of violent imagery a necessary foundational opening to an out-grouping attack? I think the science and evidence says it is, and we will explore its use further in future posts as we continue this journey.
Step forward w R foot, R snakehand to the windpipe, step forward w L foot L hand grips their shoulder the R palm heel strikes upward on the jaw, seizes back of the head and pulls down to meet a rising R knee to the face, then R foot is placed behind you and you pivot to throw using a rolling heel trip, optional followup stomp to the base of the skull. Search them for valuables and firearms, then move on to the next liberal.
Oh, rats...I forgot all about the talking part. I keep missing that one.
>>Three rules of thumb from Evolutionary Ecology, with which to predict the future. Resources will always grow limited without mortality. This will inevitably produce mortality. And nobody wants to die.
Malthusianism when applied to humans is a bit of a fallacy because it is 1) the work of British East India Company empire builders and obsolete by 200+ years and 2) and fails to understand the process of human invention. Enviromaniacs love to quote crap data about the “carrying capacity” of the planet because they fail is the same way, tho not necessarily because they lack data on how technology absolutely insures population density, but because deep down they are a gnostic priesthood who feel that humans were built by a Luciferian demiurge and are inherently evil and unworthy of life. Read Buckminster Fuller’s “Ideas and Integrities” for some hard data on the true carrying capacity of this planet. It’s not infinite, but it’s orders of magnitude greater than the populations we have today, given large scale development and water projects such as the NAWAPA project.
“If it comes down to tooth and claw, the militias.....the 6 o:clock news won’t be friendly”
>>If there was a revolution (I think economic collapse will come first,
Yah, but will the collapse be purpose engineered to destroy participatory democracy by the fascist monopolist oligarchs?
Nazism is not dead, and I’m not talking about street level skinhead prison gangs.
>>mostly because revolution is a big step, but who knows) it won’t be with militias. Not that there won’t be yahoos grouping up and dying en masse, but that won’t last long - and those guys were never going to win anyway.
My take as well. They simply won’t be able to hide from IR and other detection.
>>What is coming will be much more horrific, and it won’t be a war waged on government. It will be faceless mostly, local, and entirely directed at the softest targets on both sides, though I suspect the r’s will have it worse.
Are you describing gang violence? Certainly an urban insurrection will be harder to root out than a rural one and there will be food and commodity shortages.
>>The media undoubtedly played a large role in Obama’s victory. But the deciding factor, as far as I can tell (and it is with limited information, but...) was the mobilization of voters. Whether we like it or not, there are a lot of lazy sacks of shit to whom liberty means nothing, and which will graze freely provided resources, and then vote Democrat - but who normally don’t.
This question needs to factor in the degree to which media is creating lazy sacks of etc. Imagine a Fox News boardroom in 9/10 of all media outlets and how different our social landscape would look and you’ll appreciate the power being exercised there.
>>Obama got them to vote, with help from the local community organizer infrastructure.
All I got during this election was a barrage of robo-calls that I found more than irritating. I think that Romney appeared too corporate, too ruling class. He was too manicured, scripted and fashion model good looking, a Ken doll. He may have had a chance if he had worn glasses and appeared professorial and had the intellectual depth of Gingrich or wore dark glasses and jammed on the sax with some hipsters. I’m not joking. This is the age of image and style. Sadly, people presume this to be the contemporary idea of a “frontier”. Read your Marshal McLuhan. His ideas ain’t chopped liver.
>>This is why I think we are seeing the AW bans now. Things are getting shaky, and they have calculated that the risk of angering the NRA is ameliorated somewhat by their new voters, and it is all perhaps more necessary now, due to financial things we are not privy to at our level.
Public opinion can shift in a heartbeat. Pearl Harbor. Gun bans have always been on their agenda, they want a peaceful enviro-trotskyite globalist takeover. It’s all about stealth in the media environment. Look at the event that precipitated all this. Reminded me of Three Mile Island happening 2 weeks after the release of “China Syndrome”. Uncanny timing. I the Sandy Hook case, conservatives need to (gasp) join with liberals in a frontal assault on monopolist pharmacological corporations who are poisoning our children and creating these “side effect” monsters who shoot up our classrooms. We can only hope that their boardrooms discover just how soft they are as a target.
“This isn’t going to play like the years before our Civil War when Republicans were being shot down in Southern streets with impunity. It’s going to play like Oklahoma city and Waco.”
>>I don’t think so. I have a blog post coming up on this. I think these things evolve, with bad strategies culled, and good strategies retained. Wacos will happen, just because the feds will want them to, but they will be theater. OKC may happen, once or twice, but it will be yahoos, and not a normal part of the strategy which will evolve organically.
