White Supremacists - We aren’t all mentally ill

[Worldtraveller]

Here is a weird thought. Many of these guys also identify themselves as Incels (involuntary celibate) because women have rejected them. So there is intense anger at women and what they refer to as feminists as their problem with not getting sex. So if this is a symptom of the disease, is it a cure to get them sex?

I'm no psychiatrist - but there seems to me to be a link here.

The problem is that many of these more radical incels want sex with "Stacys", that is, very good looking, young, sexy women. Not going to happen without drugging a Stacy. Of course, if one is a repulsive, mentally ill incel with a bad attitude towards women, these incels can't even get an ugly, overweight woman with home made prison tatoos.

gotcha -

 

[PyramidHead]

gotcha -

View attachment 23022

Careful. Women don't commit mass shootings, but lots of white women call the police on people of color for no reason, and those people end up getting incarcerated or shot as a result.

 

[abaddon]

It's not 'rationalizing' anything. Absolutely the opposite. I'm looking for an explanation for what it is that makes some people susceptible to right wing (or left wing) extremism and radicalization.

Why do kids start smoking? Yeah, in part, it is that stupid.

I don't think it's a healthy personality. There is a reason that such hateful ideals appeal to some people and not to others. I think it is diseased thinking.

It's human thinking, and I think it is important to not overlap real mental illness with racism.

It's extremely important to not do that.

Mentally ill persons don't choose it. They're not taught it by peers, they're not inducted by recruiters. They often know they're ill and suffer from it and want relief from it. Rather than giving a sense of belonging, it alienates them from friends, family and society, and much too often earns them totally undeserved moral judgments. They get a big dose of discrimination due to "othering" too.

Racists are normal, average human beings who want to feel they belong somewhere. They're not suffering from their racism; actually it succeeds well at solidifying social bonds and giving a stronger sense of identity.

So it's a cultural and moral problem. Maybe characterize it as a social illness, but not a mental illness.

We're not born nice and then become aggressively tribal due to an illness. Aggressive tribalism is an evolved trait, and an aberration (a SOCIAL aberration) only because of recent multiculturalism. So it's an issue of morality rather than mental illness. The general point of ethics is to encourage humans to NOT be how they evolved to be. To be ethical is learning to be more magnanimous than what we naturally are when left to our impulsive and social natures

If they were mentally ill, you'd be confronted with a problem far worse than it is. For example, a person suffering life-long depressive episodes simply cannot decide it's wrong and therefore decide to "not be like that" with just some exposure to more "socially healthy" alternatives.

But with racism there's more choice. Observe the vids about KKK members making a big turn-around when social barriers broke down enough that they befriended a black and/or Muslim person. The person just needed to see that "the other" is as human as he is and that it's ok to stop guarding "me and my kin". That's entirely a matter of expanding the circle of ethical regard.

 

[Playball40]

Right. There are a LOT more casual drinkers than there are alcoholics. And there are a lot more casual bigots and racists than there are white supremacists.

Some people can smoke only now and then.

Some people. Can occasionally use recreational drugs.

And some people cross over the line between enjoying a substance to feeling that they require the substance to their bodies and brains rebelling at not having the substance.

We don’t understand very well why one person might drink occasionally or heavily for long periods of time without ever becoming an alcoholic and why the next person might do the same and become addicted. Sometimes a trauma or series of traumas can push one over the edge between user and addict. Genetics seems to play a role. Sometimes.

One can commit vehicular homicide driving drunk the first and only time one drinks. Or without ever drinking or using any other mood altering substance.

Being addicted to alcohol greatly increases the chances that someone will commit vehicular suicide. We still hold them accountable for the vehicular homicide, even if we recognize that a disease was a root cause.

We’re better off recognizing the alcoholic intake as a symptom of a disease and treating the disease.

I wonder if we are better off, as a society and in the long run, of recognizing racism and things like white supremacy as a disease.

Maybe not. I’m pretty sleep deprived right now.

I simply do not think pathologizing racism will IMPROVE things and in fact, will harm those that suffer from real disease. We should stigmatize racism and white supremacy NOT addiction and depression.

It's not 'rationalizing' anything. Absolutely the opposite. I'm looking for an explanation for what it is that makes some people susceptible to right wing (or left wing) extremism and radicalization.

I don't think it's a healthy personality. There is a reason that such hateful ideals appeal to some people and not to others. I think it is diseased thinking.

There isn't a sole alive that doesn't possess irrational or unhealthy thinking at some point in their lives. That does NOT make them mentally ill.

