applegrove
applegrove's JournalHere is the next paragraph:
It is the propensity for narratives that makes people fall for a compelling narrative.
"SNIP.....
Bernstein’s book, a survey of financial and religious manias, is inspired by Charles Mackay’s 1841 work, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Mackay saw crowd dynamics as central to phenomena as disparate as the South Sea Bubble, the Crusades, witch hunts, and alchemy. Bernstein uses the lessons of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to elucidate some of Mackay’s observations, and argues that our propensity to go nuts en masse is determined in part by a hardwired weakness for stories. “Humans understand the world through narratives,” he writes. “However much we flatter ourselves about our individual rationality, a good story, no matter how analytically deficient, lingers in the mind, resonates emotionally, and persuades more than the most dispositive facts or data.”
......SNIP"
That is why police use data like physical geography to tell who is doing the stalking. Data.
What Makes A Cult A Cult? The newyorker (tweet to link you can access with your email).
https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1412193006627741696"SNIP.......
Books
July 12 & 19, 2021 Issue
What Makes a Cult a Cult?
The line between delusion and what the rest of us believe may be blurrier than we think.
By Zoë Heller
July 5, 2021
"SNIP.......
If we accept that cult members have some degree of volition, the job of distinguishing cults from other belief-based organizations becomes a good deal more difficult. We may recoil from Keith Raniere’s brand of malevolent claptrap, but, if he hadn’t physically abused followers and committed crimes, would we be able to explain why NXIVM is inherently more coercive or exploitative than any of the “high demand” religions we tolerate? For this reason, many scholars choose to avoid the term “cult” altogether. Raniere may have set himself up as an unerring source of wisdom and sought to shut his minions off from outside influence, but apparently so did Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of Luke records him saying, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Religion, as the old joke has it, is just “a cult plus time.”
Acknowledging that joining a cult requires an element of voluntary self-surrender also obliges us to consider whether the very relinquishment of control isn’t a significant part of the appeal. In HBO’s NXIVM documentary, “The Vow,” a seemingly sadder and wiser former member says, “Nobody joins a cult. Nobody. They join a good thing, and then they realize they were fucked.” The force of this statement is somewhat undermined when you discover that the man speaking is a veteran not only of NXIVM but also of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, a group in the Pacific Northwest led by a woman who claims to channel the wisdom of a “Lemurian warrior” from thirty-five thousand years ago. To join one cult may be considered a misfortune; to join two looks like a predilection for the cult experience.
“Not passive victims, they themselves actively sought to be controlled,” Haruki Murakami wrote of the members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult whose sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway, in 1995, killed thirteen people. In his book “Underground” (1997), Murakami describes most Aum members as having “deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood” in the “spiritual bank” of the cult’s leader, Shoko Asahara. Submitting to a higher authority—to someone else’s account of reality—was, he claims, their aim. Robert Lifton suggests that people with certain kinds of personal history are more likely to experience such a longing: those with “an early sense of confusion and dislocation,” or, at the opposite extreme, “an early experience of unusually intense family milieu control.” But he stresses that the capacity for totalist submission lurks in all of us and is probably rooted in childhood, the prolonged period of dependence during which we have no choice but to attribute to our parents “an exaggerated omnipotence.” (This might help to explain why so many cult leaders choose to style themselves as the fathers or mothers of their cult “families.”)
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Perhaps one way to attack our intellectual hubris on this matter is to remind ourselves that we all hold some beliefs for which there is no compelling evidence. The convictions that Jesus was the son of God and that “everything happens for a reason” are older and more widespread than the belief in Amy Carlson’s privileged access to the fifth dimension, but neither is, ultimately, more rational. In recent decades, scholars have grown increasingly adamant that none of our beliefs, rational or otherwise, have much to do with logical reasoning. “People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world,” William J. Bernstein writes, in “The Delusions of Crowds” (Atlantic Monthly). Instead, they “rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.”
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Dems actually want to stop illegal migration from desperate people in
these countries. Republicans want the wedge issue of illegal immigration to thrive so they can kabuki theatre the border.
