Home » Race hoaxes, virtue-signaling, and the desire for the heroic

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Race hoaxes, virtue-signaling, and the desire for the heroic — 62 Comments

  1. Anyone who wants to be seen as heroic… ain’t no hero.

    Real heroism requires bravery and the bravest are those who do the right thing when either deeply scared or facing potentially great cost to themselves.

    In Smollett’s case, personal gain and assisting his close friend Kamala Harris with her Congressional resume* are his most likely motivations.

    *pending ‘lynching’ legislation making anything labeled “a lynching” into a Federal “hate crime” cutting out local law enforcement and putting Comey, McCabe and Rosenstein’s FBI in charge of the “investigation”…

    He’s an actor, a professional liar… and, believing his own lies is “method acting” at its finest.

  2. neo: I think you’re spot on. Conservatives are prone to dismiss leftists and progressives in terms of negative emotions like envy, greed, hate and laziness. There is truth to that.

    However, especially with activists, it is also about heroism, meaningfulness, connection and even love. Your trademark allusion to Kundera’s “Circle Dance” is perfect:

    All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring.

    Me too. I did for a long time, metaphorically and literally, with those I thought my comrades. I still get the chills when I hear “Amazing Grace,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

  3. Anyone who wants to be seen as heroic… ain’t no hero.

    Geoffrey Britain: Oh, come on. I’m sure there are some heroes who fall into their heroism. But there others who do imagine themselves heroic and partly because of that behave heroically.

    Tell me that the guys who make it to special forces don’t think about being heroes now and then. Of course, they discover there is a lot more to it than their fantasy, but the fantasy is still a part of their motivation.

  4. He assumed he would be protected by the media from any questioning so … not really very courageous. But he talked himself into thinking of himself as a victim so he can probably talk himself into thinking of himself as a courageous victim.

    I think the real issue here is the wide-scale mental instability, the assumption and insistence that their facts are everyone’s facts. They are not going to easily accept that they are living in an unsustainable cult/bubble/alternative fictional universe.

  5. It’s why they hate the right – we keep ruining their beautiful fantasy world with facts.

  6. He assumed he would be protected by the media from any questioning so … not really very courageous.

    AMartel: My take is Smollett thought himself clever enough to get away with it (he was mistaken) and whatever the risk, he thought it was worth it.

    His mother was a black radical who was friends with Angela Davis. Davis purchased the guns used for an assault on a Marin County courthouse to free another black radical. Davis was further involved as a possible getaway driver, except the van broke down so Davis and companion took it to a nearby gas station for repair.

    Imagine that. Your mother was friends with Angela Davis, who took huge risks and was willing to be involved with murder to achieve a desired end. Four people were killed and two injured in that attack. Running a mere hoax beat-down to further the Cause was small potatoes.

    Smollett is the Black Power version of a Red Diaper Baby. Maybe there were other aspects — was he being written out of his TV show? — but still he came from radical blood and he was continuing that tradition.

  7. “People usually want their lives to have meaning” (& let’s throw “connectedness” in there too)

    Completely true & many of us mistake “meaning” for “greatness” where “greatness” can be almost anything from the 21st century grab-bag of goodies or desirable life outcomes…fame, fortune, 6-pack abs, hot bf/gf/xf or that elusive heroism in the great struggle…

    And I reckon “connectedness” jumps in there too being mistaken for “followers/friends/retweets/likes/page-views or the more egregious shared oppression/victimization/tribal identity/etc”

    The West cast God out of its daily consciousness & then didn’t believe in or worship nothing, it fell for everything else…to paraphrase an old bit of wisdom. We’re designed for a certain Ultimate Connectedness and a particular Ultimate Meaning and outside of that…pretty adrift.

  8. I was lucky to grow up grounded in a large extended family. I babysat, visited dying relatives in the hospital, remembered my great aunts braiding rugs and canning food, spent lots of time with my grandfather in his workshop in our basement. All of these things protected me from getting carried away by the latest ideological fad. Too many of today’s kids lack that kind of grounding in reality. They are age and income segregated. How can they possibly fit themselves in a bigger picture. They want to be important, but fail to realize that others are important too.They would learn more from spending a year in a small city working at Walmarts or a local diner.

  9. I was lucky to grow up grounded in a large extended family. I babysat, visited dying relatives in the hospital, remembered my great aunts braiding rugs and canning food, spent lots of time with my grandfather in his workshop in our basement. All of these things protected me from getting carried away by the latest ideological fad.

    expat: But what if your large extended family was composed of black radicals and you imbibed Black Power with your mother’s milk, while the family elders spoke reverently of Malcolm X and Angela Davis?

