State Rep. Laurie Pohutsky’s account was cheered by the left-leaning protestors and condemned by right-wing social media accounts.
The 36-year-old Democrat said the surgery was a personal decision she had been considering for a few years and was finalized by Trump’s election. She wanted to validate the fears other women might have about access to contraception by sharing it.
She told The Associated Press that she has received threats since speaking this week, referring at least one of them to Michigan authorities. The Associated Press reached out to Michigan State police for comment.
“I don’t fully grasp the level of animosity that people have about this,” Pohutsky said.
I won’t disagree with you, but I think there’s something else going on also.
They’re really into symbols of allegiance and obedience. Once something becomes “officially” a bad thing, they have to show their loyalty by attacking it. Using language in a certain way, not wearing face masks, being officially Christian, being officially anti-trans/anti-woman, not watching the wrong news sources, watching the right news sources… they want to feel comfortable that they are part of the tribe, and you are too. If you make even a single decision that isn’t the official tribal decision, they’ll get wild and suspicious and angry towards you.
I think that’s what’s going on here. What she’s doing isn’t contraception (strictly speaking) or abortion or transgender surgery… but it’s close enough to those things that she’s showing she’s not part of the tribe. And she’s a Democrat. So what do you do with people like that? You fuck them up because they are the enemy.
If you’ve been close to a culture like this you will have seen it in action, how they attack in order to keep everyone in line.
It starts young, too. These exact same mechanisms are used and reinforced in schools, both by administration and by students.
Bullies thrive on ganging up to attack those who are “different.” Ever wonder why school admin does jack shit about bullying? Part of it is because when a group of kids bullies another for not being like everyone else, they’re reinforcing the administration’s desire for kids to fall in line. A kid who blends in and stays quiet is favored by both groups for the same reasons - the quiet kid doesn’t challenge anyone’s authority.
Yeah.
I don’t really know, but what it looks like to me is that humans have some ugly wiring to figure out who’s “supposed” to be a boss, and who’s supposed to be a peon. And they’ll get upset if someone is behaving outside of their assigned role.
It’s why the Trump people think it’s normal for them to bully or harass or silence someone, but it’s all of a sudden a crisis when someone does it to them. It’s why no one really minds if someone is getting bullied in school, but then if they start fighting back, it’s a crisis.
I won’t say that the wiring did not originally have a good purpose, but it feels like in the modern environment (with less urgent threats to our safety which demand tight-knit cohesion and organization to the tribe, and more loose interactions with a wider world of millions where there’s no opportunity for checks and balances to come into who’s “supposed” to be treated like the boss), it needs to go.
Check out this video from Innuendo Studios about conservative thinking: https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs
Yeah. I generally like Innuendo Studios a lot. I think the video is a pretty solid breakdown of some things that are important to understand (definitely superior to “conservatives = terrible people” which was generally the left’s view, I think, even before it started taking on some strong reality as of about 10 years ago). My only gripe is that it gives way too much credit for intellectual consistency. I actually agree with 100% of the how it breaks down the intellectual foundations of conservatism, and for that reason I actually think classical conservatism in the pre-Reagan sense is fine. Just like the balancing acts of liberalism and conservatism he talks about near the end, I think a good society builds on a balancing act of hierarchical conservatism vs. egalitarian democracy. I don’t think that’s why modern conservatives are conservatives, though. Around Reagan-time, it started to stem more from propaganda from rich people, engineering very deliberate propaganda with which people get inundated, which tells them that rich people deserve their wealth and need more handouts. And, in the modern generation of MAGA-style conservatives, they don’t even care about that stuff. It’s pure emotion. Conservatism can be a mass movement to overthrow the government (made of white men), conservatism can be social security for me because I earned it, conservatism can be subsidies for farmers because that’s what our country needs in order to be strong. It literally just doesn’t matter anymore. Their systems of critical thought have been so atrophied and their understanding of the world is so badly askew that you can present literally almost anything to them, from the right authority and with the right emotional content, and they’ll get behind it.
In my view, the intellectual hierarchical conservatism it talks about is fine, as long as it’s moderated with a strong democracy that can keep it in check. Going too far in either direction is bad. But, unfortunately, that has very little to do with any political question in our current reality (in the US at least, definitely), because the “conservatives” have so little to do with intellectually-consistent conservatism (whether you agree with that version or not) that it doesn’t really matter what that version is about. Modern “conservatism” just means a tribe that’ll kill you if you get in their way. For example I don’t think the conservative from the beginning example, in the modern day, would be arriving at what he’s saying in his argument based on what he believes. He’s just going to be echoing stuff he heard from his authorities, which may have some passing resemblance to the foundations, or it may just be emotionally-laden nonsense which he’s been programmed to emit at you under the right circumstances.
Yup. You see the same damn thing happening in churches, workplaces and institutions. The powers-that-be, whether capitalistic or morality-based, just want replaceable cogs for their machines.
I once heard a preacher tell his congregation that freaks were not welcome in his faith. I guess he forgot all about Ezekiel, who cooked his food over cow dung and had some of the wildest visions recorded, or Isaiah, who preached publically for three years while barefoot and naked.
They would have had a huge problem with those old prophets, too. The religious establishment of the day was coming after them to try to stop them pretty much constantly.
Religion in the mold of Ezekiel and Isaiah I’m actually fine with, which probably puts me in the minority on Lemmy. But if you read the New Testament, a lot of it is Jesus and friends versus the preachers and religious people, because the two groups were more or less at war with each other.
classic “us vs them” cult mentality, see also JW, scientology, LDS, etc etc