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I just saw this article in the NYTimes. It starts by talking about a similar incident to the storming of the capital that happened last August at the German Reichstag here in Berlin. It was by what we call Covidiots in Germany, a strange coalition of people who unite in their opposition to German policies to fight the pandemic. It includes anti-vaxers, right extremists, left extremists, conspiracy theorists, new-agers, general fringe types and these strange people who believe in a non-existent German Empire, which is a discussion in itself. There are even some QAnon followers, which is a thing now in Germany.
It was a much smaller group who tried to storm the parliament building and they didn't get very far, so people didn't hear all that much about it. But now we can see that as a warning sign.
The reason I post it here though is how the article continues. What it ties together is how in both cases people are essentially uniting and even willing to take violent action based on their belief in imaginary political causes. In other words, they are cults.
So how exactly do you fight this? Germany is at least paying attention now. But the author's suggestion to "contain them and take away their guns" I think is misplaced and shows a lack of understanding. First of all it is not possible and it won't really stop them.
At the same time she is correct to say that you can't reason with them in a normal political debate. You are dealing with a false belief system, cult phenomena, whatever you want to call it. We here know what that means. I don't know what the answer is but it is pretty scary. We all know from years debating with premies on this forum that there are no pretzel logic hoops that such people are unwilling to twist their neurons into to maintain their belief system.
Humans are really not evolved enough to manage their own technological achievements. I guess it is time to bring on the robot masters.
In closing I have to add that some months ago I took Jim's side in saying that the Trump movement was not a cult. Yeah, I was wrong. A main part of the reason is that deep down I don't actually think the singling out of the cult phenomenon the way people like Steve Hassan define it is valid. But that is also a topic for another discussion.
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When I left the cult and had begun a bit of deconstruction, I imagined I'd finished with cults. I'd got trapped in a side vortex of nonsense off the mainstream of life as 'normal' people live it.
However, I don't seem to be able to get away from cults and cultish thinking. I see it all over the place. Not often as discrete and self-contained as the Rawat-worshiping palaver, but still, crazy ideas dearly held, out of reach of reason. People I know pretty well, affected by Qanon. 5g, Bill Gates, the Covid hoax, the cover-up by government that allows them to control us with lock-downs. And then I think a lot of the impetus behind Brexit was some mad nostalgia for a benevolent and enriching empire. Taking back control was a cracking theme (how is it I've lost control? No more than 90 days at a time in France, no more free health care, and worst perhaps, no more taking trees to my land in France - my tree nursery disconnected from my orchard).
I think a lot of cultish activity is about taking back control. Spinning some sort of narrative where you gain more control of your own fate. Where you become more significant.
In Tony Blair's time, there was talk of Brussels seeming remote from the people under its governance, and subsidiarity was proposed as a solution. Remember that word? I think it meant devolving power downwards as far as possible, localising decision making to an appropriate level - a street, a village, a town, county, region - to give control back to people as far as possible.
Well, no-one has used that word for a decade or more I bet.
We know reason won't work to persuade people into more rational thinking. I think I really left the cult when I didn't need to be in it any more. When I had built up enough of a life outside of it. I think people do need to feel in control, to be a significant part of society, to have more of a say in how things go than the opportunity to choose between two politicians every 4-5 years.
JihadWatch seems so yesterday. The Trump cult, the rise of the far right and the madness of Qanon seem likely to have more impact on us in the long run.
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As always a really thoughtful post to read 13. I just have two things to say.
1. Being finished with cults. Yes I thought that too, and in a way that is my problem with the Steve Hassans of the world. They want to define a cult as some kind of specific aberration, but it is f**king everywhere. It's not that the cult phenomenon is a mysterious virus that infects our otherwise perfectly sane fellow humans. It is that we humans create cults because, as you said, we seem to need them. Cult-like thinking, believing in nonsense is all around us. I also have friends like you describe. I used to think it was cute and quaint, but with covid they have gone rabid and angry. Which brings me to ...
2. I think we can expect far worse than Trumpism and QAnon to come. I have a doctor friend who works at the Charite in Berlin. She told me basically that the covid pandemic is like a dry run. Wait until we get one, as basically Bill Gates has been trying to warn for years, that has the virulence of covid and the deadliness of ebola. How will people behave then? And what happens when places on Earth become inhabitable, when we start to experience serious food and water shortages? Okay sorry, I will stop now.
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Dry run? This one has the potential to become more deadly. The more the virus increases, the greater the chance of a mutation of the kind that would have greater virulence or become more infectious (there are already a couple like that, apparently originating in the UK and South Africa). Or become resistant to the vaccines. We'd have to roll another one out, and then another maybe. I think this is quite likely. It may become continuous, like the flu.
