Category Archives: Extremism

We Seem to Disagree on Everything

Extremism, Gender Warfare, Moral Humility, Pluralism, Social Issues, Woke

 

The divisions in America keep growing in number and in the depth of those divides. As usual, Canada is the same just a little more gently. Polls have shown that many Americans think those divisions are so deep that the country will not be able to survive its problems.  In other words, because of polarization we are doomed.  But are things that bad?

 

Mark Edmundson writing for the New York Times pointed out that evolutionary biologists have determined that,

 

“binary behavior is an evolutionary adaptation. It inheres in the reptile brain. There was a time when it was incumbent on us to decide and decide quickly who was friend and who was foe. Will it eat me? Am I safe around it? Err, if you must, on the side of enmity. You don’t want to equivocate about a sabre-toothed tiger.”

 

But, he also said, he did not agree things were that bad. Edmundson suggested the famous philosopher Jacques Derrida had some important things to say on the topic.  Derrida hated the compulsion so many of us have to divide the world into binaries or polarities.  Life just was not that simple he said.  That is why according to Edmundson, Derrida was an “an enemy of simple, dualistic thinking.” That is not a bad thing. Such thinking deserves critics. Added to that, he said “Derrida worried that compulsive binary thinking, in which one seeks opposition everywhere, could readily lead to violence…”  Edmundson agreed with Derrida. So do I.

 

Edmundson preferred the position of that modern philosopher Ted Lasso, who said instead, we should “Be curious, not judgmental.” That is often good advice. As a result Derrida called for thinking that did not require polar opposites but instead “resembled a form of thinking that was not based on the tension of opposites but resembled an ever-expanding web of rich associations.” Derrida’s curiosity led him to affirm the free play of the interpreting mind.

 

I agree with both of them but put it just a little differently.  My take is that we should not think and see in black and white, nor even gray. We should think and see in colour. Glorious colour. But that is not what we do.

 

Instead of that we think in black and white. We think the world is either A or B. 2 choices no more.  Pick a side and stick with it. As Edmundson said,

 

“Our culture is amok with binaries. We have two major parties, just two, and they are forever opposed. When a group tries to start a third party, it can be summarily disabled by the existing powers. We love sports, generally the most binary of activities. One side wins; one side loses. Root hard for your squad and the devil take the opposition. We savor debates where one side wins and one side loses.”

 

In the larger world, we find allies and we find enemies. We are, as I say, Democrats or Republicans, realists or idealists, people of much faith or people of none. We wear our team jerseys with pride and scoff at the opposition’s colors.

 

 Such binary thinking is just plain impoverished and so are we if confine ourselves to black and white.  Yet it is everywhere.

 

There is one clear modern example of this deficiency which is pretty plain if you look. That is thinking about  sex and gender.  More and more people are saying there are only 2 sexes and 2 genders.  A person is a male or female. Oner or the other. The pendulum is swinging. There are no other choices. In fact this is an issue in the municipal elections in Steinbach this year, as odd as that seems.

 

But life is not that simple, even if we would like it to be.  It is an uncomfortable fact that some people are born with ambiguous sexual organs. It is just not clear whether the person is male or female. Such a person could be one or the other or some combination of both. Such people are called intersex.

 

The differences between the genders is even less clear. There seem to be a lot of choices when you look. As Edmundson said, “Insisting on purity — you must be one thing or another — will inevitably create confusion and resentment.” That really is the point.  Insisting on simple answers will just bring about a lot of unnecessary unhappiness and pain.  There is no need to insist upon a clear distinction. There is nothing to be gained by such simplified thinking. Its none of our business. Let others live and let live.

 

Edmundson had a better approach, which he found in eastern religions. This is what he said,

 

“A person influenced by the great Eastern texts, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, would be likely to see it differently. The best state of mind is one in which you can look out on all creation, other people in particular, and say to yourself: That, too, I am.

 

We are all part of one being; we all possess the same soul. This way of seeing does not cultivate opposition or conflict. It accepts what comes its way without picking sides and initiating strife.”

