“It’s really weird when you come out of a cult. It’s like you look back and you go, what was I thinking?”
‘Trying to rewrite history’: Boise woman guilty in Capitol riot rejects Trump pardon
[#]politics
https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/crime/article298937855.html
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@WarnerCrocker I feel this way about both my Ayn Rand phase and my Paul Graham phase.
My conclusion is "I guess I didn't actually have that much to compare those ideas to."
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@mark @WarnerCrocker I had a very far-left, maximalist reactionary phase from school until my mid 20s. So far left I’d drift into right wing populism… which is when I actually got deep undercover in that scene trying to work out what on earth they were talking about. It’s a cult, plain as day - same as the fringe left.
I had a poor education and I struggled with traditional academia due to neurodevelopment issues and the attached stigma, but started to learn on my own and read a lot, and eventually went undercover as I say. Came out of it sharpish.
It’s so easy to see how people can be manipulated when they have no better points of reference. Education is everything.
It helped me recognise how much damage the far left has done to real, progressive, socialist politics, as much as the right.
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@SecurityWriter @mark For some reason, and nobody can really explain it given my background and the cultural and social world I grew up in, I decided to major in theatre. That decision opened up the world and expanded my curiosity and gave it room to flourish.
There wasn't a conscious political point along the path, but given the path I chose, it obviously leaned more to the left than the right. Though what I learned through telling the stories of others on a stage, /more
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@SecurityWriter @mark and later my own it that there are very few real motivations that move humans one way or another, and more often than not regardless of the "sides" folks align with I find that always holds, whether they recognize it or not.
A few of those motivations are selfless, but most are selfish, even those that appear and appeal to selfless-ness.
We are quite a species.
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@WarnerCrocker @SecurityWriter My current take on the topic of motivations (this changes every decade or so) is that we're a bit oddly wired because we have the capacity for rational evaluation, but most of our tools for "mental modeling" are really there (evolution-wise) for social dynamic prediction and, at some lower level, prey prediction. We aren't incapable of empathy, but our capacity for it is heavily weighted by the very real survival need to fit into a community (a human alone is far more likely to perish than one in a group) and the fact the tools of understanding can also be used as weapons for deception and outmaneuvering.
We aren't inherently bad. We're just also not inherently good, and we don't always have the luxury of quiet contemplation to choose. We're very vulnerable to our environment enhancing our worst qualities, or our best. I have an old work friend who thinks often about people's behavior in terms of incentives: not what they rationally chose, but what they thought was going to happen given what they probably knew? It seems to work pretty well.
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