cars posted:trots are bad but i'm not sure they're narcissists just because they continue to think they can bolster their politics by badmouthing leftist governments. i think maybe they're just dumb. maybe it's just jealousy, mixing up with a violent mind.
in an individualistic culture everyone is a narcissist by default, trots simply rebrand their narcissism as leftist political action
shriekingviolet posted:yeah, if you want to get things done it's always worthwhile to assess the situation and make tactical decisions to work with groups you might think are stupid and/or insane, but i'd still sooner trust fresh out of high school anarchy babies or "left moderates" than a trot organization
this is how i feel about anarchists (non getfiscal) but i admit it's only because i used to be one.
If socialism is something you "identify" with but don't have a desire to genuinely understand (which seems ubiquitous among trots) how is it going to last? I'm reminded of the pic someone posted of that trot with a sign saying something like, Defend the right of the North Korean deformed workers state to have nuclear arms. That guy must know from years of making similar signs that nobody is ever going to be convinced by or interested in his ideas. He's out there affirming whatever identity he needs everyone to know he has, and their rejection is probably for him confirmation of whatever martyr performance he's committed to. So it's not surprising trots etc find every excuse to disown every revolution thats ever happened, because they're only really interested in what the socialism brand does for their image among others, they have no intention of internalizing a shift in thinking towards truly accepting a socialist mindset.
Gibbonstrength posted:I suppose what also makes me believe that about trots and their kind is how so many of them convert to right wing politics later in life
I think this is an exaggeration and that there is a constant churning of activists and political views across all perspectives.
There was one supporter of East Germany who said he thought half of all state leaders were competent socialists trying to administer the country the best they could and that the other half were stupid people who seemed committed to actively harming everyone. Because in that situation all the same people who have personalities like Hillary Clinton still exist, and they are all taught Marxism-Leninism their whole lives, so their public face only rarely tends to be full-blown-dissident. What you get instead is politicians saying all the "right things" and then illegally selling heating fuel for personal profit. And then ideology becomes a formality where you have to include a discussion of Engels' views on science in your experimental chemistry journal article and it becomes background noise.
People who actually are ideologues and want to restore capitalism (for whatever reason) also only rarely say "I want to restore capitalism", usually after they've already carved a space where they can say that without any fear of losing their social position. Instead they repeat all the jargon and then contrive reasons through reverse engineering the gaps in the system to create space for capital. Like they don't go, oh, I'd love to own a factory, they say that a personal responsibility system which links production unit output to administrator incomes would increase efficiency in priority leading sectors, and that do achieve these targets the administrator will need significant autonomy and political guarantees... etc... etc...
Trotskyists are more obvious because they almost never hold positions of significance anywhere, so they just have to spin off and get normal jobs. When actual Marxist-Leninists do it, they become Yeltsin.
getfiscal posted:i am starting to think that an important thing for myself is to learn to be highly committed when no one else seems to care.
people will gravitate to the energy exerted by someone who is willing to be responsible for active work when everyone else has been demoralized/intimidated/exhausted into passivity. it's super important to the health of organizations and movement building, but rare for a reason. hope you like positions of defacto leadership with none of the official authority to make them functional, and getting denounced when things go wrong regardless of whether it has anything to do with you :3
shriekingviolet posted:getfiscal posted:i am starting to think that an important thing for myself is to learn to be highly committed when no one else seems to care.
people will gravitate to the energy exerted by someone who is willing to be responsible for active work when everyone else has been demoralized/intimidated/exhausted into passivity. it's super important to the health of organizations and movement building, but rare for a reason. hope you like positions of defacto leadership with none of the official authority to make them functional, and getting denounced when things go wrong regardless of whether it has anything to do with you :3
yeah. your best bet if youre doing this in an org is to try to create a task group you can be on. informal groups allow the most room for non-hierarchal control
getfiscal posted:I didn't mean that particular part about being demoralized, I meant like... keeping interest in topics that aren't the cause of the day and just plugging along on them whether or not there are many NY Times editorials about the country/topic.
well. that sounds good too! godspeed
Urbandale posted:yeah. your best bet if youre doing this in an org is to try to create a task group you can be on. informal groups allow the most room for non-hierarchal control
agreed, for getting work done I really like having informal/semi-formal working groups that run perpendicular to the official organizational structure, though it can really complicate things when shit like interpersonal conflict happens. get the most done at the meeting-after-the-meeting, and get in the most trouble too!