  10. The Chicago fable was the SECOND try by Mr. Smollet. I believe a Grand Jury in Chicago is currently investigating the federal crime of sending powered aspirin in a hate mail letter from Jussie to Jussie. When that failed to get media attention, he had to try harder.

  11. I had a black (actually milk chocolate) medical student who had parents in Oakland who were Black Panthers. I learned this later as I was trying to help him. At first, I thought he might be schizophrenic. He could not talk to patients. One middle aged woman in the University Hospital threw him out of her room.

    It turned out he did not know how to talk to white people. He didn’t know what to say when he was supposed to be taking a medical history.

    I finally gave him a script to use to get started. It helped and he graduated.

  12. Maybe I’m too close to this stuff. But my big flashing red alert with Obama back in 2008 was discovering his close relationships to Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright a few days apart.

    I was only a spear carrier in my leftist days, but I know one doesn’t form relationships like that unless you are deeply clued in. If you tell me who your friends are, I’ll tell you who you are.

    So post-Obama we are seeing Ta-Nehisi Coates and now Jussy Smollett, the spawn of the Black Power/New Left, jamming the culture.

    I’m horrified, given my current politics, but I must admit a bit of schadenfreude that you conservative squares who feel so much smarter and more righteous got their lunch stolen by weirdo hippies and whatnot like me and it’s still happening … but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.

    Did I say that?

  13. huxley,
    Kids still learn from watching their grandmother making a cake for their birthday or helping their mom sew curtains for their bedroom. The family you describe is not grounded in reality. If they don’t do real things with and for their kids, they are crappy family members who don’t care about their kids.

  14. expat: If you don’t think black radical kids don’t have grandmothers making cakes or moms sewing curtains for their bedroom etc., you are not grounded in reality.

  15. Hmm…there’s a questionable double negative in the above comment. Read it like you pretend you understood it.

  16. “The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”
    ? Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

    Your explanation neo once again, tries to paint unnatural fomenting, in a natural more rational way…. no… your description may mark who or what kind of person is more likely to be used that way, but your point also doesn’t point out that these people were and are known and are depended on by every revolutionary movement…

    IF they had not had a modern feminist progressive leftist liberal socialist communist type education, with everyone not filling them up with crap for several generations so by the time you get to Smollett, your three generations deep under?

    I know you don’t pay attention to trends in children’s TV, and on and on, but heck, why not see what the focus is..
    is it on knowledge, or being part of an army revolution? how much does it reflect what was warned a while back?

    there is also a refusal to look to the odder things that governments teach people who they need to do things…
    or the agencies they create to support them that have humongous black budgets which have no effect on the world
    even if its old enough, declassified, out in the open, the old wrong no effect story sticks…

    even if a defector points out how much money they spent and bribed and such so that their actions and histories remain less visable much to the quizzical and unexplicable faces of the people who cant figure out why this is so – as they cant conclude the scary every day truth thats gone on before they were born, and will continue long after they are gone…

    we are all so willing to accuse our own agencies in movies and such of destabilizing a nation, and changing thought and more, to the point we take it for granted this is the evil they do we cant stop… well, what do you think ALL those nations are doing with us in any way they can?

    Nickelodeon off air for 17 minutes to honor Student Walkout

    and are you paying attention to what is going on not in the news in the education areas?
    not that you would be able to match the conceptual rhetoric to that of the 1930s right after weimars decadence…

    The concept of “white privilege” essentially is taken as gospel on American college campuses. There are workshops about it, classes on it, and the concept has been woven into just about any discipline you can think of. [Snip] the proposed and promulgated remedies for white privilege are found wanting. – College Fix

    California State University, Chico’s Rachael Bayuk – demands that you, as a white person, “stop bringing up how hard you had it as a kid, stop saying you were poor, [and] stop naming every bad thing that has ever happened to you in defense of yourself.”

    White women (or, should that be “female-identifying”?) also aren’t permitted to wear hair braids, according to Bayuk. “Think about how privileged this sounds,” she says. A white girl appropriating this look would get compliments, while a black girl so coiffed would be considered “ghetto.”

    Georgetown students may pay reparations for slavery with new student fee
    Georgetown University students will soon vote on whether they want to tax themselves to benefit the descendants of slaves sold by the university in the 1830s.

    if you grew up on this kind of discourse, would what smollette do really getting attention, just lying, etc? is it about meaning? greed? well? or has someone been ginning up the fight in him for his whole life? so much so that his being a actor, star, etc… means nothing like for keapernick…

    “Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”
    ? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

    “White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost.”
    ? Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

    “Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.”
    ? DaShanne Stokes

    “The epitome of white privilege is the luxury of believing that “real communism has never been tried.”
    ? A.E. Samaan

    “Our police forces were created not to protect Americans of color, but to control Americans of color.”
    ? Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