I imagined on Xmas eve that with a free trade deal agreed things would be basically OK, so I looked at the rules about moving plants across the border. Every tree I am propagating here to take to France is now prohibited. I have 100's of trees with little or no value in the UK, plus I brought my tractor back to the UK to prepare a tree nursery, for which I now have no use. And I even need phytosanitary certificates on my tractor, mower, trailer (all three) to get them back into France.
So, I was preoccupied (and pretty pissed off) with that. But yesterday, I was down at the allotment. Very cold grey day, buggering about trying to get things ready for the spring. Seemed a bit of an end of the world type activity. There was a new young guy there. I ended up helping him get a huge piece of plastic sheeting over his allotment to kill the weeds. He'd lost his job in July, no prospect of another, so he figured he was down to the basics of growing food. He hadn't known the plot he was taking over was the plot left vacant by the guy that died of Covid in the spring.
I think that little scenario has helped get the tree thing in perspective. Now, it's more of a concern that our seed orders are a couple of months late, the delivery date keeps being extended.
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I'm sorry to hear about your problem. I became aware that this would happen in 2017, not might happen, unless the govt took steps to avoid it. That they didn't amounts to criminal negligence in my view. It isn't only a matter of stuff subject to 3rd country sanitary & phytosanitary regulations, but loads, & I mean many, many, other areas of economic activity will run into walls like this as a result of the insane decision to leave the single market.
My point is if I, an ordinary citizen, could know about this 3yrs ago why haven't professional journalists. I know it's a bit nerdy to delve into the workings of the EU treaties as well as being terminally boring, & a part of my job involves ferreting out information, but none of this is or was a secret, nor difficult to find.
It's the duty of the media to identify things vital to the national interest & to present them in such a way as they become understandable to the general public, not to mention those politicians who don't have the benefit of access to civil service advisors. They have failed in that duty, which means one of the institutions which support our system & keep our society functioning properly has failed.
That's really serious.
You're probably right in your other post about an element of nostalgia coming into the leave vote, but for most people I believe it was a protest against the political class having ignored their concerns, especially around immigration, for the last half century. No-one voted to leave the single market; that was Theresa May's doing without so much as a word of debate.
It was entirely possible to leave the political structure of the EU whilst staying in the single market, which is what I thought I was voting for, & had it been even hinted that that could happen I would probably, reluctantly, have voted remain.
The ironies mount up though. You mention T. Blair's ambitions for decentralising govt. Well, he did manage Scottish devolution, but getting down to the local level was impossible because that was opposite to the EU's political direction of travel. Did he not know that at the time. We don't know. Now though it would be possible, though highly unlikely as long as the present crew remain in power.
You'll probably need an import agent in order to get your stuff into France, but as far as I'm aware he/she doesn't need to be a specialist, just a resident, not neccessarily of France only, but you'd need to check that. In other words a friend or relative could do it without payment. Of course they would then be legally liable should one of your seedlings turn out to be a triffid. 
At least, unlike lobsters for example, a couple of days sat on a dockside aren't going to make your enterprise impossible.
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Ha, and if I thought we would have stayed in the single market but quit the political structure, I might have voted leave! Though freedom of movement is important to me, I'd have wanted to preserve that too, but I doubt that would have been possible.
I don't think an import agent would solve my problem. I thought I might need phytosanitary certificates for some of my trees, and that would have been prohibitively expensive. I thought I'd have to give up on those. It turns out though that most the species I am propagating, or had plans for are simply prohibited. A few, I'd need a certificate for each species, and as I am specialising in diversity, that's not going to work.
Two bright spots though. A good friend has decided to move to France, and is looking for a house with land nearby. In which case, I'm sure I could wangle a corner for creating a nursery there.
And I've just realised that the great big lizards scurrying through the grass aren't green lizards as I'd thought, but ocellated lizards, a threatened species. I'd like to preserve them, as it's always been my aim to maintain if not increase the biodiversity there. There may be money in that. I could threaten conservationists with concrete...
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Wow! There's just so much going on here that it's an overload for me.
As an American I was frightened and appalled by the insurrection incited by Trump. It was scary to see the mob ransack the Capitol building. I've been there and inside and I've seen the House Chamber from the gallery. And to have all those grubby goateed goons with their flags while running amok and tearing the place apart was shocking.
Yes, as we understand what it is to be in a cult and completely off track with reality, I think that we can call the Trump phenomenon a cult.
Where and how does their cult thinking end - I don't know. It seems impossible to me and that we are headed for some kind of crazy civil war again. We had a civil war, of course, and with that one we had a physical demarcation - the North vs. South. But with this craziness being everywhere, are we going to have bombings, assassinations, and violence in the streets everywhere?
Aunt Bea, I'm certainly not an expert on Germany even though I'm mostly German, but on Wednesday it felt like the early days of Nazi Germany when they stormed the Capitol building.
And while Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, Trump certainly could become like him if he hasn't already in his need to be worshiped.