But “theater” is the name of the game and their ace in the hole. We can learn from that playbook, particularly the guerilla theater one. Theater is what liberals do best and what electronic media amplifies best. We need to start sending our kids to acting school. I’m not kidding. We can’t get away with a few stunt men making it to the top in Hollywood or a few soap opera actors getting a movie gig. If we can’t take the media back, it’s game over.
>>The real war will be personal, and I suspect it will be waged with government on the sidelines, unable to be where the action is when it goes down, no matter how badly it will want to. None of us will be walking by our windows freely anymore, on either side.
You could be right to the degree that drug cadres control Northern Mexico. Maybe Mexico will do what Colombia did and turn a blind eye to tight knit bands of LEO’s “moonlighting” on weekends.
>>I suspect K’s will win, since they will deal with the constant threat of death better than r’s, and be more tolerant of it, but I could be wrong.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that our stereotypes of liberals and their radical extremists are accurate or total. Your schematic may have merit tactically, but strategically the game will go to the most flexible and adaptable as it always does. And by adaptable I don’t mean they will defect to save their hides. They will become effective fighters and then, more than likely down the road, become what they fought against, LOL. But at that point it will be K’s against K’s who used to be r’s. Don’t assume that the will to survive necessarily results in a conservative ideology, brain chemistry or no. I only have to conjure Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. You need to recompute the K-r dynamic to include the power of ideology.
>>It is a long way out, and revolution probably will not even happen, to begin with.
I’m going to tell you one thing, kid...suitcase nuke.
>>But if it does, I would not think we will have enough productivity to support welfarites, and the government will be mostly tied up dealing with what will be an epic mess there. Lotsa r-mouths crowded together, and no free food will be fun. Especially when they are crunched up against the moderately and very rich r’s, who were designed to be preyed upon.
Again, stereotypes don’t help. You need to study the organic farming movement; lots of hard working people with collective blueprints who will take over fallow farm land by force if necessary and patrol it kibbutz style.
“The strategic winners have better technology and the mental/organizational infrastructure it’s based on every time, whether raw materiel, long bows, horse mobility or A-bombs.”
>>Not always. Vietnam, even back to the Revolutionary War. A well motivated group can find ways to disable a lot of technological advantages, and exploit a lot of weaknesses.
Reread my comment, the part about mental/organizational. We fought the Viet Cong like the French and any imperial power would, with last year’s conceptual framework. We needed to frame that conflict in terms of more Montangnards led by Green Berets, Seals and Recon elements and spend the money slated for ginormous supply dumps on roads, schools and hospitals.
>>And even then, outcomes are dependent on a lot of things, especially motivation to win, and paths of least resistance which open up. Plus, we have never seen a battlefield where information was so freely available to both participants, or where the technology was so freely available to both sides.
Yes. Flexibility vs. set piece warfare, a battlefield where imagination can become a potent weapons array. This requires intensive elite commando style training. Trouble is, you don’t want to lose highly trained assets.
>>I am not certain r’s will not fold once the horrors begin. Stockholm Syndrome is a natural r-phenomenon of competition avoidance. Hell we had Liberals taking Osama’s side after 9/11, asking what we did to make him so angry. I will not be surprised, if the threat is made real to them, they will cave immediately.
You will be surprised. It will be like Operation Barbarossa, wiping up everything in sight until resistance stiffens and then counterattacks. You think the nation’s martial arts classrooms are populated by K types only. And don’t overlook the phenomena among our young such as skateboarding, snowboarding and jackass stunts. These guys are not afraid of pain or risk. You wouldn’t want to send a flying squad of KKK skinheads to a Slayer mosh pit, they’d get their heads stove before their first stage dive. neo-Nazi skins got the crap pounded out of them in NYC and Jersey in the 70’s by a couple of gangs of punks who simply weren’t intimidated and could use their fists like a streetfighter roustabout.
>>Either way, whatever happens, I know one thing for sure. Someday in the future, the most successful society in the world somewhere, will rise out of chaos to view homosexuals as aberrant, shame single moms, discourage promiscuity and sexual exposure of children, demand loyalty to in-group, pedestalize the masculine man, and punish the pansy, punish a whole range of behaviors which are not pro-social but which hurt no-one, encourage women to be homemakers, view masculine women with suspicion, and they will be wildly successful, globally. They may even hold trials at some point, the explicit purpose of which will be to find and punish r-sympathizers. And then the whole thing will gradually turn r and come down all over again.