    “One of the privileges of not being a part of a marginalized group is believing you can set your own benchmarks for bigotry.”
    ? Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education

    and putting aside the nazi source of social justice and father coughlin…
    [could be why its a repeat but equivalence is easy to ignore when sameness is its replacement]

    might be a bit more valid as to why would Smollett do this…

    “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”
    ? Ernesto Che Guevara

    “The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.”
    ? Marcus Garvey

    “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.”
    ? Bryan Stevenson

    “Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.”
    ? Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

    “An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. ”
    ? Anthony Standen

    “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
    ? Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=–=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”
    ? Anais Nin

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=–=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  17. There are multiple layers to the hoaxes presently in the public eye. Smollett and the mainstream media’s racial narrative is founded on a social construct (fiction, pretense, hoax) dating back to American slavery. The false distinction originally served the “property” rights interests of slaveowners. Although the abomination of slavery and its racist legacy have been officially dealt with by our legal system, more contemporary versions of the original hoax have sprung up among postmodernist social justice warriors and black nationalists in the general public and mainstream media.

    All of the aforementioned facts are potential fodder for new hoaxes simply by denying them and taking up the pretense of an alternative reality based on those denials. The result is hoaxes based on linked chains of hoaxes dating back to slavery. The institution that spawned the hoax chain thereby echoes forward to the present. Current hoax perpetrators appear to be motivated by the privileges of victimhood and the possibility of reparations. Add to that the erotic thrill that SJWs get from falsely accusing people based on their race and non participation in SJW mythology, and you have a societal psychosis.

    Having legally banned and made socially unacceptable both slavery and conventional racism, we nevertheless have not successfully dealt with the underlying race hoax that facilitates all the others. Despite scientific findings to the contrary, a societal confirmation bias favors the belief that somehow race is a valid distinction. Not that science was even necessary to debunk this obvious falsehood. Interbreeding was a well known fact during slavery, a living example of which was Lincoln’s friend Fredrick Douglass.

    The belief in race is unmistakably dogmatic. Recognition of the originating dogma as such points to the solution suggested at the time by Lincoln when he said The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present…We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
    There is an old saying that lasting solutions cannot be found at the level of the problems. Applied to both conventional and SJW racism, the solution can be found at the underlying level of the belief in race. Beliefs cannot be legislated into or out of existence. What has been voluntarily assumed must be voluntarily unassumed. We must disenthrall ourselves from this perniciously divisive idea.

  18. Smollett is most likely going to get away with no consequences, no way Chicago indicts a black celebrity for striking back against the evil orange man and his evil racist followers

  19. Smollett is most likely going to get away with no consequences, no way Chicago indicts a black celebrity for striking back against the evil orange man and his evil racist followers

    Dave: I take your point except … if Smollett mailed the white powder hate letter to himself, the Feds are involved and they will not be amused that he used the Post Office for a “terroristic hoax.”

  20. There is a recognized disorder related Munchousen’s Syndrome called Hero Syndrome in which the subject seeks heroism or recognition, usually by creating a desperate situation which they can resolve. This can include unlawful acts, such as arson.

  21. Huxley, you are still a weird hippie although no where close to the new generation of the new age. Here’s a hint: you still believe in the moon landing religion.

    No way you are gonna crowd out weirdos that way.

    The two things you squares have in common are the faith and belief in that religion plus your god gravity.

  22. It’s probably good for Jussie to have been found out so quickly. With good brain care professional help, he may fix whatever his mental problems are.

    Unless they are psychopaths, people who live elaborate lies eventually end up hating themselves. Had he been able to continue the fraud, it would have just gotten bigger, he would have gotten in deeper, & eventually he likely would have had a major meltdown – maybe even committed suicide. Perhaps one day, he will thank the Chicago Police for stopping him…

  23. Heroes are labeled by the society they live in. Thus people who want fame or infamy from society, by becoming a black star, basketball guru, President, astronaut, or doctor, is guilty of conforming their fate to the expectations of the society that honors them.

    There are also heroes which don’;t care about social honors but inevitably act in a fashion that gets them labeled as society’s heroes.

    A hero in society is classified and defined as a warrior or defender that kills the enemy and protects the society. Outside a war, the focus is more on protection than attacking. A hero can be a serial killer, so long as he only kills the enemy. Society doesn’t care.

    A hero in Palestinian culture is very different than a hero in Norse or American culture.

  24. Huxley says:

    Me too. I did for a long time, metaphorically and literally, with those I thought my comrades.

    Hey Hux. We’ve clashed on a number of things, agreed on some others, and even had amiable exchanges. With all due respect, and in all sincerity: “What the hell was that all about?” now, that you look back on it.

