Fidel Castro survived innumerable assassination attempts over the years, the most infamous being the CIA’s attempt to take him out with an exploding cigar. He died last week, at the age of 90, after a long fight against a debilitating illness.
But was it really the combination of age and illness that killed him? Or was it Donald Trump?
That’s the question being asked by a blogger calling himself Anonymous Conservative, a Trump fan and right-wing ideologue obsessed with some rather idiosyncratic theories about politics, evolutionary psychology, and the human brain, particularly the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for our fight-or-flight response to perceived danger.
AC thinks that Trump essentially terrified Castro to death, overloading Castro’s amygdalae with the sheer power of his manly essence. AC thinks this could be the first in a long line of Trump-related leftist deaths to come.
Already Trump may be cleansing the world of leftism. …
Over the next four years, leftists may begin dropping like flies, and it will be the physical manifestation of the ephemeral weaknesses of the leftist mind.
AC — who, it turns out, is something of a moral monster — thinks Trump and his fans should do their best to overload the amygdalae of their enemies.
I would even make helping that along a reelection strategy. Who know how many voters who opposed The Donald this time could be dead in four years, if his administration were K-selected enough?
I guess I forgot to mention that AC thinks liberals and leftists are the political equivalent of r-selected rabbits — docile, promiscuous creatures best adapted to an environment of abundance — while conservatives like Trump are the equivalent of K-selected wolves — aggressive predators built to survive in a world of scarce resources.
Docile rabbits? I guess he never saw Night of the Lepus.
You’ll have to read his blog for a fuller explanation of his assorted crackpot theories; he’s got a book as well, the ebook version of which is published by none other than Theodore “Vox Day” Beale’s Castalia House imprint. Because of course.
There’s no question that Trump scares a lot of people, though I suspect the overwhelming majority of them are scared more by Trump’s narcissism, his racism and misogyny, his autocratic impulses, and his complete and utter unfitness for public office than they are by his macho preening.
But for a moment, let’s pretend that Trump’s opponents are wigged out by his machismo. How exactly does this lead to their impending deaths?
In a previous post, sporting the lovely title “You Could Kill A Liberal With An Amygdala Hijack,” AC gives a more detailed explanation of his peculiar theory.
Noting that lefty writer Jeff Gillenkirk died of a heart attack last month just a couple of days after diagnosing himself with what he called Post-Trump Stress Disorder, AC suggests that it can be “highly stressful to the human brain to exist in an environment for which you are not designed,” especially for lefty rabbits now living in the wolf-eat-wolf world of Donald Trump.
A damaged amygdala, which has failed to develop the ability to resolve a threat, can leave the body in a permanently agitated state from which it never recovers, until it simply burns out.
That is probably what happened here, and while most cases are not so dramatic, mainly because the liberals afflicted are not so physically fragile, all of them endure physical costs. And those costs are produced by mere ideas and concepts they register in their brain. It is a critical step in grasping how the human machine can be hacked, turning the virtual and amorphous world of ideas and concepts into a physical manifestation of material reality.
Call it mental terrorism — an attempt to use “words and concepts” (and presumably Pepe memes) to literally terrify leftists to death.
Not that this is terribly different in practice than what many alt-rightists and Gamergaters and MRAs have been doing for years — harassing and threatening their assorted enemies in hopes of scaring them into silence.
While ACs talk of r-selection and K-selection and “amygdala hijacking” is more or less crackpottery, it’s certainly true that stress takes a toll on the body.
In other words, self-care needs to be a major component of whatever strategies we adopt to stand up against Trump and his fans.
All suggestions are welcome.
EDIT: Added the video.
Death by Manliness to the old left! Dude survives a 5 year war in the jungles, fighting a much more formidable enemy, but dies from Trump’s “manliness”. Too funny. Also, I think the Anonymous Conservative is a bit confused regarding his own theories – Castro was definitely the “wolf” in this historical equation.
Well, a lot of people on both sides of the aisle are going to die all right, in emergency rooms, and under bridges, and in the inevitable terror attack and ensuing war/martial law that will occur when President Tire Fire’s popularity wanes and he needs a distraction. But nobody’s going to die as a result of ODing on alphaness. (Nothing says “manly” like spending your first two weeks whinging about Hamilton, SNL, the “unfair” press, and the popular vote, while rummaging through the crud at the bottom of your toilet’s U-bend for Cabinet picks and failing to stand up to actual neo-Nazis.)
