Much of this post is based on the work of the psychiatrist and trauma expert, Bassel van der Kolk. While a clear distinction exists between PTSD and trauma there is a lot of overlap as well. Because of this overlap, I do tend to use the terms interchangeably.
When I first started exploring van der Kolk’s work on trauma and PTSD, I was struck by three things:
- How traumatized MAGA Nation is by the propaganda, lies, distortions, and disinformation of the GQP.
- The role of shame and humiliation plays in traumatizing MAGA Nation.
- And, that we are all living through a very traumatizing time in our national and world history between climate change and extreme weather events, the demise of our democracy and the loss of status of the US on the world stage, and the daily conflict and stress of living with open hostility and increasing threats of physical violence.
Adequately addressing all three of these ideas is beyond the scope of this post. We will explore the signs and symptoms of trauma that van der Kolk identifies and match them to the behaviors that we see from MAGA Nation. This process should give us some insight into coping with the rank and vile base of the authoritarian GQP.
Symptoms of Trauma
As far as I can tell, van der Kolk divides the symptoms of trauma into three areas:
- Difficulties with interpersonal relationships;
- Being unable to enjoy life and be engaged in the present; and
- Feeling fundamentally flawed as a human being.
One of the common symptoms or traits of trauma is that the world is no longer trustworthy. It feels dangerous and threatening all the time. A basic principle of human psychology is that the world is constant. It doesn’t change much from day to day. Solid objects remain solid and the objects that they were. The table doesn’t morph into a couch or your coffee cup into a mouse to run around your table. If either of those things happen, seek professional help using the information listed at the end of the post.
The sun comes up every day. There’s only one sun. Shadows are cast and shift at the same rate throughout the day. Any changes that happen happen slowly like the changing of the season and are predictable from year to year. The world is amazingly predictable and cannot be so dangerous that life cannot win out over those dangers. That’s a given, and we’ve all come to depend on it.
Trauma occurs when the world is no longer safe and predictable. When severe injury happens and there is little that can be done about it or time to process the resulting emotions in. He gives the example of the 9/11 attack. Most of us were not traumatized by it because we could process the emotions resulting from it and those that survived it were able to run away and find safety and comfort. Those who were trapped in the rubble and rescued had a different experience.
Interpersonal Relationships
van der Kolk says that the presenting problem of most people seeking treatment for trauma issues is difficulty with interpersonal relationships. Many trauma survivors have one of two reactions to “triggers” in their environments: they freeze up and are emotionally unavailable and withdrawn or they blow up and are super angry and aggressive. Those around them cannot predict when these reactions will happen. The trauma survivor can’t either.
Because trauma is a somatic reaction and not a cognitive one, many survivors report that other people leave them irritated, annoyed, and angry. They can’t explain it. It just is, and they want them to go away and leave them alone.
As you can imagine, or perhaps as you’ve experienced, these reactions make relating to other human beings really really difficult.
Engaging in the Moment and Enjoying Life
Traumatized people have difficulty engaging in the moment. They have difficulty feeling engaged with or feeling pleasure in what they are doing right now. There minds are reacting to the things that have happened in the past as if they are happening right now. Their focus is on what is causing them to feel endangered and threatened and not on what they’re doing. How could anyone enjoy life or engage in the moment under those circumstances.
Because these moments of traumatic confusion are caused by sensory associations, it is difficult to realize what is setting them off. The moments of trauma cause people to focus on the sensory input that they were experiencing, so whatever they focused on, the pattern of the wall paper, the smell of the breath, the texture of the clothing, the sound of gun fire, during the initial experience will set off the re-experiencing of trauma when it is stimulated in the present.
Sometimes it is obvious; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the person is aware; sometimes they’re not.
The world comes to feel very dangerous and threatening and the only protection from it is constant vigilance. you can’t engage fully in the current moment and what you’re doing if you need to be constantly on your guard to protect yourself from harm and danger.
Eventually, though, the person begins to believe that their life was always this way: joyless and disengaged. They can’t remember what life was like before the traumatic events… if there was a life before their trauma.
A Fundamentally Flawed Human Being
Trauma and traumatic memories take over your life. It is invasive. It is sporadic. It is all encompassing. At first, the person fights it and tries to control or manage the intrusive thoughts, emotions, and images, but gradually it wears them down.
To cope with the trauma and protect themselves from it happening again, people often assume that they somehow caused it. The reasoning seems to be that if I caused this to happen, then I can prevent it from happening again if I’m careful.