    I don’t get it, and I don’t think it’s because I am completely autistic or that much of a psychological outlier. Numerous members of my family were or are just about as devoid of an impulse to belong as I apparently am. [Or maybe I’m not and I don’t recognize it] But I mean, you know, if you want a real a-social case look at Parker (yuk yuk)

    But seriously, as best as you can, could you describe, or offer some insight into what was driving that desire at the time?

    Appreciate it. Really.

    DNW

  25. Neo, apropos of my half tongue in cheek remarks to Huxley, do you as a psychologist (or thereabouts) have any insight into this group-belonging-drive thing?

    The phenomenon has been well and repeatedly described, but the impulse in itself really describes, or explains, nothing.

    There must be some need or appetite that is being satisfied, inordinately, or inordinately, in a way that is ordered or disordered. What is it?

  26. MikeK on a intern or student who didn’t know what to say:

    “It turned out he did not know how to talk to white people. He didn’t know what to say when he was supposed to be taking a medical history.

    I finally gave him a script to use to get started. It helped and he graduated.”

    What was he saying instead?

  27. Neo, that makes sense. Rush often says that if you don’t believe in God then you seek meaning in something else like climate change. (We are the generation that will save the planet!) So I can imagine that this gentleman, seeing his career faltering, fashioned a heroic scenario for himself. I wonder if he will ever understand how much damage he could have caused with his lies.

  28. Why do so many left leaning folk think they’re part of some heroic rebel alliance when the totalitarian policies for which they advocate are more in league with the empire?

  29. Just saw the store surveillance video of the two brothers involved buying the clothing—masks, hats, etc.—to be used in the fake attack.

    A few hours ago I also caught the tail end of a report on TV that seemed to be saying that one of the people involved had even kept the magazine–holes and all– out of which the letters were cut that were pasted up to make the first threatening note.

    We’re obviously dealing with some criminal masterminds here.

  30. huxley,

    All real heroes “fall into it” and then discount their heroism. Special forces, like all who “have seen the elephant” invariably regard only those who have “given that last full measure of devotion” as heroes. Heroism for them is a posthumous award, those who live were just doing their job. Living Medal winners are examples of doing your job.

    “If you tell me who your friends are, I’ll tell you who you are”

    Reportedly, Smollett is close friends with Kamala Harris… quite a coincidence in timing that had Smollett’s fraudulent “hate crime” not fallen apart, it would have greatly assisted in getting Harris’ ‘lynching’ hate crime legislation passed, adding needed gravitas to her Congressional resume…

    I know there’s no direct evidence in support of that speculation but my “look beyond the obvious” meter is refusing to dismiss it.

    There is no lie too big, no depravity too low… that the hate filled left will not embrace in its fanatical determination to “fundamentally transform” the world.

    It’s for the greater good…

  31. DNW –

    I guess as with most things we’re simpatico on this one. In the conventional sense, I’ve never had a desire to belong to a clique or group or bonfire circle-dance.

    On the other hand, it might be going too far to say I have no desire to belong, period. I think I do. I want to belong to a rather abstract “group” of people who don’t particularly care about belonging, who value integrity, who strive for personal excellence and value truth and beauty over lies and ugliness. That type of thing.

    And I don’t just mean that as another way saying “I want to be a certain type of person,” though I mean that as well. I actually imagine what kind of recognition I’m aiming for whenever I do something potentially recognizable, and who I want to be recognized by. It gets a little paradoxical, admittedly. Aiming to be recognized by people who aren’t after recognition, again, could seem like a roundabout way of using my innate desire-to-belong to subvert itself and “psych” myself into not caring about recognition – into, that is, focusing solely on the excellence of the task at hand.

    In other words: I want to be recognized by people like (say) Socrates –> Socrates would not recognize anyone based on anything except their qualities of excellence –> Ergo, what I really care about is excellence, not recognition.

    The thing is, I’m not sure if I *use* that neat trick to tame the beast inside me, ravenous for attention, egoistic, and so on, or if it springs organically from a genuine lack of concern for belonging and recognition. I suppose it wouldn’t matter all that much to anyone aside from me, since it’s really just a question about my internal make-up, or as we say, who I “really” am.

    (Even then, who are we “really”? One could say I’m “really” the ravenous beast every bit as plausibly as one could say I’m “really” the type of person who puts a leash on the beast… Another issue for another discussion.)

    It might be a stretch to compare the kind of imaginary belonging I’m describing (you never really form any meaningful, or at least tangible, community with these people) to what we’re talking about here, but the desire is intense enough to be motivating in any case.

    An example: I wrote a paper that got nothing but bemused or scornful neglect from everyone in my “community,” aside from one man I respected above all others. He was ecstatic about it, and with that, every other negative, dismissive remark evaporated. I said to myself, “This is who I was writing for anyway.”