 

This does not just apply to issues of sex or gender. We should look at the other and keep our opinions to ourself.  If the other person is suffering from confusion let him or her or they choose. Be happy.

 

I am not sure the Bible actually says, as some suggest, “we are all God’s children,” but it could still be true. If you believe in God surely you would say we are all God’s creation. Is that not enough to give us all dignity? Sometimes, we should give up judging in favour of accepting. As the Beatles said, “Whispser words of wisdom. Let it be.”

 

Is that not enough?

Even Hitler was Loved by his Mother

Extremism, Hate, Polarization

 

Mark Edmonson pointed out in a New York Times articles something that is actually quite obvious. He said, “Our culture is amok with binaries.” I have called it ‘My way or the highway’ thinking. This is particularly true in politics but this attitude has seeped into many aspects of modern life. For example, in can still be seen among some religious communities where each thinks they have a monopoly on truth and the “other religions” wallow in ignorance.  Sadly, many Mennonites think that way, though not as many as before.  There is some improvement. For example, my teacher Will Braun, did not think that way. He always worked hard to avoid such binary thinking. He was a Christian but admitted that there is truth to be found in other religions.

 

Sports is one field where binaries still rule and the glaring ugliness of it can be seen there.  At hockey games or football games as soon as the referee makes a call adverse to “our side”, we tend to leap up in with venomous disgust. We can’t stand it.  I have even seen parents jumping and screaming at very young refs of games in which their children are participating. It is ugly enough to tarnish the sport.

 

And really, we must admit that these games and these perceived injustices are really pretty insignificant. Why do I love the North Carolina Tar Heels and hate the Duke Blue Devils? They are both great basketball teams and live about 7 miles apart in North Carolina. But there is a lot of hatred between those teams, and sadly, not all of it is good natured. Some of it is vile and really the differences between the two sides are puny.

 

This is what Freud called the “the narcissism of minor differences.”  And their sole purpose is to keep insignificant binaries alive. Yet, even though I know this is true, when I watch the next basketball game between Duke and North Carolina is will be dying every time Duke makes an unlikely basket or North Carolina misses an easy shot. These small differences to me are very important. My bad.

 

We should not think and see in black and white, nor even gray. We should think and see in colour. Glorious colour.

 

Will Braun’s attitude which he got from his interpretation of the Bible was that we are all God’s children.  My wife Christiane says something similar, also wisely, “Even Hitler was loved by his mother.”

 

 

The Noise Machine: Create Confusion, Doubt, and Anger

Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America pointed, in the film The Brain-Washing of my Dad, that  out often The Noise Machine, as he called it, tries to create confusion, fear, and misinformation. This is a common tactic used by those political leaders that want to be kings or modern equivalents. By the Noise Machine he meant the Republican Noise Machine that works in conjunction with Fox News. He said “It is designed to attack people and smear people…in order to confuse viewers and news consumers and get them all riled up.” There is not much better than fear or anger to get people engaged. That is its goal and it is very effective. It helped Trump win 2 presidential election. In the world of social media there is nothing more important than engagement.

 

Senko, the producer of the film,  asked  Boehlert for some examples of deliberate spreading of misinformation.  One he gave was the 2008 American presidential election where a lot of right-wingers were unable or unwilling to believe that Obama won the election and claimed  voter fraud and faulty voter registration. Sort of like Trump does too.

 

There was very little voter fraud meaning someone shows up to vote and pretends to be someone else. That did not stop American conservatives from  alleging voter fraud in the election and then again and again. Lies have a long life span it seems, on the right.  Of course, this same tactic was used by Trump in the election he won in 2016, as crazy as that sounds, and once more in 2020 in the election he lost, and he was even trying to set up his supporters once more in 2024, but did not need to do that. The claims were bogus, but they got their own based riled up so effectively that they thought the Democrats had tried to steal all of those 3 elections.

 

Political theorist Noam Chomsky said this was similar to the massive attempts to create climate change denial. Again, these were very effective campaigns by corporations who benefitted massively from delaying action on climate change. They tried to convince Americans that humans have nothing to do with climate change even though they had a lot scientific information from their own scientists that this was not true.