But that echoes the modeling of a lot of Black Bloc anarcho-nihilists who are hell bent on destroying everything because anything rising from the ashes would be better than capitalism and conservative values.
“Your K environment lawfully evolves to an r environment every time.”
>>Yes, that is true, I have written about this. And then it turns back. Every time. I don’t view this as strange, because I see it in the context of ecology, where no population can expand freely forever, absent mortality. And once mortality shows up, and the only choice is flee and die, or fight and kill, K will return, because it is designed for that killing environment, which history (and Ecology) indicate is unavoidable.
See my anti-Malthusian ideas above. But also realize that flee does not necessarily equate to die. A zillion years of evolution, including brain chemistry evolution, shows that flee and live is a damned effective survival strategy, otherwise why would it still be an option? And, in a natural setting, prey animals will outnumber predators by orders of magnitude. Animals have scant concept of time. We humans “bind time” (Alfred Korzybski) and can plan for the future based on the past PLUS the flexibility of greater adaptive behavior. Our adaptability is precisely what gives us an utterly unique ecological niche, one that Mother Nature, that destroyer bitch, stares at like a deer caught in the headlights.
“What you will need is a global governance of some sort that can regulate the quantity of war vs. its absence, like the Aztec “War of the Flowers”, a matter of combat theatrics to provide sacrificial victims for the temples.”
>>Yes! I love this part, because what I see everywhere is people who understand the basics of this whole thing, on a very deep level, but don’t realize it. I mean, you coming up with that – it is as if you have been studying Evolutionary Ecology, and its relation to politics for years.
Nah, I just have an interest in Aztec lore as part of a greater interest in comparative mythology. I’ll tell you something about myself, I’m an ex hippie anarchist underground starving artist who managed to find huge quantities of free time to read and learn out of the simple joy of better understanding this miracle world we inhabit. I’ll also report that there are a surprising number of my peers who are disgusted with the intellectual corruption of the postmodern left, particularly regards the greatest scam on Earth, global warming, er, climate change.
>>Where does that come from? Question, and it is my only one : Would you be more comfortable in a world of random mortality, where a lottery sentenced individuals to death at the hands of another or a world where mortality arose organically in equal measure to the first, out of shortage and violence at the hands of others? Assume the deaths would be equally painful.
Well, I understand your point, and would favor the natural option, of course, because causality could be analyzed and incorporated into a survival strategy. But again, humans are not according to Nature’s design. We transcend Nature, like any organism transcends the womb, and, in many ways we are superior to Nature, we are divine, godlike, however you want to phrase it. This is not egomania or pride, it is a ding dong fact. Furthermore, and I’ll save my reasons for another discussion, I am convinced by the weight of scientific evidence and a unique interpretive framework, that Earth is the only planet in an infinite Universe evolving over an infinite period of time that has life on it, let alone sentient life. This implies a sense of responsibility commensurate with those cited infinite figures. If we are Gods, we better start acting like it. Or for Freeper Christians, if Christ inhabits us, we better start acting Christlike.
>>Back to your insight. There is only one way to sustain an r-environment in nature, and it is with a constant level of mortality. That is why you see it expressed most purely in rabbits, mice, etc. The Predator provides the mortality, which keeps the population constantly below the carrying capacity of the environment, which in turn, keeps resources freely available at all times. Without the mortality, things always turn K. Liberals, without ever studying ecology, know this, and I can’t imagine how.
Again, humans aren’t rats. We invent. We invent more efficient processes of food extraction and preservation. We make margarine out of tar and Tang out of corn. The lefties equate a chimpanzee using a stick to pull termites out of their nest with putting a man on the Moon or writing the Eroica Symphony. This begs discussion of what a boundary actually is. Me and a lot of mathematicians will
argue until the sun goes down up that all statistical quanta are microscopically lumpy and boundaries are what lumps are. Dolphins go eek and lefties say...look! Language! Sentience! Spirituality! Wrong Fabulous Furry Freak Brother, it’s signal not language, it is semaphore not Shakespeare, and the quantity of complexity involved turns it into a different species or category.
>>Liberals seem to want to try to do this other ways, instinctually, even though they don’t consciously know of the r/K relationship. From forced sterilizations to sterilants in drinking water, to Brave New World’s gestation bottles, and government run breeding, to over-population concerns and Malthus. China did it it’s own way with births. Stalin had his methods.