Since few people talk about their traumas, often we think that we’re the only ones. If this terrible thing has only happened to me, the reasoning goes, I must be a terrible person. If the people who loved me and took care of me did this to me, then I must have deserved it.
Eventually, the person comes to believe that they deserved to feel their trauma and that they are completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Trauma and MAGA Nation
When I think of all those MAGAs out there who are punching the Walmart greeters who are reminding them to wear a mask and assaulting restaurant hosts who are asking for proof of vaccine and who are screaming vile invective at school board members as they walk to their cars after meetings, it is easy for me to think that that reaction is at least in part due to the trauma of living in mass psychosis.
First, they see #COVID19 mitigation measures or election integrity as being fundamentally threatening to them. Then, they see the only way to protect themselves as being to threaten and attack election workers, public health employees, and school board members.
No one behaves like that because they have made a conscious decision to. They’re doing it out of emotional reaction to the situation. They are living in abject fear of this terrible thing that hasn’t happened and likely won’t ever happen, happening. The election wasn’t stolen and probably won’t be stolen in the way the Big Lie describes. #COVID19 mitigation measures aren’t taking away their civil liberties.
How often do you talk to your favorite drunk rage uncle and he just can’t stop himself from ranting on about how wrong the Dems are and all of the crap that the GQP conspiracy theories have fed him. How can he enjoy time with his family or dinner if he’s consumed by the anger and agitation that these lies and this disinformation have stirred up in him? He’s not engaged in the moment. He’s not getting pleasure and enjoyment out of life, not when politics invades everything including professional sports.
While they aren’t feeling fundamentally flawed as human beings, they are feeling fundamentally different from you and me. They know the truth and it is vitally important that we all believe that exact same truth or else or else… I don’t know what bad thing will happen, do you? We’ll all get sick and die of #COVID19 like the unvaccinated are now?
It seems clear to me that the process of inducing mass psychosis has traumatized the rank and vile of MAGA Nation.
Finding Help
If you suffer from any mental health issue, or someone close to you does, and if this post worsened your condition or provoked your anxiety or stimulated your trauma, and you need professional assistance in coping with it, then try these links:
- On World Mental Health Day 2020, Ye Olde Blogge put together a list of links and phone numbers from around the world including the US, UK, India, and Canada. These are links to national established mental health organizations and were good last October when we checked them.
- The good folks behind the blog, Choosing Therapy, have a directory service to help you find a therapist near you if you are in the US.
- If you need help and are having trouble accessing services, please let me know. I’m in Cambodia, but I can do Internet searches and was once a social worker. I’ve helped several people hook up with therapists and figure out something. I’m not offering anything other than a sympathetic ear and nudge in the right direction.
The perfect gift for your favorite drunk rage uncle: A FREE lifetime subscription to Ye Olde Blogge!
Or, you could comment, like, rate, or share in his name!
Image Attribution
Original meme created by CalicoJack on Ye Olde Blogge for the post, Meme: White Raged, unlicensed and free for use.
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Categories: Abnormal Psychology
The Psy of Life 
I keep having the recurring thought, “If only Grant had surrendered to Lee, and just let them go.”
Of course it would have been devastating to slaves and could have resulted in more wars between the states, But the Northern Democratic Republic would have prospered and evolved towards greater equality, perhaps enough for the Southern Slave Nation to amend its ways in order to compete.
Just a sick fantasy in these sick times.
The fact is the human species is cursed by the reactionary third of its population having the over-active amygdala of the authoritarian personality. They are putty in the hands of authoritarian leaders who have mastered the art of manipulating and exploiting the primitive emotion center in the brain..
Our self-extinction of severe devolution will be assured by these frightened dupes and their power-mad, authoritarian, greedy leaders.
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Howdy Dave!
The problem with the Confederacy winning either in 1865 or now is that authoritarians will always need a scapegoat, which will often be a foreign enemy. Any MAGA-based nation whether in 1865 or now would use the liberal-based nation as a punching bag and when necessary a target of violence and war.
The truth is we’ll never be rid of them because they need us. We don’t need them, but they will never let us go.
Huzzah!
Jack
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As someone who survived more than one DV relationship & suffered severe trauma & still has PTSD, & who will ALWAYS be in physical pain because of the beatings I took from a man I loved passionately, I find it rather offensive to be lumped in with MAGA people. I have worked VERY HARD to overcome my traumatic past … I have been in therapy for YEARS. I am still working through my issues & I will probably always have to. & I know dozens of women JUST LIKE ME.
