Children of alcoholics often get mad at those who point out the problems their parents made rather than their parents for making them. They protect the parents against accusations of abuse, for example, even while being abused by them. Siblings will turn on the one trying to point out the problem, namely their parents and their alcoholism. They’re mad at the one pointing out the problem instead of at the parents who are causing the problem. Shut up, put on a facade, keep the family secret, etc. Fall in line.



RfMers know this pattern. Mormons don’t get mad at the problems of the church, they get mad at those who point out the problems of the church. For example, they’re not mad at the church for continuing to take 10% of their income every month, even though the church sits on a hundred billion dollars. No, they’re mad at those who tell them about the 100 billion dollars. I don’t want to hear the truth, they are saying.



The pattern continues in our broader life as citizens. Some don’t want to hear the truth, even of the simplest kind: Power is corrupt and Money buys influence. They’re not mad at the Powerful for fucking them at every turn, or at those who take money and lie for them. No, they’re mad at those who tell them about the corruption and the lies that cover for it. For example, they’re not mad that Bill Gates’s billions may distort public health data, no, they’re mad at the guy who asked the question and proceeded to find out, and, oh the outrage, tell others what he found:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gates-covid-data-ihme/

Headline: Are Bill Gates’s Billions Distorting Public Health Data? —Thanks to the Microsoft founder’s support, the IHME can make its own rules about how to track global health. That’s a problem.



They’re not mad that Gates and Bezos and the rest of them buy influence with journalism and journalists, no, they’re mad at those who point it out, or those who help them point it out, like the Columbia Journalism Review:

https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php

Snippet: As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations—a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronavirus pandemic—an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors. Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favourable news coverage.*



This is not “don’t shoot the messenger”. The psychology involved is far more complex. The Major yelling at the subaltern after receiving an unpleasant communique is a different kind of phenomena. That’s a moment of frustration vented. This is a complex, life-long phenomena often requiring recovery.

Part of recovery from Mormonism is recovering from this phenomena.

Human


*The next paragraph:

“I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.“

Human Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Some don’t want to hear the truth,
> even of the simplest kind:

The assumption being that you are the one who can grasp the truth and everyone else is wrong.


-------
> Power is corrupt and
> Money buys influence.

If your assertion is correct, you can surely find examples of people on this board denying that power corrupts and that money buys influence. Of course if you can't, you're just another pretender assailing a straw man.

Can you produce those quotations?


--------------
> they’re not mad at the
> Powerful for fucking them at every turn, or at
> those who take money and lie for them. No,
> they’re mad at those who tell them about the
> corruption and the lies that cover for it.

You implicitly reject the possibility that others don't agree with you on the substance--whether Gates is distorting reality--or over the degree to which that distortion is worse than the distortion in sources you prefer.

Are you confident that your perception of reality is superior to everyone else's?


--------------
> They’re not mad that Gates and Bezos and the
> rest of them buy influence with journalism and
> journalists, no, they’re mad at those who point
> it out. . .

There it is again: the portrayal of those who disagree with you as fitting a pattern followed by an attack on that pattern. It's sloppy, to be sure, but easier than treating people as individuals with complex views.


--------------
> This is not “don’t shoot the messenger”.
> The psychology involved is far more complex. The
> Major yelling at the subaltern after receiving an
> unpleasant communique is a different kind of
> phenomena. That’s a moment of frustration
> vented. This is a complex, life-long phenomena
> often requiring recovery.

Bizarre.


---------------
> Part of recovery from Mormonism is recovering from
> this phenomena.

Another part of recovery is surrendering the presumption that you alone have a clear understanding of reality, an assertion that seems dubious given that we have seen you take diametrically opposite positions on a single issue within a few days depending on whom you are arguing with.

Still another relic of Mormonism is the use of straw man arguments to ensure that you win a debate.


------------
> “I recently examined nearly twenty thousand
> charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made
> through the end of June and found more than $250
> million going toward journalism. Recipients
> included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al
> Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The
> Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times,
> The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett,
> Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for
> Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations
> affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media
> Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases
> Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose
> documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports
> Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic
> organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on
> Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation,
> and the International Center for Journalists; and
> a variety of other groups creating news content or
> working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett
> Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to
> create a “news site” to promote the success of
> aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they
> distributed part of the funding as subgrants to
> other journalistic organizations—which makes it
> difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s
> funding into the fourth estate.“

We are to assume that those organizations are less honest, or less perspicacious, than the sources you prefer?

Sorry, but nope. Our disagreement with your sources does not mean either that we fail to see the danger of money influencing opinion or that we are too stupid to recognize you as our intellectual superior.

