Doing God's Dirty Work

WOTMQ: Doing God's Dirty Work - Mr Deity > .

Suddenly they Pretend to Care

After 4 years of zero action and zero empathy, RepuGNicans pretend to be outraged that the incoming administration has not cleaned up their mess in 2 1/2 months. Needless to say, the logic-challenged authoritarian hypocrites who vote for blatant sociopaths won't give a hoot ...

TED and LINDSEY! - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody > .

Still Glad to See Britain Leave?

Just like families, shared ethnicity is not necessarily the optimal choice:

Hong Kong: China limits parliament to 'patriots': China has passed sweeping changes to Hong Kong's electoral rules which will tighten its control over the city. The number of directly elected seats in parliament has been cut almost by half, and prospective MPs will first be vetted by a pro-Beijing committee to ensure their loyalty to the mainland.

The aim is to ensure only "patriotic" figures can run for positions of power. Critics warn it will mean the end of democracy, fearing it will remove all opposition from the city parliament. [Of course it will mean the end of democracy --- that is the whole point.]

Sail away, sail away, sail away ...

Suez Canal reopens after giant stranded ship is freed - BBC N > .

Suez Canal: Ever Given container ship finally freed: A giant container ship that blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week has been freed after a huge operation. Tug boats honked their horns in celebration as the 400m-long (1,300ft) Ever Given was dislodged on Monday.

Traffic is set to resume in both directions through the canal at 20:00 local time (18:00 GMT), officials say. Hundreds of ships are waiting to pass. Suez, which connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea through Egypt, is one of the world's busiest trade routes.

More Me-Again Trouble

TV personality Sharon Osbourne has left US chat show The Talk after a heated on-air debate [squabble?] about racism earlier this month. Osbourne defended broadcaster Piers Morgan over his criticism of a high-profile TV interview given by the Duchess of Sussex. That led to a clash with co-host Sheryl Underwood [black], who accused Osbourne [white] of giving "validation" to "racist" views. 

[I'm confident that, if the opponent's skin colors were reversed, the outcome would have been different. I have never seen either participant in action, so I don't have a personal opinion about either participant. However, I do maintain that character counts and pigmentation shouldn't.

Racism comprises unjust victimization of individuals purely because of skin color or ancestry. Racism also comprises unjustified exoneration of individuals purely because of skin color or ancestry.

When an individual lies and manipulates for personal gain or attention, the duplicitous behavior should not be exempt from criticism because of false race-card claims of victimization [whatever the individual's pigmentation]. Those individuals who behave badly because of personality defects and/or self-serving motivation should be judged on their behavior, not on irrelevant features such as of skin color or ancestry. Historic and current racially-motivated attempts to deprive individuals of civic rights damage society.

I suspect that caving to cancel culture mob-rule pressure will ultimately evoke a justified backlash. For example, bigoted wrong-wingers gleefully condemn cancel culture along partisan lines, while new-racists seek revenge rather than emotional maturity.] 

Untrustworthy for Independence

I would not trust either of the self-serving Independent Kingdom "SNP-style leaders" to salvage Scotland's fortunes from the carrion crows that would gather around a small, isolated mini-nation ...

[Disgraced] Former SNP leader Alex Salmond has announced the creation of a new pro-independence party which will contest the Scottish Parliament election. The former first minister said he would be among the candidates who will stand for the Alba Party on regional lists. Salmond claimed the aim was to build "a supermajority for independence" at Holyrood after the election in May. Other parties described Salmond as "discredited" and questioned his suitability for public office. [Yup!]

Authoritarian Sex Obsession

How to Spot a (Potential) Fasc!st - ToNi > .

The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after WW2.

The Authoritarian Personality "invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)." The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.

Though strongly criticized for bias and methodology, the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."

...

Authoritarianism was measured by the F-scale. The "F" was short for "pre-fascist personality." Another major hypothesis of the book is that the authoritarian syndrome is predisposed to right-wing ideology and therefore receptive to fascist governments.

...

The F scale targets an authoritarian, anti-democratic personality profile that makes a person susceptible to Fascist propaganda. The items were written in accordance to fascist propaganda materials as well as priory held TAT protocol data and interviews with ethnocentric participants.

• Conventionalism: Adherence to conventional values.
• Authoritarian Submission: Towards ingroup authority figures.
• Authoritarian Aggression: Against people who violate conventional values.
• Anti-Intraception: Opposition to subjectivity and imagination.
• Superstition and Stereotypy: Belief in individual fate; thinking in rigid categories.
• Power and Toughness: Concerned with submission and domination; assertion of strength.
• Destructiveness and Cynicism: hostility against human nature.
• Projectivity: Perception of the world as dangerous; tendency to project unconscious impulses.
• Sex: Overly concerned with modern sexual practices. 

