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In college while pursuing my degree in sociology one of my professors assigned the book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 it was one of the most powerful books I have ever read. It does not justify their actions but gives perspective on what it takes to make a human go down that path. It explores the societal pressures, views and violence from within. It was not an easy read by any means but it was very thought provoking.
Another really great one that theorizes exactly WHY America as a country is so susceptible to snake oil salesmen, con men, and anyone who spouts patriotic/religious nonsense is *Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.
I really enjoy macro histories, and this one is particularly compelling and enjoyable to read.
I recently read "Ordinary Men" about how normal polish police went from being civilian normal police to aiding the Germans in the Holocaust and it's scary how many parallels there are. It requires normal civilians and police to all step up and speak against it to stop
Edit: comrade pointed out these were German civilians. They are correct.
"Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever."
A big thing that struck me: when the police who initially said "no" in front of the rest of the group were later asked how they were able to say no they talked about how they were older and financially independent. The young guys all said yes because they were focused on their careers and hoping for a promotion. I wonder how much of the same mindset controls our police in this country. If the chief of police is smiling at militia run check points, is the 24 year old cop ready, mentally but financially, to question him?
You might find Mick West's book, <em>Escaping the Rabbit Hole,</em> to be helpful. It's all about how and why otherwise smart and reasonable people can fall into conspiracist beliefs, and how to approach the topic with them. It also goes into some of the details of the arguments behind specific conspiracy theories like the 9/11 ones. And it's a surprisingly good read, IMO.
I've been reading this book called Fantasyland : How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.
It posits that America is so messed up because Americans have been self-selecting gullible idiots since the days of Columbus.
Many many people came to this continent in the early days because of promises of easy gold and riches. After a year or two of struggling and not finding any easy riches, the smart ones packed up and went home. The dumb ones stayed and reproduced with other stupid people and bad stupid gullible children.
And this same kind thing repeats over and over for centuries until we reach the point where we are today. Not everybody is here is stupid. But the stupid tend to put down roots and reproduce and the smart people tend to see through the bullshit and go home when they have the chance.
> Violence and Crime today are due to depriving people of our Christian values on respecting life.
Which would be a good argument if violence and crime weren't way down overall globally. We live in the safest era to live in ever.
Steven Pinker provides a huge amount of evidence to support this in his excellent book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.
It is also worth noting that the most violent countries in the world (excluding places that are actively at war) are almost universally Christian. If you sort the list of murder rates by country by rate descending, you will see that there is not a single country in the top 20 that is not majority Christian. And in fact, most of the countries at the top of the list have pretty high religiosity.
https://www.amazon.com/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-History-ebook/dp/B004J4WNJE
Americans have generally always been believing weird-ass shit, simply because unlike most other large-scale pre-industrial societies, there usually wasn't an institution charged with limiting the acceptable body of belief (e.g an official church, or a Confucian mandarin elite, or a priestly caste). In the 19th century you had the Great Awakening and all the bizarre religious sects that came out of that (Mormons being the most prominent), but also things like patent medicine salesmen etc.
But you could argue that rationalism and scientific thinking peaked in the US immediately postwar, during the 1950s and early 1960s. Not coincidentally, this is when the US gained a 'thought control apparatus' for the first time, in the shape of television and other mass media. The prestige of American science and technology in this era, though, was quite heavily bound up with the military-industrial complex.
So when you had the counterculture emerge in the mid-to-late '60s, a lot of it veered into anti-science and rationalism, given the deep associations between the technocratic scientific establishment and the military industrial complex responsible for the carnage in Vietnam. This book is quite good on how a lot of woo came out of California, at first with the hippie movement, but later associated with the sort of postmodern French theory that gave rise to woke idpol.
Ofc it wasn't just the 'left' that was going down this road, the American Right from the late '80s up till now began to embrace the sort of paranoid conspiracism that's really dominated their politics ever since.
A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America (yes I know the title is a bit cringy) actually works through this in rather solid, data-backed detail.
Of course any individual has the possibility of being convinced or shifted from their position, but on a large-scale the boomer generation has caused, and are still causing, a LOT of damage due to actions of mass-sociopathy.
Tangential, but have you guys read One Billion Americans? Lots of really good pro-natal policy proposals in there. Big recommend.
You might want to read ordinary men. It goes into a lot of detail on the explanations that soldiers came up with to justify their actions to themselves. One big theme was duty, basically "If I don't do this gruesome thing, the next guy in my unit will have to do it and that's not ok". Probably the one anecdote that stuck out to me the most was a soldier who would only kill children because he felt like he was freeing them from living lives as orphans since everyone else was killing their parents.
edit: This book focuses on a the history of a specific battalion working the final solution on the Eastern Front. If I recall correctly the men were reservists from an area of Germany that wasn't particularly pro-Nazi and were very "ordinary".
>There are swaths of land in the US bigger than the country of Ireland that has a population density of between 0 and 1 person per 10 square miles.
This entire post misses the mark. We're not calling them to arms, we're mocking them and pointing out their against tyranny stance has no litmus test they will actually apply. Their use of guns is partisan. This is the predicted step we all knew was coming: right wing support for police will be support for the gestapo as long as gestapo target their political enemies.
