No imaginary transgression is too small for the mob of virtue-signalling SJWs on Instagram

Kathrine Jebsen Moore
Quillette

"Knitting is just so white. Let's hope it gets better." I overheard this puzzling remark in my local yarn store in Edinburgh, Scotland, last week. The store is in the affluent area of Marchmont, just outside the city centre. Its Edwardian and Victorian tenement flats, adjacent to huge green spaces, are popular with students and families alike. Two customers were chatting to the store owner: "It's about time we had the conversation," one of them offered. Her companion nodded in solemn agreement.

Knitting, which helps lower the blood pressure and keep the mind busy, has enjoyed an upsurge in popularity in recent years. The Internet has allowed for the proliferation of new platforms from which to buy yarn and patterns, and has helped connect artisans and hobbyists worldwide. Usually, it's a calming and creative pastime focussed on aesthetics rather than politics. However, a short browse through the knitting posts on Instagram steered me in the direction of the source of the exchange I had overhead and the "conversation" it had produced.

On January 7, Karen Templer, a knitting designer and owner of the online store Fringe Association, published an innocuous blog post on her website entitled "2019: My Year of Colour," in which she enthused about her forthcoming trip to India. To most observers, Templer's post will read like a guileless account of her hopes and aspirations for her upcoming travels:

I've wanted to go to India for as long as I can remember. I've a lifelong obsession with the literature and history of the continent. Photos of India fill me with longing like no other place. One of my closest friends [when I was 12] and her family had offered back then that if I ever wanted to go with them on one of their trips, I could. To a suburban midwestern teenager with a severe anxiety disorder, that was like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars. ... Then about six weeks ago, the opportunity presented itself-a chance to go with a friend who's been. ... I said yes. And I felt like the top of my head was going to fly off, I was so indescribably excited. Within 48 hours, three of those friends of mine who are so much better travelers than me-but who are all equally humbled at the idea of actually going to India-also said yes. There has hardly been a single day since that I haven't said in disbelief, either in my head or out loud, I'm going to India.

And what on earth could be wrong with any of that? Rather a lot, it turns out. After a series of encouraging posts from well-wishers, the comment thread took an aggressively inquisitorial turn. Templer's previous posts had typically garnered between three and 30 comments, but "My Year of Color" has 197 at the time of writing.

One of the first people to attack Templer was a user named Alex J. Klein who wrote:

Karen, I'd ask you to re-read what you wrote and think about how your words feed into a colonial/imperialist mindset toward India and other non-Western countries. Multiple times you compare the idea of going to India to the idea of going to another planet-how do you think a person from India would feel to hear that? 

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Hooked on Feeling

Meghan Daum
Medium.com

 Jussie Smollett’s story is horrifying. It’s also unleashed a torrent of “groupfeel.”

A few weeks ago, someone made an observation on Twitter that struck me as exceptionally wise (this happens every once in a super blood moon). The observation had to do with the concept of “overfeeling”:

“You’re over-feeling this” needs to be a thing we can say as easily as we suggest “overthinking” it. Yet, we talk about “Groupthink” when “Groupfeel” is the new wave transforming our public sphere.

The tweeter was mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, who frequently has things to say about the collapse of intellectually honest conversation. And while “groupfeel,” depending on how you define it, could describe the kind of emotional stirring-up and fearmongering that Donald Trump has been trafficking in for decades (from the Central Park Five to his current hysteria about immigrants), the occasion for this tweet, as far as I could tell, was mostly ambient. Weinstein was registering frustration at the way public discourse increasingly eschews actual logic for a sort of culturally agreed upon standard of emotional logic.

