“What the way we have responded to Trump reminds me of is the movie Darkest Hour about Churchill dealing with the approach of Hitler. Churchill was basically negotiating a path through Britain’s desire to maintain peace and Hitler’s aggressiveness. They just didn’t know what to do. They didn’t want to fight. But they didn’t want Hitler taking over: achieving his ambitions. We are dealing with a very similar situation with Trump as progressives. We just don’t know what to do.” -me
“This mess isn’t going to end with the end of Trump.
We need to be very clear on that.” -ibid
I have several concerns here:
For one, I can’t help but feel that the troll mentality has broken from cyberspace and become a real-world issue. We clearly saw it in what the tea bagger’s have been up to: the modern-day equivalent of the brown shirts. But I think it’s become a little more subtle than that. And before I go on, I will admit that I am working with gut instincts based on anecdotal evidence. The best I can hope for is that it resonates enough for you to consider it.
That said, Bruce Cannon Gibney wrote an excellent book (by which I mean he made a convincing argument for his thesis (called A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. And I would not dismiss his argument -that is altogether. However, things I have seen lately (especially on the boards (has brought me to believe that not all millennial nuts have fallen that far from the tree. That sociopathic MO seems to be at work in a lot of young people I encounter on these boards.
And I don’t think I’m the only one seeing this. I recently watched a movie called Untraceable about a serial killer who killed his victims online just to show the system that more people would watch than we would like to believe. And yes, it is just a movie and not solid proof for my thesis here. But there is something about the comments on the antagonist’s board that rang true: the way they adopted the mannerisms of professional critics, in a kind of ironic way, to comment on the performance of the murder.
I saw it as well in the first episode of the latest season of Black Mirror. A brilliant computer programmer (the latest version of the Nietzscheian overman (takes people from his real world situation and programs them as simulacra for his own personal fantasy which involves him being a modern day Captain Kirk, a scenario in which he becomes a tyrant to the perfectly sentient replicas. And you can easily see the troll MO at work here. But you see it even more in what happens when the simulacras rebelled and broke free. They found their selves in a gamer’s universe confronted by a gamer who, when he found they had nothing to trade, threatened to blow them out of his quadrant if they didn’t leave immediately.
“Yeah,” he said after they left, “I am king of the fucking universe.”
And you can see a connection (a rhizome (with a point I have previously made on these boards:
“Today I want to explore the InCel (involuntarily celibate (movement and the Red Pill sights they are associated with. It is, of course, tempting to mock it –and many highly intelligent people do. But I’m not really sure that is the smartest approach. For one, it can only exacerbate the situation by taking (what seems to them, at least (a kind of “in-crowd” tone that is, in the sense of not being part of that “in-crowd”, the very source of their understandably painful experience of alienation. And this is important to understand since it may well be this experience of painful alienation that lies behind most of the mass shootings we’re seeing in America. I mean this could well be the reason this is mainly occurring in High Schools and Colleges, the outright cauldrons of narcissism and vanity in which being part of an “in-crowd” is everything. And I’m not blaming the victim here. Kids will be kids. But what I will suggest (and I apologize for my opportunistic Marxist jab (that a lot of this comes from producer/consumer Capitalism and the way it bombards us (via TV ads (explicitly with images of what it is like to be part of an “in-crowd” while implicitly implying that if you are not like one of those people you see, you are no one.”
And I would further reiterate the connection I see between this movement (the alienation involved (and the fascist experiment we are currently engaged in. I would reassert my theory that such sites are prime recruiting grounds for neo-nazis and alt-right types. I’m not altogether sure that jobs are the only thing that white heterosexual males are afraid of Mexicans stealing. (And in my defense, just look how I got trolled when I suggested that world peace could only be achieved when, through interbreeding, we became a world of mutts.)
My other concern is that this propensity towards fascism can only get worse as the pressure to emigrate from third world countries gets greater. As climate scientists have argued, the first main effects will be close to the equator: the place where third world countries are. And I can’t help but see a mob/threshold dynamic in that we are primarily dealing with people with low thresholds for now. But what happens when more and more immigrants overwhelm our capacity to help them out? All I can see is people with higher thresholds (higher tolerances (succumbing to the fascist/troll mentality.