Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

That desire to get two people fighting and then hide is a very deeply imbued urge. It is borne of an attempt to make something which stimulates the leftist’s amygdala stimulate their enemy’s amygdala, combined with sheer cowardice making direct confrontation not an option. As with every other leftist tactic, the goal is an outcome which would terrify the leftist, were positions reversed, namely manly men coming to kill them.

From simple social out-grouping, to calling cops to a store in such a way that they might shoot a conservative, to out-right swatting, to deploying various other government agencies to harass and intimidate conservatives, leftists have a burning, innate desire to get K-strategists fighting each other, especially as things get crazy. It is not a coincidence and it is not an accident – it is a long-evolved strategy, and we should all expect to see a lot more of it in the next two decades. The obvious solution is to not fall for it, and instead focus on the leftist themselves as the source of the problem. Very quickly leftists would abandon that strategy.

Anonymous Conservative
October 14, 2014
Amygdalae in the News
[If you want to understand the psychology of our political opponents and strategies for defeating them and just as important how they attempt to defeat us, you must read Anonymous Conservative’s work. He has a book, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans, which is sometimes available free on Kindle.

One of the more important insights I have gotten from reading him is that, in general, the police are our natural friends. They enforce the rule of law and only enforce the whims of some ruler because the ruler had the authority to make law. Our state and federal constitutions, being higher law than those that would be our unconstrained rulers, gives them authority and license to oppose those rules. See, for example, the opposition to many of the gun laws such as in New York, Colorado, and in Washington State (I-594). At some level our political opponents recognize this and attempt to get us to fight each other, to the death.

Recognizing this we can adopt a much better strategy of encouraging and supporting the police to respect our guaranteed rights and deal with those that would infringe upon our rights in an appropriate manner.—Joe]

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13 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

    • I can’t say much about the biology. What I can say is that decades of personal experience with “crazy” people (most of which were related to each other) maps into what he says shockingly well.

    • The primary author is a microbiologist so any criticism I might have of his biological conclusions would be rather weak.

  1. LabRat and I were howling over the summaries and excerpts when it popped up in my “Based On…” Amazon feed the other week while I was visiting at Nerd Ranch.

  2. Microbiology != biology. Also, his misuse of less-common words is typical of a BS artist.
    Joe, are you familiar with “confirmation bias?”

  3. Hmmm, People whose views I respect are disagreeing pretty strongly about this. I may have to get the book and try to figure out what the fuss is about.

  4. I can, right from your quote: “…a very deeply imbued urge.” The $20 word *imbued* is not right here. “Held” or “embedded” come closer to the sense he wants, but the first is a dime-a-dozen and the second is no more than a $5 word. This kind of thing is scattered all through his writing, word use that is so off it just makes me itch. I happen to have an enormous vocublary; I don’t always get the right word and I have found, on a few occasions, that my definitions were wrong, but I’m more right more often than most people and this guy spends a lot of time talking over his own head. It’s not a good sign. It makes me suspect he’s selling snake oil. (Not everything in “snake oil” was necessarily bogus or harmful — and some of the people selling it were convinced of the efficacy of their product. Alas, overlap between the first and second group was far from total. The snake oil has become metaphor but the reality remains as it ever was.)

    A quick scan of his sidebar links turns up some (IMO) creepy folks, too, not people I’d care to link to or get links from. I don’t think that’s a good sign, either.

    I trust LabRat to be current on models of the brain and she’s saying this is, as the famous phyisicast said, so far afield it’s “not even wrong.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong)

    YMMV. This is the Internet and it is — wonderfully — wide open to the full array of human thought.