It’s possible, too, that he was referring to the saga of the Covington video, a viral, Rashomon-evoking document that, from certain angles and when viewed for certain durations, appeared to show a “Make America Great Again” hat-wearing white male Catholic high school student smirking at a Native American elder during protest marches in Washington, D.C., on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

After an avalanche of online outrage about the student’s white privilege, toxic masculinity, and whatever else people wanted to project onto the situation, it became evident there was more going on. The kids, it turned out, had gotten caught up in some verbal sparring with a fringier-than-fringe group of anti-everythingists (or just about) known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. The Native elder was apparently trying to intervene between the two groups by banging a drum in the face of the teenager. (Maybe not the best method for de-escalating a tense situation, but who knows until you try?)

After an avalanche of online outrage, it became evident that there was more going on.

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It's past time to get out of the mainstream media bubble

Bob Shanahan
Investment Watch Blog

 It's only getting worse amidst continuing Russiagate hysteria and has already begun to pop

Whoever controls the media controls the narrative. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Media propaganda has reached a level we have not seen in our nation's history as wars are ignored, politicians destroyed, and truths distorted. But the American people want change and they got that in Donald Trump. Despite that, the media is still the same and is now as atrocious as ever.

"Those who report the news and shape public narratives are of particular interest to US oligarchs, who bought up the old media long ago and are doing everything in their power to secure influence over the new media as well," caitlinjohnstone recently wrote on Steemit. "Pundits like Joy Reid are some of their most valuable assets, and they protect those assets accordingly. Because whoever controls the narrative controls the world."

The media bubble is very real and it's only getting worse. Our major media companies consist of a cast of anchors and pundits suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. They got 2016 wrong and they are still getting it wrong, continuing to promote the baseless Russian collusion narrative while ignoring the many successes Trump has made in his first two years in office and failing to adequately cover much more significant stories.
Journalistic groupthink is the primary symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The media still cannot accept that they live in a world in which Donald Trump is president. The bias can no longer be ignored. The blatant Fake News is deluding the nation. And the deception has gone too far.

America is finally waking up as "Fake News" was named word of the year last year, defined by The Collins Dictionary as, "noun (feɪk ˈnjuːz): false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting."

Just look at where journalists and our mainstream media companies are located. Tucker Doherty dug into the statistics and broke them down against voting patterns and Census data for Politico to decipher exactly what the American media landscape looks like and how it has changed in recent years.

"The national media really does work in a bubble," the Politico piece reads, which is "something that wasn't true as recently as 2008." And this bubble is expanding and concentrating along the coasts. Journalists working in media today aren't just located in pro-Clinton country, they are in the most pro-Clinton counties in the country. Reporters and television pundits really are clustered in Brooklyn, DC and California. The numbers unveiled by Politico bear this undeniable reality out. It is no exaggeration. "Not only is the bubble real, but it's more extreme than you might realize," Politico points out.

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Totalitarian Thinker David Suzuki

Donna LaFramboise
No Frakking Consensus

SPOTLIGHT: If you value free thought and open debate, David Suzuki is no role model.

BIG PICTURE: Amnesty International calls them ‘prisoners of conscience:’ people jailed not for violence, but for expressing the wrong opinions. This term was coined by Amnesty founder Peter Benenson back in 1961, who cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought…Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion…

Canadian broadcaster David Suzuki, 82, doesn’t believe in freedom of thought. He thinks people should go to jail if they think the wrong way about climate change.

Ten years ago, he urged a Montreal audience to find “a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.” In Suzuki’s universe, climate change is a compelling problem (although not compelling enough for him to reduce his own air travel). Politicians who fail to take certain measures should therefore lose their liberty.

The difficulty, of course, is that there are diverse perspectives regarding the source, magnitude, and significance of recent climate change. The climate on this planet is always changing, and many smart people consider its recent fluctuations to be trivial. Those who hold such views – whether they be scientists or democratically elected leaders – have a right to behave according to their conscience.

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Groupthink drives global warming zealotry

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?

A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) shows that both the science and policy of the climate debate are shaped and driven by an almost flawless example of classical Groupthink.