Shoot the messenger much?

If the messenger can't defend the message, perhaps it's not worth much.

As long as we’re using Nerf guns.

I think we can figure out that OP shoots from the lip. But why don’t you? You want a second source for everything, but what about your personal opinions that you can’t back up? Surely everyone should have their own unique cosmology.

The church could actually use that concept to turn Book of Mormon factual problems into an asset rather than a liability. That the gospel worked for over a century in spite of those problems demonstrates that a person’s subjective reality is really what matters to God. They can play up the practice of personal revelation. They should stop pushing institutional truth and focus more on subjective truth. Being a good Mormon or anything else means living your truth.

Or as Steve Jobs put it, don’t live someone else’s dream. Unfortunately, that messes with their authoritarian fantasies so it won’t happen.

As for institutional racism and bigotry, that can turn on a dime because it’s a “Simon Says” thing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/01/2021 08:42PM by bradley.

bradley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You want a second source
> for everything,

Not necessarily. But I would like *a* source, and I would like to see it evaluated. For example, if Human argues that money corrupts but then only applies that to a subset of people and organizations, something is wrong. Why are liberals the only ones who are venal and deluded?

That's a question that deserves to be addressed. Perhaps there is reason behind his ideological inconsistency, in which case it would be good to understand that logic; or perhaps he is simply biased, subject to his own delusions. The difference matters.


------------------
> but what about your personal
> opinions that you can’t back up?

Oh, I definitely have those. And if I make an assertion and am wrong, I would hope and expect that people will point that out so I can improve my thinking.

I welcome correction--if it's based in logic and evidence.


-------------------
> Surely everyone
> should have their own unique cosmology.

Yes. But no one's cosmology is immune to examination, especially when that vision of reality has immediate political consequences for others. And when those consequences implicate voting rights, personal safety, and the fate of constitutional liberties--as has been the case in recent years--there is something approaching an ethical obligation to challenge implicit biases.

Well yes, politics is a minefield of bias on either side. The notion that money corrupts smacks of class warfare, which is an effective distraction from the real issues. If money corrupted as a general rule, why is philanthropy so big in the US? Power corrupts as a general rule. That’s why Marcus Aurelius had an assistant whose job was to tell him “You’re just a man” when anyone venerated him. Power and money are often related, but they’re not interchangeable.

Human started the thread on a reasonable proposition but then veered into political territory, which is uncomfortably close to preaching. The problem with political discussions is that we’re all being played so political arguments are based in emotion. Just like the church that we all know and don’t love.

bradley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The problem with political discussions
> is that we’re all being played so political
> arguments are based in emotion. Just like the
> church that we all know and don’t love.

True. But facts and logic are a basis for rejecting emotionalism in all its forms.

bradley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> As for institutional racism and bigotry, that can
> turn on a dime because it’s a “Simon Says”
> thing.

I'm addressing this point separately since I think it is very important.

By definition, "institutional racism and bigotry" do not "turn on a dime." It is because the racism is institutionalized that Lincoln couldn't eradicate it; that Jim Crow was created AFTER the Civil War and endured for many decades; and that much of the United States continues today to discriminate on the basis of race.

If it were merely a matter of "Simon says," the election of Joe Biden and others who denounce bigotry would have ended the discussion. And yet daily we see some Asian person beaten for being Asian.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/01/2021 10:51PM by Lot's Wife.

I suppose racism could be stronger than Mormon brainwashing. TBMs don’t automatically fall into line like good little mobots. There was a lot of pushback against anti-gay policies. So even if church leadership flushes all of its past racism down the memory hole and gives a bunch of money to BLM with lots of fanfare, TBMs might not be on board.

Although strategically, such a move would make sense because the only people on the planet who can be persuaded to join the church live in Africa.

The problem with that, Bradley, is again the matter of institutionalization. Yes, there are lots of Mormons who resist the homophobia and racism, but both are institutionalized in the scriptures, the temple ceremony, and the church's history. So those forms of bigotry survive/d long past the point at which Americans in general had lost patience and wanted change.

But when the US, for instance, decided it opposed racism, there was still the US constitution with its States Rights provision as well as laws and social patterns dating back to Jim Crow. Those institutions permit/ted a minority to maintain its preferences even after the majority wanted to move forward. This shouldn't be a surprise; the South agreed to join the federal system in the 1780s only because the North consented to institutional mechanisms that would preserve slavery.