    It would have saddened me deeply to have him dismiss my work like the others, so once again it’s possible to see the desire to belong, to be recognized, at work in my work. On the other hand, wouldn’t my sadness boil down to a simple feeling that I’d failed to reach the excellence I was striving for? Hard to say.

    To get back to the question at hand, I suspect (and only suspect) that there’s a kind of “atomic decay” that occurs with the pure idea of excellence among people. First, it gets confused with recognition or belonging. Recognition gets confused with fame. Belonging gets confused with conformity. Excellence proves to be extremely difficult, laziness kicks in, or (to be fair) frustration and exhaustion, a sense of futility, and the bar gets subtly but progressively lowered, tick by tick, whereby it begins to blur with fame and conformity. Path of least resistance temptations kick in, and then the easy way, the shortcut, comes to be preferred to the hard and arduous path.

    It’s extremely risky to aim for excellence when conformity is so much easier and possesses more guarantees (as Strauss put it in another context, “low but solid ground”). You don’t know if you’re on the right track. You don’t know if you’re crazy or everyone else is. You feel keenly the costs of being wrong about all of this. It’s like a constant sense of vertigo.

    Who needs that? There are types of people, I gather, who innately take it in stride, but most of us don’t. It’s not that we’re not hardwired to seek belonging, but rather that we’re also hardwired to discern and make judgments. We don’t just go after whatever group and get smiley because we’ve been accepted. It’s far more complicated than that. We fall in, we craft judgments ex ante or ex post about the goodness or nobility of the tribe, in one way or another relating our behavior to estimations of excellence (or goodness, or nobility, or what have you).

    Just look at Jussie. The black radical movement he hails from embodies, unfortunately, a fully “decayed” notion of excellence from the outset, substituting all of the classic proxies for the standard as a matter of course. Racial clannishness? Check. Virtue signaling? Check. Craving for notoriety and cheap emotional theatrics? Checkeroo. But in his own mind, he clearly had some convoluted notion of the supreme goodness, excellence, and nobility of what he was doing.

    I’m suggesting that looking at the phenomenon from the angle of belonging alone is not going to get us very far. Instead, it’s a more or less equipollent interaction between an intense desire for excellence and an intense yearning for belonging and recognition. To oversimplify somewhat for the sake of illustration, purer notions of excellence will tend to go with more “abstract” notions of belonging, while more decayed notions of the one go with more decayed notions of the other.

    When you extend this basic idea to a diagnosis of what in our culture is encouraging these types of disgusting displays of Potemkin virtue, it’s fairly interesting. Just my two cents.

  32. Well, let’s hope that he spends enough time in jail to contemplate and fully appreciate his errors.

  33. Eva Marie said,

    “Rush often says that if you don’t believe in God then you seek meaning in something else like climate change.”

    So, we should encourage belief in one fantasy, in order to prevent belief in another. Right…

  34. Folks,

    Do you realize just how close we came to the 2020 election being impacted?

    If the additional evidence about the Covington kids had not been found and the careful work of the CPD to investigate the Smollet affair had not taken place, the entire Trump supporting population would have been smeared by the SJWs, the democrats and their enablers in the mainstream media.

    And they talk about “Trump Russian Collusion” while destroying our democracy!

  35. huxley on February 20, 2019 at 7:41 pm at 7:41 pm said:
    Smollett is most likely going to get away with no consequences, no way Chicago indicts a black celebrity for striking back against the evil orange man and his evil racist followers

    Dave: I take your point except … if Smollett mailed the white powder hate letter to himself, the Feds are involved and they will not be amused that he used the Post Office for a “terroristic hoax.”
    * * *
    https://www.dailywire.com/news/43751/breaking-prosecutors-charge-jussie-smollett-felony-ryan-saavedra

    “The Cook County state’s attorney’s office officially charged “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett on Wednesday with felony disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report.

  36. DNW on February 20, 2019 at 9:02 pm at 9:02 pm said:
    Neo, apropos of my half tongue in cheek remarks to Huxley, do you as a psychologist (or thereabouts) have any insight into this group-belonging-drive thing?

    The phenomenon has been well and repeatedly described, but the impulse in itself really describes, or explains, nothing.

    There must be some need or appetite that is being satisfied, inordinately, or inordinately, in a way that is ordered or disordered. What is it?
    * * *
    This study doesn’t directly answer your question, but at least the phenomenon of “belonging” is being addressed obliquely. Maybe people want to belong to a group that trusts them, and that they can trust, to reduce both psychological stress and conscious effort.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5516679/

    “Trust and cooperation often break down across group boundaries, contributing to pernicious consequences, from polarized political structures to intractable conflict. As such, addressing such conflicts require first understanding why trust is reduced in intergroup settings. Here, we clarify the structure of intergroup trust using neuroscientific and behavioral methods. We found that trusting ingroup members produced activity in brain areas associated with reward, whereas trusting outgroup members produced activity in areas associated with top-down control. Behaviorally, time pressure—which reduces people’s ability to exert control—reduced individuals’ trust in outgroup, but not ingroup members. These data suggest that the exertion of control can help recover trust in intergroup settings, offering potential avenues for reducing intergroup failures in trust and the consequences of these failures.”