I’m not sure we can call Stalin or Mao liberals using the generally accepted meaning. Marxist is not necessarily the same as a New Age airhead. Wanting equitable working conditions and an equitable wage is not the same as wanting to have a multi-bong TV party. In fact, there are some Marxist conspiratorialists who feel that the whole hippie dippy Summer of LSD Love was engineered by the Stanford Research Institute to disperse and dilute strength from actual Marxist Comintern CPUSA agitation. Read the book “Acid Dreams” for a new take on the CIA’s role as drug pusher of LSD and any number of other books on the CIA’s role in trafficking drugs to add to their black ops budget.
>>The problem you have is, r’s are fundamentally less capable at inflicting mortality themselves. Occasionally, r’s can rise up and seize power, ala the Soviet Union, so they can get the K’s of the society to do their killing for them.
Um, I’m afraid they kinda did a lot of the killing themselves. Take a look at the Ukrainian movie “Cheka” to see where Hitler learned all he needed to know about death camps. I’m going to ruffle some feathers by saying that 90% of the Cheka death squads in the early Soviet Union were Jewish. Sad fact, but true as hell. What is also poorly recognized by liberals is that the first victims of Lenin, within days of consolidating control in Petersburg and Moscow, were all the other socialists who didn’t toe the correct bolshevik party line.
>But r’s can’t eliminate the competition in our species – it is in the DNA.
Sure we need to compete, even when the grill is covered in burgers and ribs, we do it for fun. It’s part of what we are. The trick is to sublimate it away from psychopathic behavior.
>>Gain power, ala Lenin, and K’s will realize the rules have changed, and then dive in, and what you eventually end up with is an even more aggressive and ruthless K than you had when you started – because those K’s which succeed do so in a less rule/honor governed r-model of competition.
Agreed in spades. Mob psychology is one of the ugliest things on Earth. How do we teach people to evaluate and come to conclusions by themselves? In this day and age, we certainly have enough data at our fingertips.
>>Try advocating for gays in Russia today. Try telling the government the rich need their wealth seized, and given to the poor. Try taking the side of the Chechens. It is more K than we are, and it wouldn’t be that way if Communism had never taken hold.
All true. Who knows what would have happened if Russian capitalism had marginalized their aristocracy into quaint artifacts populating a Disneyland. Communism took hold, though, precisely because the aristocracy was feudal, reactionary, sociopathic and ultimately self-destructive. A lot of conservatives think that Marxists are evil wizard hypnotists. Wrong. Marxism was the defensive reaction of huge segments of society who were treated like vermin by ruling class and capitalist class elements. Working conditions under early capitalism were just short of slavery. Who wants to be a slave? We look at union featherbedding and wage demands as excessive and they are, but then we conclude that that is how unions have always acted, like gangsters. We really need to read about working conditions in urban centers of the 1800’s. No way you’d send your kid to work in a cotton mill dawn to dusk, breathing fibers, growing up illiterate and alcoholic. Conservatives think that child labor and safety laws were written into statute by enlightened factory owners and then they’ll point to the occasional 20th century example of factory towns. This covered perhaps a ten millionth of the world labor force and relying on that statistic as a balm to conservative consciences is an act of utter delusion. The treatment of factory, farm and other workers in the industrial age is a record of contemptible abomination.
>>r’s are chaos generators. K creates great, efficient systems, r wrecks them, collapses the system through delusional attempts to make it better, then K-selection returns, and r’s then either adapt by becoming K out of necessity (most) or die back, resulting in a more K-environment. As a mechanist, I find this very cool. Jiggle it one way more than it should go, and it will jiggle itself back the other way, more than it would have gone otherwise.
A self-regulating feedback system to be sure. But you had better be certain of your variables. You are using a lot of stereotypes in that equation. For example, that equation absolutely does not take into account invisible hand manipulations, the setting of one side against the other purposefully by macchiavelian manipulators. How do you think the Vatican has remained in power for millennia?
No standing army, sacked only occasionally, serious freaking players, yet I’m not certain what hours of daily prayer and contemplation do for the amygdala.
>>You may not like my work, but it is sound, and will eventually be how politics is universally viewed - it is just too interesting to go away.
It IS interesting, no question, and needs to be added to the mix. The quest of humanity is to discover what we are across all the disciplines. The trick is to not be trapped into an interpretive frame of reference that can be blind sided. Also, your schematic needs to consider the differences between tactical and strategic considerations. And then, the cherry on top, what exactly is our potential? Can we escape these biological feedback loops? We’ve certainly transcended many limitations that Nature imposes on the animal kingdom. How many others are there to tackle with both K and r sensibilities in our holsters? The point I keep trying to make is that the r end of the spectrum is not stupid, they have hegemony. If you want to wait around for your formula to kick in, go for it. Me, I’d rather put some of my r-contemplation derived insights into a K inspired attack on stupidity. I don’t see ANY precondition of Nature as limiting. We have a Universe to discover and a planet to protect from the cosmic pinball game. I think we should all go K consciousness against the tyrant bitch Nature, THAT’S the enemy.