So in the church and without, eliminating homophobia, misogyny, racism, and other forms of bigotry will require not just the achievement of majority support but also the restructuring of various institutions which, in turn, will require a political supermajority. It's like the Electoral College, whose original purpose was in fact the preservation of Southern power in the face of a rapidly growing Northern population.

Institutions are tough to change. Very tough.

“Institutions are tough to change. Very tough.”

And getting tougher. Medical technology delays death, the final attitude adjuster. Between seniority policies and the church’s ultra conservatism, the church will always be dragged kicking and screaming behind any social evolution.

My own liberal education, tame as it was compared to today’s, underlined the importance of Christ’s message. First let me say that I can’t stand the Church. Believe me, I try. It just doesn’t work for me. But I try to give everything a fair shake.

There are concepts in secular humanism that led me to Hell. There are concepts in the gospel of Christ that led me to Heaven. Your experience may differ, but if I were a betting man...

Which brings me to the topic of Mormon Recovery. What is recovery? Is it Atheism? Is it reconciliation? Is it an alchemical transmutation? For almost a decade, any mention of “God” made me bristle. It was a trigger word.

But I’m okay now. I’m Lt. Dan after the storm. ‘Twas grace that set me free. I love God. I love the Christ. The infinite divine is the fabric of being. I’d say fabric of reality, but reality is more an imaginary subset of being. Would I live without it? I could, but I choose not to. I consider this wisdom. The approach of most of the modern world is to trust in the arm of the flesh and to lean towards one’s own understanding. This is foolishness. Teaching people to take offense is foolishness. Corruption of youth is the kind of foolishness that will wreck a nation. It’s no small thing.

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, that will build a nation.

Note: Misplaced response.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2021 03:29AM by bradley.

Your list of bad sources comprises nothing but liberal sources, right? And the people you attack by name are the liberal Bill Gates, correct?

Why nothing about sources from the right? It seems that you think conservative sources are above reproach, that they are not influenced by markets and donors.

If I have that wrong, please post the second part of your argument. Because the way it stands now exemplifies the close-mindedness, the political naivete, of which you accuse liberal posters.

A corollary to this phenomena is the predilection for false narratives. Families build them, LDSinc maintains them, political factions spin them and nations uphold them. People desire the false narrative, they hang on to them, defend them, and hate anyone who dares tells the truth that undoes them.

The late Robert Trivers seemingly delighted in pricking the bubbles of cherished false narratives. He may remind some RfMers of the old days when the former Sunday School types loved pricking every corner, no matter how arcane, of the church’s false narrative. In a chapter on the subject, in the aptly named The Folly of Fools, he writes the kind of straight talk that makes some squirm:

“There is a deep contradiction within the study of history between ferreting out the truth regarding the past and constructing a false historical narrative about it. As we have seen in this book, we make up false narratives all the time, about our own behavior, about our relationships, about our larger groups. Creating one for one’s larger religion or nation only extends the canvas. Usually a few brave historians in every society try to tell the truth about the past—that the Japanese army ran a vast, forced system of sexual slavery in World War II, that the United States committed wholesale slaughter against Koreans during the Korean War and against Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians in the Vietnam War, that the Turkish government committed genocide against its successful subgroup of Armenians, that the Zionist conquerors of Palestine committed ethnic cleansing against some 700,000 Palestinians, that the United States has waged a long campaign of genocide and murder against American Indians, from the nation’s founding to the murder by proxy of more than a half million in the 1980s alone, not counting before or after, and it has sought through military means to determine the fate of the entire New World for well over a century. But most historians will tell only some version of the conventional, self-aggrandizing story, and most people in the relevant countries will not have heard of (or believed) the factual assertions I just made.”

—The Folly of Fools—
—Robert Trivers—

God bless those willing to speak the truth, about our families, churches, professions, countries, etc.

Human

Human: “God bless those willing to speak the truth, about our families, churches, professions, countries, etc.”

When I first read this post, it occurred to me that you might have read the Trivers quote you cite; particularly “that the Zionist conquerors of Palestine committed ethnic cleansing against some 700,000 Palestinians,” and just fell in love with the confirmation of your anti-Israeli, pro Palestinian narrative. After all, love is indeed blind!

But, I suspect, if you knew anything about Trivers (or about the complexities of real, non-trivialized, history) you presumably would have resisted aligning yourself with Trivers. I base this assumption on what Trivers stands for as a socio-biologist and evolutionary psychologist in the materialist science tradition; and in light of your prior posts where a worldview involving genuine altruism and free will is espoused and celebrated; both of which Trivers denies. Perhaps you have now quite literally “sold your soul” to the “devil” in exchange for your favorite historical narrative. In any event, let me try to restore some rationality to your thinking.