getfiscal posted:i am starting to think that an important thing for myself is to learn to be highly committed when no one else seems to care.
same
Petrol posted:in an individualistic culture everyone is a narcissist by default, trots simply rebrand their narcissism as leftist political action
sure i'm probably conflating narcissism in a broad psychoanalytic sense needlessly with narcissism as the idiot pop psych article diagnosis du jour right now (everyone below a certain age is said to have NPD because of how they're expected to perform on social media, donald trump is supposed to be particularly narcissistic for having the same POV on himself as every other businessman of any politics in the U.S., people forming massive armchair diagnosis blog communities about all of their spouses, parents, siblings, everyone in their life being supposedly NPD etc.) following on the recent years of self-loathing petit-bourgeois writers worshiping psychopaths in this class-ignorant way even though that mental architecture is more likely to gift you with an adult life in and out of the penal system than a corner office, the myth of artists having "genes for bipolar" before that or the belief in autistic people as wizards that still tempts people with social anxiety to confabulate savant-like powers while undermining parents seeking support for teenagers who literally can't communicate that they need to use the bathroom... this shit horrifies and disgusts me because of my former professional life trying to convince the state and companies to even consider the indigent & mentally ill as such. and i'm grimly looking forward to the widespread spurious diagnosis of everyone who expresses feelings as having borderline personality disorder which seems to be up next. so right now i tend to have a kneejerk reaction to people calling their foes narcissists.
cars posted:narcissism as the idiot pop psych article diagnosis du jour right now (everyone below a certain age is said to have NPD because of how they're expected to perform on social media, donald trump is supposed to be particularly narcissistic for having the same POV on himself as every other businessman of any politics in the U.S., people forming massive armchair diagnosis blog communities about all of their spouses, parents, siblings, everyone in their life being supposedly NPD etc.)... so right now i tend to have a kneejerk reaction to people calling their foes narcissists.
That's fair, point taken. Having said that, I have to raise my suspicion that NPD has always been one of those completely bullseye diagnoses. Anecdotally, it rarely seems to mean anything more than "person who even annoys their own shrink with their dumb bullshit". I know it theoretically means something but in practice..?
Keven posted:Yea, my thoughts exactly. +1.
i honestly forget how i trolled you in the first place
Petrol posted:That's fair, point taken. Having said that, I have to raise my suspicion that NPD has always been one of those completely bullseye diagnoses. Anecdotally, it rarely seems to mean anything more than "person who even annoys their own shrink with their dumb bullshit". I know it theoretically means something but in practice..?
yeah there's probably often transference involved because of the lack of availability for BPD for that purpose once the strange way that diagnosis was handed out got called it into question & it became fashionable for professionals to shame their peers for putting it on paper.
the provider-vengeance diagnosis used to be BPD which was used as the scarlet letter for "difficult" patients to soothe professionals over their own clinical failures, basically something in the patient's file saying that they should never be trusted and could never be treated. and it was pretty much only given to women with all sorts of contradictory nutty theories trying to backwards justify that & then later reforms in the DSM, etc. made it moderately politically shameful for professionals to give to anyone at all.
that led to an absurd situation where the actual cluster of symptoms currently treated as BPD usually can't be officially diagnosed in anyone in the united states as BPD at the same time treatment is administered for that disorder, since then no one who has the symptoms would likely be able to afford treatment. the scarlet letter era of the diagnosis gives private insurers an ironclad excuse to deny coverage. That has skewed research data for decades since a lot of the research on BPD goes on in the U.S., and investigations of that population, into the cause of the observed clustering, the validity of the disorder itself, etc. now seem bound to produce useless results because most patients considered by providers to be BPD are now "bipolar II" or something similar on paper for purposes of insurance, except for the most extreme cases who are often on lifetime disability.
Keven posted:You acted towards me with a toxic clubhouse mentality, for which you may never be forgiven.
we have a thing for that. but if you'll link me i can print something out to show to a confused middle-age volcel Korean immigrant next time i bother him.
cars posted:the provider-vengeance diagnosis used to be BPD... most patients considered by providers to be BPD are now "bipolar II" or something similar on paper for purposes of insurance,
Honestly I'm unclear what BPD is even meant to entail because I've only ever heard of it being used as a kind of too-hard-basket, yeah. Is the bipolar II thing purely for insurance or is there actually meant to be some similarity? I thought surely they were pretty distinct and, for instance, shizoaffective is way more like bipolar.