>>It will prove predictive, if looking back is any measure.
It certainly is and the K-r schematic is workable to a degree and in certain circumstances. But there are variables that are not being dealt with because of the stereotypical categorizations I see. I’m not saying that the antics of liberals deserve a pass, or that objectivity requires a dispassionate observation. It’s hard to be dispassionate even in the best of times. And conservatives engage in antics also, tho not as much as in past times since we are now the underdog.
>>And I have no doubt it will have dramatic effect on the nature of our battles in the future. Knock it all you like, but all you are doing is ignoring what I think will be the greatest advance in the Political Sciences since the American Constitution. And I have a feeling your IQ is high enough that you see that.
I try to keep my IQ out of the dogpile. It’s just that I see the chemistry happening a bit differently. I tend to view both fight/flight as at the same end of the spectrum rather than at opposite ends. They are both adrenaline fueled and they both require a narrow cone of attention laid upon the threat factor. They are both extremely limiting spatially, but worse, obliterate any sense of future time or ideal, they obliterate or bypass mind and substitute nothing more than reaction, automatic reflex arc response. It is not how you build civilizations, it is not how you create beauty, it is not how you become holy or divine or made in God’s image. That simple.
But I’m really enjoying this exchange and would hope it could continue. I’ve been thinking that Free Republic might be doing itself a favor if we could come up with a forum dedicated to the philosophical end of things, where principles and their causes and results are discussed openly in the intellectual spirit of our founding fathers. They were very bright people who were sons and daughters of the exiled anti-monarchy European intelligentsia of the era. Literacy in the Colonies was near 90%, while in England and Europe, about 30%. They were from immigrant stock who were political outcasts from an oppressive feudal oligarchical system who knew the power of a free mind to create power over Nature, cynicism, ignorance, superstition, cruelty and narcisism. I simply want to live a life and do things that would make them proud. So many have died so I can type this, and I feel their presence in my profounder moments. What would it take to create a special interest sub-blog here dedicated to the amplification of mind and curiosity?
>Conservatives sniffing it curiously but unsure what to make of it. Liberals freaking out and calling it pseudoscience.
I have seen the same phenomenon on both sides. I don’t know why some Conservatives don’t immediately see it like Liberals do. It is like they don’t see the mechanism. Maybe it is being presented wrong. Or maybe Conservatives, being group animals, need it to have social proof, in the form of fellow Conservatives validating it. Or, being hyper-logical, they need enormous amounts of data and lots of time to think, to render well considered conclusions?
Weirder still because Libs see it immediately, and freak. They wouldn’t freak, if they thought it was bogus. They see something in it which makes them agree, and it poses a threat. Something about their worldview, resonates with the theory.
>Interestingly, when I told him, ‘Look you’re the test subject here, bunny rabbit. I’m curious to see if this Revlon mascara causes irritation and death, not if you like the color, dig?”, that both got a laugh and shut them up.
Interesting. A subtle presentation of violent stimuli, and perfectly done. They are the bunny rabbit, and you are just toying with them to see if they die.
>I’ll continue testing, but my initial impression is that there’s a very steep grade between initial comprehension and acceptance. I think people get the basic idea very quickly, but there needs to be a good intermediate rung to grasp next.
That may have to come from someone else. There is a cost to being in as deep as I am. I have seen this for so long, I no longer remember what it was like to have not seen it, or what it would have taken to convince me, and take me from prone to running.
>Libs wanted to tear it down. Conservatives kind of liked it but weren’t sold.
This is puzzling. Why does it hit people like you so hard? What is different about how you view the world, that it hits you between the eyes. What is different about how other Conservatives, who don’t see it innately, view the world, that they think it may be right, but doesn’t really relate to the debate, or have any utility?
>It’s going to be a new language to most people, so you a good set of layman definitions and talking points will be invaluable.
Excellent point. I will think about that for a day, and then begin putting something together.
Kinda funny you took the name Steel Wolf. Did you by any chance spend time around a real wolf/wolves?
>>Malthusianism …..
Our carrying capacity is not the carrying capacity of the earth. It is the carrying capacity of our productivity. The resources in our modern world are not a patch of blackberries we happen upon, or a heard of deer we cull. It is Big Agro, whose long distance economic interactions are fueled by currency and credit. Crash the economy, destroy the confidence in the currency, and you will see the inner cites go Malthus quite quickly, if I am seeing things right. A lot of those people aren’t all that able to locate and source theri own food, and they will have the additional problem of people without food just taking any which is brought in.