 

This was also a fantastic success for the oil and gas industry which gained decades of American inaction on climate change when the science had already made it clear that climate change was real and was caused by human activities. A lot of this information has come out in litigation where courts have required these corporations to reveal their tactics. In law suits this is called discovery. Participants in a trial must disclose a lot of information to the other side. As Chomsky said, “you gotta make profits tomorrow and if the species goes down the tube that is somebody else’s problem.”

 

Decades earlier tobacco companies used the same approach to convince Americans that tobacco smoking did not cause serious harms to smokers even though they had massive scientific data showing that this was not the case. They ended up paying billions in those law suits. The oil and gas sector used the same public relations firms to sell those falsehood to Americans, again giving those corporations decades of extra profits as Americans were getting sick and dying.

 

In each of these cases the corporations used tactics of sowing confusion through disinformation designed to make people angry at the liberals who were interfering with their life style choices. In each of these cases the corporate predators that organized the campaigns showed callous indifference to the harms caused by their disinformation campaigns to the American people. Profits are all that mattered.

 

As Brown and Williamson a former tobacco company said in a memo it was forced to disclose, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”

There is a lot of hate out there

Extremism, Hate, Polarization

At least one thing is clear in this topsy-turvy insecure world. That is that there is a lot of hate out there. Really there is more than enough to feed a dozen worlds.

 

This is how Mark Edmondson put in the New York Times awhile back:

 

“I find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. Libs hate conservatives, and conservatives hate ’em right back. People hate politicians, the elite, MAGA hats (and their wearers), social media (though they cannot stay away from it). Some hate the rich. Some despise immigrants. People hate the media. They hate corporations. They hate capitalism. They hate woke and cancel culture. They hate globalism and globalists. They hate this president. There is love out there to be sure — for Beyoncé, for Pedro Pascal and, yes, even for this president, but hate trumps love by a mile now, or so it seems to me.”

 

 

I am a college basketball fan. I prefer it to professional basketball. My favorite teams are the University of Manitoba Bisons and North Carolina Tarheels. In North Carolina they take their basketball very seriously. The fans basically get insane about their times and even more their rivals. The hated rival of North Carolina is Duke University only 8 miles away. Those teams, and particularly their fans, hate each other with extreme passion. I remember once on a trip through the deep south of the US, in North Carolina where both of those Universities are located and we stopped somewhere and I started chatting with a woman who was a rabid basketball fan. Like me she was a Tarheels fan. I mentioned to her that it was too bad North Carolina had bad season last year. She was outraged at this comment. How could I say that?  It was true that by their standards they had not won many games, but they had beat Duke. Nothing else mattered. It was a great season because of that one win.  Her fandom was defined by her hatred of Duke.

 

Edmondson mentioned something similar in his article:

 

“One may define oneself — one may define the self — through hate. One day you are a blank slate, a void. But you can become yourself simply through hatred. You define yourself through your antipathies. I hate the church. I hate my school. I hate my parents, hate the administration, hate the president, hate the fascists, hate the communists. And maybe you begin to hate the Red Sox, too. I know any number of people who define themselves at least in part by hating a sports team. Take a bow, Duke University basketball.

Suddenly, you have stabilized the self. Do you want to be somebody? Well, now you are. You are the person with a stunning palette of hatreds. You don’t need to have positive allegiances to define yourself: The negative ones will do. Suddenly, ambiguity and nuance disappear, and you become Someone, with all of whose energies flowing in the same direction.”

 

 

Rene Descartes a famous French philosopher wanted to find certainty in the world.  That was tough to do.  He had an interesting way of doing it. He decided he would not take anything for granted. He would doubt absolutely everything he possibly could.  The one thing he found that really must be true and could not be doubted was that he existed.  Even if a malicious super-being was trying to fool him he must exist because he was being fooled. He was thinking, so he existed.   As a result, he concluded, I think therefore I am.