The MAGA idiots & trumpsters I know are nothing like that. They revel in their so-called victimhood. & usually, they’re not victims AT ALL. They’re entitled white folks with everything going for them. They think they’re victims because the neighborhood changed or they see women wearing head scarfs or they’re required to wear a mask when they go to the doctor’s office. That’s not being a victim. That’s being a jerk.
Traumatized, my ass. Get real already.
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Howdy Silver!
I can understand your resentment at the notion of having commonalities with MAGA Nation. Their trauma isn’t exactly the same as yours, but I think their behavior reveals trauma. I think that the process of inducing mass psychosis is a traumatizing and abusive process.
The work that you’ve done to recover from your trauma is the work that they’ll have to do, too, to recover from theirs. The difference is that you recognize your trauma, you recognize the ways that it affects your daily life, you recognize that it is not desirable, and you recognize that you can do something about it. Right now, MAGA Nation is celebrating their trauma. They are indulging in it. And, the Republican leadership is using it to foment widespread violence in our country.
If we are to bridge the gap, which I’m not at all sure is a good thing or something we should continue to strive for, but if we are to do it, it will be by recognizing these commonalities that we have. And, if we are to reach our friends, neighbors, and family members to help ease them out of the psychosis, it will be by using these limbic system therapy techniques.
I’m of two minds on MAGA Nation: (1) They are human and have fallen prey to our fallible cognitive tendencies that have been ruthlessly exploited by Republican leadership to destroy our democracy. As such we can have some empathy for them because but for the grace of god go I, right? We are all vulnerable to the same cognitive tendencies. Perhaps the conservative mind to some more than the liberal, but we all run afoul of these tendencies to one degree or another. And (2) we’ve made nice with these people multiple times before in our history. They have strong racist tendencies. They refuse any kind of introspection or attempt to change. And, they are willing to be openly hostile and violent to get their way. After three hundred years of it, it is abundantly clear that they are not going to change, so we should cut our losses and divide the country similar to the way the Soviet Union did when it dissolved.
I’m no sure which one is better. I’m not sure which one is achievable. But, I do know that MAGA Nation is composed of real live human beings who from my perspective seem to be in real live psychic pain. Part of me will always respond to that.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Think the white trash is traumatized now? Wait until decent Americans start shooting back. Let the whinging begin….
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And that is exactly what Republican leadership is hoping for. During the 6 January Insurrection, they were hoping for Antifa or other liberal groups to fight back a la Portland so Trump could use the Insurrection Act. Luckily, they miscalculated and we didn’t.
As with voting, the MAGA side is way more enthused about shooting and murdering people than the liberal side is. I think if we give in and do anything other than mass peaceful protest, we are playing into their hands.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Howdy Wesley!
While I appreciate any and all comments, I don’t approve just any comment for publication. Comments must have a reasoned and supported argument and cannot cast aspersions on a group or individual without some clear and supportive reasoning. We have not had methodical murder of protesters in the US. The worst of it was in Portland where there were police abuses and running street fights between left and right protesters. The comparison is just not there.
I’ve argued that it is a goal and that the base is being radicalized for this purpose, but it has yet to happen and, with any luck, may not happen.
Zionists is a loaded term, and, again, I’m not comfortable with such a broad generalization. The Israeli Defense Force and militant Israeli groups have committed atrocities against Palestinians. There is no denying that.
Unfortunately, I cannot and will not let such commentary stand. And to continue down this road will get you stricken from the Festivus card list.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I don’t see any bastards nobody wanted in that bunch; any mixed breeds, mutts that’s been on their own since they were twelve. I don’t see anyone in there that’s done everything ever asked of them and still had the world handed back to them on a shit-platter. I don’t see anyone in there that’s lost everything numerous times only to pull themselves up by their stretch-sock and keep on keepin’ on.
I see a bunch of candy-asses who’ve had the world handed to them on take your pick a crystal/silver/plastic platter and they’re poppin’ a cork over a bunch of made up bullshit poked into their heads through the combination of drugs, hypnotic propagandizing and Pavlovian conditioning. I’m tired of hearing about their anxieties, to paraphrase a favorite: their anxieties are nothing compared to mine.
We’re down to about eight years to turn this thing around or our grandkids are likely to be the last …
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Howdy Ten!
I agree about us being in the last few years. We won’t really know until it is upon and systems are breaking down in a massive way. It will be sudden when we reach the breaking point.
