I had it but really had to scroll to the bottom. It was also not Reddit but articles saying it was the first result. Which is kind of ironic.

I might have to print it and put it on a lanyard. Or it sometimes feels like that.

I am 86 baby and you are one of the only very few people born in 80s or earlier that had really early adoption to computers in addition to me. I could use MS-DOS before I could write anything else as I also had had computer available since pretty much birth also because of my dads job.

It is also not always about our intelligence but our skill set. I rarely have hard time learning when I want, but issue in my case has been in addition to probable ADHD and mental health issues that the system wasn’t designed to teach me studying.

I am crossing this divide now. I have secondary education but no university and I am working to get to med school now (In Finland it is a combined undergrad and med school). I think I can do it but I don’t really know how to study. I know how to learn but learning in schedule is the issue. I was too ill to go to university when I should have and I could have gone to easier courses I could have gone to without an entrance exam and done OK but I always wanted medicine. Or well, I not easier but easier to get into like maths. After I got better I ended up in aid work, and stopping that is really hard. But I still want to become a doctor so I am trying now in my thirties. Having what looks like undiagnosed ADHD that is now under investigation and crappy childhood might explain part of why I never became what people felt I should have but the fact that I never had to learn to study because I didn’t need to get through is up there.

I try to remember that our education does not mean anything for our value, but it seems hard when it comes to you.

Not in America only but how bad it is depends on the country. In most, even when things are miles better, if you are a racial minority or other minority, the likelihood of cops doing shit goes higher. In mine, I can’t remember a case where people have been killed in these situations but I do know a lot of cases of structural and open racism. In other countries I have lived in, it can get a lot worse.

Would have suggested it but Calcifer is written with C in Howl’s Moving Castle.

I played being a bureaucrat. I became woke moralist. Well, kind of.

They played too much WoW.

No, but seriously, calling people whatever they like is OK. As another Millenial, at least in my corner, we all had some kind of nicks and they came to real life. I have a lot of friends who still go by their nicknames from decades ago. I also changed my own name a little and am currently almost exclusively known by that name. I don’t go around telling people why but my name is connected to trauma quite strongly. I can even go further in my family history to have an example of how people have been doing that always. My grandma was called by two names. She moved to the city and decided to go by another name. I was a little bit confused as a kid when my great-aunt called and asked her by a name I had never heard before. I might understand not calling someone something offensive, but Kalcifer is quite mild. In the end, it doesn’t hurt anyone and is a tool for building your identity.

Islam as religious text basis doesn’t really differ in a bad way from the other two Abrahamic religions. It even gives some extra rights to women that Christianity and Judaism don’t. Forcing hijab on women is also expressively banned in Islamic theological texts. Doesn’t change how it works in practice as forced hijab is pretty common in fundamentalistic Islamic theocracies. But might explain why converting is a little bit less insane than at the surface level. If I had to choose one of the Abrahamic religions on a purely theological basis I might end up choosing Islam. Please note, I am not trying to give a pass to Islam, Islamic countries or especially fundamentalist Muslims. The issues are myriad. People outside Islamic countries just have a somewhat skewed image of the religion. Both in theory and practice.

I think you are not aware how troubled teen industry is run at least in the US. Just so you are aware that they are places full of physical, sexual and mental abuse. It is like you sent your kids to a camp but instead of summer camp, it was a refugee or concentration camp.

Maybe because it was a left versus right conflict leading to decades of Franco’s more or less fascist dictatorship.

To be fair to America, I don’t think there are any sane countries left. Finland had an actual neo-Nazi as minister and while it didn’t last longer than Truss or even half of it, the party that is ministerial party is still there with similar ideas. They just had forethought to not write 14/88 in an old electoral ad. We are tied for first place still in the least corrupt countries and 5th in most democratic countries.

Add me to the list with a side of furiously searching for security and privacy of cloud storage services and figuring out which Linux I want to use. I’m shaking my head at how complacent I got with my services. I always do my due diligence when starting to use anything but I somehow forgot to keep up in the past couple of years.

You are absolutely right that we need to recognize both genocidal and oppressive policies in our countries and where possible restitute people or their descendants, the majority of society usually did directly contribute to those policies. However the case example by the person that answered you is actually more relevant than you would think. While we can’t make our ancestors pay for their direct and indirect crimes, oppressed people who make use of horrendous policies should be exempt even in the level of thought.

To give a modern-day example of international law. Asylum seekers can’t legally be punished by the mode of entry. Not because it changes it into a good thing but because oppressed people have so few options that are sane.

Reconciling and instituting is also not enough by a mile. We as Western countries need to stop these inhumane policies. I am not American. But mine while being better than most (based on rankings not my opinion) has shit ton issues.

While I mostly agree with you I don’t think country-owned companies or even monopolies are always bad. There needs to be a huge amount of real separation between politicians and those companies but it can work. In mine, both gambling and alcohol spirits stores are monopolies and owned by a country. Profits from gambling are distributed to grants for health and social welfare nonprofits. The question is if my country with very little corruption is the exemption that confirms the rule or if, if you do it right, it can work.

