this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
71 points (94.9% liked)
Slop.
775 readers
541 users here now
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No bigotry of any kind, including ironic bigotry.
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target federated instances' admins or moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'll consider it when you stop reading everything I write in the most obtuse and uncharitable way
You don't know what you're talking about, do you?
lmao sure I'll pretend that's something you actually believe, the sheer idea of living in a suburb and watching Fox News has more valence than a neurotoxin that literally ravages the social centers of the brain, now we're doing some real hardcore materialism
What do you think is going to be accomplished? That if you're abusive enough then I'll have an epiphany that you're right? You're just making excuses for antisocial behavior.
This is a non-sequitur. Obviously I never ascribed to you the position that lead poisoning is responsible for "all conditions under capitalism," and was just reminding you that I didn't make any such accusation, and I'm met with this new insult that doesn't contribute anything beyond being an insult.
And again I'm just confused about why you're even bothering saying this beyond your apparent dedication to hurling insults, because why else would you ignore issues like public education, anti-intellectualism, and economic trends? If you're only still replying to me to insult me, then you can always just choose to stop replying and it's probably better for everyone involved, yourself included.
There is sort of an ironic point here about how emotional dysregulation hampers ideological progress, because why actually talk to someone who makes you feel grumpy when you can just attack them? But I just don't think that's adequate, I think there needs to be an ideological and epistemic direction for people to be put in that such dysregulation is only a supporting element of. If it was merely people being prone to lashing out and having a harder time thinking things through, that is still an extremely surmountable obstacle, it would just take them a little longer than someone who is better-equipped, which is the consistent finding of things like IQ studies.
You cannot be serious with this convulsive-ass reaction to being called "dense"
Idealistic wish-casting does not trump literal severe brain damage, we are animals made of flesh and blood, not monads with unchanging essences guided by ideas and mere social identity, sometimes if you damage our brains badly enough, then we're fucked, that's the unfortunate reality of life on this planet
And lead doesn't just damage the brain, it ravages it, and it keeps ravaging well into old age, leading to more and more damage over time
You do understand that is a massive selection pressure that when multiplied by millions or billions of people does in fact create a major determining factor in negative civilizational outcomes?
I'm literally just asking you to not insult me and saying it's not helpful to either of us. I don't think that's a failing on my part.
Regarding the rest of your comment, you're speaking very abstractly about brain damage but you are neglecting to explain why it is necessary, a core element, of the political backwardness of the people Yugopnik is talking about. Being disabled doesn't cause you to be a fascist and that's not "idealistic wish-casting," nor does it change the fact that someone with the mental capacity to dress themselves and operate a computer to a normal level, even if their IQ is multiple standard deviations below the mean, can still learn how to do basically any task that a higher-IQ person can that doesn't rely on making effective snap-judgements in response to complex new information. This is something that has been studied a lot by our phrenology-loving society.
Yes, obviously the poisoning is very damaging to society, but we aren't arguing about lead being nebulously harmful, we are arguing about it producing fascists at a massive scale, which it does not do. There simply isn't a reason to think that if someone has the mental presence to be able to have a meaningful political ideology, that people are too low-IQ or emotionally dysregulated to be able to be communists. It's baseless to say people are too stupid and cranky to understand the truth because that literally just isn't how cognition works. Understanding the truth can be made more difficult by these factors, as I already said, but fundamentally the problem is that they have been directed away from the truth by the whole of society, explicitly and implicitly, at basically every level, and trained in a very conscious way to take antisocial attitudes.
Studies on the psychologies of reactionaries and right-wingers disproves this assertion, the traits of the average fascist are one-to-one compared to the symptoms of neurotoxin poisoning like lead
You don't know what you're talking about, right-wingers are over-represented among the sufferers of brain related comorbidities, if an already right-wing society suffers an historical period of mass poisoning that causes brain damage leading to those people developing sociopathic and anti-social behaviors, than yes, the vast majority of those people will became right-wing with lead becoming the main driver in their identity formation, not because lead has magic powers, but because it destroyed their brains
We know the effects lead has on the brain, we know the majority of boomers and GenX were lead poisoned during childhood (the worst possible stage to suffer neurotoxin poisoning), we know right-wingers are over-represented in terms of brain injuries
If you can't connect the dots then it's because you don't want to, it's utterly bizarre not to recognize an important environmental multiplier in right-wing societal formation
Your argument as it stands is picking out correlations, assuming a causal direction without demonstrating it by anything but a hypothetical just-so account, and ignoring all other variables (e.g. subsequent economic decline and the resultant wealth stratification with low social mobility causing an exaggerated stratification in political ideology). We have already long-acknowledged several of these correlations, but that in itself is not adequate for a causal account. Also,
Do you not see how this was already my basic claim, that every level of society is built to guide people toward reaction and that's the real core of the issue? Of course, I think your phrasing still understates it a little, because (not that I think you'd actually defend this claim) it's as though society is merely sitting with this orientation rather than a machine actively working to turn as rightward as it can sustain, which I think you'd agree is the reality.
The demonstration is the vast body of evidence of severe brain damage among countless millions of people
Again, you can assert that entire populations suffering from compromised brain development has no MAJOR causal links or effects on the course of society (despite the fact the symptoms manifest as anti-social behavior) be my guest, believe in idealism
And do you not understand that claim is completely dwarfed, subsumed, made subordinate to the reality that brain damage across entire populations has far more valence, for the simple fact that thing between our ears is little more important than ideological conditioning
Certain ideologies do not stick to people who have brains geared towards empathy, so what do you think happens to a society where millions of people thru childhood poisoning literally lose the ability to empathize? Yes, then certain ideologies become more popular than they were ever meant to be, that's my point