I also agree with your assessment of conservative and independent white voters who dance to the tune of their inner racist. Those folks have got nothing to complain about and no one to blame but themselves. Using being ate up with the dumbass as an excuse for your inexcusable behavior and voting record ended sometime in Dubya’s first term when he proved himself to be too incompetent for the job and the rest of the GQP just out to find a permanent majority. If you couldn’t figure it out by then — really with Nixon or Goldwater or Reagan — then you deserve the hardship the GQP forces us all to live under.
I’ve gone back to that Arlie Hochschild post again and again and it still holds up in explaining the reasons that white voters vote against their best interest but it still doesn’t make any sense. And, as Hochschild put it, it doesn’t help me climb their empathy wall, either. These people feel like it is their nationalist duty to live in Cancer Alley. Now, they feel like it is their nationalist duty to take their AR-15’s into public, scare up some trouble, and murder someone in self-defense.
Unfortunately, it is only going to get worse on the climate front and political violence front before it gets better.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack – The trauma of the MAGA
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People sometimes accuse me of being “liberal” but I just don’t see how that’s so, given I am and have for many years been of the conviction there is a sizable population less than sufficiently evolved that constitute and clear and present danger to my grandchildrens’ survivals, that hence need be eliminated … forthwith, we don’t have much time.
Stepping past Hochschild all of this is the pettiest of snot-nosed school-yard bullshit given the gravity of that which we face. Whither or no they vote against their own interests is moot, is of no consequence. Whither or no I vote in the best interests of society in general, the world in specific, is moot, is of no consequence. Nothing we do that isn’t concentrated on reducing the warming in the atmosphere is a waste of time. Is of no consequence.
I like that you used the word “cancer” because that’s what these animals are, a cancer; that need be treated as a cancer.
Need be eliminated. Don’t call me no damned liberal …
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Did I call you a “liberal”? I don’t think so. I have to agree that in the long run, climate change is the only issue that really matters simply because it is species existential. It is also possible that we have already passed some critical tipping point and won’t know it for some years because there is lag time in large systems with multiple feedback loops. From that point of view, any lesser political, social, economic issue needs to be evaluated on how one or another side of the question advances or impedes dealing with climate change and its consequences.
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Howdy Bob!
I’ve long thought that interacting complex system wibble and wobble as they begin the implosion process but at some point the collapse is rapid and spectacular because the entire vast structure of multiple complex systems cannot be maintained. Ten years ago, they said that the effects of climate change were fifty years out. The complexity of the system as multiple parts failed caused it to speed up exponentially. I think that trend continues. The end result is atrocities being committed by one group of human beings against others.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Quite so. Those who create computer models of climate, however sophisticated, can only test them against the past, even if that past is last year, or the last ten years. When things are happening that we have not seen before, records being broken and broken again, and so on, prediction can only ever be a best guess and is likely to be some degree wrong. In the climate/weather system there is a particular difficulty in that different parts of the system change at different rates (air temperature changes far faster than ocean temperature, for example), which makes the feedback and feedforward loops full of lag times. Ten or so years ago it was said that it wold take 500 years to melt all the glaciers. I don’t know what the assumptions about temperature and such were in that, but I haven’t seen another estimate since. I expect that even at a 1.5C temp rise, that time line is significantly shorter now.
The one word I notice is missing in all discussions of climate change mitigation and adaptation discussion is “population”. I seriously doubt that 7, 8, or 9 Billion humans could live sustainably at even the lowest levels of energy usage in the industrial countries, especially the US, even with 100% green power. The waste heat alone might be destabilizing.
What happened in Glasgow? It was negotiation about who gets to burn how much fossil fuel for how long and for way purposes. Until we settle on Carbon Zero, not Carbon “Neutral”, and go Hell For Leather, combination of New Deal, Manhattan Project, and Moon Landing, with military budget spending level (in all “developed countries”) for the Zero ASAP, we stand only slight chance of keeping it under 2C by 2100. We are already 30-50 years late.
Human groups tend to behave badly toward other groups in the face of scarcity or forced relocation, let alone both at once.
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Howdy Bob!
The climate refugee thing will further rend our country and world asunder. Once real hardship and deprivation starts and populations begin fleeing, things are going to get ugly real quick. I think the most prescient thing I’ve seen on it is Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” We’d be lucky if that’s as bad as it gets.
Huzzah!
Jack
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It is said, “The revolution will not be televised.” That will hold even more when the refugee numbers really ramp up. When a place becomes too dry, too wet, too hot (or, by turns, all three) to live, those who can flee and those who can’t die very unpleasantly.