 

Edmundson suggested that perhaps there was something just as certain in the modern age and that was that hate existed. I Hate, therefor I am.

All if know is that I don’t want to be such a person. I don’t want to be defined by hate. Even hatred of Duke. Or Trumpism. There is much more to life than that.

Tactics of Brain-washing

Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism, Sacred Ignorance

For many years I never watched the TV news. I thought I was better off just reading a newspaper or magazine.  Now there is evidence that in some cases at least that is true!

Jen Senko, the director and producer and narrator of the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, which I had watched blogged about earlier, told the story of her father who had been led from being a good guy to a fanatic right-winger largely on the basis of Fox News.  She felt he had been brain-washed by Fox News. She found some scientists and doctors who identified some of the tactics of the right-wing  that could result in profound changes in people.

 

One tactic she called “Lie and Skew.” This is based on an insight of the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” this is what Timothy Snyder called “The Big Lie.”  Hitler told such lies too. So did Donald Trump. It seems counter intuitive but the bigger the lie the better it worked.

 

Another example was the claim by George W. Bush and his cronies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when they invaded in 2003. Such weapons were never found no matter how many years they occupied Iraq. Many conservatives so strongly believed this lie that many years later they still believed, entirely without evidence of course, that Saddam Hussein just kept moving the weapons to keep them out of sight of the occupying American army. George W. Bush, to his credit eventually admitted that they never found them. Though he didn’t admit they lied about it. More recently, Donald Trump has claimed the 2020 presidential election in the US was stolen fraudulently by the Democrats. He has never stopped spreading this lie because it is useful to him. He can use this to discredit the electoral system in case he is not elected. He has never provided evidence to support that claim. He just repeats it over and over again as if that is enough.  And many Republicans believe it even though they don’t have any credible evidence for it either.

 

In the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, Jonathan Schroeder professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology  pointed out that often news media will claim a statistic that they cite out of thin air without saying who said it or where it came from. You have to know these things so you can tell if the statistic  is independent, created by recognized experts in the field and has been peer reviewed. If you don’t know the source you should not trust.

 

Fairleigh Dickenson University’s Public Minds survey asked 1,185 people nation wide what their news services were and then asked them about events in the US and abroad. Those news services were then evaluated on the basis of how many of the viewers of various sources got the right answer. The result were incredibly interesting: Here is the order from good to bad of those news services’ viewers:

 

NPR

Sunday Show,

Daily Show,

CNN,

MSNBC,

No News,

Fox News

 

You got it. Fox News viewers came last even behind viewers who watched no news at all! In other words, people got more reliable news without watching the news than they did watching Fox News!

 

I more or less would rank the news services in the same order though Comedy News is a comedy show.

 

Of course, to many on the right in America the only source they trust is Fox News and, of course, their own independent “research” on the Internet. I have watched it too, but find their opinions usually far-fetched. But I admit I don’t watch it often. I am referring particularly to the version of Fox News that includes their pundits like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Trump seems to believe everything he hears there and has in fact appointed a number of their pundits to his Cabinet or panel of advisors.

 

I know that others disagree, but Fox News, in my opinion, based admittedly on very limited experience,  is addicted to the Big lie because it sells. It gets people angry. And anger is the basis of their widespread support among the American right-wing. For what it’s worth that is my opinion.

When Murderous Regimes Meet

Extremism, War Between Israel and Hamas

 

Since the first day of the war in Gaza I have been saying that this would be a brutal war with very few if any limits. When I said that I based that on my limited knowledge that both groups were dominated by extremists. And then I was just thinking of Israel and Hamas. I did not think others would jump in, though I recognized that this would a real possibility.

 

Now there are a lot of more extremists involved. Since then, the United States jumped in on the side of Israel and Hezbollah on the side of Iran. As a result, we now have 4 murderous regimes in the war and make no mistake about it, 4 all are murderous regimes including the US under Donald Trump. When murderous regimes meet nothing good is likely to follow.

 

We must not flinch from pointing this out to even to our friends on any of those sides. The ugly truth must be faced.