Written by one of Britain's leading newspaper columnists Christopher Booker, the report is based on research by Professor Irving Janis, the American psychologist who is famous for his theory of "Groupthink". But as Booker explains, Janis never looked at the application of his theory outside the policy areas he was interested in:

"Janis's focus was on decision-making in the foreign policy arena. However, as soon as you look, you see that his ideas apply elsewhere. The climate debate is a case in point - all of the characteristic 'rules' of groupthink are there: warmist ideas can't be tested against reality, and so to ensure they are upheld as the truth, they have to be elevated into a 'consensus' and anyone who challenges them must be crushed. These are precisely the features that Janis used to define Groupthink."

So just as Groupthink led to the policy disasters of Pearl Harbour, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war, attempts to suppress serious debate of climate science and the policies that are being promoted as solutions are leading to irrational behaviour, costly policy blunders and corruption on an unprecedented scale. This will only end when groupthink eventually bumps up against reality.

As Booker puts it in his conclusions:

"Every South Sea Bubble ends in a crash. Every form of Groupthink eventually has its day. This is invariably what happens when human beings get carried along by the crowd, simply because they have lost the urge or ability to think for themselves."

Christopher Booker: Global Warming - A Case Study in Groupthink (pdf)

The book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes is available on Amazon (out of print, but used editions are available)

Collectivism and engineered perception

Jon Rappoport

 

The primary feature of The Group is: its members look at events indirectly; they look at events in accordance with what they think other members are seeing; they don’t look at or judge an event through their own eyes or minds.

This method of seeing is, in fact, empty. It’s a fantasy. It’s like passing around an unknown object, from hand to hand, and describing it as you believe everyone else will describe it.

You are always listening for “an echo effect” before it happens.

And you claim the echo effect is what you perceive.

It’s a rank absurdity.

It creates a foundation of zeroes, in all areas of human life.

High-IQ idiots will tell you this is the only way society can operate. Why? Because they no longer know what a free and independent individual is. They no longer know what it means to see things as they actually see them. And when they vaguely sniff out a free individual, they recoil in horror.

In the early days of the American Republic, as the two-party system developed, certain men saw that it was moving toward collectivism.

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Why being in a group causes some to forget their morals

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog

When people are in a group they are more disconnected from their moral beliefs, according to new neuroscientific research.

The results come from a study which compared how people's brains work when they are alone compared with when they are in a group (Cikara et al., 2014).

The study was inspired by a trip to Yankee Stadium in New York made by Dr Mina Cikara, now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

On the trip her husband was wearing a Red Sox cap (for non-US readers: the Red Sox are a rival team from Boston).

He was continuously heckled by Yankee fans, so Mina took the cap from her husband and wore it herself:

"What I decided to do was take the hat from him, thinking I would be a lesser target by virtue of the fact that I was a woman.

I was so wrong. I have never been called names like that in my entire life.

It was a really amazing experience because what I realized was I had gone from being an individual to being seen as a member of 'Red Sox Nation.'

And the way that people responded to me, and the way I felt myself responding back, had changed, by virtue of this visual cue - the baseball hat.

Once you start feeling attacked on behalf of your group, however arbitrary, it changes your psychology."

When 'me versus you' becomes 'us versus them'

Two reasons why people behave differently in groups are that:

1. they feel more anonymous,
2. and that they feel less likely to be caught behaving badly.

But Cikara and colleagues wanted to examine a further factor: whether people's moral compass also goes awry when they are in a group.

They did this by asking a group of participants to answer question which gave an insight into their personal morality.

This enabled the researchers to create personalised statements for each of them, such as:

• "I have stolen food from shared refrigerators."
• "I always apologize after bumping into someone."

Participants then played a game while inside a brain scanner: once as part of a team and once on their own.

When people played on their own, and saw moral statements related to themselves, their brains showed more activity in a part of the medial prefrontal cortex - an area associated with thinking about the self.

This is normal, suggesting a strong identification with their own morals.