As a side note, back in the 90's a friend and I went to a little arts movie theater in Seattle to see the film 'The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl'. In the film was, of course, the Brown Shirts and it's leader Ernst Röhm. My friend pulled me close and whispered in my ear that Röhm was his great uncle.
Yeah, dealing with the far right Trumpers et al is probably going to be a long messy battle.
One thing that I'm wondering about as the FBI and other police are arresting and charging some of the mob that they've identified is whether Trump will pardon them along with all the other pardons he's going to be giving out.
Modified by eDrek at Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 14:34:58
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I am sort of sorry to say that I never even realised how amazing the Capitol building complex was until now. I had never been to DC. I hope that we will still be allowed to visit it after this. But I still feel what you are feeling: grubby goateed goons – exactly. It really is something like holy ground that they desecrated.
One of the things that the woman talked about in the article and which I also observed is that there was a kind of "let's play revolution" attitude about them. It was a lack of seriousness or something. There is this funny video of one of the woman that I will try to post here that really expresses it well. The same thing happened in Berlin in August.
The reason I say this is not to minimise what happened, but to just point out that Trump really isn't Hitler and they are not really brown shirts. But how easy it is for them to get that far in their mindset, with so little to actually work from and so little to push them. Imagine someone like Trump who isn't such a buffoon coming down the lane and what could happen in that case.
We can only hope that this episode can somehow be a lesson, in the way that I was saying above to 13 that covid is a dry run. So people are prepared for the real thing. I don't know, I don't have much faith in people coming to their senses.
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Article behind paywall. So, anyway.
What happened to losing with good grace? Surely that is the bedrock notion on which democracy is based. Now we have Trump being a bad loser, but what about Clinton et al in 2016; they never for a second from the start of his Presidency right up to now, accepted his win as legitimate, & indeed fought tooth & nail against it throughout.
In this they were aided by a large part of the 4th estate, the NYT included.
So I take their analysis with a large pinch of salt.
I try not to think of political movements in terms of cults, partly because like you I'm not entirely on board with the definition, & because it's getting into Cancer Ward territory when terms like 'false belief system' are used.
The guy with the horns on the Davy Crockett hat doesn't represent any of the millions for whom the present economic arrangements are cause for anxiety & disillusion.
These people aren't going away & so Trump's shoes are there & waiting to be filled. Doubling down on the men become women can they use the wimmins restroom nailbiting debate, just ain't going to cut it.
To hell with relying on the robot masters; isn't that what the Chinese Social Credit system is all about. For myself I'd rather see an old fashioned clandestine shipment of a couple of hundred thousand rifles & few million rounds of ammunition to a resistance movement against that, than give in to such a horrifying vision.
I really hope it doesn't come to it, just saying in advance whose side I'd be on if it ever does.
Something has gone very wrong with our politics when we can't agree to disagree & a large part of the blame for that isn't the politicians themselves, but the people whose duty it is to report on their activities & make them understandable to the public.
Who guards the guardians is the question that really needs to be addressed by those who want to halt the decline of the West.
Are there enough of them to prevail against the odds, as opposed to the predominant new age puritans I don't know, but whichever way it goes, anyone who sees getting rid of Trump as a new dawn, is a wishful thinker.
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But Pat, with the previous election Trump lost the popular vote, so there is a legitimate debate to be had about the way the electoral college works (always in favour of the more sparsely populated red states).
Trump lost the popular vote as well and the states, and not even by a small margin. There wasn't vote fraud to any extent that could make a difference. And then he was on the phone trying to get someone to 'find some votes'! That's way beyond being a bad loser.
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I'm not sure who Clinton et al is. I certainly didn't want to see Trump as president and was shocked when he won. But I accepted his win as fair and square. Yeah, as 13 says, the electoral college thing sucks, but that is how we play the President game here. People always get upset when someone loses the popular vote and wins the electoral college, but I don't remember anyone not accepting his win as legitimate.
Even Hillary, with all her moaning and lame excuses afterward, never questioned the legitimacy of it. At least I don't remember that.
One of the big problems with the electoral college issue is that a lot of people don't really get that if the Presidential election was determined by popular vote, campaigning would be very different and who is to say who would win under those circumstances. Although apparently in the current demographic the GOP benefits from the electoral college thing. I read on 538 I think that the Dems have to win by at least 2% or 3% to outrun the electoral college. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was something like that.
Anyway I think they should get rid of the system, but it will never happen, because it means a Constitutional Amendment.
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transgenders in the women's restroom is just the tip of the iceberg pat - will we have a women's sport with a limit on how much testosterone you can have to compete in it?
this is the nail biting debate we need to have. 
here's a link about cultish thinking at school.
https://www.sott.net/article/437748-Discovering-the-link-between-gender-identity-and-peer-contagion
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