Trump's Supporters EXPLAINED

[StarWrecker]

I missed this thread when you first posted it, but there's an interesting psychological tidbit in this:

There is a fraction of human beings (around 10%) that has this primal desire for a powerful authority figure. They want to be ruled, they want to be told what to do, and they want to be able to defer to the leader for their morality, because it makes them feel safe.

Of course, personally I'd blame this segment's failings on shitty parenting and a bad upbringing, but these people exist.

I also think that they neatly overlap with the segment of insane nativists and xenophobes.

When Trump does one of his wannabe-Mussolini moments, they adore it rather than are horrified by it, because it's precisely what they want to hear from Daddy Government. Just put the right strongman in charge, and everything will be alright. They can go to bed and switch off their brains.




As for Jimmy Dore

Fuck that guy. I remember in the run-up to 2016, he was on The Young Turks saying he wanted Trump to win, because he'd shock the left into turning out to vote next time and getting a real progressive in power. How did that end up, shit for brains? The time for that sort of long-term play is when the opposing candidate isn't a cryptofascist insane troll. Maybe there's a time for that discussion when the opposition is a principled conservative, but the GOP in the 2010s is neither principled nor conservative. Even if Sanders won the 2020 nomination, even if he'd beaten Trump in the election, it will take at least four years to clean up the mess Trump left. Biden's presidency will be a purely janitorial job, cleaning off all of the feces that the monkey has coated the Oval Office with. Oh, did I mention the damage that Trump has done to America's reputation? That stink may never come off.

Didn't he get fired for spitting in someone's mouth during an altercation? Pure class.

[Tessera]

There is a fraction of human beings (around 10%) that has this primal desire for a powerful authority figure. They want to be ruled, they want to be told what to do, and they want to be able to defer to the leader for their morality, because it makes them feel safe.

I've talked about this also. It's the R-Complex... the so-called "reptile brain," that is responsible for that type of behavior:

(1) Fear
(2) Aggression
(3) Territoriality
(4) Tribalism (which derives from #3)
(5) The willingness to follow leaders blindly

All of those behaviors are aspects of the "reptile brain." In primitive and ancient times, those behaviors served us well, because they augmented our survival traits. But today, in the modern world, those behaviors cause far more harm than good and are merely ugly remnants... primordial leftovers from our slow upward evolution from reptiles, to mammals and then finally to humans.

Trump's supporters are, therefore, displaying the most primal, primitive behavior that a human being is capable of. They don't represent the future and in fact, the future holds no place for them. No, they represent our distant, reptilian past. They're just frightened little animals, huddling together for warmth and mutual protection, and worshiping at the feet of their imagined savior and protector.

[StarWrecker]

I mean, the reptilian brain model isn't an accurate way of seeing these behaviours (it refers to the basal ganglia whereas these fight or flight behaviors come from other, more recently evolved parts of the brain quite often) but it is true that this is raw fight-or-flight survival mode behaviour that really should have no place in a civilized society. We should have been past thinking that way when we settled down to build cities rather than being roaming hunter-gatherers.

I'm wondering why a certain subset of people are dominated by these impulses. If you've heard of Maslow's hierarchy, it says that higher human drives are irrelevant when lower ones aren't satisfied...


Which means that these people are stuck on the second-lowest rung of the ladder. They can't care about relationships with other people (rung 3), or higher social functions (4 and 5), because they feel so deeply, profoundly unsafe that they need to rally around a big man with a big club. (In Trump's case it's a sand wedge).

Why do they feel unsafe? What is there to be afraid of, in an era when war between nation-states is almost obsolete, when hunger is less prevalent than ever, and when violent crime is statistically less common than it's ever been (barring a recent uptick in the late 2010's).

[Tessera]

Why do they feel unsafe? What is there to be afraid of

I think we're back to territoriality again. Think about it. Once you've staked out your territory... what would be your next instinct..? To protect and defend that territory, yes..? Against all trespassers, whether real or imaginary. You'll live in fear of losing your territory every day. Soon you start worrying that anyone who isn't exactly the same as you are is a potential invader.

[Drazgar]

Whoa, you know... I just realised that this whole "reptilian brain" idea gives a whole new meaning to that popular reptilian conspiracy theory around the world.

You do learn something new every day.

[Tessera]

Whoa, you know... I just realised that this whole "reptilian brain" idea gives a whole new meaning to that popular reptilian conspiracy theory around the world.

LOL... you mean the UFO crap..?

I'll just respond to those kinds of rumors real quick:

There may be life on other worlds. There may be other civilizations. Some of them may even have figured out a way to give Einstein the finger and travel faster than light. Some may even have visited the Earth on numerous occasions. I have no trouble accepting any of those ideas.

But... there is absolutely no way that I would accept the notion that extraterrestrial life forms look ANYTHING like the life forms on our planet. No to reptilians, no to little greys, none of that crap is acceptable to me. Why should life forms that evolved on a totally different planet, within a totally different ecosystem, under what may be totally different environmental conditions, even slightly resemble ANY of the life on this planet..? So when I hear people claiming to have seen little grey anthropoids, with two legs, two arms, a head and bilateral vertebrate symmetry... well I'm sorry, but you lost me. Same for the imaginary reptilians.