But, when some people playing in group saw moral statement about themselves, they reacted much less intensely, suggesting weaker identification with their own beliefs and moral ideals.

Forgotten morals

In a follow-up test, these people were also much more likely to try and harm members of the other group.

Not only that, but they even seemed to conveniently forget the moral statements they'd heard beforehand.

One of the study's authors, Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, said:

"Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts, people's priorities change when there is an 'us' and a 'them'.
A group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into 'mobs' that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality."

You're As Evil as Your Social Network: What the Prison Experiment Got Wrong

Comment: Very interesting article. This pretty much offers confirmation that authoritarian personalities and social dominators (psychopaths) are a powerful reason for the subversion of normal life, but it is the beliefs which are vital in the process of ponerisation. And it is those that are authoritarian followers which are most open to be broken down by this corruption through their innate attachment to highly subjective beliefs. In other words, it isn't JUST the adherence to authority and a charismatic, spellbinding personality but the corrupted belief which followers are led to imagine underpins their idea of ethics and morality.

Once they are subverted then anything is possible. Pathological infection can erode any kind of humanity while the victim/perpetrator believes they are doing God's will, whether it is through Bush's Neo-Conservatism, Netanyahu's apocalyptic visions or through Obama's police state agenda - all for the good of the whole.

Once the belief has become a powerful enough addiction, then ponerolgical influences can do their work in hollowing those beliefs out to represent their antithesis of ethical and moral behaviour. As it progresses, the capacity to discern and discriminate is dramatically reduced due to a progressive degeneration of the conscience of the individual. It is like a psychological disease which renders the individual a follower of evil, often without knowing it.

What the researchers are really talking about is - ponerology.
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Motherboard
McLean Gordon

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment that left humanity with one of the most dismal and damning self-portraits we've ever seen. It seemed to demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of regular Americans are willing to administer a lethal electric shock to a human victim when prompted to do so by an authority figure.

A decade later, Milgram's fellow psychologist and former high school classmate Philip Zimbardo performed another experiment at Stanford University that captured on tape the transformation of regular college students into authoritarian monsters. In a matter of days, those playing the role of guards had the prisoners going mad in solitary confinement and defecating in buckets in their cells. Zimbardo shut the experiment down half way through, but only after his fellow psychologist and future wife appealed to his sense of humanity.

The experiments were part of a greater intellectual reaction to the 1962 trial of Adolph Eichmann - the Nazi bureaucrat generally regarded as the man who signed off on the holocaust. An explanation was sought, but as far as outward appearances, Eichmann was no blood-hungry ogre. He was an average looking, middle-aged pencil pusher with thinning hair. In her classic account of the Eichmann trial, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt summed up the Nazi obersturmbannfuhrer's life and death thus: "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all." He was "just following orders."

To Arendt, this was "the banality of evil," the apparently mechanical process of obedience--whereby an otherwise uninteresting person can become an agent of extraordinary cruelty. In a system like Nazi Germany, where social acceptance was the reward for evil, the socially normal individual sees evil as good. Doing evil becomes nothing more than healthy self-interest, and the horrifying irony is that the person committing unimaginable cruelty comes across in other social contexts as a perfectly "normal," uninteresting individual, no more conspicuous than the rumpled businessman sitting next to you on the train.

The body of psychological research around the banality of evil painted a pretty awful picture of humanity. "The System" was turning regular folks into monsters. In his book "Obedience to Authority," Milgram quoted George Orwell:

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only “doing their duty,” as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well- placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it."

In Milgram's own words: "The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions."

But the theory about obedience and comformity wasn't quite complete. Fast forward to 2002, when the BBC produced a 5-episode series blending reality TV with social psychology research. By no means scientifically conclusive, "The Experiment," as the show was called, did serve to illustrate some of the shortcomings in the famous Stanford prisoner experiment and the widely accepted banality of evil theory.

