Way back in the 90s, I was talking to a Swiss friend about that “issued a gun” business. People who had completed their compulsory military service (six months) were issued a rifle and ammunition to take home. The ammunition was issued in a locked box, and every round was accounted for. There was an annual inspection in which you had to present your ammunition box. If a single round was missing, you had committed a gun crime, and you were in some seriously deep doo doo.
I understand they’ve tightened up the rules and distribution since then.
“It’s a cult” summarizes it pretty well, I think. Why do people get sucked in? Because for a certain portion of the population, being involved in this type of thing makes them feel good. As in, their reptilian brains have literally been hijacked, and they have become addicted to the stimming they get from this weaponized aggression.
We want to think that all cultists are idiots, but that’s not true, and your Germany example is apt. Very large percentages of entire populations can get sucked into very dark shit, and quickly. They can become radicalized and radically altered over the course of a few years, and most of these Trumpers have been getting that high for several years now, so they are hooked something bad.
The only way to attack it is a massive societal deprogramming effort, which is an entirely different thing than some kind of “educational reform” bullshit – in other words, I agree with your main point entirely. And yes, we need beaucoup educational reforms, but that doesn’t really solve the problem of fiercely horrible black magicians who are very good at manipulating the masses and their reptilian brains via mass media.
Pile on the state-level Russian intelligence operations, etc. that magnify this through social media by orders of magnitude, and the inherent problems of FB and social media echo chambers/feedback loops?
I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few months just how much our world and these kind of group tendencies were touched on in the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series. QAnon really does feel like The Laughing Man thing, in real life.
A solid liberal arts education, on the other hand! I say this only barely-snarkily, as I am quite happy with my liberal arts BA from a small liberal arts school, and feel that it actually does at least attempt to teach a person to develop critical thinking skills across a variety of areas of life.
One might opt for going say, underground, or promoting a sideline as an embedded ventilation specialist there. In court, maybe he can hire a Pat That Cat to provide expert witness (and thus avoid the Don’t F=== With Cats Sentence of 6 consecutive lives.)
Agreed: the level of cringe-worthy hollow bravado in that crowd suggests that maybe 1 in 10 would stick around at the kind of job where people shoot back.
ETA: Still cause for concern, of course. Maybe more so: more power than they can handle, and all that.
I’m sure that’s true of many of them, but there were active duty military who were a part of that insurrection. There were former military personnel who were a part of that insurrection. There were police, firefighters, and other first responders who were a part of that insurrection. Just like it’s a mistake, as others here have pointed out, to characterize these fascists and QAnon supporters as all mouth-breathing morons, it’s just as much of a mistake to characterize all of them as cowards. Well, they are cowards in a way, of course, but I think painting them as people who would run if alone is a mistake. We have to stop underestimating this movement, or it’s going to continue to grow.
Now that I look back, I find the strangest military open-carry I ever participated in was part of my battalion, all carrying M16s or M1911s, filling an orange Braniff 747 and flying from Ontario, CA to Alexandria, LA. We even had stewardesses.
Anybody who’s ever been on a elementary school playground knows what “I was just patting him on the back” means. Hell, anyone who ever had a big brother.
They usually didn’t get away with it then, and what kind of idiot thinks he can get away with it as an adult? A geophysicist adult apparently…
