Another Anti-American Subversives List

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Oct 18 06:47:14 PDT 2002



> But then Mencken would never be allowed to post on Freep's
> board. He'd be listed as "anti-American" (which he was in
> life by Freep's ancestors), and this shows the utter
> depravity of modern American "conservatism." I mean, Buchanan
> is on the above nut's list. Why? He opposes the war on Iraq.
> I'm happy to see that the Buchanan/Raimondo/American
> Conservative wing is being dragged through Freep's shit pile,
> and I'll take them over the Freep types any day of the week.
> The Freepers have no appreciation for freedom, much less the
> Constitution, which is why they revel in making Enemies
> Lists. The ANSWER crowd is no different, nor those who
> willingly march alongside them. Read some of the posts over
> at Proyect's list -- little more than Red Freepers. The two
> sides have more in common than they realize.

Yep, fundamentalism is a cognitive predisposition rather than a rationally adopted view. I've seen that, inter alia, among Polish immingrants in this country - the most ardent anticommunists used to be party apparatchiks in their previous lives. The fundamentalist mindset is like a low resolution camera - it is unable to process complex multidimensional information, and reduces every image to crude white and black blocks. The colors of these crude blocks are easily interchangeable, which explains why fundamentalists switch ideologies so easily, but their cognitive style remians essentially the same.

IMHO, fundamentalism is a mental disorder that, like schizophrenia, have a not yet understood neurological basis. Hopefully, with the progress of neuroscience we will be able to diagnose and remedy this condition. Unfortunately, as Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo once said, if one man's delusions are shared by others, they become a political point of view, protected by constitutional rights. That may pose some obstacles to treating that mental disorder.

Wojtek



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