 

[Playball40]

Why do kids start smoking? Yeah, in part, it is that stupid.

It's human thinking, and I think it is important to not overlap real mental illness with racism.

It's extremely important to not do that.

Mentally ill persons don't choose it. They're not taught it by peers, they're not inducted by recruiters. They often know they're ill and suffer from it and want relief from it. Rather than giving a sense of belonging, it alienates them from friends, family and society, and much too often earns them totally undeserved moral judgments. They get a big dose of discrimination due to "othering" too.

Racists are normal, average human beings who want to feel they belong somewhere. They're not suffering from their racism; actually it succeeds well at solidifying social bonds and giving a stronger sense of identity. Which is exactly the cause of the racism.

So it's a cultural and moral problem. Maybe characterize it as a social illness, but not a mental illness.

We're not born nice and then become aggressively tribal due to an illness. Aggressive tribalism is an evolved trait, and an aberration (a SOCIAL aberration) only because of recent multiculturalism. So it's an issue of morality rather than mental illness. The general point of ethics is to encourage humans to NOT be how they evolved to be. To be ethical is learning to be more magnanimous than what we naturally are when left to our impulsive and social natures

If they were mentally ill, you'd be confronted with a problem far worse than it is. For example, a person suffering life-long depressive episodes simply cannot decide it's wrong and therefore decide to "not be like that" with just some exposure to more "socially healthy" alternatives.

But with racism there's more choice. Observe the vids about KKK members making a big turn-around when social barriers broke down enough that they befriended a black and/or Muslim person. The person just needed to see that "the other" is as human as he is and that it's ok to stop guarding "me and my kin". That's entirely a matter of expanding the circle of ethical regard.

I think I fell in love with you a little!

 

[RVonse]

Why do kids start smoking? Yeah, in part, it is that stupid.

It's human thinking, and I think it is important to not overlap real mental illness with racism.

It's extremely important to not do that.

Mentally ill persons don't choose it. They're not taught it by peers, they're not inducted by recruiters. They often know they're ill and suffer from it and want relief from it. Rather than giving a sense of belonging, it alienates them from friends, family and society, and much too often earns them totally undeserved moral judgments. They get a big dose of discrimination due to "othering" too.

Racists are normal, average human beings who want to feel they belong somewhere. They're not suffering from their racism; actually it succeeds well at solidifying social bonds and giving a stronger sense of identity.

So it's a cultural and moral problem. Maybe characterize it as a social illness, but not a mental illness.

We're not born nice and then become aggressively tribal due to an illness. Aggressive tribalism is an evolved trait, and an aberration (a SOCIAL aberration) only because of recent multiculturalism. So it's an issue of morality rather than mental illness. The general point of ethics is to encourage humans to NOT be how they evolved to be. To be ethical is learning to be more magnanimous than what we naturally are when left to our impulsive and social natures

If they were mentally ill, you'd be confronted with a problem far worse than it is. For example, a person suffering life-long depressive episodes simply cannot decide it's wrong and therefore decide to "not be like that" with just some exposure to more "socially healthy" alternatives.

But with racism there's more choice. Observe the vids about KKK members making a big turn-around when social barriers broke down enough that they befriended a black and/or Muslim person. The person just needed to see that "the other" is as human as he is and that it's ok to stop guarding "me and my kin". That's entirely a matter of expanding the circle of ethical regard.

So evolution is wrong?

Not saying I necessarily disagree. Maybe nature evolved the current human species incorrectly. After all, we seem to be hell bend on nuking ourselves with Russia right now. But if you do take that view you can not be a hypocrite. You must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing to the fullest extent possible for the improvement of humanity.

And that sounds more like Hitler than any white supremacist I have ever seen. Or is your position that just you and your friends get to pick and choose what parts of evolution (like the tribalism) which need the correcting?

 

[RVonse]

gotcha -

View attachment 23022

Careful. Women don't commit mass shootings, but lots of white women call the police on people of color for no reason, and those people end up getting incarcerated or shot as a result.

Agree with this.

Furthermore, I do not agree that there are "hundreds of millions" of disenfranchised, disaffected women in the US. While there are certainly some who are disenfranchised in the middle east, you do hear about those women killing others with car bombs. So I would imagine if there really were women who were disenfranchised in the US, we might actually start to see some of them start shooting up Wal Marts as well.

 

[abaddon]

So evolution is wrong?