  37. A commentary on C. S. Lewis’s writings about the desire of most people to be part of an “inner ring” — affinity-driven informal group — but doesn’t ever really explain WHY people desire this, other than that they are “comfortable” places to be, or that they bestow some prestige on the insiders.

    http://vladimirsays.com/blog/2018/1/26/why-we-crave-joining-exclusive-groups

    “Inner Rings may be considered harmful and dangerous because they have the ability to exclude and separate individuals. Especially today, when exclusion is automatically labelled as bad. Yet, Inner Rings are in fact beneficial to our society because they divide the individuals into social groups where they can be comfortable with. We all want to be special to someone or several someone. We all want to be valued and valuable. And Lewis says that there’s nothing wrong with inner rings in and of themselves. They’re simply structures filled with people longing to be connected.”

    Text of Lewis’s article:
    https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

  38. PS – the commenter Vladimir doesn’t really grasp the full import of Lewis’s description of Inner Rings: that they are formed to be exclusionary for the sole purpose of excluding The Wrong People.
    “In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.”

  39. Roy that’s a good point. Less damaging fantasies are better than more damaging fantasies.

  40. Sorry Neo, I call BS. Anyone whose life is so shallow and meaningless that they have to make up a hate crime is a jerk. There is no justification. If you want to fight against whatever “injustice” you believe in — real, or more likely imagined — then find a positive way in the real world to make a difference Staging a hoax is never a legitimate choice.

  41. “if Smollett mailed the white powder hate letter to himself, the Feds are involved and they will not be amused that he used the Post Office for a “terroristic hoax.” AesopFan

    Are those the same ‘Feds’ of which the Deep State is composed?

    If not, upon what basis do you assert these Feds to be of a different character?

    One of the tricks the left uses is to charge the accused appropriately under the law, but arrange for the trial to be under a ‘liberal’ judge, who then lets the ‘miscreant’ off the hook.

    If a jury trial in a strongly liberal demographic, the ‘prosecution’ packs the jury and you get “Jury Finds Garcia Zarate Not Guilty In Steinle Murder.” or in a less ‘favorable’ venue the prosecution allows the defense to slant the jury, which most often results in a hung jury. The ‘prosecution’ then declines to go to the “needless expense” of another trial.

  42. Geoffrey Brittain-That’s exactly right and is what the San Francisco prosecutor’s office did I. The prosecution of the illegal alien who murdered Kate Steinle.

  43. “The Cook County state’s attorney’s office officially charged “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett on Wednesday with felony disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report.

    Think about Chicago juries. The OJ trial was an example of jury shopping as the DA, whose son ended up LA Mayor, moved the criminal case from west LA to downtown. He said the reason was because the Santa Monica courthouse did not have a big enough courtroom. The result was acquittal by a black women jury. Black women are very hostile to interracial marriages, especially to white women marrying black men.

    The civil case, which “convicted” him, was in west LA. The civil lawyer was much, much better than the asst DAs but the jury pool was different.

    The feds have a better chance to convict him of using the mail for a terrorist threat,

  44. Don’t get it.

    If Obama / Clinton / Holder / Lynch / Jarrett / Rhodes / Comey / McCabe / Rosenstein / Mueller / Ohr / Ohr / Harris / Warren / Sanders / Pelosi / Schumer / Feinstein et al. (along with the entire MSM) can hoax the country—repeatedly and continuously, regularly and consistently….

    …not to mention shamelessly…

    …then why can’t poor Jussie?

    Doesn’t seem fair…. Not one bit.

  45. Like any good cult, if they don’t have enough witches to burn at the stake, they manufacture them.

    Additionally, it gives Jussie a leg up in the intersectional Olypics. Black, gay and a “hate crime survivor” is better than simply being black and gay. The peak of perfection would be islamic, gay, trans-woman of color who is also handicapped.

  46. “The peak of perfection would be islamic, gay, trans-woman of color who is also handicapped.”

    Not quite. Undocumented would get you the whole way.

  47. A Martel,

    The prosecution also charged Zarate inappropriately with murder a much harder charge to prove. Voluntary manslaughter easier but still a bit of a hurdle. Whereas involuntary manslaughter was a slam dunk, since there can be no doubt that he killed her. The claim of it simply being an accident is placed in doubt as what cause was there for him to pull out the gun in the first place?