Let’s start with a quote from Stephen Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: (Pinker cites Trivers in detail, and they are from the same evolutionary psychology mold. (If they believed in such things as souls, they would indeed by “soul-mates,” along with their favorite son, Richard Dawkins)

“Robert Trivers [like Chomsky], was a left-wing radical as well, and one of the rare *white* Black Panthers. . . . Trivers viewed sociobiology as a subservice discipline. A sensitivity to conflicts of interest can illuminate the interests of repressed agents, such as women and younger generations, and it can expose the deception and self-deception that elites use to justify their dominance. In that way sociobiology follows in the liberal tradition of Locke by using science and reason to debunk the rationalizations of rulers. Reason was used by Locke's time to question the divine right of kings, and may be used in our time to question the pretension that current political arrangements serve everyone's interests.” {Pinker 2002:301}

Now, as you know, I am an unabashed political “lefty” myself. As such, I have no problem with “illuminating the interests of repressed agents . . . and exposing the deception and self-deception that elites use to justify their dominance.” The problem with Trivers, and his ilk, is as follows: (1) the pseudo-scientific program of using sociobiology and evolutionary biology as 'scientific' support for their left-wing agenda; (2) the undermining of human values, which logically follows from a commitment to evolutionary psychology; and (3) the distortion of history by cherry-picking historical “facts” taken out of their social context in order to support his left-wing outrage. (As you have done in your citing of Trivers here.)

In essence, Tivers uses principles of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to come up with a simplistic, naturalized, explanation of human behavior. For him, human behavior is based upon the deterministic genetic principles as outlined in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. (Triver’s wrote the Preface to this book) Through these questionable evolutionary principles, Trivers (and others) believed that they can identify the general biological and psychological source of all that is wrong with human psychology, and the right-wing social institutions that it generates; and thereby defeat any overriding “moral” arguments that might otherwise be offered in support such policies. The upshot of this project was to deny genuine altruism through free acts of will, by placing such things within scientific deterministic mechanisms, both evolutionary and neurological. Fortunately, this program doesn’t work scientifically, simply because (1) human behavior is far too complex to lend itself to such simplistic mechanisms; (2) the cognitive capacities of human beings—including consciousness, human thought, and creativity—far exceed what can be explained by the rote physical mechanisms that underlie neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Anyway, I have harangued on this many times on RfM, and found you for the most part 'on board' with these observations.

Trivers’ negative review of Sober and Wilson’s book, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, and the follow-up debate, is helpful in understanding Trivers’ attitude. In this book, Sober and Wilson distinguish between “biological altruism” and “psychological altruism” and invoke “group selection” as a partial explanation of genuine psychological altruism. By so doing, unlike the social psychologists, they take the folk psychology of beliefs, desires, motivations, etc. seriously. Here are some of Trivers’ objections to this position:

“You know you are slow train to nowhere when, in a book promising to treat the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior, we have to stop and consider whether *introspection* may provide an adequate evidentiary basis for firm conclusions on human behavior? If the answer to that is “yes,” I want off this train. As it is, I wish I were reading a different book on the train.”

In other words, Trivers wants no part in any explanation of human behavior that involves conscious reflection about desires; motivations; or genuine emotional caring in the context of free choices. Altruism is a rote biological (genetic) mechanism and nothing more. Thus,

“The effort to put together a coherent theory of psychology using terms such as desires, thoughts and beliefs seems to me doomed at the outset.”

The negativism of such a position as it relates to human values is relished by Trivers:

“Unto Others brought to mind two visits to my office when I was a young professor at Harvard in the 1970s. The first was from a freshman in my “Social Evolution” class. He said that he was disturbed by the implications of natural selection applied to human behavior. I seemed to be arguing, he said, that there were only two kinds of altruism in nature, kin-directed and return-benefit, chiefly reciprocal altruism. He asked if I thought there was any other kind of altruism out there. I said I did, and his face brightened and he asked me what its meaning was and I said it was being selected out. [In other words the kind that doesn’t actually exist because it is not evolutionally helpful.] His face fell and, as he stood up to leave, he said he could not go on living believing the things I believed. I smiled broadly and assured him that it created no problems for me at all.”

https://metanexus.net/review-elliott-sober-and-david-sloan-wilsons-unto-others/

This last quote shows the damage that so-called “liberal education” can do in unsuspecting young minds: By all means, let’s be sure that our college freshmen do not subscribe to such ridiculous notions as genuine altruism and free will. [One might ask Trivers how individual human behavior can be altered for the "good" if in fact there can be no real reflection and genuine free will from which to evaluate bad institutional ideas, and act to change them.

