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.
Wait. Isn’t it a good thing that any weakness of our minds is “ephemeral”? If he is contrasting his mind to ours, does that mean the weakness in his mind is well established and permanent?
Absolutely, with one amendment:
Self-care and mutual support. There is no need for any one of us to feel they are alone in this struggle.
One suggestion I can make is that we all check in with ourselves and our friends and loved ones so we don’t burn ourselves out on this stuff.
Another is to offer moral support to anyone suffering from harassment.
So the way I’m reading this is: Agent Orange’s manliness is only sufficient to kill a 90-year-old who is also in extremely poor health..I’m not sure that’s something worth bragging about..
So, what I want to know is: ¿Quien es mas macho? Donald Trump? Or Ricardo Montalban?
http://jawprods.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/abe75a952887a7f148ff2e9490e390d7_zps7ac91ea2.jpg
Just after Castro died some Fox talking head said that the US Surgeon General should be sent to Havana to make sure Castro was truly dead. Apparently Anonymous Conservative didn’t get the memo that some Americans were worried Fidel is actual Ra’s al Ghul, and might use the Lazarus Pit to renew his health.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/fox-pundit-obama-must-send-surgeon-general-to-cuba-just-to-make-sure-fidel-castro-is-really-dead/
In the past few years I’ve been seeing jackrabbits fairly frequently here in Saskatoon. It’s always fun seeing them sitting on someone’s lawn, although I do worry about their ability to avoid traffic.
Fuck me, these guys really do not understand biology. If they took classes they didn’t study and I doubt they passed.
I guess they are just trying to make up some science that supports “Alpha/Dark Triad Superman” as the Lord of all Creation. But K-selected doesn’t work for that, cuz guess what, plenty of prey animals are K-selected too, like sheep for example. Not just wolves and bears and shit. Dinosaurs were probably r-selected, and I”m pretty sure a T-Rex can kick a wolf’s ass. I just..this is so, so stupid. I just hate the way these fuckers steal concepts based on other peoples’ hard work and good ideas and just use them as buzz words that they don’t even understand to create a stupid, lazy, and wrong analogy, brought to you by the University of Assfax.
I teach college freshmen biology, and I teach about the K-selected vs. r-selected thing when we go over ecology at the end.
So I’d like to point out that humans are more K-selected than wolves (these things being relative terms). Wolves have litters of several pups each, that reach sexual maturity much faster than humans. Humans only have one baby at a time, and we don’t reach sexual maturity until our teens. It’s hard to get more K-selected than that. Elephants and whales are much closer to us than wolves in that regard.
And yes, actually K-selected species in general (like elephants and whales) are doing *worse* right now during the Anthropocene extinction event than r-selected species. K-selected species require a stable environment to survive, while r-selected species can bounce back much faster after a disaster because of their fast reproductive rates. That’s why, as some else said, rabbits are doing much better than wolves. Elephants and whales are doing even worse.
And yes, liberals in general are trying to make humans even more K-selected than we already are, with advocating for small family sizes and birth control. The conservatives making it harder for women to get birth control and abortions and freaking out about “white genocide” are the ones who want humans to breed more, or at least they want white-skinned humans to breed more. I mean, if white people are so much more “highly evolved” than non-white people, why are the so afraid that white people are going to go extinct?
Ecology and evolutionary biology are my area of expertise, so I don’t nearly as much about amygdalas, but considering that marginalized people (people of color, LBGT, etc.) have already been under a lot of stress for hundreds of years, I really doubt that Trump becoming president is going to suddenly make all their brains explode. If anything they should be more resilient than people who have been at the top of the social hierarchy all this time.
But you already knew that anyway.
Wait, how does this theory about leftists account for hawkish left-wing presidents?
Wait, why am I even bothering to ask this when the whole theory is so obviously crackpot nonsense?