Petrol posted:Honestly I'm unclear what BPD is even meant to entail because I've only ever heard of it being used as a kind of too-hard-basket, yeah. Is the bipolar II thing purely for insurance or is there actually meant to be some similarity? I thought surely they were pretty distinct and, for instance, shizoaffective is way more like bipolar.
BPD and bipolar II sometimes co-occur in the current model but are, at least in theory, significantly distinct from each other, as the mood-related symptoms included under BPD don't by themselves establish a basis of any (supposedly) clinically sound diagnosis of the disorder (and, according to the current model, don't follow the same patterns as bipolar II). Bipolar II just happens to be a mood disorder that is currently regarded as responding well to established methods of treatment and also happens to feature quick-cycling extremes of mood that can conceivably include some "BPD" behaviors that doctors & therapists can't hide from potential hearings/reviews, stuff like police reports that suggest both manic and depressive symptoms, so providers often use that as a "safe" diagnosis so it can be defended against insurance companies.
This forum has a few severe skeptics of bourgeois psychiatric and psychological care and models but I don't know enough to be one of them in any honest way. In my completely worthless layman's opinion based on interacting with the diagnosed, BPD seems to me to be "real" in the sense that its symptoms co-occur in a recognizable way in a lot of people, but the etiology remains opaque. The name is a total anachronism even in the current model, since it used to be considered something on the "borderline" of full-blown hallucinatory psychosis but now it's usually handled more like a cousin of PTSD, or as though it's a preexisting condition that primes people for post-traumatic stress from "normal" experiences. Again, all my experience comes from helping people seek care, not from providing it, so I know a lot more about stupid tricks than I do diagnoses.
Edited by cars ()
Gibbonstrength posted:I suppose what also makes me believe that about trots and their kind is how so many of them convert to right wing politics later in life (the hitchens brothers, neocons). If your beliefs are something you've investigated and built through learning then I feel like time won't spontaneously turn you into a reactionary. However if your opinions were part of a collection of things that your self image projection is comprised of (alongside your septum piercing, tattoos, bespoke clothing, and other stand ins for identity) then once they stop servicing that construct they'll get dumped.
the collapse of the soviet union is probably what drove all these exTrots over the edge?
shriekingviolet posted:life as a motorcycle is pretty great. vroom vroom wheeee
transformers. robots in disguise
cars posted:Petrol posted:in an individualistic culture everyone is a narcissist by default, trots simply rebrand their narcissism as leftist political action
sure i'm probably conflating narcissism in a broad psychoanalytic sense needlessly with narcissism as the idiot pop psych article diagnosis du jour right now (everyone below a certain age is said to have NPD because of how they're expected to perform on social media, donald trump is supposed to be particularly narcissistic for having the same POV on himself as every other businessman of any politics in the U.S., people forming massive armchair diagnosis blog communities about all of their spouses, parents, siblings, everyone in their life being supposedly NPD etc.) following on the recent years of self-loathing petit-bourgeois writers worshiping psychopaths in this class-ignorant way even though that mental architecture is more likely to gift you with an adult life in and out of the penal system than a corner office, the myth of artists having "genes for bipolar" before that or the belief in autistic people as wizards that still tempts people with social anxiety to confabulate savant-like powers while undermining parents seeking support for teenagers who literally can't communicate that they need to use the bathroom... this shit horrifies and disgusts me because of my former professional life trying to convince the state and companies to even consider the indigent & mentally ill as such. and i'm grimly looking forward to the widespread spurious diagnosis of everyone who expresses feelings as having borderline personality disorder which seems to be up next. so right now i tend to have a kneejerk reaction to people calling their foes narcissists.
This i claim is a good point. If anything it seems like the way people define these mental illnesses (like bpd and narcissism) is design to quarantine those conditions off into a few extreme cases. In a way it's our society's defence mechanism: define narcissism so narrowly and tied so such a rare constellation of symptoms that it's never about me, it's always about somebody else, some mythical weirdo. You could say the dsm definition of narcissism is a narcissistic defence.
getfiscal posted:Gibbonstrength posted:I suppose what also makes me believe that about trots and their kind is how so many of them convert to right wing politics later in life
I think this is an exaggeration and that there is a constant churning of activists and political views across all perspectives
Yeah you're right it's an exaggeration. but like you I've always favoured rhetoric over reasoned debate