At the helm of "The Experiment" were two psychologists who have worked for over a dedade challenging classical models of obedience: Alex Haslam, currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland, and Steven Reicher, head of the School of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews. Both focus on the role of social and group identity in  determining how people behave. 

Their research suggests that there is no passive "Lucifer Effect" leading people simply to do what they are told. In a recent paper, Professeors Haslam and Reicher summarize some of the conclusions being drawn from the past fifteen years of research. What they have found is that blind obedience is not the norm. The study concludes:

"At root, the fundamental point is that tyranny does not flourish because perpetrators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous. It is this conviction that steels participants to do their dirty work and that makes them work energetically and creatively to ensure its success. Moreover, this work is something for which they actively wish to be held accountable—so long as it secures the approbation of those in power."

These findings point to the inner, conscious agency of those carrying out the vicious agendas of evil regimes. People are never just black-box agents taking inputs from authority figures and producing outputs in the form of obedient execution of commands. People are responsible for their own ideas, and it is through their own personal identification with a given social order that they become agents of good or evil. Belief matters, and any resistance to authoritarian control depends ultimately on the strength of the opinions in the minds of individuals.

To get some perspective on what these conclusions about obedience and authority might mean, especially in the information age, I called Dr. Haslam at his office in Queensland.

In terms of authority figures getting others to identify with them and their point of view, are there any sort of observed techniques for how they do that?

Earlier this year, Steve Reicher and I wrote a book on leadership, which was really talking about how leaders cultivate a sense of identification with their followers. I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about "we" rather than "I," and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about “we-ness” and then getting people to want to act in terms of that "we-ness," to promote our collective interests.

That’s at the heart of effective leadership, whether for good or for evil. So in a sense, identification and social identity is absolutely critical to leadership. I mean, what predicts the outcome of the U.S. presidential election is whether or not people identify with the particular leaders and whether they buy into their vision of the whole that they present. Let me ask you a question: What do you think is the single word that has increased in inaugural addresses over the last century?

Uhh, I’m gonna go with "we."

Absolutely, and the other one is "America." You’re appealing to the collective, and the words have increased because people have become more aware of their power to a certain extent. But also, those addresses are reaching out to more and more people. A hundred years ago not too many people were paying attention to these speeches. Nowadays people are, and so it’s a critical opportunity to galvanize that sense of who we are and what it means to be American, or what it means to be Australian. And the point is, if I’m a leader who wants to do good, then I’ll mobilize people around a positive, good understanding of what it means to be American, and how we position others in relation to us. Do we see everyone who isn’t American as a problem and as a threat to our Americanness? Or do we see a situation where we can actually work together with other people to create a better world? That’s the stuff of politics as well, so I don’t think these issues are just about these kinds of studies. They’re also about these more positive processes of how leaders mobilize people to act, either for evil or for good.

Presidential inaugural address, 2009

 
So how does a leader create that "we-ness"?

In terms of what they do, in terms of cultivating a sense of “us,” we argue it comes down to four things: first, you’ve got to represent us, which means you’ve got to be seen to be one of us; second, you’ve got to stand up for us, so you’ve got to be seen to defend our interests. Third, you’ve got to cultivate a sense of us - you’ve got to cultivate a sense of us if one doesn’t exist already, and fourth, you’ve got to have practices and activities that embed a sense of us. So, representing, promoting, cultivating and embedding that sense of shared identity, that's what leadership is all about we argue.

How does your thinking on social identity depart from previous ideas about why people are obedient, and their willingness to do harm?

The classical idea is that people just conform blindly to the instructions of authorities, and I think now the research shows they don’t really. Actually if you look at these studies themselves, people are never conforming blindly. Where they go along with an experimenter’s instructions or with the roles an experimenter gives them, it seems to me that firstly, not everybody does, and that secondly, whether or not they go along is a function of whether or not they identify with the experimenter and with the scientific project. Also, when they go along, they’re not just obeying, they’re responding enthusiastically, and creatively. They’re not just doing what they’re told; they’re doing more than is asked of them. I think that’s also really critical when you try to explain the behavior of people like Eichmann and other kinds of Nazis. They were never just following orders: they were responding in an engaged fashion to what they perceived to be the requirements of the situation and the requirements of a leadership with which they identified.