>>Yah, but will the collapse be purpose engineered to destroy participatory democracy by the fascist monopolist oligarchs?
No, I don’t think so. The people in power will fight it off tooth and nail until it is too late. Once it is underway, power will seek power, but I think the mechanisms of control won’t show up to work without the money to pay them.
>>What is coming will be much more horrific,
>Are you describing gang violence?
No. Individual rs and Ks will get so pissed off at each other they will begin a DC Sniper type war to eradicate each other at the grassroots level. You will have to wait for the blog post, to enjoy the ride.
>>This question needs to factor in the degree to which media is creating lazy sacks of etc. Imagine a Fox News boardroom in 9/10 of all media outlets and how different our social landscape would look and you’ll appreciate the power being exercised there.
I think the lazy sacks are coming from dopamine excess, due to a too comfortable existence. I suspect it is epigenetic as much as immediate receptor transcription downregulation.
>>Wacos will happen, just because the feds will want them to, but they will be theater. OKC may happen, once or twice, but it will be yahoos, and not a normal part of the strategy which will evolve organically.
>But “theater” is the name of the game and their ace in the hole....If we can’t take the media back, it’s game over.
If it did come to revolutionary war, and I am right about how it would be waged, our ace in the hole is we can’t be controlled by dead bodies. If we have a revolutionary war level of participation (3%), in theory every individual who voted for Obama could be dead in 7 days. And I mean all the tools are there for it, and all you would need are single shot rifles. It wouldn’t happen that way, because the method of operation wouldn’t work as well in cities, which is where Libs would flee to, but just depopulating most libs outside of a major city would be huge, and would change their psychology immensely. No way Law Enforcement would be able to stop it, or even process all the investigations. The battle would be too decentralized, and opportunistic.
>>I suspect K’s will win, since they will deal with the constant threat of death better than r’s, and be more tolerant of it, but I could be wrong.
>Don’t make the mistake of assuming that our stereotypes of liberals and their radical extremists are accurate or total. Your schematic may have merit tactically, but strategically the game will go to the most flexible and adaptable as it always does. And by adaptable I don’t mean they will defect to save their hides. They will become effective fighters and then, more than likely down the road, become what they fought against, LOL.
I know Liberals, and am friends with some, and loyal to a few, though their ideology makes me feel like a guy who is friends with a child molester. They will not function well under the kind of constant threat of death I see, which does not allow for either side to really fight back. Neither side will set a date, and meet somewhere. You will set down your gun to make some tea, and catch one in the head through a window, and I will go for groceries, and not make it to my car from my front door. I will accept that world, and adapt, and maybe even find it more interesting - who knows. The libs I know, who are roughly average libs psychologically, will not do well under that, and will agree to anything to make it stop. My guess is their side would run out of radicals playing that game before we do.
>>Either way, whatever happens, I know one thing for sure. Someday in the future......
>But that echoes the modeling of a lot of Black Bloc anarcho-nihilists who are hell bent on destroying everything because anything rising from the ashes would be better than capitalism and conservative values.
I’m not advocating, just pointing out what I believe is a cycle of nature. Things go up, come down, and go back up. I think r/K is the hidden hand.
>>….humans are not according to Nature’s design. We transcend Nature, like any organism transcends the womb, and, in many ways we are superior to Nature, we are divine, godlike, however you want to phrase it.
No. People think this during Holocenes, but at the end of the day, we have animal urges we can’t control, and nature doesn’t like unlimited, free reproduction. The Medieval Warming Period was the last time I saw like this, and I expect we may see similar effects soon, within decades.
>>The point I keep trying to make is that the r end of the spectrum is not stupid, they have hegemony.
Suppose for a minute, their hegemony occurs not because the individuals at the top are smart, but because a majority of the populace perceives an environmental variable, and their own psychology shifted beneath them, absent any conscious decision making. Suddenly, many more are open to the r’s. Suppose moreover, it can shift back, not by logic, or the strategy at the top, but just by the environemnt changing. Think anyone will support tax increases for welfare if they are having trouble paying for their children’s food?
>>K-r schematic is workable to a degree and in certain circumstances. But there are variables that are not being dealt with because of the stereotypical categorizations I see.
r/K stereotypes too. Not everything is pure r or pure K. But as you zoom out and look at popualtions, you get two strategies things coalesce around, just like how as you zoom out on humans, you get two ideologies. They are the same.
