World War Two
Published 16 Oct 2022The German Nazis and their helpers are facing increasing resistance, this week in Rome from the Vatican, and at the Sobibor extermination camp from their victims.
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October 18, 2022
CENSORED: The Great Escape from Death Camp Sobibor – October 16, 1943 – WAH 082
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“On average, a twenty-five year old man has the same level of impulse control as a 10 year old girl”
Rob Henderson considers how early humans managed to overcome violent tendencies as human communities got larger, and specifically considers the social role of young men, then and now:
One challenge to overcome involves the behavioral tendencies of young males.
[Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin] Dunbar writes:
When males (and younger males, in particular) are deprived of social, economic, and mating opportunities, they are prone to behaving in ways that both stress other group members (especially reproductive females) and threaten the stability and cohesion of the group. This is as true of the more social primates as it is of humans, and is often associated with high mortality rates. Under these circumstances, males are also likely to indulge in raiding neighbouring groups, which can result in poor inter-community relations as well as retaliation. Managing male behaviour may, thus, be critical to maintaining an environment conducive to successful reproduction.
Young males are (unknowingly) experts at disrupting social cohesion. To be fair, they are also required to maintain and defend it. They’re a mixed bag.
Disputes that spill over into violence and homicide have been an ever-present risk in both contemporary and pre-modern small scale societies. Young men make up the overwhelming majority of such conflicts, both as perpetrators and as victims.
[…]
The vast majority of violence is carried out by young men.
Psychologically, a key reason for this is that women are more sensitive than men to penalties. Men are more inclined to take risks, oblivious to the punishments they may receive. Men also have lower levels of empathy and a higher tolerance for pain.
The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has posited the hypothesis of the “extreme male brain”, suggesting that males are at higher risk for a clinical diagnosis of autism because of the constellation of traits men tend to score higher on (e.g., systematizing over empathizing, favoring things over people, etc). It also implies that most males may be a little bit autistic. Of course, some women score highly on these traits, and there are girls and women who are diagnosed with autism. Just at much lower rates than males.
I have wondered if, in addition to autism, the idea of the “extreme male brain”, could just as easily apply to psychopathy.
For both psychopathy and autism, the ratio of males to females is about three to 1.
Men (especially young men) are more pronounced than women on just about every trait that characterizes psychopathy.
Relatively low impulse control, low empathy, low fear, high sensation seeking, relatively shallow emotions, need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, violent fantasies, desire for revenge, and increased likelihood of criminality. Of course, some women score highly on these traits, and there are women who are psychopaths. But far fewer than males.
The psychologist John Barry has pointed out that when he was a student, he learned he couldn’t use standard adult psychopathy tests to administer to teenage boys. The reason? Because adult tests might give teen males a false positive.
Just as (relative to women) most men might be a little bit autistic, most (young) men might be a little bit psychopathic.
On average, a twenty-five year old man has the same level of impulse control as a 10 year old girl.
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The War That Ended the Ancient World
toldinstone
Published 10 Jun 2022In the early seventh century, a generation-long war exhausted and virtually destroyed the Roman Empire. This video explores that conflict through the lens of an Armenian cathedral built to celebrate the Roman victory.
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QotD: The US media and the Democratic Party since 1968
… back in 1968 the Media convinced themselves they held the whip. Between the “Chicago Police Riot” (in reality a bunch of SDS goons finally goading the cops into cracking down) and the Tet Offensive (in reality, a communist catastrophe that all but destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force), the Media convinced themselves they truly were the shapers of the nation’s hearts and minds. From then on out, the Media assumed their primary job was not to report the news, but to instruct us how to feel about the news. They anointed themselves as a secular priesthood, and from that moment forward, people went into “journalism” specifically to change the world.
That suited the Democrats’ short-term interests just fine. Then as now, the Democrats were a bunch of fellow-traveling wannabe-totalitarians. The difference, though, is that in 1968 grownups were still in charge of the party. Being intimately familiar with the concept of “useful idiots”, the grownup Dems were happy to encourage the journo-kids’ delusions of grandeur. The kids might not have been able to stir up enough shit to get Hubert Humphrey elected — that would’ve been a tough sell for Josef Goebbels — but they could make life hot for Richard Nixon. In other words, the Democrats thought they held the whip.
1972 should’ve been a wakeup call, but to be fair, all the campaign wonks were still reeling from The Great Magic Party Switch of 1964. Both halves of the failed Democratic ticket from 1968 ran in the 1972 primaries, and so did George Wallace (who actually won more primaries than either Humphrey or Muskie — 6 to 5 and 4, respectively). Which left George McGovern, a goofy hippie from a nothing state who was so bad at politics that he got outflanked as a peacenik by Richard Nixon, the man who was right at that moment actually running the goddamn war. […]
[McGovern’s platform was], in short, “amnesty, abortion, and acid,” a Donald Trump-level linguistic killshot if ever there was one.
The point isn’t that McGovern was a goofy hippie. The point is that McGovern was The Media’s fair-haired boy. Hubert Humphrey was no one’s idea of a steely-eyed realist, but he was a grown-up. When he attacked McGovern as too radical during their primary debates, he was expressing America’s frustration with bratty, coddled, know-nothing college kids and their bong-addled, patchouli-soaked nonsense. But since it was the aforesaid spoiled, stoned college kids who wrote the election coverage …
Viewed from this perspective, Democratic Party politics up to now can be seen as the increasingly desperate attempts of the few remaining grownups to fend off The Media’s increasingly frantic grabs for the whip. Take a gander at these goofballs from 1976. Remember the “Scoop Jackson Democrats” all the National Review types kept gushing about when they needed some Democratic cover for W’s imperial misadventures? “Scoop” Jackson was a real guy, and probably the only adult in the room in 1976. Jimmy Carter, the eventual nominee, could at least fake being a serious, mature human being when he wasn’t being chased by enraged, swimming bunnies. The Jerry Brown of 1976 is the very same Jerry Brown who is putting the finishing touches on the shitholization of California here in 2019, and guess who The Media just loooooooved back in the ’76 primaries?
See also: Every other election through 2016. Sometimes The Media and the Party moved in tandem — e.g. Bill Clinton — but more often it played out like 1988, when the Party had to drag a bland nonentity (Mike Dukakis) over the finish line in the face of a Media darling (Jesse Jackson). This dynamic also explains the weird “enthusiasm gap” of Democratic voters starting in 2000 — nobody actually liked Al Gore or John Kerry, but since W. made The Media lose their tiny little minds, they went all-in on painting those two human toothaches as The Saviors of Mankind.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
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