  48. The Chicago PD or DA has weighed in on Smollett’s motive. According to them he was after a big pay increase for his role on the TV show, Empire. So much for the “noble impulse” idea.

    I’ll say it again, it is difficult to be too cynical when evaluating these political events. Keep an open mind and consider a wide range of possibilities.
    _____

    Neo’s thesis is well put and large pieces of it ring true. I’ve struggled to figure out what I don’t like about it. I guess it is the concept of heroism. Traditionally, most heroes are accidental heroes. We don’t find out what people are made of until they’re in the moment, including ourselves.

    Are special operators intentionally seeking a heroic life when they join up? Maybe. I’d be more inclined to say they want to be defenders, tough guys, the very best, adrenaline seekers, and camaraderie seekers. They probably want every mission to go like clockwork, so no one needs to be a hero.

    I’ve seen cop shows with convincing plots, that illustrate why the last thing a cop wants is to have partner who wants to be a hero.

    To oversimplify, I think the heroism Neo is considering is a type of faux heroism. Even in the case of real French resistance heroes, I’d guess almost none of them started with the intent of being heroes. Anger, desperation, or moral outrage perhaps, but not heroism.

  49. A comment (the first) on Second City Cop’s blog.

    Anonymous Anonymous said…
    the fix was in for smellit by Prickwinkle’ kimmy foxx until fbi ,postal inspectors

    joined investigation….

    I agree. The feds will be the ones to put him in the slammer.

  50. Roy, Eva, and Delilah already touched on it, but what if Smollett had pulled this off?

    Here’s what happened to small business owners in Ferguson after the Dorian Johnson hoax. Remember the Obama DOJ and Eric Holder were deeply involved in exploiting that hoax. I doubt the Smolletts or Johnsons give a sh_t about the damage they do.

  51. TommyJay, that was no accident.

    Rioters may claim that they are attacking what they allege to be white racist society, yet it is minorities who are most hurt by the violence committed in minority-dominant communities such as Ferguson.

    Those minorities were strivers and that is not allowed in the black community. They might as well have been black kids who wanted to learn in school. The black culture right now is opposed to any attempt at self improvement. Learning in school or owning a store is not on their agenda.

    This is tragic and we can only hope that the culture changes. Right now it is thug culture.

  52. they are trying to spin it as a scheme to get a raise instead of political hit job against Trump and his supporters. even if we take the money as a motive angle, the real question no honest journalist is asking is why would fraudulently hiring two losers dressing up as white Trump supporters to beat you up give you a raise? The raise would not happen if there was no political angle to the hoax that could be used by Jussie’s direct bosses and people above them to attack Trump, Jussie’s attempt for a raise is to manufacture and provide a political weapon for people who can make decision on his career to use against their political opponents, so it is not as unrelated to activism as the police chief claimed.

  53. Delilah:

    What exactly are you calling BS on? Did you read my post? My post made it clear that this is not, I repeat not, the least bit legitimate as a motive, nor is it the least bit heroic. It’s a self-aggrandizing desire to be a fake hero, among many many other things.

    Nor am I sure this was part of Smollett’s motive. But note that I say “part.” I also discussed other motives for him, all of them self-aggrandizing. The police say it was money. I listed career. Money is certainly part of that.

    I think the desire to be part of a heroic movement and seen as a victim in the Cause probably WAS part of Smollett’s motive, although I have no way of knowing. But it’s not the least bit incompatible with other motives that co-exist with it. It’s used by the perp as a way to self-justify the other more venal motives. Since Smollett wasn’t paid for it, the assumption is that he thought the fame coming from the incident would lead to his being worth more to the show, and therefore being paid more money.

  54. Consider this–if he had sent his letter a couple weeks later after the Covington story died down, Smollett would have gotten everything he wanted! It would have gotten the same big coverage in the media. The same politicians and celebrities would have made the same show of outrage directed at Trump and his supporters. And instead of the Chicago Police being involved in the investigation, it would be the FBI. Even if they came to the conclusion that Smollett mailed himself the letter, it’s doubtful they would report it. And also given what we know about the people working in the FBI and their political biases, who’s to say they wouldn’t frame up a couple white men to charge with the crime?

    Thus, if he waited to send the letter and doesn’t get the Chicago police involved, at worst, he gets all the virtue signalling points, and the incident fades away but is acknowledged as “settled science”. At best, two perpetrators are created to bash Trump and his supporters with.

