More Brexit. Avoid if necessary.

[johnny9fingers]

And so it comes down to our Intel bods telling folk that we're screwed:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/06/ex-mi6-chief-uk-going-through-political-nervous-breakdown

Sir John Sawers isn't the sort of chap to involve himself in politics in the normal run of things. But Iain Duncan Smith's response to Sir John's statement is really quite eye-opening.

Crisis, what crisis?

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

My own theory—completely unverified and unsupported—is that the polarization we are seeing in your country and my own is not entirely issue-driven.

Part of it represents the fact that subversive humor no longer represents a viable safety valve since so much subversive humor is now politically incorrect in the true Orwellian sense of the word.

In the States right now, for example, a huge ruckus has arisen over the existence of a sooper-sekrit FB group in which various border officials posted off-color jokes about refugees and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And I am thinking, So fucking what? Who does that hurt?

I remember very well back when I was a nurse how mercilessly we lampooned out patients behind the scenes. This black humor was a way of blowing off steam. Reduced burnout and allowed us to be better caregivers.

The polarization we're seeing is a symptom of burnout. There are no longer any politically correct ways of minimizing burnout so the steam builds up to a head.

[johnny9fingers]

I’m not so sure.

We have a similar problem in our equivalent border agency; I blogged about it here:

https://johnny9fingers.dreamwidth.org/286330.html

And I have to say, that certain agencies attract certain types.

[mallorys_camera]

Perhaps.

My undergraduate minor was criminology. I've always been fascinated by the psychology of social deviance.

I went to the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and Berkeley is shoved right up against the border with Oakland, which in the early 1970s, was a kind of slash-and-burn place. It's since evolved into an upscale suburb for Silicon Valley workers.

I had to write a mini-thesis for the minor, so I wrote one about the Oakland police department, which at the time was one of the most corrupt police departments in the U.S.

I did a lot of interviews for the project. I'll note here that I am a wonderful interviewer, very good at getting subjects to trust me. I vividly remember one lieutenant telling me that he'd joined the police department because he wanted to help people. But then what happened is he kept going to parties where everyone would treat him normally until the conversation inevitably progressed to, And what do you do for a living?

Once they found out, of course he became a pariah. Which threw him more and more in the company of other cops, thereby reinforcing all the negative in-group/out-group dynamics.

It's hard to see any component of I want to help people in prison guards and border patrol people, of course.

I dunno. I think everybody needs to break out, and if you don't give people a relatively harmless way to break out behind the scenes, they're gonna break out publicly and destructively.

[johnny9fingers]

I can understand someone being a policeman because of a sense of justice, or a detective because of some intellectual challenge allied to a desire to protect society.

I think the problem with social media closed groups turning into 4chan/Stormfront echo chambers is real. I mean even I was redpilled in the early days, and I made a few enemies of former online friends because I pointed it out, whereas they ran with it uncritically.

When folk start talking about the great replacement etc on these sites, that isn’t just humour to let off steam. Imagine if, as a nurse, one of the coppers you shared a cigarette with always used the n word and was particularly disparaging about ethnic minorities, but was the funniest person and charming. As you know, that sort of cognitive dissonance can unlock nascent prejudices in folk; and essentially, that has been a tactic of the far right on social media for the last decade. And it is not just me saying this. Other folk have begun to notice too.

I’m a pretty “establishment” sort of person. I consider myself to be a species of conservative; but that may be changing looking at the folk who call themselves conservative these days. I first noticed the pattern of this redpilling about a decade ago; but 4chan had forums dedicated to the best ways of redpilling folk some years prior to my awareness of it. I had originally followed a link on the old encyclopaedia dramatica and ended-up on a 4chan forum. As you do.

These social media closed groups may have started as places to let off steam; but, along the way, they appear to have acquired other attributes too.