Those are all Earth life forms... so if anyone really saw something like that, then it didn't come from elsewhere. It came from right here on our planet. Or they may have been artificial constructs of some kind. Or else they simply imagined it.

[Cylnar]

Convergent and parallel evolution can make organisms that evolved in similar, though isolated, ecosystems develop similar traits that help them thrive in those ecosystems, like the independent evolution of flight by birds (dinosaurs) and bats, by evolving the forelimbs into wings. Of course, many insects also fly and their mechanisms for doing so are dramatically different. It's not impossible to imagine that a creature that evolved in Earth-like conditions might somewhat resemble Earth creatures that formed under the same sets of stresses, though the convergent evolution of large numbers of similar features evolving in a single alien organism to make it a strong analog to an Earth organism is ridiculously unlikely. And of course no other alien planet is likely to be so close to Earth-like conditions to evolve similar orders of life.

Indeed, it may be difficult or impossible for humans or any highly evolved creatures to survive on alien worlds that evolved alien biospheres and alien biochemistry without life support or extensive terraforming/alien-forming (to destroy much of the native ecology and replace it with one the colonizers can co-exist with). Just imagine humans settling a beautiful green world, with independently-evolved photosynthesis and an oxygen-rich atmosphere, able to support many orders of large, advanced flora- and fauna-analogs operating on carbon-based biology...and finding that some weird microorganism or spore just happens to find the dark, moist environment of human sinuses and lungs to be a perfect medium for growth. They don't even suck blood or anything...they just proliferate, feeding off of other microorganisms in the inhaled air, and grow until they kill their host. The immune system has nothing to engage against because of different biology...the growth may as well be dirt or something.

All that aside, it is likely that the ability to stand erect (or at least tall) and observe one's surroundings may be a popular evolutionary adaptation to defend against predators. Bilateral symmetry is an effective, efficient body plan (though radial symmetry has its uses), complex manipulators capable of tool development and use are pretty much required for the development of advanced technology (and are likely to have evolved from limbs or limb-like structures that originally developed for swimming, walking or even flying), positionable sensory receptors capable of high resolution perception of the environment are likewise necessary (likely to be placed on a structure which can be moved somewhat independently), and so on. So while it is beyond credulity to imagine that alien life forms might look like Vulcans or Klingons, it's not impossible for an alien to superficially resemble a humanoid bilateral structure with hands and eyes...though the "hands" may actually be masses of articulated tentacles, and the "eyes" may actually perceive magnetic and gravity fields, or data we have no conception of. Or they could be their genitalia.

[Tessera]

On this planet, we have bipeds.

We also have starfish. And slime molds. And jellyfish. And plenty of other lifeforms that don't conform to the bilateral symmetry plan. And they evolved on the same planet as we did. Given enough time, I could even envision a day when cephalopods (squid, octopus) become sentient and begin to develop technology.

An alien planet, which could have a completely different environment, is not likely to produce complex organisms that resemble Earth life. That's just my opinion, of course.

[Drazgar]

LOL... you mean the UFO crap..?

That too, ranging from UFO ideas right until people start getting crazy about reptilian "masters" secretly ruling over our human world from the shadows (recently this shit also started being actively mixed with another idea of USSR still existing de jure and whole CIS being illegitimate) even without this UFO foundation. Because, you know, glorious Ruses/Aryans are all descendants of the God(s) and currently (in some most extreme cases - since like 17st century) being oppressed by, of course, those mischievous Reptiloids. At some point of our shared evolution they became so smart and powerful so it all happened to be what it is now on our planet.  Jews are also somewhere close, as usual.

You'd be insanely surprised how popular this whole shit became recently here, especially between older people. Well, I should probably say now "between Soviet people" because at this point of history it's pretty much clear that they (a good portion of them at least) are like from "another world".

[Tessera]

Let's try some "what ifs" for a second...

Imagine intelligent aliens who absorb nutriment through their skins. Or absorb it from the air around them. Or photosynthesize, like Earth vegetation does. Or maybe they "eat" electricity.

Imagine intelligent aliens whose bodies don't conform to ANY particular plan. They could be shapeless blobs, who extrude extensions from their central mass if and as they need them, in order to manipulate objects.

Imagine intelligent aliens who are essentially large, floating gas bags with tentacles. They pump heavy gases from their interiors and float about like balloons.

Imagine intelligent aliens who don't have a centralized brain, or anything resembling what we would call a nervous system. Every unit (notice I didn't say "cell") of their bodies interconnects and creates a great big brain. Their whole body is a brain, in other words. They'd be like colony creatures... with all of the smaller parts interconnected in such a way as to produce a highly intelligent super-organism.

Imagine intelligent aliens that employ some sort of hive system. Some of them would be smart, others would be mindless workers, and others would be the breeders. Robert Heinlein explored a similar idea in his novella "Starship Troopers."