  5. I posted on this subject a little while back. It’s one of those things that sounds very good, but almost so good that it’s got me questioning it now, too. It is a very appealing theory, it seems like it explains a lot of things. It certainly appears to fit observed behaviors and history fairly well at first blush.
    But all the criticisms I’ve seen of it have not been technical, they are simply dismissing it as crazy, or saying “it doesn’t work that way!” without any clarification to what precisely “it” refers to, or any details on what’s wrong, or how “it” really does work. Referring to something as loony doesn’t actually rebut his argument in any meaningful way. Saying “it’s not even wrong” sidesteps what the problem is. OK, so he makes some poor word choices… If you can get the sense of what he means, in spite of the need of an editor to provide better word choice, what’s the problem, specifically, with the theory? And, if there are specific problems with it technically, do those problems mean it’s utterly useless, of negative value, misleading, merely a flawed doorway to a much better theory that doesn’t have the same problems, or something else?

  6. No, Rolf–

    First of all, this is classically “not even wrong:” his theories of mind/brain interaction are overly-simplistic and so at odds with current science as to not be discussable withing that framework. LabRat could take you through the science; for me, it doesn’t pass the sniff test

    Second, they’re not falsifiable. This means they’re untestable. It also means that while they may be philosophy, they’re not science. (If you’re hazy on “falsifiable,” Google is your friend.)

    From what I have read so far, I am pretty sure that any effort to explain just how far off-base his theories are will be taken by him as confirmation of them: “See how they react to suppress unwanted stimuli?” This, too, is not how scientific thought works; we (rightly) criticize this kind of reaction when we see it in discussions of anthropogenic global warming and there’s no reason to give this fellow a wave-through simply because there is some correspondence between his theory and some aspect of present-day political polarization. (This is what I was talking about when I brought up “conformation bias.”)

    –And look at who this guy links to. There’s some overlap with Joe and the mainstream conservative/shooting/libertarian spectrum but it veers off into crypto-racists, rabble-rousers, and jerks.

    • To be clear I’ve not read the book, just summaries of it and the basic r/K selection theory.
      Yes, I’m clear on “falsifiable,” and I do see some problems with testing it. But then the field of psychology is a minefield littered with bad tests and difficult to test ideas.
      Rejecting it because of who supports him is also a logical fallacy, something like a reverse appeal to authority.
      It appears to explain a lot of observable human behavior, but I understand the idea of confirmation bias…. On the other hand, I’ve not seen any better theories, so if it’s the best of a bad lot, then why not go with it, while giving it a huge asterisk that says “valid looking for a better idea with better science”?
      I see those in leadership positions on the left harping on and on about sustainability and proposing things that would tend to limit those on the right more than the left, while at the same time they themselves are acting as if resources are virtually unlimited (hello, Al Gore’s Jet).
      Perhaps it’s not “genetic” but a common aspect of human psych / attitude that can be enabled/activated by culture / society with a certain level of relative affluence that separates a sufficient number of its people from the actual means of primary production. They get lazy and entitled, and the “r” “gene” gets turned on because it’s not being killed off or stepped on so promptly and forcefully…

      • It’s still true that “not falsifiable” == “not science”. If psychology is littered with that, this simply means that psychology is in many respects not a science. That should not really be surprising to anyone.
        I’ve often said that any discipline that contains the word “science” in its name isn’t one. “Political science”, “social science”, and so on, all nicely demonstrate this point.
        By the way, the test of “is it falsifiable” is very helpful in dealing with the warmists. That stuff all badly fails the test, in part because its acolytes treat the raw data as a deep secret rather than as something to be generally distributed to anyone who wants to dig in — as real scientists do. This, incidentally, is what makes John Lott a scientist: he does exactly that, even if it enables fraudsters to manipulate his data in dishonest ways to “prove” the opposite of what it plainly says.

  7. “Rejecting it because of who supports him…”. No: *questioning* his notion a little more because of who he links to. Crypto-racists, anti-freedom conservatives, etc.

    We have here a fellow putting forward a particular and very simple physiological mechanism in the brain as, ultimately, an explanation for people’s political beliefs and it just *happens* to be a really good fit to favoring the two-party system and his own political outlook? That’s inherently suspect.

    The model looks a lot weaker if we look at other countries or — especially — the United States of the past. And, again, the leap from a nonstandard model of brain function to assertions about mental state and attitude is not supported by actual experiment. It’s not science.

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