  55. I agree that Smollett will be found not guilty of the charges by a Chicago jury, but it will take more work by his attorneys than you expect. They’ll be looking to target not only black jurors, but black jurors that aren’t aware that Smollett is gay. One of the truths the left avoids acknowledging is the fairly prevalent homophobia within the black community, that was best suggested in the California referendum for gay marriage several years ago that was defeated. The Left blamed the Mormons in California for its defeat but a more apt culprit was the much, much larger black population, the majority of which voted against it. Therefore, if a Chicago jury actually manages to convict him of anything, it will likely be due to homophobia (which causes the jury not to overlook the overwhelming evidence against him, as it did in the OJ case).

  56. melange — No, Smollett will cop a plea that gets him a fine and community service and/or probation.

    Mike K — not that it matters, but the alleged reason for moving the OJ trial downtown was lack of security at the Santa Monica courthouse, which is ridiculous because they could have added security. There’s a long-standing feeling among L.A. lawyers that Garcetti picked two lawyers whom he knew were doofusses who would lose the case.

  57. Geoffrey, I know they overcharged. Commentators on the right didn’t take note of that until it was too late to publicize the sneak procedural move to effectively prevent it. Everyone just went along assuming that murder was the way to go without considering the evidence. That’s how they got the desired outcome. It was a farce and I have a feeling the authorities will massage the outrage and the procedure in order to achieve a similar outcome in this case. I was heartened to see that a DA recused herself due to a possible conflict from her contact with the Smollett family. Some other DA got on her scold box about that but she’s right to keep the prosecution as clean as possible, and not create any defense talking points.

  58. Neo, the idea of the hoaxers as heroes is good and important — I’m sure they think they are being heroic, in their own minds. Sort of like Dan Rather: fake, but accurate.
    The Dems really seem to believe that Trump Supporters are as criminally inclined as the Occupy Wall Street rapists — of which there were many, most of whom were never investigated, nor even reported on.

    They really believe Trump is Hitler, and supporters are racist, sexist, Nazi KKK lynchers-in-waiting.

    There is one more issue almost brought up but not enough by Banned Lizard:
    “Add to that the erotic thrill that SJWs get from falsely accusing people based on their race and non participation in SJW mythology, and you have a societal psychosis.”

    The false accusation, itself, is forbidden fruit exciting.
    I recall my 9 year old self using a magnifying glass to cook/burn beetles until they smoked and stunk. There is something powerful about the ability to cause pain, to destroy. The erotic thrills in accusing others seems likely to be real. Not sure if only when it’s a false accusation, it seems the true accusations also cause some thrills.

    Another issue is the circle dance belonging, and the desire to be a part of, to belong to, a group.
    This is so important to so many.

    I see that many people have that desire, but me joining the Libertarian Party (when young) was the closest I came, and the LP could also be called the anti-circle dance group. Even there I was on the fringe, like on the Frisbee team group, game-players group, college dorm groups; company groups, first wave of Westerners in post-commie Czechoslovakia group; and all Slovak groups since.

    Of course, I came to Slovakia “to save the world” — as a Free Marketeer, supporting the lower taxes, and tolerable justice, which is all that is needed for a country to grow rich. People, like me and not so much, people do want meaning in their own lives.
    And belonging.
    And to be seen as a bit more virtuous than the other equals in their particular group, with their own groups’ virtue signaling.

    The fact that hating Trump is considered a virtue among so many Dems is a problem, but it hides the deeper problem of Dems hating American Republicans, and demonizing the Reps, starting before Trump and probably to continue after Trump. The demonization is causing the Dems to act deranged.

    Jussie is clearly suffering from Democrat Derangement Syndrome. Believing lies, instead of seeing the real truth.

  59. Neo has defined it correctly. Purpose is the thing sought for. Heroic struggles are hard to find. There is a void in many lives seeking a solution.

    Several generations are now heavily burdened with student debt, removing the joy of self sufficiency that was possible to earlier generations. Traditional human activities of marriage and child raising are now seen as high risk to a generation loaded with debt and barely making it. Two broke girls and living with parents are now the norm.

    The Democrats abandoned improving working class income as a core issue, and have gone totally to identity politics. Eric Weinstein, who coined the phrase “Intellectual Dark Web”, has noted that this is being driven by their billionaire donor class because the traditional focus was too expensive.

    H1B abuse allows importing thousands of foreign knowledge workers, providing huge cost reductions. Low skill jobs are now done by undocumented immigrants. Barely literate Muslims who don’t even think about asking for benefits and good working conditions are now preparing our chickens, hogs, and beef, jobs that were formerly done in processing plants located near large black populations. Casting immigrants as oppressed and therefore victims to be heroically supported is a plus to the Democrat donor class, as is meeting their needs with government welfare.

    The Democrats have done the Civil War Era all over again. A huge wealth gap. A planter class enriched with labor from slaves, who they described as unable to fend for themselves and better off as slaves with their master’s protection. An impoverished poor white class unable to compete against slave labor but who could find meaning through war.

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