In any case, he’s forgotten that feminists can simply neuter the right’s “manly essence” with their zombifying mind-control vadge butter.
Gotta love it when CTs cancel each other out.
Or he was 90 and in poor health. Also a possibility.
Also,
THAT IS NOT HOW HUMANS OPERATE
r- and k- selected are relative terms.
In general, r-selected species produce large numbers of offspring and achieve sexual maturity sooner. Among mammals these tend to be what we think of as prey animals, like (yes) rabbits. As an example, a single female of the species Sigmodon hispidus, the Hispid Cotton Rat, which is very common in the drier areas of Texas, New Mexico and northern Mexico, can produce up to 2500 offspring (including children and grand children and great grand children, etc.) in her first year, given enough food and ignoring predation. Cotton rats, like many r-selected species, tend to have populations that grow rapidly, spiking at sometimes amazing numbers, than then crash, usually due to decreased food resources and/or disease.
In general, k-selected species tend to have fewer offspring with the adults caring for offspring longer, resulting a higher percentage of offspring making it to sexual maturity. Humans are extremely k-selected, as we generally have fewer than 10 offspring in our lives and care for them for a while even after they have reached sexual maturity. There are advantages and disadvantages to each strategy.
However, whether a species is considered r- or k-selected is a matter of comparison. Those r-selected cotton rats up there are k-selected when compared to octopuses. Yes, in most octopus species, the mother guards her eggs, but once they hatch they are completely on their own, thousands of them. Cotton rat moms spend a few weeks caring for their 6 to 12 offspring after birth. So, they are comparatively k-selected compared to octopuses.
All of which is to show that the idiot in the OP heard the phrase somewhere, didn’t bother to find out what it really means, and made a fool of themselves.
I don’t know as much about amygdalae, but I am willing to be they don’t know anything about them either, if only because if being stressed makes us self-destruct we would never have made it off the savannah.
This is why an education is more than collecting facts off the internet, children.
And here I thought Fidel Castro died of nothing but old age. Silly me!
(However, I can see why this con-turd is anonymous. If I had such cockamamie, laughable “scientific” ideas about things, I’d be anonymous, too.)
This is a joke, right? There isn’t actually someone out there who thinks Donald Trump can kill people with his manliness.
Before becoming a communist, Fidel Castro was part of a movement that included both left- and right-wing elements, but was overall populist. He did, though, eventually align with the Soviet Union and communism.
Oh and by the way, Ivanka is apparently fairly liberal, and disagrees with her father on quite a few issues. (For instance, she formulated a child-care plan, but Donald has given no indication that he’s actually going to pursue her idea).
So it should be interesting to see how much, if at all, she ends up altering his trajectory.
@Podkayne
I would not be surprised to see a thrump version of the “Chuck Norris facts” meme only instead of it being a joke his supporters take it seriously .
Mmmm, I mean, being 90 is the plausible explanation for Fidel’s death, but that’s clearly a FALSE FLAG.
It’s interesting that the same folks who are supposed to be Trumpelstiltskins core constituents are also less likely to be in good health in terms of metrics like heart disease, smoking, cancers, addictions, and so on, but sure, the great orange godhead will strike the leftists down. Anytime now. Because scientisticalnessosity.
I just really enjoy how on one hand being adapted to deprivation and violence is awesome alphasauce good times until it’s a brown menace to this, our glorious white civilization of gentility and advancement. I enjoy it like wasabi to the eye.
http://derpicdn.net/img/2015/5/20/900575/medium.gif
This AC guy isn’t gonna kill me with his manliness, but he might kill me with his arrogant stupidity.
So, we’ve had a total misinterpretation of pack dominance dynamics, and a critical failure to understand r- vs k-selection.
Anyone like to place any bets on which biological concept they’ll mangle next?
Hello.
So, after Trump provoking disease to Clinton body (Trademark Cernovitch), now Trump provoking death to Castro (Trademark Anonymous Conservative)? I know United States are the country of superheroes, so i suppose i shall not be surprised. After all, he is also a Master Persuader (Trademark Adams), so we are not at a superpower more or less. He can transform himself in a (memetic) frog (Trademark infringement, since the author does not support Trump), so he may also have some ninja training.
In this case, i am sure he can have his own comic/comic strip, in place like Breitbart or Stormfront, between Dildobert strips and some other KKKomiks, with a publishing house called DK (like DicK, but shorter, no pun intended) for some weekly and/or monthly releases. Thanks to that, his fans will be happily able to read about their hero and his deep and tortured reflections like “Do i grab her by the booty or the pussy ?” or “Do i wear my heroic brief on or under the spandex ?”. Thanks, again, to that, after Trump using his superpowers to make his white men supporters raise (absolutely no pun intended, of course, eh ?), he is also going to make USA comic market raising.
