Slop.

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.

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

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?

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.

@yugopnik@hexbear.net boo

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

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

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

Hakim lent Yugo his skull measuring calipers.

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

*Taps copy of Masses Elites and Rebels *

genzedong has a thread too

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10503166

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.

Saying this shit is not only ableist but also lets reactionary Americans off the hook. Like I can understand to a degree liberal Americans and Americans who default to liberalism because they've never really thought about it, but 99% of reactionary Americans are absolutely aware that the things they espouse are EVIL and they adopt whatever justifications or avoid looking at any evidence or simply pretend to believe whatever they need in order to resolve that dissonance.

bruh

I mean, if you can already tell that folks might think you are "just ... calling them R words in a nice way," maybe sit with that for a few hours before clicking "Post."

I work in university education and critical thinking is abysmal among students. I deal with 40-60 students per class, maybe 10-15 in a class show worthwhile critical skills. Most struggle to retain key points or cannot read and follow instructions. The majority don't, or don't know how, to access library databases or archives. Most assignments are full of sources they got from Google because the library search function is an extra click away.

Students also make life hell for themselves, their peers, and teachers because of their lack of respect for their surroundings. A significant portion of students just sit there with earbuds in and text or shop online.

And this isn't even mentioning the fact that half the curriculum isn't worth learning because the professor or department are compromised by liberalism and settler imperialism.

Not sure what I'm contributing here. I think this is nothing new, it's just so intense these days that it's hard to believe it's ONLY education and ideology. It feels like there is more to the puzzle otherwise my story of emerging out of Christian fascism through criticism is just an accident and not a universal model for personal growth.

Edit: I want to add that my deepest frustration isn't even with fascism per se. It's with liberals. I am about as scared of liberals as fascists, because liberals (and anarchist types) are very self righteous about things that will only make things worse and they are so poisoned by discourse that whatever critical skills they have only function as their own ideological prison, a golden cage to be proud of. Fascists do exactly what I expect at least. Fanon was right that people can only truly become themselves through conflict against oppression and by destroying their oppressors. There is no other anvil to be molded on but imperial ideology.

Bro needs to stop drunk posting.

I am deeply disappointed seeing how many people in this thread think that the problem with this argument is invoking genetics as the biological cause of reactionary thought, instead of the actual problem that "intelligence" or cognitive capacity has nothing to do with one's ability to be class conscious or to have solidarity with their own class. Not lead, not covid, and not microplastics can turn a population towards reaction, even if it does affect their cognitive capacity. Being disabled does not make you a reactionary. Being 'smart' doesn't make a communist.

the material conditions seem to be that you are, biologically, a liberal

Ive always attributed the crank shit coming out of the US to decades and decades of cold war propaganda turning their brains to mush.

Dude has bad vibes, combines two of my biggest red flags:

millenial who smokes cigarettes man who screams on the internet

It's ridiculous and embarrassing to suggest genetics is an issue here, but ITT "years of lead paint lol" mfs when someone just slightly rephrases their frequent theses on people being brain-poisoned at a huge scale.

Granted, Yugo and those posters are wildly overstating nonsense like that because it lets them sidestep trying to actually sociologically understand what is going on, same as others try to make it about some sort of essential evil or whatever.

I wish I could remember the specifics of something I heard/learned about in college decades ago.

It was probably an "Intro to Psychology" type of course. Something about a mental development framework that mapped onto human beings as they went from "baby" to "adult" and with some criteria as to when a person had progressed through each phase. I have a vague memory that the course reading stated that a significant portion of people who are "adult aged" did not meet the qualifications of having reached the final "adult" phase outlined in that framework. I wonder if You-go-pink, having gone through higher education to get a degree in ... Marketing, right? Had similar intro to Psychology or Sociology courses describing that framework.

(Really wish I could remember what it was called to see how badly I've misremembered this)

No! A podcaster said this? I just don't believe it.