...

The study employs both quantitative and qualitative components. The first part of the research resembles a survey type of research with structured questionnaires. Based on the scores on the questionnaires, a smaller number of participants was elected for clinical interviews and administration of the Thematic Apperception Test. Interviews were coded with the techniques of content analysis.

...

A number of studies have examined the external criterion validity of F scale, with various demographic and political groups. Such groups included: German cosmetic factory workers (Cohn and Carsch, 1954); English fascists and communists, compared to 'politically neutral' soldiers (Coulter, 1953). Both studies found high scores (>5) in F-Scale.

However, the Coulter study also found the Communists scored higher in F-Scale than the politically neutral group. Eysenck (1954, ref. by Brown, p. 80) commented that Coulter's results indicate that the F-Scale actually measures general authoritarianism, rather than fascist tendencies in particular. (see Left-Wing Authoritarianism).

https://thereaderwiki.com/en/The_Authoritarian_Personality .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality .

• Ambiguity tolerance .
• Authoritarian personality .
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder .
• Right-wing authoritarianism .
• Psychohistory .
• The Mass Psychology of Fascism .

[Yet another tragic, disgusting, pointless US killing spree supports some of the conclusions of the book:] Eight dead in US spa shootings - BBC > .

"Officials say it is still too early to know whether the attack, in which six Asian women were killed, was racially motivated. The suspect may have been a patron and claimed to have a "sex addiction". Robert Aaron Long "apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate," said Capt Jay Baker, adding that Long was caught with a 9mm handgun and did not resist arrest. The attack comes amid a sharp uptick in crimes against Asian-Americans. Four of the victims have been identified as Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Xiaojie Yan, 49; and Daoyou Feng, 44. Elcias R Hernandez-Ortiz was identified as having been injured.]

More on authoritarian obsession with sex: 

Atlanta Suspect’s Fixation on Sex Is Familiar Thorn for Evangelicals CONservative Proselytizing Pseudo-Christians: The man accused of killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent, blamed “sexual addiction,” a disputed term used in parts of evangelical CONservative proselytizing pseudo-Christian culture.

When man who grew up in a strict evangelical CONservative proselytizing pseudo-Christian "community in Southern California that emphasized sexual purity heard that the man accused of a rampage at three Atlanta-area spas told detectives that he had carried out the attacks as a way to eliminate his own temptations, the claim sounded painfully familiar.

The man had "spent his teenage years ... subjected to "a militant vigilance: Don’t let anything in the house that will tempt you sexually,” the man, now an associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, recalled.

The evangelical culture he was raised in, he said, “teaches women to hate their bodies, as the source of temptation [unsurprisingly, this is also a common issue for females who were sexually abused as children], and it teaches men to hate their minds, which lead them into lust and sexual immorality.”

Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in the massacres that left eight people dead, told the police this week that he had a “sexual addiction,” and he had been a customer at two of the spas that he targeted. He was so intent on avoiding pornography that he blocked several websites on his computer and had sought help at a Christian rehab clinic. [Instead, clinics it would be healthier to establish clinics to help the indoctrinated to recover from CONservative proselytizing pseudo-Christianity]. A former roommate said that Long agonized over the possibility of “falling out of God’s grace.”" [So much for "thou shalt not kill", "go forth and multiply" and "created man in His own image".]

Toxic Theology and the Legacy of Atlanta: Did racism or religion or gender motivate the shootings in Georgia? All of the above.

"The long history of anti-Asian racism is rooted in the history of U.S. American expansionism amid wide-ranging legal, cultural and military projects across the Pacific. These colonial projects hypersexualized Asian women, through forced sex and sex work, casting them as docile creatures that brought comfort. [I suspect that, in addition to culturally-inculcated obedience, a subset of American males prefer Asian women because their smaller, neater facial features and shorter stature resemble those of young girls --- in other words, legitimized pedophilia.] They also shaped Asian men as submissive and feminine, objects to be conquered, dominated and consumed. Even the humanitarian interventions and the religious outreach that helped to shape much of white imagination about Asian women’s bodies overseas were then continuously reproduced here in America."

...

"The fear of temptation the killer is reported to have had was born decades before his birth. Absolute moral ideals of virginity or marital sex have long been linked to conservative CONservative white [pseudo-]Christian attempts at what is sometimes called “sexual containment” or more popularly known as purity culture. This contributed to a theology that taught the salvific power of marital sex (as well as a critique of extramarital sex). Though more and more people of faith have questioned the psychological impact of purity culture, shame around sex persists. The Asian women murdered in Atlanta were an explicit threat to the purported ideal; their perceived entanglement with sex work justified this violence."