No attempt to defend your implicit claim that right-wing news outlets and commentators are morally pure while centrist and left-wing outlets are fundamentally corrupt?

Your "false narrative" has been "pricked" and is deflating.

I agree. You could insert "Koch Brother's", or "Murdoch" for "Gates Foundation" in the OP and it would still be a long, unsubstantiated "guilt-by-insinuation" diatribe.

It just goes to prove that the cult of the right uses the same straw-men approach to their politics as they do to their religious cult preferences.

HH =)

It appears to me that Human is often grossly misunderstood with respect to his social and political views. I have hoped that he would at some point dispassionately articulate such views, but so far he has declined--or they have been deleted. Because I believe his views are relevant and important, I will try myself to explain where I think he is coming from. He can then respond (if he wishes) to tell me where I have missed the mark.

Human often presents his positions and arguments in terms that appear to be "right-wing" oriented; e.g. his relentless attack on the left-wing mainstream media (MSNBC and CNN). However, it is neither true or fair to characterize his position in this politically dichotic way. After all, his endorsement of leftist Robert Trivers in this tread; his strong support of Palestinian issues; his anti-Capitalist stance; and his appeal to such left oriented publications as the Guardian, and The Nation, demonstrates that the foundations of his criticisms are "left" oriented, not right. He also cites Glenn Greenwald frequently, who disavows any political orientation to his views, but who is also traditionally associated with the Left. (e.g. the Guardian).

The problem (as I see it) is that the left mainstream media although pressing populist values traditionally associated with the left, like equality, anti-poverty; civil rights, etc., are failing to meet the "deep state" threat to civil rights as posed by the US Intelligence Community. (hereafter the "USIC"). But worse than that, the left-wing media are now in bed with the USIC in their joint fight against the far right, "deep state" audience of Fox news.

In short, the tables have turned. Fox News has taken on the role of questioning (to some extent) the deep state and pushing back against USIC. That leaves people like Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, and Human between a rock and a hard place in terms of mainstream media identification; i.e. they espouse liberal, leftist, social values, but see the main threat against human rights and values as a global issue, and in terms of an unbridled, renegade USIC, which the left-wing mainstream media has now wholeheartedly embraced.

Remember in 2013, when Eric Snowden was arrested for exposing the NSA's civil rights violations. At the time, the left mainstream media momentarily embraced Snowden and Julian Assange of Wikileaks as heroes, and the NSA as the villain. Such a stance, however, became too controversial and "unpatriotic", so it was rejected and set aside as too controversial an issue for general viewership ($$$). Thus, when it looked like the USIC would finally be exposed by a relentless press for its misdeeds around the world, such matters were suppressed. And, again, to add insult to injury, media outlets like MSNBC embraced the USIC in its fight against Trump, and the far right. (They are all over MSNBC as "commentators" attacking Trump and his "deed state" supporters.)

That is the source (I think) of the anger of Greenwald, Human, and others against the mainstream left-wing media. And there is a great deal of validity to it. And the reason they do not attack Fox News as much as MSNBC is because (1) Fox News did not betray the broader liberal civil rights agenda; and (2) Fox News *does* recognize and call attention to "deep state" issues. Aside from that, I would guess that Human would agree that the same media "truth" issues, or "agenda" issues, or "deception" issues, would also apply equally to Fox News as it does to MSNBC. It is unfortunate that the merits of such a view often get drowned out by unbridled rhetoric where passion represents 90 percent of the argument and objective facts and reason 10 percent. It would be nice if it were the other way around.

Finally, I will note that I have been following Human as a poster on RfM for many years. There is no doubt in my mind that he is one of *the* smartest and most informed posters here. When I read his threads, even when I strongly disagree, I always suspect that there is some grain of truth that I am missing, and always try to find it. Unfortunately, we don't always speak the same language.

So, Human, did I get any of this right?

Good points. I agree many people react angrily to people or information that doesn’t support their views.

I don’t get why. I’m not the sum of my opinions or ideas. I don’t suffer a psychological death if I’m wrong. The realization that I’m wrong, had an incorrect perception, was incorrectly judging someone, or was just being a dumbass means I get to change what I’m thinking or doing.

That raises the prospects that I’ll deepen a relationship, make more money, find better health and/or navigate life better.

It’s a rush. When the big waves hit the North Shore of Oahu, some grab their boards excited for the challenge. Some don’t.