I recently read "ordinary men". Polish authorities interviewed polish police that aided the Germans in the Holocaust for ten years. Between those interviews and police documents we can see how ordinary law enforcement are coerced into aiding genocide. It's horrifying how familiar reading all that stuff is into today's light. I'm not saying genocide will occur but law enforcement mentality towards everything occuring is wrong. The mentality they are breeding is primed for dark things
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-ebook/dp/B01G1F0F84
There are basically a billion book / internet article / discussions about this issue in relationships. This is one of the most recent ones that presents a possible strategy, of course it assumes that both parties are willing to cooperate
Fair Play https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NTX84PY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_9JHK0YGJWV15283C94FF
I will say that it sounds like you're talking about two different issues... One is the burden of being the Household CEO, The other is the the actual execution of the tasks. Messing up the cooking with just 3 tries (it can be improved!)! is ok but the household CEO thing is a different issue.
I do agree that no matter how this all plays out, it's going to be Worth it to your household to hire a once-weekly professional cleaner. BTW, In addition to the entire internet being available to teach someone about household chores and cooking, if your H a written book about how to maintain household chores and cleanliness, there's "home comforts" and "Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook:" both of which are very gendered but do contain instructions about how to do stuff like sorting laundry and how full to make the washing machine.
I've for quite some time thought that the "ego" or "esoteric knowledge" thing was part of it and it may be but I'm reading Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect and the author points out that although there has been a study done on having special knowledge that the relationship between the need for this knowedge and conspiracy belief is very weak. I'm paraphrasing a bit but I was surprised to see that. This is one of those cases where the media promoted this with a sensational headline when the evidence wasn't very strong. I can't find the specific article but I think it was from Psypost.com
It helped a lot for me to understand the psychology behind pornography addictions. Your brain literally reacts the same way it would with hard drugs. It rewires itself to need more of "it." It produces more dopamine in the brain (the itch) more than the serotonin (the satisfaction) can rightly deal with. Your brain makes habits and triggers and there is so much on the psychology of addiction that I can't cover in a single message.
I would recommend this book if you want to read more about it: <strong>https://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Porn-Pornography-Addiction-ebook/dp/B00N2AH8NW</strong>
Don't give up hope and don't stop fighting the itch, the more you fight it, the more your brain remembers how to fight it.
I actually just heard from an author who wrote a book about this, Fair Play.
I dig that you're partners are all so willing to help. Agreed that it's been socialized into us as girls as it's OUR JOB - on top of everything else.
you might want to suggest your brother to read THIS book, it talks about how Americans are exposed to so much fantasy and conspiracy that they think everything is a conspiracy, something along those lines, it ll clear his head
I just read a newspaper article talking about this book, and how it can help you balance housework and domestic duties within families. Its not only a book I think there are "playing cards" with it as well to facilitate the conversation. Perhaps it will be useful..
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https://www.amazon.com/Fair-Play-Game-Changing-Solution-When-ebook/dp/B07NTX84PY
I highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-History-ebook/dp/B004J4WNJE to get perspective on American history with conspiracy theories and other unique American cultural traits.
I read this book a few months ago.
The Sociopathic Generation.
His points about how it came about applies to every generation that primarily had a top down one way communication system including mine Gen-X.
Maybe especially mine, as our original name was "the latch key kids"... but then the Boomers were known as "the Me Generation"...
Feel free to get from local store as I did..
Bruce Cannon Gibney talks about that in "A generation of Sociopaths - how the baby boomers betrayed America", basically the pension funds will run out of money sometime in the mid-2030's.
So that is another problem to consider.
https://www.amazon.in/Your-Brain-Porn-Pornography-Addiction-ebook/dp/B00N2AH8NW
Your Brain on Porn
Book by Gary Wilson
I'm saying that if we didn't watch porn I think it would be fine, but since we've hot wired them together it's not a good idea and seldom have I seen in myself or others any success without giving up both. Porn is a Sin, masturbation alone is not.
Your Brain On Porn by Gary Wilson would be a good resource for learning about the science and the plethora of experiences behind these claims
They are brainwashed, pure and simple. Pretty easy to do, too:
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
The reason that the penis evolved to work like a plunger was precisely because in order to increase the odds of impregnating the female with it's genetic material, it had to pump out a lot of other semen first.
Cumdumps are as old as humanity itself.
Read Sex at Dawn. Gay men don't get turned on when we gang bang a bottom because we're gay. We get turned on because we're men.
Monogamy is a relatively modern concept. It's not how we evolved to be. Many couples make it work and while it is common, it's not normal... for gays or straights.
Read Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
No problem man! I just realized I got the author's name wrong, it's actually Mick West. Here's an amazon link if you're curious:
https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Rabbit-Hole-Conspiracy-Theories-ebook/dp/B077YS5G2N#ace-g7448806443
I believe I came across an even less determinate consensus in the book Sex at Dawn based on observations of the Kalahari bushmen, probably the last real hunter-gatherer society.
One of the authors, Christopher Ryan, used the word "Monogam-ish" at a presentation in Sydney. You can picture him using that hand gesture with the fingers spread out and waving in that "sorta, kinda" fashion.
Anyway to the point, within a single tribe he observed both trends toward monogamy and non-monogamy. Some members liked to be exclusive and the others - the decision making didn't differentiate between men and women - would change partners every so often. Basically just like sexuality is a spectrum, not a polarity.
Parenting - aside from the direct birth mother link - was a duty of the whole tribe. The promotion of the nuclear family ideal is a tragedy.
EDIT: Clarified my closing sentence
> I can see why people are angry but I don't know what the alternative
I do: remove arbitrary, non-technical height limits and, where relevant, parking minimums, per The Rent is Too Damn High.
If you want to decrease prices, there are two ways: decrease demand or increase supply. The former seems unlikely in NYC over the short to medium term.