Timely.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/how-world-war-ii-scientists-invented-a-data-driven-approach-to-fighting-fascism/#p3//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js
Timely.
Published
Timely.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/how-world-war-ii-scientists-invented-a-data-driven-approach-to-fighting-fascism/#p3//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
the clear historical and political content of the post is also worthwhile although I don’t think it’s going to change anyone’s mind about anything. I’m reposting it just because it seems relevant to http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.nl/2016/04/lovecraft-nerds-and-uses-of-ick.html
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Maybe “authoritarianism” isn’t the best scale to weigh him on? At least, my guess is he would have scored fairly low on that test. His xenophobia seems to come from a different psychological space — and a more totalizing one.
A book I worked on a few years ago got into how the work of some Japanese modernist and just-pre-modernist writers was full of metaphors of body and disease and the penetration of membranes and this was related to a state-level paranoia over foreign corruption. HPL often makes me think similarly. Everything was a threat to his integrity, a risk that he might be entered into and changed. I feel like his racism comes from something more like that. Maybe the authoritarian brain has similar fears? But it feels so personal with HPL.
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http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/what-scared-h-p-lovecraft.html “So: the universe H. P. Lovecraft was born into consisted of a single galaxy containing about a million stars, and our own star was less than 100 million years old.
The universe Lovecraft died in was very different.”
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I also don’t think hpl makes a very convincing authoritarian – the whole contamination fear (of his world, his country, his mind) seems dead on and not necessarily related to his assessment of what would make good political systems. Obviously it’s tempting to relate it to colonialism/inequality, it seems alsoto be quite typical of turn of the century Protestant ideologies (thinking here about Weber’s observations).
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The New Atheist crowd is pro-science (or pro-scientism), but anti-contamination (by e.g. Islam) in a very similar way. I don’t know if I’d call them authoritarian. They’re not interested in regulating what they regard as their “own” society in accordance with any sort of Führerprinzip. But they are interested in disciplining the same non-Western world that HPL also despised (regime change), and keeping the blowback from that disciplining from reaching their own shores.
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While I’m hardly in agreement of his politics I consider hpl to be a pretty good example of someone channeling their irrationalism quite healthily, compared to how most of us do it, even now
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Presumably disgust sensitivity is the most relevant psychological measure.
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Boris Stremlin can you point me at a few examples of what you are talking about? I am genuinely curious to see if I am thinking of the same folks.
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http://www.iep.utm.edu/n-atheis/
Bill Maher, for a more pop-cultural figure.
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Thanks, Boris Stremlin, the very ones.
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Boris Stremlin at the danger of derailing the conversation, I don’t think Bill Maher shows fear of contamination by Islam.
Do you have any evidence that would connect his views of Islam with contamination fears? It is worth noting that he is generally scathingly critical of religion, including Christianity.
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Apologies if you are already familiar with this work, but you may also want to look at John Haidt’s moral foundations theory, in particular the sanctity/degradation dimension, and how contamination concerns relate to various political leanings.
http://moralfoundations.org/
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Saying we don’t want their refugees because they don’t share our values (they believe in killing women for being raped – all of them) sounds kind of indicative of a fear of oontamination.
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/11/20/maher-islam-is-a-problem-saying-syrian-refugees-have-values-at-odds-with-ours-may-not-be-wrong/
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I’ve heard a lot of “we’ve got something special here and it just won’t survive being smothered by refugees” – admittedly not from those particular sources, but it’s a frequently-repeated trope.
And that’s a type of contamination fear.
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oh god Boris Stremlin I went and read that link. Blugh.
I’m talking about the wife whose husband can beat her with impunity. The gay person, who if he comes out, will be put to death. The maid who can be raped with impunity. The intellectuals in the Muslim world who would like to speak out, but they see bloggers getting killed
So the US, then, where all of those things either happen today or have happened in the recent past. It’s a classic pattern of holding up our ideals and comparing it with their criminal activity. Or in cases where the activity is not considered criminal, assuming that when people are transplanted to a place where the laws are different, they will ignore those differences.
(oh wait he’s in Canada where nothing like that ever happens)
And then he signs off with why can’t they fight their own wars?
Oh, right. That’s why there’s no war in Syria.
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…the more I think about it, the less sense why don’t they fight their own wars? makes. They clearly are fighting wars (do we want that?) and everyone involved is clearly having a very hard time of it. Insufficient will to fight is definitely not the problem.
I have a feeling if you really pressed Maher on what he could possibly have meant, what rational point he was making, you’d find out that his real question or frustration is something quite different.
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I think Bill lives in LA, not Canada. Chrystia Freeland was probably a guest on his show at the time.
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Is it possible, Richard Grenville, that he can mean what he said and also see the inherent sadness of what he means, and that they both can be true?
Seeing horrors in the world and recognising that they should be righted does not grant the ability to right them without creating new horrors due to the intervention. Change seems to stick when it is arrived at internally, and seems to spawn reaction when acted upon from the outside. However, when someone from outside comes to do that unappreciated thing (whatever that is at the moment), it is still OK for the recipients of the unwanted action to want to stop the actor.
It is OK that the West may not want to accept those who may not be as accepting of their ways, while still wanting the situation that is spawning the migrations to be resolved (at varying degrees of altruism) in the same way that is is OK for the migrants to want to flee rather than fixing their own worlds. But, it is equally OK that those who stay and fight not be liked by those judging from the outside, and the fighters to be outraged at the inaction of the West.
One thing to ask: What makes the ‘West’ care to whatever degree it does when no one else seems to even care, much less get involved?
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Russia’s involved. Iran seems to be involved. My sense is, there’s too much involvement. It’s just that not everyone wants to help the refugees.
I have more thoughts on this but they’ll have to wait until tomorrow. My real point with objecting to why can’t they fight their own wars is that we’re seeing fallout from direct US intervention in Iraq. This is very much the US’s war, since the US set about systematically destroying Iraq’s political and economic institutions and then Bush acted all surprised when the result was not a spontaneous and west-friendly Anerican-style middle class revolution. Maher’s trying to avoid one kind of colonial thinking but to do so, he’s ignoring the actual colonialism on the ground.
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I think you are misunderstanding his “fight their own wars” comment. He is talking specifically about opposing ISIS. I think I remember seeing that particular show and the Breitbart article does not really capture the conversation that actually happened.
I also think he is honest about opposing the traditional sexist and homophobic ideas and not being culturally xenophobic.
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I can’t argue with any of what you have just said, Richard Grenville.
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Brendan S OK but ISIS seems specifically to be at least partly the US’s inadevertent creation – framing it as their problem that they have to solve is itself a problem (and even if it were true there’s a simply altruistic/solidaristic argument that it’s a problem for all of us).
Maybe what I’m reading does not reflect the actual discussion – in which case I’m repelled by the article, not necessarily by Maher (I’ve been drastically misquoted myself, I should be more wary about everything I read).
Kyrinn S. Eis I think we agree on a lot but this is such a charged subject that it’s hard to recognise that. We’re also quite a long way from the point of the OP now and into territory I usually keep quiet about online.
I don’t mind discussing it but (a) I haven’t been following it all as obsessively as I should have to really have a fruitful discussion, so I’m more likely to fall back on general points of principle than real data, thereby adding more heat than light, and (b) we should probably move such a discussion to a group especially created for it, since I know a lot of folks around here are politics-averse.
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