Probably not. In summary, a couple of historians did claim that, but while lead concentrations in Rome were high, there’s no good evidence that they were high enough or specific enough to affect history to that magnitude.
There is a difference between learning about history (which I have), and actually living through it.
IANA psychologist, but psychotic seems like a thing individuals experience, not something groups share, and certainly not on the scale we’re seeing. It’s deluded but it’s organized and it isn’t happening in a vacuum or absent rebuttal (like say, Hitler executing people who spoke against him).
WebMD supports that idea:
A shared psychotic disorder is a rare type of mental illness in which a healthy person starts to take on the delusions of someone who has a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia.
For example, let’s say your spouse has a psychotic disorder and, as part of that illness, believes aliens are spying on them. If you have a shared psychotic disorder, you’ll start to believe in the spying aliens. But apart from that, your thoughts and behavior are normal.
People with psychotic disorders have trouble staying in touch with reality and often can’t handle daily life. The most obvious symptoms are hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren’t real) and delusions (believing things that aren’t true, even when they get the facts).
I wish I could remember who said it, but the quote was something like, “In a democracy you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” The propaganda machine is well-oiled: social media is “listening” via what you click on and feeding your more of it, confirming your bias (so they can sell advertising). It also connects you to others who believe the same, encouraging you to believe you’re on the right track. I mean, if someone challenges you on the Dope, you probably rethink your arguments, look for other supporting sources, etc.
Those other guys just unfriend you, call you a name, etc. Many of those sucked in by social media can’t handle that level of discourse. The ends DO justify the means, to them. Straw man argument? No problem. Ad baculum, ad populum, what are those? And so on, poopyhead.
To some degree, if you believe certain facts then some conclusions aren’t so wacky. But then you get things like Pizzagate and ask how anybody could possibly go along with the premises. I didn’t say there weren’t ANY crackpots.
Stormy Daniels? If you go to the source, pay her off and get a non-disclosure agreement, then for all intents and purposes it never happened.
I was reading something that said back in the old days, if someone accused you of a crime, you’d probably go on the defensive and deny it etc. Now, rather than do that, they plant several other stories. Your opponent committed the crime. Misquote someone to seem that wasn’t a crime after all. And so on. Plant so many stories that people can’t sort the wheat from the chaff and people end up believing what they want or giving up completely.
If people can go on big media outlet sites and make outrageous claims, yet nobody takes them to task for it, then reality is up for grabs. Will Trump, Giuliani, Powell, et al. be held to account? I’m afraid this will progress like a raging forest fire, ending only because it burned everything till it ran out of fuel.
Great article, in case you missed it (possibly paywalled):
I agree with this 100% even though we are probably coming at it from different sides. Social media allows you to interact with only people who share your worldview. The internet in general allows you to read only those news articles from the political slant that you prefer.
Humans are tribal in nature. I don’t think it takes very long after such one sided exposure to believe that “we” think this way, that “we” are right, and that “those people” are crazy outsiders trying to harm us. And when it is given to you in that format, done exactly for the purposes of persuasion–backed up by professionals trained in the art of persuasion–it works; both sides are right.
Back in the days of the Big 3 Network nightly news broadcasts and mainstream papers (even if they did lean left) we all had the same basic information to go off of and you had to listen to the other side. Today, I don’t have to do that. I can set it up to where I don’t have to hear one single viewpoint from the other side, just a straw manning of that viewpoint from my side.
Obviously that isn’t healthy, and it does call into question the nearly universal belief that more information is better. The only possible worse thing we could do is start censoring based on viewpoint.
That was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Indeed it was. An amazing statesman, that guy.
Thanks!
By the way, for the analog version I found this movie to be quite illuminating.
As Jen Senko tries to understand the transformation of her father from a nonpolitical Democrat to an angry Republican fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under President Richard Nixon for a media takeover by the Republicans, the 1971 Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion (especially the media, universities, and courts), the 1987 dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine under President Ronald Reagan, and the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act under President Bill Clinton. The documentary aims to show how the media and the nation changed, which leads to questions about who owns the airwaves, what rights listeners and watchers have, and what responsibility the government has to keep the airwaves fair, accurate, and accountable.
ETA I guess it’s also available on imdb tv if you don’t mind commercials.
It’s like analytics in sports. They come up with much smarter ways to play the game, but it’s becoming less enjoyable for the spectators.
Yeah, if that was an 8th grade school project, I’d give it a C-. I dumped it after the third poorly written paragraph.
Actually, on an individual basis I still find Americans to be almost universally friendly, delightful people.
It’s only collectively that I’ve come to think that they are more than a little mad.
This certainly seems to support the thread title:
It isn’t just that a retired general is casually making terroristic remarks about murdering his political opponents: a fucking church gave him the gun he’s threatening to use to do it AND he made these remarks in said church.
That is NOT normal.
I was just looking to see if we had a thread about this. I mean, could I get away with this kind of stuff or would I be arrested? This can’t be allowed to stand.
Or a paranoiac deciding to gun down all the people he blamed for his financial reverses (plus some innocent bystanders) - in 1915. It even inspired a copycat shooting!
http://www.glynngen.com/history/bwkmassacre.htm
I stopped reading at “the GOP puts kids in cages”. As everybody knew long before the article, Obama actually started doing that, but nobody cared until Trump came into office.
Do not tell me about Americans being psychopaths.
You don’t think that only giving a shit about kids in cages is important when the other guy does it is NOT a sign of psychopathy? Interesting take, that.
Perhaps the writer, like many people IN this country (and who has the excuse of not being from here) was unaware of the kids in cages during the Obama administration because the smoother criminals were in charge. I’ll wager you too are unaware of atrocities in other countries until the MSM in your country chooses to make you aware of it, it’s not like this is some unusual situation.
Just FYI, I have written a series of articles on this theme, published on my Substack, and have a few more planned:
Anyway, in a world with 3 billion websites, 4 billion social media accounts and over one hundred million videos on YouTube, it is quite easy to create an information bubble which itself destroys the consensual reality which we have shared up until about 2010 or so.
Instead of having 1 reality, we now have 300,000,000.
This societal shattering happens every time there is a communications revolution. The Tower of Babel. The invention of the printing press. The invention of the high speed rotary press. The Internet (plus mobility).
In time, we will settle into a new shared reality. Whether we can do it w/o fighting is another matter. And while I can’t say what the new reality will be, I’m confident it will not be the old post-war Pax Americana reality, and it won’t be Trumpism. It may not even be America-centric. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
A post was split to a new topic: How psychotic are the Europeans? (Spin-off from The Psychotic States of America)
When it is noted that there are kids in cages, the obviously proper response is to get them out of the cages, not argue over who put them there to begin with.
The whole “kids in cages” thing is hyperbole, anyway.
There were children in detention, which (in my opinion) was dreadfully wrong and wholly inappropriate. The accomodations in that detention were substandard, which is a secondary wrong that is still inappropriate. But they weren’t “cages” except in a looser, metaphorical sense.
The problem comes with underfunding the whole sector, especially the legal side of it, designed to process immigration and asylum claims. I don’t know of any country that manages it within a reasonable time, and that’s absolutely by design. But the “kids in cages,” while loosely accurate, is designed as an appeal to emotion.
As said above, solving the problem should be the priority, not assigning blame. The phrase has you focus on the metal fences, rather than the process of moving a minor immigrant or asylum seeker through the system.
(Edit: while I’m ranting, I thought the solution should be to free up federal money and personnel to speed the processing, so that any child would be released after 72 hours maximum, either because their claim was resolved or because at hour 72 the government forfeits and the child is granted residency.)