 

And the result of a meeting of such 4 murderous states is guess what? Murderous words followed by murderous actions of course. And the result of all of this is bound to be unhappy.

 

Foad Izadi an associate professor at the University of Tehran pointed out an interesting fact to a Guardian reporter: “Trump and Netanyahu have managed to unite Iranians more than any Iranian politician could.”

 

Mehran Haghirian, director of research and development  at the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation in London said that the Islamic Republic  was not capable of change, as that required being open to the outside world.”  Does he think the other 3 regimes are any different?

 

Elham, an artist in Iran, made an interesting suggestion when she said, referring specifically to Iran but the suggestion is actually just as applicable to all of the 4 murderous regimes: “We have to build new coalitions. Whether you are a reformer or hardliner, everyone has to take a step forward towards each other.” This is a valuable insight. We must learn to step away from the extremists. Even those who support us.

 

That is what everyone must do. But when murderous regimes meet that seldom happens. But it should. By each of them

 

 

 

John Cleese and the Good Things about Extremism

Extremism

John Cleese, of Monty Python fame and  certainly one of England’s most learned philosophers, gave a talk given in 1987 in which he had some interesting things to say about extremism that fits in well with what Luke in the Bible and Will Braun, have said. Actuall,y it fits well with everything you have ever thought about extremists.

 

He started by acknowledging that a lot of people were complaining about extremism.  The airwaves were filled he said with people who were less friendly and more intolerant of others. People lacked respect for their opponents. Cleese did not disagree with that, but, he said, what about the other side? What about the good things about extremism?

 

“The biggest advantage of extremism,” Cleese said, “is that it makes you feel good, because it provides you with enemies. The best thing about enemies is that your can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you!”

 

 

Cleese had more to add, as if that was not enough:

 

“If you have a lot of anger and resentment in you and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that the only reason you are doing what you do is that your enemies are such very bad persons and that if it weren’t for them you’d actually be good-natured, courteous, and a rational all the time. So if you want to feel good become an extremist. Now you have a choice.  If you join the hard left, they will give you a list of authorized enemies—almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the city, the Americans, judges and multi-national corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals, class traitors, and, of course, moderates. Or, if you’d rather be an extremist on the hard right, no problem, fine no problem, you still get a lovely list of enemies, only a different one. Noisy minority groups, unions, Russia, weirdo, demonstrators, welfare spongers, meddlesome clergy, peaceniks, the BBC, [or I guess CBC in Canada] strikers, social workers, communists, and of course, moderates. Once you get this superlist of enemies you can be as nasty as you like and still feel your behavior is morally justified. So you can strut around abusing people telling them that you can eat them for breakfast, and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth. A fighter for the greater good. And not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are.”

 

As a result, maybe extremism is not such a bad thing after all.

 

A Mixed Stew of Simmering Hatreds

Extremism, Hate, Polarization

 

Hatred and Extremism go together like love and marriage. Or should I say like hatred and marriage? Or as a friend of mine would say, pea and porcelain.

 

Recently, an Albertan radical posted a manifesto on line in which he said “women’s sole purpose is to reproduce and modern society is marginalizing men.” Clearly, he was aligned with the Incel movement. The Woe is me movement which attracts a lot of dissatisfied men. Besides, women, he also hated real estate developers, elites, pornographers, and Jews hence establishing his credentials as pretty omnibus hater. Perhaps we should call him an egalitarian hater. It surely was a simmering list of hatreds that could only spell trouble. And this is what it did.

 

I think hatred metastasizes. It spreads and brings cancer to everything on which it alights. And eventually, it brings death.

 

After publishing his manifesto on-line he travelled to Montreal to cause a ruckus. He visited the area that contained a number of powerful companies and began an incident in which a Montreal cop and an innocent bystander who happened to be Jewish, were shot and killed. I think I heard the bystander was actually shot by the cop.

 

All this accomplished was making it clear that Canada was home to domestic terrorism too. Perhaps our terrorists are just more incompetent than their American heroes. Certainly, no better.