Not saying I necessarily disagree. Maybe nature evolved the current human species incorrectly. After all, we seem to be hell bend on nuking ourselves with Russia right now. But if you do take that view you can not be a hypocrite. You must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing to the fullest extent possible for the improvement of humanity.

And that sounds more like Hitler than any white supremacist I have ever seen. Or is your position that just you and your friends get to pick and choose what parts of evolution (like the tribalism) which need the correcting?

This post is just one idiotic non sequitur after another:

I say evolved traits don't amount to an ethical system. You imagine that suggests evolution is wrong.

From talking about choosing to be more empathetic, you somehow squeeze "must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing".

I described how people can learn to see each other as equals. You liken me to Hitler.

I said tribalism serves purposes; it's aggressive tribalism that becomes a problem in a multicultural world. Somehow you think I want to "correct" evolution.

We're evolved to make choices and imagine other minds, and that's why we tend to expand the circle of ethical regard with time. I know... hard to believe that, with how conservatives always resist it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Why do kids start smoking? Yeah, in part, it is that stupid.

It's human thinking, and I think it is important to not overlap real mental illness with racism.

It's extremely important to not do that.

Mentally ill persons don't choose it. They're not taught it by peers, they're not inducted by recruiters. They often know they're ill and suffer from it and want relief from it. Rather than giving a sense of belonging, it alienates them from friends, family and society, and much too often earns them totally undeserved moral judgments. They get a big dose of discrimination due to "othering" too.

Racists are normal, average human beings who want to feel they belong somewhere. They're not suffering from their racism; actually it succeeds well at solidifying social bonds and giving a stronger sense of identity.

So it's a cultural and moral problem. Maybe characterize it as a social illness, but not a mental illness.

We're not born nice and then become aggressively tribal due to an illness. Aggressive tribalism is an evolved trait, and an aberration (a SOCIAL aberration) only because of recent multiculturalism. So it's an issue of morality rather than mental illness. The general point of ethics is to encourage humans to NOT be how they evolved to be. To be ethical is learning to be more magnanimous than what we naturally are when left to our impulsive and social natures

If they were mentally ill, you'd be confronted with a problem far worse than it is. For example, a person suffering life-long depressive episodes simply cannot decide it's wrong and therefore decide to "not be like that" with just some exposure to more "socially healthy" alternatives.

But with racism there's more choice. Observe the vids about KKK members making a big turn-around when social barriers broke down enough that they befriended a black and/or Muslim person. The person just needed to see that "the other" is as human as he is and that it's ok to stop guarding "me and my kin". That's entirely a matter of expanding the circle of ethical regard.

So evolution is wrong?

Not saying I necessarily disagree. Maybe nature evolved the current human species incorrectly. After all, we seem to be hell bend on nuking ourselves with Russia right now. But if you do take that view you can not be a hypocrite. You must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing to the fullest extent possible for the improvement of humanity.

And that sounds more like Hitler than any white supremacist I have ever seen. Or is your position that just you and your friends get to pick and choose what parts of evolution (like the tribalism) which need the correcting?

Wow, how you managed to get from what he said to what you painted him as saying is remarkable!

Person 1: I’m not a fan of Tottenham Hotspurs
Person 2: So you hate Jews!
Person 1: Wha?!
Person 2: You don’t like Tottenham so you must be a Jew hater.
Person 1: *confused*
Person 2: Tottenham is owned by a Jew. I suppose you think we should just gas them all.
Person 1: *walks away*

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

So evolution is wrong?

Not saying I necessarily disagree. Maybe nature evolved the current human species incorrectly. After all, we seem to be hell bend on nuking ourselves with Russia right now. But if you do take that view you can not be a hypocrite. You must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing to the fullest extent possible for the improvement of humanity.

And that sounds more like Hitler than any white supremacist I have ever seen. Or is your position that just you and your friends get to pick and choose what parts of evolution (like the tribalism) which need the correcting?

Implying that evolution is "wrong" is weird and makes no sense. Your questioning, however, is an evolved human behavior that evolution and natural selection has offered up is all. To ask if evolution is wrong is to ask if water is wrong or if quarks are wrong. The question is bizarre and nonsensical scientifically speaking.

The conclusions you draw based on that premise are equally nonsensical. Instead of your thoughts, my brain is thinking we need to override those racist and violent impulses and try to make humanity into something peaceful. Both of our behaviors are in competition from an evolutionary standpoint. That's how it works. And our brains have been evolving from primitive limbic systems to possessing regions that filter out those violent, primitive impulses.

So evolution isn't wrong anymore than feet are wrong.