>> It is not how you build civilizations, it is not how you create beauty, it is not how you become holy or divine or made in God’s image. That simple.
I suspect you will find that when these things have happened to the greatest degree, it was immediately following a great tumult which culled the population. From the Renaissance, to the young America, a lot of the poorer, weaker, and less able, needed to be taken by Darwin immediately before, or they would have fucked it all up. Almost like this thing called K-selection in biology.
I think in fifty years or so we will begin another such period.
>>What would it take to create a special interest sub-blog here dedicated to the amplification of mind and curiosity?
I do not know, you’d have to ping the Admin Moderator and ask.
Conservatives are traditionalists. They tend to favor concepts that are common sense and traditionally proven to be true over time without often considering the deeper workings of why they are true. Social proofing from a few trusted sources would probably be the single most important mechanism for allowing this theory to gain widespread acceptance.
There are some good grassroots level blogs like Ace of Spades (and his legendarily ravenous commenter community) that would probably take interest in this topic were you to submit a guest blogger post. I would start around that level. Conservatives need this injected into the bloodstream before they'll absorb it. I think the serum is effective, you just need to find the right gauge of needle to deliver it.
The conservatives who will likely get it first are libertarians, because, to paraphrase Aristotle, we can entertain ideas, even paradigm shifting ones, without accepting them. I got it right away, and with grim clarity I saw everything from LBJ's Great Society to the Roman concept of panem et circenses fall into order. It explains why liberals are pro-abortion. It explains why blacks are 95% Democrat. It explains why highly educated people tend to be liberal. Not just superficially, either, but in a way that might be able to prove predictive and actionable.
Once you really see it, you can't un-see it.
Interestingly, once liberals see it and get it, they hate it. Not dislike or dismiss, but outright anger. The few that took a second to read past the title and review the article understood it immediately and reacted like I was waving a branding iron at them.
It's not terribly relevant whether liberals like the idea or not; only if it works on them. There are plenty of highly effective sales, advertising, social engineering and manipulation techniques that people don't like conceptually. Besides, their intense and negative reaction may have some value as a selling point to conservatives. ;-)
You could say I was raised by them. My family has been in million dollar real estate sales since back when that was still a lot of money. We've also been into many kinds of engineering, from civil to aerospace. I was definitely raised to appreciate the concept of competition, self-improvement and seeking professional excellence.
I took a dozen or so year break to get into intelligence collection and Special Operations support, and spent the last five of those living in Iraq and Afghanistan as a contractor teaching classified tracking systems to ground troops.
I always tend to live among wolves or seek them out.
The name itself derives from what you might call my Indian name, Gray Wolf. As a child, I thought the greatest thing in the world was to be smart and accomplished enough to have wisdom that others would someday need. 'Steel' made more sense than 'gray' at that stage of my life, and it was color compatible.
At this stage, however, I want to put some of that wisdom, such as it is, to use. I'm retired from the overseas fight, but there's a greater cultural fight I feel I could contribute to. I work pretty much every day and don't have enough time to do more than hit and run fights with online liberals, but I have toyed with the idea of writing a book or starting a website for hand to hand online debate tactics. I spend a lot of time at that (waiting on clients and such) and see a lot of room for improvement for conservatives there. This r/K framework may provide the template for our side to devise an entire arsenal of weapons and tactics. It seems like that's where we get pulverized, in the ground war, and that's where reinforcements are needed.
Sitting back on a liberal, you will also be beaten.
bttt
Props on the history.
If I can help, drop me a line at (ac (at) anonymousconservative.com). I also know a lot about book publishing, if you go that route, and I am happy to help fellow Conservative Wolves. You’d be surprised at how complex that whole publishing area can be, decision-wise, and the way the machine which runs it works. There is a lot to know. If you want to go the book route, drop me a line early, to go over it - some of the info may change how you go about it.
Any liberal worth his salt will immediately turn this line of thinking around to point out that it is conservatives who feel fearful and in danger. For example, take a look at any thread on this site and you will see statements, beliefs and attitudes generated out of fear.
Political views are based on value systems. Many value systems transcend logic, including many religious value systems held by conservatives. Again, look at the posts on this site ( or any other political discussion board) and you will see that very few arguments offered by liberals or conservatives are based strictly on logic.
This also accounts for the wild success of the advertising industry, which would would be completely ineffective if people in general acted strictly according to logic.
The average person in the street, liberal or conservative, has never taken a debate or rhetoric class, and does not think in terms of logical arguments.
