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Notes -
The Trudeau Rorschach Test
The Canadian golden boy seems to be in contention for the run of the century. Moving from politics to dating pop stars and going to concerts like the youth never left him. Reactions are mixed. Some say it's a cute romance between two adorable public figures, Trudeau and Katy Perry, whilst others believe they should both go to hell.
I can't comment much on celebrity gossip culture that lives for these type of crossovers, but what is striking about the scathing criticism that follows Trudeau around dissident right circles is how hollow it sounds.
This guy single-handedly ruined a G7 nation's economy and social fabric and then retired and took his girlfriend Katy Perry to Coachella
Whilst Trudeau keeps smiling, living his best life.
When you have freshly harvested baby adrenochrome running through your veins, what else can you do?
I have a hard time imagining anything that would make two sociopaths happier.
Yeah, our suffering and toil makes us real, whilst luxury and enjoyment make him fake. God I wish I was fake.
I'm the opposite of a fan of Trudeau, but all of this rings empty. Pure cope and seethe.
Maybe it's hard to contextualize this outgoing life enjoying man who seemingly can't stop winning, next to the consequence of his political advocacy. Be that the environmental humbug like carbon taxation, the drowning of Canada through mass immigration, cannabis legalization or the instances where the mask slipped off and our progressive Golden Boy let out for just a second that he is just as conniving and corrupt a politician as anyone else. Solidifying the accusation that his performative progressivism was always just that, and that love and kindness are not for the outgroup that protests COVID restrictions. Though the hardest ones to get over are the instances of MAiD overreach. Where mostly white Canadians who are down on their luck are offered suicide as a way out of their homelessness, PTSD or depression.
With all of these disastrous policies put together it's understandably hard to look at pictures of this apparently happy go lucky 54 year old father of 3 living his best life without expressing ones ire. But there is something fundamentally debasing and ugly about wallowing in your impotence like that.
Trudeau is not going to stop loving life just because he made you hate yours. You are going to have to make him hate his life yourself, if that's what you really feel when you look at the test, or figure out a way to make yours better by doing something other than looking for glee through another mans misery.
Trudeau is a terrible politician and leader who, as you note, in may ways damned Canada by adopting the kind of harebrained immigration policy that even Angela Merkel might have balked at.
You’re also right that a lot of this dissident right reaction is cope and seethe. The reason is simple. Extremist politics is and has always been dominated by outsider groups, especially autistic men. Autistic people have a very strong concept of fairness, which is widely noted by psychologists. Autistic people find people “breaking the rules” more viscerally painful, annoying and unfair than neurotypical people. The fact that life is unfair, that many people do, in fact, “get away with it” and always have and always will, is more painful to them than it is to everyone else.
This manifests itself in two key ways. First, autists seethe about the political and social opponents (real or imagined) more than mentally normal people. This is expressed often in the desire for them to be “punished”. So according to these people Trump must be “punished”, Trudeau must be “punished”, Stacies must be “punished” as per Rodger etc. it’s not enough for them to be removed from power, they have to suffer because that is them repaying their debt to the rules they broke.
Secondly, autists*, who dominate most politically extreme movements, always prioritize “owning” the enemy over actual positive change that doesn’t necessarily directly (even if it may indirectly) hurt one’s enemies. The joy experienced at watching a fat blue haired liberal cry after being OWNED in a college debate is far greater than the joy of getting a promotion, a tax cut, a nice annual return on your investments. The joy of watching some Hispanic guy who used the OK sign FIRED for being a white nationalist, or of forcing some poor parents to accept unreservedly their child’s medical mutilation because the law says they can’t stop it far outweighs the boring mundanities of single payer healthcare.
The most psychologically healthy people I know (not me) often don’t think about this form of punitive, absolute, rules-based “justice” at all. Which isn’t to say they don’t care about unfairness or corruption or whatever, it’s just to say that they are able to acknowledge and live with the unfairness of the world, perhaps find it sad, but don’t let it guide their every emotion and value.
* political autists, of course. Those whose special interest is vintage stamps or taxidermy couldn’t care less
You had me nodding along on the first paragraph around fairness and genuinely confused on the next one about seething. Revenge is such a base human feeling that isolating it to "Autists" is misattribution. Human's live for watching their outgroup suffer. We go watch mal-doers get tortured in the square and sell popcorn for it. It isn't "Autists" watching trashy reality TV or feud porn. Blood-feuds and honor killings are not Autist-coded. The jews cheering on Jesus's crucifixion weren't just the local gaggle of "Autists"
Autists in the Internet sense are known for their inability to comprehend feelings and to model other people's motivations. The Internet autist will try to logically analyze some expression of hatred, not even understanding that it was meant to show hate, never mind they themselves hating someone else. "Autists" hating politicians is the opposite of this.
I'm not sure I understand the connection between your first and last points?
EDIT: my brain moves faster than I type and I forget to type out important words
Internet autists (actual clinical autists are irrelevant here) don't hate politicians. They don't even understand hate and tend to think that every disagreement is just something that can be settled with pure logic. An Internet autist's reaction to a politician who breaks the rules would not be to hate him for breaking the rules, it would be to try to calmly and gently inform him that he's breaking the rules in the belief that once he realizes that he's breaking the rules he will surely stop.
(Of course Internet autism is on a spectrum, no pun intended. There are people who are bad at modelling others but who at some point will hate them anyway. But that's not because they're autists, it's because even autism only goes so far.)
Ahh yes the Quokka effect. The innocent belief that if you just show people the error in their ways then they will correct because the only reason they made that error is because they were unaware they were making it in the first place.
I do think the parent comment is touching on something in regards to an extreme sense of fairness being inherent to Autists, and the violations of that fairness being very triggering. But you also have a good point here in the inability of Autists to model uncharitable behaviors online and assume a base level of "something". I'd say its probably a level of development, as Autists are forced to reckon with the wider outside world, I think an anger at the unfairness develops including a souring of the "Quokka effect"
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It was probably poorly worded. My point wasn’t that revenge is limited to autists, or that mob mentality around this kind of thing as in your last example isn’t real. It’s that there is a specifically autistic catharsis around someone who was perceived to be ‘getting away with it’ apparently no longer ‘getting away with it’. To the victim or even observer this may be indistinguishable from ‘you hurt me, I hurt you’ revenge but I think there is a distinction, it’s more about the rigidity of the underlying rules. This is why I think autists are drawn to clear cut extreme ideologies like corporatist fascism or communism that define enemy classes and establish strong rules for the in group and out group.
I think you're more right than wrong. My normie coworkers point out the absurdities of the unfairness in our immediate environment all the time. But there's never seethe or resentment. Just passive acceptance of the fact that things are this way and there's no avenue to do anything about it short of home visits with a shotgun. Anything else is just signaling low status. 'Someone has to do something about this!' is the kind of cringe that gets emotionally unregulated teenagers hooked on 'KONY 2012'. It's too juvenile in its earnestness and sincerity for adults to buy into.
Same goes for black on white crime or the ethnic cleansing of white South Africans. No one normal wants to wallow in that crap, or even hear about it. You need a bit of 'autism', for a lack of a better term, to get past that hump of emotional negativity and look at things in a larger systemic context. And it's in that larger systemic context that the real resentment starts building, as ones understanding of scale and scope of the crimes and the consequences become larger and larger.
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No, just regular catharsis.
Autists are drawn to extreme ideologies because they have a logical consistency that makes sense in a theoretical framework, but fails upon contact with the messiness of real life.
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