 

[Jarhyn]

So evolution is wrong?

Not saying I necessarily disagree. Maybe nature evolved the current human species incorrectly. After all, we seem to be hell bend on nuking ourselves with Russia right now. But if you do take that view you can not be a hypocrite. You must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing to the fullest extent possible for the improvement of humanity.

And that sounds more like Hitler than any white supremacist I have ever seen. Or is your position that just you and your friends get to pick and choose what parts of evolution (like the tribalism) which need the correcting?

Implying that evolution is "wrong" is weird and makes no sense. Your questioning, however, is an evolved human behavior that evolution and natural selection has offered up is all. To ask if evolution is wrong is to ask if water is wrong or if quarks are wrong. The question is bizarre and nonsensical scientifically speaking.

The conclusions you draw based on that premise are equally nonsensical. Instead of your thoughts, my brain is thinking we need to override those racist and violent impulses and try to make humanity into something peaceful. Both of our behaviors are in competition from an evolutionary standpoint. That's how it works. And our brains have been evolving from primitive limbic systems to possessing regions that filter out those violent, primitive impulses.

So evolution isn't wrong anymore than feet are wrong.

I maintain that all these evolved traits merely evolved to be "good enough for (what situation we were in 40k years ago)" and not "actually the game-theoretic best solution for what we would become today". Ethics is the technology that fills the gap that Darwinian evolution does not have the dexterity to match.

Edit: whereas morality, distinct from ethics, is the evolved trait that was a piecemeal kind-of-halfassed wannabe ethics that filled the gap between then and now.

 

[starwater]

None of them are happy. All of their problems are the fault of others. they lash out in anger and violence. I would say that is a mental issue.

 

[ronburgundy]

None of them are happy. All of their problems are the fault of others. they lash out in anger and violence. I would say that is a mental issue.

By that definition, almost every negative behavior is "a mental issue". Which isn't very useful since obvious all behaviors are a results of mental processes. What is in question is whether the behavior is just a symptom of a far more general inability to form rational thoughts and/or to control one's emotional impulses. That would mean an inability to do so in contexts that have nothing to do with race or any political issue. If a person's irrationality and aggression is confined to particular ideological domains, then the cause is not a general mental illness, but just that they are a violent asshole with a dogma that encourages violence.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

None of them are happy. All of their problems are the fault of others. they lash out in anger and violence. I would say that is a mental issue.

Isn’t that just immaturity?

 

[Toni]

Why do kids start smoking? Yeah, in part, it is that stupid.

It's human thinking, and I think it is important to not overlap real mental illness with racism.

It's extremely important to not do that.

Mentally ill persons don't choose it. They're not taught it by peers, they're not inducted by recruiters. They often know they're ill and suffer from it and want relief from it. Rather than giving a sense of belonging, it alienates them from friends, family and society, and much too often earns them totally undeserved moral judgments. They get a big dose of discrimination due to "othering" too.

Racists are normal, average human beings who want to feel they belong somewhere. They're not suffering from their racism; actually it succeeds well at solidifying social bonds and giving a stronger sense of identity.

So it's a cultural and moral problem. Maybe characterize it as a social illness, but not a mental illness.

We're not born nice and then become aggressively tribal due to an illness. Aggressive tribalism is an evolved trait, and an aberration (a SOCIAL aberration) only because of recent multiculturalism. So it's an issue of morality rather than mental illness. The general point of ethics is to encourage humans to NOT be how they evolved to be. To be ethical is learning to be more magnanimous than what we naturally are when left to our impulsive and social natures

If they were mentally ill, you'd be confronted with a problem far worse than it is. For example, a person suffering life-long depressive episodes simply cannot decide it's wrong and therefore decide to "not be like that" with just some exposure to more "socially healthy" alternatives.

But with racism there's more choice. Observe the vids about KKK members making a big turn-around when social barriers broke down enough that they befriended a black and/or Muslim person. The person just needed to see that "the other" is as human as he is and that it's ok to stop guarding "me and my kin". That's entirely a matter of expanding the circle of ethical regard.

So evolution is wrong?

Not saying I necessarily disagree. Maybe nature evolved the current human species incorrectly. After all, we seem to be hell bend on nuking ourselves with Russia right now. But if you do take that view you can not be a hypocrite. You must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing to the fullest extent possible for the improvement of humanity.

And that sounds more like Hitler than any white supremacist I have ever seen. Or is your position that just you and your friends get to pick and choose what parts of evolution (like the tribalism) which need the correcting?