The tactics described in this post seem to have more feel good appeal than usefulness in the real world. They may sometimes succeed in spooking the occasional ignorant coffee shop liberal, but they are powerless to advance conservatism in a society where it is the conservatives who are predominantly fearful at the present time.
They could try to say that.
Which I would just say explains why all the fearless Liberals gravitate to military service, while all the fearful Conservatives want everbody disarmed and helpless, like them, so nobody can fight.
The thing is, I am about truth. For better or worse, Conservatives perceive threat better than Liberals. It is why we want Al Qaida dead, while Liberals want to coexist, and ask what we did to make them angry. It also a trait which is better suited to a violent K-selected world where you need to see threats to deal with them. Only in an r-selected world of free resource availability can you let your threat detection apparatus atrophy, and become stupid.
“Political views are based on value systems. Many value systems transcend logic,”
Yes, that is my point. If you look to how the literature studying ideology characterizes all of its traits, and then look to how the same literature characterizes r/K Selection Theory, you will see they are the same, indicating r/K is just how humans have incorporated r/K into their ideas about governance. r/K has driven these value systems.
“The tactics described in this post seem to have more feel good appeal than usefulness in the real world. “
My blog is run because I spent a lot of time around a Narcissist in childhood, and became quite adroit at manipulating his psychology. When I say that, understand I literally gave him symptoms of a stroke on several occaisions (and other Freepers have since freepmailed me saying they have done the same thing to their Liberal acquaintances - it was not unique). Now, I offer what I learned at my site, and show how the scientific literature describes these very things I discvered myself.
Here, the study I quote specifically says this technique works. Jost may be Liberal but his methodologies are sound, and furthermore, my experience tells me this will work.
The thing with Liberals is that they are Liberal because of a mental vulnerability, relating to threat perception. Adherence to Liberalism, regardless of facts or logic, is actually an attempt to shield the vulnerability. If you understand it, you can make them mentally uncomfortable by exploiting the vulnerability. It is why Liberals never pay attention to logic, and why Conservative logical arguments always fail to sway the Liberal. They are protecting something wholly different.
The biggest key to understanding others, is to realize that picturing how you would respond in their shoes is the least effective way to predict their behavior, or understand their mind. The rapist doesn’t rape because he is horny. The serial killer doesn’t kill because it is a fun diversion from a otherwise enjoyable life. People think differently - so much so, that how you would respond, or what will motivate you may be meaningless in understanding them.
You kind of can’t understand that, though, until you run into a real defective, and spend enough time with them to understand what was happening behind the mask while you knew them. Suddenly, one day, you see two realities, side by side. The reality your mind made up at the time (and which you believe you experienced), composed of your psychology driving their curious behaviors, and a parallel history (the real reality), in which they were motivated by forces you couldn’t have imagined, and would never have believed at the time.
Without that, a lot of what I write, though correct, may not be comprehensible.
Cheers!
You should have the mod remove one of your posts. Looks like you posted in an emotional state and repeatedly hit the key. Chill.
Good post.
Some examples please.
Bfl
Here’s my example.
Posting on a Site about Gun Control.
A Liberal boasts that all Guns should be confiscated.
I reply, come and get mine, I assume you will be on Point when you break down my Door.
No response from the Liberal, I assume it’s because he didn’t understand what I meant by “on Point”.
You will never change a Liberal’s mind about anything so ridicule the only thing you can do.
My favorite response to the more aggressive Liberals is telling them that they would be absolutely Giddy loading Conservatives like me onto Cattle Cars destined for the Concentration Camps if they could get away with it.
They know it’s true, but they act offended.
I then remind them of a certain Democrat President that did the exact same thing to American Citizens of Japanese Descent during WWII. Amazingly, some of them had no idea that really happened.
If they really don’t like hearing Facts, they just call you a Bigot or a Tea Bagger and move on.
I have read through many of the posts and am familiar with the r/K proposition, though I don’t find it as compelling when applied to humanity. I have worked with numerous victims and survivors and have a signicifantly different view of the agmydala and it’s not nearly as postitive, but that’s another topic.
My question is simple, if put into proper context with those gods of logic, Monty Python:
What happens when the rabbits have guns?
I probably should have dropped the cultural reference, but I think it actually reveals a perceptual bias that overshadows an empirical fact: rabbits are more likely to commit genocide than wolves.
Every time Eddie Eagle comes up, I remember my boys coming home after seeing the program. They were so young that their version was “Stop. Don’t touch. Go tell an areadult.”
Took me a long time to figure out what an areadult (area-adult) was. Yes, I agree that the area statement was superfluous. LOL
Does this mean I can punch ‘em in the face when they say something stupid?
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