I also do not believe communism without very solid safeguards can work and those would need to be applied almost at the start. I am also pessimistic about human nature these days and am not sure if there can ever be enough safeguards to protect that model from misuse. I am what you could call a democratic socialist. I believe in mix and match where public and private companies can work in the same economy. Although I do oppose land resources being sold, especially as they are usually sold with a pittance for companies to profit. And I am not talking about private persons selling their land’s resources but government land resources. Selling them really doesn’t often make economic sense unless extraction would require a really high investment. Ecologic considerations should also be taken a lot more into account.

They definitely are emotionally compromised person being manipulated but being emotionally unintelligent and being emotionally compromised are not the same thing. While being emotionally unintelligent will affect your risk of being radicalized it does so through your own emotions and capacity to process them in a healthy way.

Radicalization happens in steps. You don’t get from being blind to racism and as the next step participating in genocide. Nor do you go from wondering if you are being lied to for some nefarious reason to believing 5G will kill you. It is a slow and gradual process. A lot of people are following the same playbook. It includes things like moving goalposts, giving the same legitimacy to two viewpoints that are not equal in ethics or evidence, playing on fear and discomfort, and giving convenient fall guy for people’s difficulties. In my language, there is a saying that in a group stupidity condenses. That isn’t because people’s intelligence somehow lessens but because of the social nature of human beings.

It is not like people in Nazi Germany suddenly lose their collective cognitive or emotional intelligence in 20s and 30s. There were pretty clear issues going on that could be seized for populist politics. It is also not like Nazis themselves didn’t have a huge amount of anti-intellectual pseudoscience in their idealogy and, in the case of some members, a lot of occultism going around.

The hard truth is that people in general are really bad at seeing manipulation. You can see the clumsy attempts but the majority of people judge others’ actions based on their view of their intentions. And as in general we would like to think of ourselves as well-intentioned, we are not judging if someone is manipulating all the time. Critical thinking can help but the thing about radicalization is that it speaks to multiple psychological tendencies we naturally have.

And while I deem QAnon shit and even any flavor of alt-right or religious fundamentalism idiocy, the pure fact that they have been as successful as they have tells that their manipulation is quite finessed.

It is because radicalization is more than a cognitive process. It is as much social and psychological. Intelligence alone is a pretty bad predictor of a lot of things we like to think only depend on intelligence. While there is some causation, it is not a vacuum or often even the biggest predictor of many things.

Radicalization is the thing that makes you believe in things that can’t be real. Making people believe a lot of things is surprisingly easy. Look into religions. While I don’t believe and you might not, a lot of intelligent people throughout world history have. There might be a correlation between intelligence and atheism these days, but the effect is far from linear.

We really need to step out of the idea that radicalization only happens to people who are somehow slow or uneducated. It might make you more likely to fall for it, but cognitive ability and education will not mean you will not end up there as well. Issue with the anti-intellectualism of the alt-right is not if someone themselves has education but if they are willing to listen to other people who do. If no one is an expert for example racist ideas of the alt-right about biological differences can’t be refuted. Which is probably partially where it comes from times quite a lot.

Everyone likes to think they have cognitive ability. If we just think radicalization happens only to stupid people, and you are not stupid, getting a person de-radicalized is going to be a lot harder. Thinking that we as people with cognitive ability can’t be radicalized will also make it easier to fall for it because you can’t be radicalized.

Instead of intelligence or education, we should focus on the trifecta of vulnerability, marginalization, and othering. That’s a better predictor.

(And no, I do not actually disagree about the ideas being idiocy, just that falling for them are not just for idiots)

I don’t think it is about flipping a coin between open-minded and close-minded but about radicalization. While it is harder to see with QAnon, radicalization be it right, left (although you have to go really far on the horseshoe), or religious is staunchly anti-intellectualistic. Once you believe in ideas or at least do not see them as really distasteful, it gets easier to go towards more and more batshit insane ideas.

While I am not sure if there is actual research on how age affects radicalization, research on radicalization has identified certain things that make it likelier for a person to be radicalized. Vulnerability, marginalization, and othering are all pretty common. To extend it there might be an age group vulnerability of 45 and up age group because of either being empty nesters or kids at least starting to be a lot more independent.

There is also somewhat of a domino effect. People like to be part of a group. If people don’t give any legitimacy to radicalized viewpoints, it makes it harder to be radicalized. The problem with this is also how hidden ideas can become mainstream as has at least in Western countries happened with the alt-right, they can reach a scary critical mass. Once you have been tempered with completely crazy viewpoints at one point thinking JFK Jr will be resurrected is not that weird anymore.

Over a decade ago when I started to get really worried about the rise of fascism in the West, my mom thought I was insane. Now we have had (not American) actual neo-Nazi as minister and no one of the ministerial parties thought it was a huge enough deal to actually not do it. In my books that means they all are neo-Nazies. My mom also doesn’t think I am insane anymore. The tools they used to gain power are not new. We are just not taught to identify them. I was because it would be a pretty bad idea to have someone in my profession if not aware of signs of radicalization.