5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Defund the police?
“Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope.”
– Stephen King
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When people talk about Trumpism being a Death Cult, it’s not hyperbole. People wrap their identities up it it, and that isn’t just intentional on the part of the cult leaders, it is by design. 45 just does it intuitively as part of his grifter shtick. It’s his GOP enablers who put the full social engineering whammy on credible marks who get so deep in it they can’t see their way out.
That’s how they get people to kill for them. And that same toxicity that makes people visualize killing “enemies” for dear leader that also harms them so deeply that they can’t visualize their own way out once it all comes crashing down.
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Ouch.* Perhaps completely accurate in this case, but just, ouch. People dealing with depression, for whatever cause, are far likelier to succeed at suicide if they have access to firearms. To me this is a bit less of a “this poor, whiny man-baby killed himself when he didn’t get his way” (which is true) and more another example of how owning guns is just a very bad idea for almost everyone. (Making an exception for the “30 - 50 wild boars” guy and other similar).
Exactly. I’m not trying in any way to make excuses for this guy, but suicide is always a sad thing. Even if we’re glad they’re gone.
*I had a friend die of suicide by gun as a teenager, and I don’t think it would’ve happened if he’d had to find another way. Maybe he was weak-willed (my friend), I don’t know, but he wasn’t a bully.
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I don’t disagree. It’s another “All-American” aspect of this “All-American” horror show. The “ouch”, though, is a well-earned one.
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This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
Yet one more reminder from the FAQ with the relevant part bolded:
Do not make assumptions as to anyone’s mental state, race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, group affiliation or sexual orientation without corroboration.
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There was a very good pathology of MAGA in some newspaper or other recently, and one observation really resonates:
[Hannah] Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.
There’s a real iceberg of a reference (Arendt had a whole fascinating theoretical framework of loneliness and its role in totalitarian politics), but even at face value it feels deeply right as a description of Turmp myrmidons. There may be millions of them, but they’re millions of isolated individuals. None of them is part of a society of ideas, where friends reflect and listen to each other. They have only the ideas people yell at them from a screen or a dais, and they’ve gravitated to Turmp because his lies are the loudest and the most bias-affirming. They’re literally addicted to him as a way to numb their loneliness.
I guess, if one of these lonely minds suddenly realised Turmp didn’t give a shit about them and has never meant a single word he’s ever said, that’s a hard blow. Especially if you’ve never experienced a setback before. But if you hit that point, surely it doesn’t take much imagination to think “oh wait – in light of this new info – maybe all those people who were so upset by me ‘owning’ them were actually trying to get through to me as a human being the whole time?”
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Liebengood Sr. seems to have died in 2005. He was certainly a lobbyist and was connected with Manafort. Any half-competent investigator would be looking at the family link.
But Liebengood Sr didn’t organize the event, unless he did it by Ouija Board.
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I’m surprised that QAnon et al haven’t yet (as far as I know) spun a conspiracy theory around the suicide.
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I would bet big money they have. I would not, however, venture down that rabbit hole to find proof.
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I think the same thing might be said about QAnon.
I remember reading an article about the popularity of “reset button” scifi shows. They basically have a story each episode, and the next episode starts off from default state, with very little changes to that state over the course of the whole series, or at least very slowly changing. Shows like Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, Firefly, basically anything by Josh Whedon, etc.
Anyway, the point was that they were insanely popular because they presented the viewer with social surrogacy. They gave you time each day with people you knew, safely facing dangers and living their lives. I imagine that soap operas function in the same way.
I think QAnon and similar conspiracy communities are very similar. It’s like “Cheers” for these people. When we see their pics posted, we always get their avatar handles. They get a lot of self-actualization from these interactions, and dwell in them a considerable amount of time.
So, I think we can expect a horror show now that their “Firefly” has been cancelled. If scifi fans are vehement in their anger at losing their social surrogates, and I certainly am, can you imagine how these people will be, long term?
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I gather you haven’t watched Dollhouse? The whole point of the show was that the reset button doesn’t work
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No, I haven’t, but none of the shows I mention were really like that. It’s a misnomer. Every character in all those shows progressed, changed. The changes were slow, but I think it contrasts the clumsy way TV is made now, crushing entire books into a few episodes.
That was the superiority of them, I think. History. It wasn’t like reading the synopsis of a big story, you were there, 26 episodes per season for many of them, watching the slow, realistic character progression of the story’s history. It’s hard to get the same social surrogacy from 8 or 10 or 12 poorly paced episodes.
Game of Thrones, The Expanse, most new shows are enjoyable, but they are basically the Cliff’s Notes of the real stories.
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Since the mathematical problem known as “squaring the circle” has been proved impossible, I find your meaning unclear.
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There’s no question that this suicide will become another piece of conspiracy grist.
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Even successful participants haven often ended up getting whacked by the people they helped into power, who might not want anyone around who knows where the bodies are buried. The conveyor belt bringing victims to the very top of the Soviet NKVD to be executed by their successors, and the Nazis’ Night of the Long Knives, are a couple of good examples.
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In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent video, these are the “broken men” of his father’s generation that he was talking about
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I’d be ok with this being the first administration with a Director of Deprogramming…
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Or maybe including “Cult Awareness” information in schools fairly early.
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