How do you think spending so much time on the Web, with social media and in general, inform peoples' social identity?

I think if you’re talking about kind of tyranny and oppression, that involves a physical set of actions that aren’t just virtual. Clearly the Nazis didn’t need the internet to perpetrate the holocaust. I mean, it would have helped in certain ways, but there are other things they needed to be doing physically that made their regime brutal, and again I think that’s true today. At the end of the day, what really concerns us are situations where people are getting treated inappropriately or abused.

Clearly that can happen in a virtual kind of environment when there is some kind of physical manifestation of that also. But even in those kind of virtual domains people don’t get involved in hate campaigns unless they to some extent identify with the hateful cause, and clearly whether or not you get involved with some sort of viral war or whatever it might be, depends on whether or not you are engaged and identify with the parties concerned. Go and look at the BBC News, look at the responses to it, how vigorously people respond to particular points, and you can pretty much see where their affiliations lie. It’s certainly not the case that they just go along with things because someone important is telling them to do so.

Thinking about the web, have you looked at how anonymity affects peoples' willingness to do evil?

Your construction of the audience is quite critical there. For instance in Abu Ghraib, a lot of that stuff was filmed and photographed, but the point is who do you think is watching? Who’s taking the photographs? In a way, it’s about the relationship between you and the audience. I think that’s right. Just to anticipate one point, there’s a really nice analysis that was done by two researchers in the Netherlands, Tom Postmes and Russell Spears, looking at the relation or the correlation, across all available studies, between anonymity and destructive behavior. What they found was that that correlation is close to zero. There is no evidence of a relationship between anonymity and abuse. Everything hinges on moderators, and the key moderator is, what is the norm of the group?

If the norm of the group is to be destructive, well actually then anonymity can enhance that. But if the norm of the group is to be constructive, then anonymity can enhance that. So it isn’t the case that anonymity is one of those things that feeds into brutality. You know, doctors and nurses in a sense kind of dress up in a kind of uniform to make their personal identities less salient, and charities have a lot of anonymous donors who are very concerned to protect their identities for various reasons. That doesn’t stop them from doing good.

 

"Most have been so scared they piss on themselves. Its sad. But pictures were taken, you have to see them!"

 -- From a letter by Army Specialist Sabrina Harman, the woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib. 

Well, if you think your friends back home are going to be seeing this photo, you’re probably going to be more self conscious of what you get photographed doing.

That issue of self consciousness is a really interesting one, and again I think the issue is the audience, and who do you think is watching? This again goes to the heart of what’s going on in the Milgram and Zimbardo studies. The key audience is the experimenter, Zimbardo, and you ask yourself, do you identify with him? And if you do, you ask yourself, what is it that he wants me to do? And you try to enact that. And in the same way, if you think about those photographs of people at Abu Ghraib, clearly they knew they were being filmed, but they had a sense that the people they were waving at and smiling at was an in-group who would approve of what they were doing. They were therefore in some sense doing it for them.

I mean, the scary thing there is that they thought they were doing it for us, and in a particular kind of sense they were, because clearly they had a model of what it meant to be us that justified, condoned particular treatment of the detainees in that particular prison, so, I think again all those things are telling effectively the same story, and really all the cameras do is make salient different audiences, and if you think it’s going to be watched just by your friends, then that’s not a problem, so the issue then is one of identity salience, and that’s what things like cameras do. There's quite a lot of research too on exactly that point. You can have a camera there and it doesn’t have any particular effect. What has an effect is, who do you think is taking the photographs, and who’s behind the camera.