You are confusing bilogicsl evolution, which is, for humans, a process that takes a million years or more with cultural evolution and societal evolution—and political evolution which occur over decades to centuries.

 

[SimpleDon]

So evolution is wrong?

Not saying I necessarily disagree. Maybe nature evolved the current human species incorrectly. After all, we seem to be hell bend on nuking ourselves with Russia right now. But if you do take that view you can not be a hypocrite. You must also embrace eugenics and/or genetic testing to the fullest extent possible for the improvement of humanity.

And that sounds more like Hitler than any white supremacist I have ever seen. Or is your position that just you and your friends get to pick and choose what parts of evolution (like the tribalism) which need the correcting?

I think that he was talking about cultural evolution, not biological evolution. Tribalism is a product of cultural evolution, the evolution of man's social order.

The human genome is extremely narrow, we all have a common ancestor, a woman who lived about 75,000 years ago, a blink of an eye in terms of biological evolution. There is more diversity in the genome of a pod of the chimpanzees we evolved from than in the entire human race. What this means is that 75,000 years ago we almost died off, and were reduced to maybe as few as a thousand individuals in East Africa. probably by a massive eruption of a Yellowstone caldera sized volcano.

There is no support in our biological evolution for racism. It is a cultural phenomenon. There is no need for eugenics.

Toni caught it and phrased it more succinctly.

 

[Elixir]

I think that he was talking about cultural evolution, not biological evolution. Tribalism is a product of cultural evolution...

Culture (the thing that binds tribes) and tribalism are products of biological evolution, as they did provide individuals with reproductive/survival advantages in millennia past.
Mental illness during that period of time would have been whatever impulses failed confirm or conform to the idea that "my tribe is the best tribe". Now that tribalism has become a threat to the continued existence of the species and doesn't confer any reproductive advantages to individuals, tribalism can be thought of as a mental illness.
IOW, the utility of the label - "mentally ill" in this context is less than zero. In fact, as applied to an individual because of a retained tribalist trait, it holds the same meaning as "stable genius".

On a practical level though, if the white supremacists want to insist on their own sanity, then I guess it's okay to lock 'em up or put them to death if they shoot a bunch of people, right?

 

[SimpleDon]

Here is an article from the NY Times that explains part of the problem.

The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism

Sweden was long seen as a progressive utopia. Then came waves of immigrants — and the forces of populism at home and abroad. ...

First came a now-infamous comment by President Trump, suggesting that Sweden’s history of welcoming refugees was at the root of a violent attack in Rinkeby the previous evening, even though nothing had actually happened. ...

The president’s source: Fox News, which had excerpted a short film promoting a dystopian view of Sweden as a victim of its asylum policies, with immigrant neighborhoods crime-ridden “no-go zones.”

But two days later, as Swedish officials were heaping bemused derision on Mr. Trump, something did in fact happen in Rinkeby: Several dozen masked men attacked police officers making a drug arrest, throwing rocks and setting cars ablaze.

And it was right around that time, according to Mr. Castillo and four other witnesses, that Russian television crews showed up, offering to pay immigrant youths “to make trouble” in front of the cameras.

“They wanted to show that President Trump is right about Sweden,” Mr. Castillo said, “that people coming to Europe are terrorists and want to disturb society.”

That nativist rhetoric — that immigrants are invading the homeland — has gained ever-greater traction, and political acceptance, across the West ...

In the nationalists’ message-making, Sweden has become a prime cautionary tale, dripping with schadenfreude. ...

Fueled by an immigration backlash — Sweden has accepted more refugees per capita than any other European country — right-wing populism has taken hold, reflected most prominently in the steady ascent of a political party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats. In elections last year, they captured nearly 18 percent of the vote.

To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation, and amplification of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far-right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.

The central target of these manipulations from abroad — and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success — is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.

Trump is both a victim of and a conduit of far-right disinformation.

As are our current crop of nativist mass murders.

 

[PyramidHead]

True then and true now, courtesy of Dr. Seuss:

 

[PyramidHead]

This recent resurgence of white nationalism isn't easy to square with our purported values as a democracy, or those of the Western world in general, until you realize there's nothing to square. All of European and American national identity is rooted in overt or subtle white supremacy and has been from the get-go. These places would not exist without the colonial conquest of nonwhite populations, and their political attitudes toward the descendants of those they colonized has never risen above cautious opportunism. White nationalism is not an aberration visited upon Western culture from the outside, but an integral part of its foundation.