Authorities are not speculating. I should not be either but i heard someone
talk about tb in a historical report (they have done a walking tour of the national cemetery in ottawa that highlights those public employees who were either good or bad to the indigenous as part of the Truth and Reconcilliation process and someone who was considered an advocate complained about TB and how dangerous residential schools were in that regard back at the start of the 20th Century). That is all i know.
Here is an outake from the CBC story about the Beechwood Cemetery;
"There lay Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, who, in a 1907 report to his bosses at the Department of Indian Affairs, warned of atrocious health conditions at residential schools in Western Canada, where the mortality rate among the Indigenous children was shockingly high, largely due to tuberculosis."
Here is the link:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/beechwood-cemetery-ottawa-reconciling-history-tour-1.6060442
Mitch McConnell says it's 'highly unlikely' he'd let Joe Biden fill a Supreme Court seat in 2024 ...
Mitch McConnell says it's 'highly unlikely' he'd let Joe Biden fill a Supreme Court seat in 2024 if Republicans win back control of the Senate
Grace Panetta at Business Insider
4 hours ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/mcconnell-biden-block-supreme-court-seat-in-2024-2021-6?utm_source=reddit.com
"SNIP.....
McConnell confirmed he would hold open a hypothetical Supreme Court vacancy in 2024 or 2023.
The minority leader said it would be "highly unlikely" he would allow Biden to fill a vacancy.
McConnell blocked Obama's Supreme Court nominee from getting a hearing in 2016.
.....SNIP"
Applegrove: This is a dominance display. Biden needs to let the air out of McConnell. Dominace displays like this are directed at females (female voters). Women gravitate towards aggressive men during hard times and lower middle class or working class suburban women are having a tough time and they may break towards republicans or not vote in 2022.
"SNIP....
The Suburban Women Who Will Decide the Midterms
https://politicalwire.com/2021/06/14/the-suburban-women-who-will-decide-the-midterms/
June 14, 2021 at 11:55 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 39 Comments
Greg Sargent: “Democratic strategists are taking steps now to set the terms of the debate in the midterms. To this end, they say they’ve homed in on a key demographic: suburban women who support President Biden but are at risk of either backing Republicans in 2022 or staying at home.”
“This demographic is somewhat distinct from the relatively affluent, educated White suburbanite demographic that is often discussed as central to the suburban shift to Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.”
“Instead, this group is a subset of suburban women who are more likely to be non-college-educated and somewhat less affluent, and tend to be drawn from the working class or lower-middle class, or the ranks of small business owners.”
.....SNIP"
Maybe Trump saying he will be back in power in August is laying down
a false narative to explain why he is being indicted by liberal New York prosecutors as in "they are out to get me to stop me from resuming power".
This is why the GOP wants only a skinny infrastructure plan. They don't
want rural areas to have a good experience with government helping rural lives and livelyhoods.
Getting bogged down will just advertise the excellent Biden Build Back Better
policies and stick it out there for the public to digest. Will be good for americans to live it, see it and know it.
They can create an environment of authoritarian harassment and plant the seeds
of fielty in people who are old and feeble and afraid to vote. Populist Doug Ford in Ontario was really unpopular as a conservative premier with draconian governing. Then covid arrived and he copied Trudeau in how he protected people. His numbers went up. Recently he has gone authoritarian and anti-compassion with no law for paid leave for necessary workers who often live in multi generational homes and end up working when they are sick because they can't afford not to. Ford also was going to allow and get the police to pull over any car they saw on the street. Police forces around the province told him to **** off and he cancelled the edict. His numbers are now tanking again.
The point in these authoritarian populists will never waste an opportunity to break people's spirits by making them afraid of the authoritarian's "power" so people will become more compliant be it to play the police off the people or to sour the very thought of voting in the US case today. The police in Ontario were having none of it. We have the benefit of being many steps removed from what is happening in the USA so we kept our perspective. That is what americans should do with this meant-to-be-very-scary voter baiting ****.
The other thing vote baiting does is lock the aggressors into being for authoritarianism because they sold their souls and there would maybe be no turning back and simply saying or deciding "hey i need good cheap childcare so my wife can work and we can save for a home in the burbs" that Biden is trying to appeal to.
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