I could go on and on... but nothing that I have suggested in this post is far-fetched, or outside the boundaries of organic science as we understand it. Nor is any of it even unlikely, given the enormous range of possibilities for organic lifeforms that evolved on entirely different planets.

So then, why should the aliens who supposedly have been visiting us here on the Earth look ANYTHING like us..? Why would they have a head at one end, feet at the other, two arms, two legs, two eyes and a mouth..? That's what Earth life looks like... not entirely alien life.

The answer is: anthropocentric-ism. Humans tend to automatically assume that if life developed a certain way on the Earth, then it probably developed in similar ways on other worlds. Despite the fact that there is absolutely no scientific reason to be thinking such things. All of that crap about "parallel evolution" and so forth is just that: crap. It's a convenient plot device in science fiction stories and TV shows, but it's also BAD SCIENCE to make presumptions about other worlds, based upon a single known model.

[Drazgar]

I agree with all that. I disregard most of those shadowy assumptions as a sort of "wishful thinking" of sad people in despair (which it mostly is). And probably of some too romantically inclined people, given just how the whole science fiction field is dominated by sexy alien girls (not that I'm trying to call it a bad thing, but still).

But still I find the aforementioned reptile brain idea funny because of its general irony. People are afraid of Reptiloids but... we ARE Reptiloids ourselves.

[Tessera]

Trump supporters are very similar to the ignorant townspeople, who gathered like geese and threw tomatoes at witch burnings during the Middle Ages. Mindless fear and hatred. They are the most primitive people on the planet.

[Tessera]

How To Respond To Trump Supporters Online
LESSON #1

Whenever you run up against a Trumptard online, you can bet that you'll be dealing with an egocentric, ignorant dumb fuck, who will desperately cling to Trump's Big Lie about the election.

You can fight with these people... as I have many times... and you can counter each and every single bit of their psycho-babble with great big piles of facts. It won't matter, because as I previously stated, these clowns are all VERY egocentric. Their fragile little egos won't permit them to openly admit that they've been full of shit, ever since they first supported Trump. These idiots are like Pavlov's dogs.

Well then...

Below is an example of a much better way to respond to the Trumptards, whenever you see one of them claiming that the 2020 election was rigged:




Do you see what I did there..?

Instead of getting into a back-and-forth pissing contest, which is what every single Trump troll thrives upon, I've shifted the conversation to "The libs are too powerful for you to defeat."   

Remember what I said about Trump trolls being egocentric..? If you respond to them exactly as I have, they will almost certainly run away and refuse to reply. In fact, every time I respond that way to one of these morons, they almost never post a reply. Their heads would explode if they tried.

This is only one example of a larger strategy, when dealing with Trump trolls: try to use their own frail and wounded psychology against them. 

[Blankspace]

It isn't getting any better.

Nearly half of Republicans say 'a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands,' new poll shows

A new poll offers an alarming picture of GOP beliefs about democracy.

Almost half of Republicans said a time might come where they have to take the law into their own hands.

A majority of Republicans endorsed potentially using force to uphold the "traditional" America.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Less than a year after a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol, nearly half of Republican voters (47%) say that "a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands," per a new nationwide survey by George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs.

[Tessera]

Nearly half of Republicans say 'a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands,' new poll shows

I'm not worried about it... not even a little bit. The media likes us to be worried and scared, because that's how they generate ratings.

Let's look at some actual numbers...

Currently, the Republican party has withered down to being only 24% of the total electorate. So, "half of Republicans" amounts to a tiny 12% of the electorate. Add to that the fact that a good percentage of them are frightened little pussies, who would never actually take up arms when the time came, and you're left with a very small number of right-wing psychos who wouldn't have a prayer of winning any real battles.

Lastly, the U.S. Armed Forces will not support a coup attempt by the Trump loonies. So if anybody starts any shit, then they'll be facing the most advanced military force on Earth. Their little civil war will be over and done with in a single day.

So like I said, I'm not worried. 

[Tessera]

Dear Trump Trolls:

I have a couple of questions and maybe you can help me.

When you decide each day to pick a fight with the libs on YouTube and elsewhere, do you ever stop to consider the fact that you people have lost nearly every single battle during the past five years..? Do you believe that one day, despite being hopelessly outnumbered, you will magically prevail and turn America into the right-wing Nazi paradise that you so obviously crave..?

How will that happen, exactly..? Just curious.   

[Blankspace]

Dear Trump Trolls:

I have a couple of questions and maybe you can help me.

When you decide each day to pick a fight with the libs on YouTube and elsewhere, do you ever stop to consider the fact that you people have lost nearly every single battle during the past five years..? Do you believe that one day, despite being hopelessly outnumbered, you will magically prevail and turn America into the right-wing Nazi paradise that you so obviously crave..?

How will that happen, exactly..? Just curious.   

They are either bots or crazy people with no lives.

[Will Never]

Yeah a lot of their support is manufactured through paid trolls and bots.   How desperate.   I can tell when they're en masse in certain videos by looking at the views to comment ratios.  Videos that are under assault by bots have comment numbers that rival the view numbers, which makes no sense.