Oh, USAns, you lucky you !
Have a nice day (and stay safe !)
Wow! I wanna be an alt-righter so I can make up my own facts, slap them on my own blog and gain dozens of followers who really believe what I write is true because it confirms their own biases. Yay! I’ll have someone to listen to my extremely flawed theories so I’ll feel important!
[Post contains sarcasm. Use at your own risk.]
I love how they think leftist are more easily scared than rightists. I doubt any credible research has been made to back it up, but what do I know, I don’t sit typing out evopsych nonsense on my blog. And then they use Fidel Castro, veteran of an armed revolution, as an example of the typical wussy liberal scaredy-cat.
Yeahh.
Wouldn’t people who get scred to death so easily just go extinct after a rather short time?
I think this guy MIGHT have no idea about biology or evolution.
@Alan,
Such is 2016 that I honestly don’t know whether you made this up on the spot or it is true :0
I’ve heard the beard chemicals one before. Still, sounds almost too hilarious to be true.
@ mish
Yeah, it does feel like we’re living in a badly plotted TV show at times. But the hair thing is completely true. It came to light in the report of the Church Committee. That was a government inquiry set up in the aftermath of Watergate to investigate the shenanigans of the various intelligence agencies.
The report does read like a work of fiction at times. Although as Ian Fleming was an advisor to Kennedy on how to deal with Cuba that may not be entirely co-incidental.
It’s actually a pretty entertaining read:
https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/ir/pdf/ChurchIR_3B_Cuba.pdf
Christina Nordlander,
I don’t have time to look it up just now but if IIRC there was a study that showed that conservatives have more active amygdalae than liberals. Suggesting that they may be more fearful. It’s possibly a leap but it does make sense to me considering they fear brown and black people will kill them, women will “divorce rape” them and they must carry guns for self defense at all times.
These people have no idea the stress many of us have gotten used to. We aren’t the ones pretending our childhoods were retroactively ruined by a new Ghostbusters movie or that not getting sexed up by models on the regular makes us oppressed.
I’m reminded of the passage Terry Prachett wrote about Granny Weatherwax being an old woman running away from the fairies in Lords and Ladies in her hob nail boots and easily evading them because she had years to get good at running in heavy old boots.
There’s a similarity with climate denial: “those tree hugging lefty fascist alarmists just want to scare you and take your money. If we do what they say then the economy will be immediately and irretrievably ruined — we’ll live in mud huts and the population will crash!”
Nah, Castro just checked out early to avoid the rush.
Trump’s never had to deal with scarce resources, not like the actual poor people who make up a lot of the Republican voting bloc. He gets to be a wolf just because he looked Carrier right in the eye and had Mike Pence give it $700,000 a year for 10 years and then let it outsource 1,300 jobs to Mexico. And before that he persuaded Buick not to move jobs to Mexico that it wasn’t planning on moving to Mexico.
So for all the ridiculous and hilarious wrong, the stress of Trump may very well have played a part in the journalist’s untimely death. This study is suggestive, though prone to recall bias.
http://content.onlinejacc.org/mobile/article.aspx?articleid=2430620
The amygdala had about as much to do with as any other random brain region though, and this doesn’t mean you can actually intentionally induce heart attacks in people because WTF kind of monster actually wants that?
@Hu’s on First
TBH, I wouldn’t pursue her idea, either, but that’s because it’s crap:
Make child care expenses tax-deductible for those making less than $500,000, which means they lower your total income and you pay a lower tax rate, but you still have to have the damn money up front.
Establish tax-free accounts for child care and enrichment. Which means you need to have the money up front.
Extend unemployment insurance benefits if your employer doesn’t offer maternity leave. Unemployment insurance benefits are predicated on your being able to show you’ve looked for work. Are mothers on maternity leave going to have to look for work? What guarantees will there be that her job is waiting for her? After all, she took unemployment insurance benefits! And the payout is based on income and length of employment, so it’s not going to be uniform.
EDIT: “A source” allegedly close to Ivanka says she’s hoping to push the climate change crisis. That’ll be Nice If True. I wonder if Donald will denounce her as a Chi-Com Stooge, seeing as Global Warming Is Chi-Com Lie.