Live Feed and Open Thread: Mass Shooting in Lewiston, Maine

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

I don’t think a person can peddle grievance while telling people that they have the power to change their lives.

It seems like that would depend on how he tells them to change their life, aka, what he says about what is wrong with it.

And he has a lot of very obvious neutral suggestions to help people. Keep your environment tidy, your appearance neat, be generally polite, all these could from literally any self-help person, no one has any issue with those, so let’s skip past those and ask ourselves what he says about _deeper_ problems.

And it appears that a good chunk of his philosophy is that the world should naturally exist under patriarchy, as men are order and women are chaos.

To quote him: “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

He also talks against radicalization and the far right, which he sees as a symptom of the decline of masculinity, an excuse rather than a cure.

Talking about the decline of masculinity _is_ male grievance. At least, how he does it.

He’s probably a lot of people’s last exit ramp from radicalization, and yeah, when you appeal to broken people you’re going to have some broken fans.

LOL. He’s not only the exit ramp, he’s constructed a good chunk of the highway _leading_ to that exit ramp, and if you want to argue that a few people manage to exit at his ramp, whatever, but he’s also made it extremely easy to follow along the path he built and _keep going_ past where he is.

I don’t know all his views, so I don’t know if he believes any conspiracy stuff, but I’d say that he has the opposite temperament.

..his entire philosophy, at a very base level, is full of nonsensical conspiracies, although admittedly most of those are incredibly stupid and have no relevance to anything. In fact, you called him Jungian, and he is…and…you do realize that a lot of Jungian stuff is total gibberish, right? It’s a better _starting place_ than Freud, but it is still gibberish.

He constantly brings up ancient myths, and then attempts to hang entire structures of meaning on them. It’s basically evolutionary psychology but _even dumber_ because it’s about things everyone knows are false, instead of evolutionary psychology, which is at least about things everyone wrongly thinks are true.

Or, whatever. We can argue how true Jungian stuff is, (although we really can’t because it’s incredibly vague, it’s sorta the horoscope of psychology, you can bend any archtype to mean whatever you want), but I have no problem with people believing in it. What I do have a problem with is people who take it past ‘Here is how humans often reasoned’ instead ‘And this thing we do is How It Should Be and Why We Should Patriarchy’. The problem is not the _theory_, the problem is ‘putting it into practice’.

I’ve mentioned this before, when talking about conspiracy theories. It’s why no one has a problem with cryptid theorists…who the heck cares if someone believes in Bigfoot? That does not impact their behavior. That’s completely different than some conspiracy theory that causes them to take horrible political positions or even storm the Capitol building. Or, to get back on topic, that some ancient story reveals ‘archtypes’ about men and women that, in turn, should be used to control how we live today.

But, yes, he also is a climate change denier _and_ recently has wandered into vaccine denial, or at least sitting _next_ to RFK Jr’s vaccine denial.Report