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Howdy Bob!
I assume that the climate migration will be televised up until the point that our extremely violent response is so great that we won’t be able to stomach it. Eventually, we may lose our ability to televise much of anything shortly thereafter.
Huzzah!
Jack
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That’s probably accurate. It will be televised as long as it is needed to stoke fear of the “barbarian hordes” coming to take everything we have.
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In the extreme pessimism of my outlook, I’ve convinced myself that we’ll see a full societal collapse in La Petite Fille’s lifetime. But, that is just my curmudgeonly pessimism leaking out.
Jack
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Whatever the degree and timing of any societal collapse may be, like climate change itself, it will not be evenly distributed in location or time. The most vulnerable to the one will be those most vulnerable to the other.
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Howdy Bob!
And the people leading the charge against the most vulnerable to climate change are the same ones who’re leading the charge against the most vulnerable to the political and economic exploitation in Central America. Somethings will never change.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Exploiters exploit. Its what they do any way they can, always targeting the most vulnerable.
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Howdy Ten!
You’re no liberal if you’re advocating genocide or some kind of climate change pogrom. Yep. You got that right.
You don’t get any argument from me on the primacy of climate change and mitigating what we’re doing to cause it. The problem is out maneuvering those who belief it is in their best interest to continue business as usual and their useful idiot allies. While violent fantasies might make us feel better in the moment, like Kyle Rittenhouse just demonstrated, we cannot shoot and murder our way out of our social issue disagreements including climate change.
I remember sitting with a small group of seniors a few years ago and talking about their futures. I struck by how much harder their lives are going to be than mine was just in coping with climate change and rising authoritarianism and all the economic-technical changes. Life was going to be much harder for them largely because the powers that be are going to squeeze them for every farthing they can. For that briefest of moments from 50 to 80, the white middle class had achieved for itself a bubble of wealth and prosperity. Now, it is gone and the wealthy figure they’ll survive whatever climate depredations the pursuit of their wealth creates and the rest of us will die keeping them wealthy and protected from climate disaster.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I don’t care where they go, just as long as they go away.
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Howdy Ten!
That much I hear. Given that some nutter just drove a car through a small-town Wisconsin Christmas parade and killed five and injured forty, I feel like we should all be mindful of the effect our words can have on those reading and listening.
To me that is something that’s going to be hard. If we retain our democracy, how do we reconcile and work with MAGA Nation, again? How does that happen? Is it possible? If it isn’t possible, what then?
It’s a mystery to me.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The answer is never the answer, what’s really interesting is the mystery*
It’s a fine line: for years I’ve advocated turning it back in their faces, step off the curb into the gutter and play the game by their rules, and as such I am indeed guilty of eliminationist rhetoric. I don’t what to do about it either, but they’re gunning us down in the streets, maybe it’s time we stop turning the other cheek?
*Cite upon request, you should know this one 😉
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Howdy Ten!
“I’ll take Beatnik Poets and Philosophers for $200.00, Alex.” Who is Carlos Castaneda… or… maybe Ken Kesey… or… Alan Ginsburg?
At some point it doesn’t make sense to try and continue on with these people who are so devoted to their own inner racist that they can’t be bothered to change. These people didn’t even change when they were in enough pain to change after the Civil War. We can’t inflict enough pain on them to get them to change. Part of me is like, fuck it, let’s dissolve the union and go our separate ways.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I’m not sure about “give me three choices but the first and third don’t count …”
Referring back to the bigger picture: that all of this is moot in the face of the climate crisis, and my long-running contention that it does not recognize the boundaries of “nation/states” (just ask the Neanderthal), talk of dissolution or secession, revolutions, wars and rumors of wars are soon to be shown, rendered, moot. I alluded to and I think Bob got it that this thing has been sneaking up on us for a while, and while it’s readily apparent to those of us paying attention, it’s going to take something like a winter of no-snow in Buffalo to get everyone else paying attention. I think we are on the verge of bigger, more extreme weather events, that we’re about to actually get slapped in the face with it. (Not just) people are going to leave places they cannot stay, and imaginary lines in the sand are not going to stop them.
Whither it be Kumbaya, the whole world get’s together as a global state, save the planet and become Star Trek or not I leave to your imagination. Seven soon to be ten billion on a ball of rock that can barely sustain one. Fleas, agitating the hide of a far greater organism, is actually a pretty high compliment, compared to lice, or when you consider that only a few maggots morph and escape, the remaining consume the host, then each other, and die.
I wish it were otherwise … but I have no horse to ride
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Howdy Ten!
Life on the planet will become exceedingly difficult for most of us. Human population will decline. Will society collapse? Will human beings go extinct? We just don’t know how severe it will become.
All radicals justify their violence — if they are violent radicals, that is — because of their certainty of their point-of-view. Probably, it will be much more severe than any of us have imagined. If we knew that 100%, we could justify radical actions now. We just don’t know how severe it is, so violating people’s civil rights and human rights is difficult to justify.
Like #COVID19 and every other disease, climate change will not respect boundaries, ethnicity, or socioeconomic lines. No one is immune. Some will be better insulated from suffering than others, though.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Excellent summary. Another sign that someone is living in a world they see as unpredictably dangerous is the feeling that they must be armed all the time. The important thing about that is that it is feeling based, on a pervasive sense of threat. All the justifications about Constitutional Rights and ideology come later as rationalizations to explain the feeling and the need.
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Howdy Bob!
That’s a great point and one I wished had included in the post.
The problem with having a gun, and I think the Kyle Rittenhouse and Trayvon Martin cases both really make this point, is that it makes you over confident. You think you’re invincible, and you want to use it. It is just another toy that you acquire and you want to use. If you acquired it for hunting, you go hunting. If you acquired it to murder people, you put yourself in harms way like Rittenhouse and what’s his name did.
I used to joke that shooting a burglar was on my mother’s bucket list. We lived in a bad neighborhood and she got licensed to carry as soon as she could and did all the courses and used to to drive alongs with the police and sit on the roof of the local mall and call in car thefts to the police. She was all law and order. I don’t think it was a joke. I think she really hoped that someone would break into her house just so she could justify gunning them down. I think that feeling is going to be much more widespread now that we have laws allowing drivers to run protesters down and armed people to fear for their lives when people are armed with skateboards and sidewalks.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Context matters, and guns are context markers. When I go on my daily walk, I don’t take a hammer with me, because I’m not expecting to need to pound in some nails. When I hike in the woods, I have with me a whistle and bear spray, but strolling down Main Street, I don’t. If someone is holding an AR-15 or AK47, they are in a combat context. Having that weapon in your hands and your finger near the trigger sets (consciously or not) the context that you are likely to need to shoot, that you are in danger. Kyle Rittenhouse would have behaved and felt very differently in that chaotic situation if he had left the gun at home, what ever he may have believed consciously about his intentions. Just taking the gun in hand, even thinking about having it in such an environment already primes the fight-or-flight system. I’ve felt the truth of this walking guard duty with a loaded M-14. Fortunately, I was in a relatively safe area and no bad guys showed up, and neither did the tiger who occasionally came to check the garbage cans. We were instructed to not try to shoot the tiger (not an easy critter to kill before it gets to you, very angry) but to get indoors if it came around.
Once the gun is in hand, without a great deal of intensive training and discipline, it is the alligator brain that is in control of the trigger finger.
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That’s really well put. Again, to ignore the reality by ignoring the way guns change their immediate environment and the people who carry them is to be crazy. The Rittenhouse verdict shows just how crazy that is. Applying the law “logically” means that its okay to provoke a violent situation so you can justify shooting someone.
Probably the greatest single invention that contributed to human safety, going indoors.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Indoors is a great invention, especially when there are large carnivorous animals outdoors, not to mention stinging and venomous critters, and disease carrying things that bite.
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If you’ve ever tried to sleep outdoors in mosquito country, you know the value of being able to go indoors even if it is just a mosquito net, hammock, or tent.
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I’ve lived in places where just trying to sit on the porch in the evening had that effect.
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In the ’80’s when I was stationed in outside of Norfolk, Va, I used to joke that Virginia weren’t for lovers, it were for bugs.
Jack
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I’m sure. My once upon a time GF from Minnesota said that there the mosquito was the official State Bird.
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Those places with intensely cold winters get intense bugs during the few months it is warm enough to allow them. Interestingly, mosquitos don’t particularly like warm weather and cold doesn’t really bother them. They just can’t breed in ice.
Jack
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Which fits well with another saying she had about Minnesota. “Nine months of winter and three months of very poor skiing.”
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Ma Belle Femme tells tales of snow in July in the very far northern reaches of Canada where she is from. I’ve been up there in the dead of winter. -40 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit (it doesn’t matter they are actually the same) is pretty darn cold.
Jack
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Yes, -40 is COLD!
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