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Fmr Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz laments to Jewish Federation that people are finding content from “Al Jazeera and Nick Fuentes” on social media and seeing videos of “the carnage in Gaza.”
Holocaust education has backfired in part as people see Palestinians as Jews’ victims, she adds.
“They think the lesson of the Holocaust is…you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
That’s what a psychopath unmasking looks like, it’s genuinely disturbing how these elite meetups, conferences, book tours seem to create an environment where severely anti-social personalities feel comfortable enough to unmask without any response or reaction
Don’t pathologize these people, they chose to be this way.
I disagree, I believe the system actively selects for these people, psychopathic tendencies are absolutely catnip to elite recruiters
Only a small minority of the people in charge have personality disorders and only a small minority of people with personality disorders are in charge. They’re not psychopaths, they have actively chosen to adopt these opinions because the system selects for people with these opinions.
On top of that, few of us are qualified to identify psychopaths, and doing it incorrectly only reinforces the same idealist view of the world that you see in American media.
The system selecting for elite opinions and psychopathy are not mutually exclusive, in reality they reinforce each other
The exact percentage is meaningless because we can’t prove what the exact number is either way, but the point is we can draw conclusions about the mindsets and lack of empathy among the elite through observations and taking into account how they select for people in positions of power
I don’t know what you mean by this, American media is in no way, shape, or form asserting American elites are psychopaths, they’re literally doing the exact opposite, either by whitewashing the actions and personalities of these people or outright lying about how elites are benevolent caretakers
Like I’m sorry but if someone is gonna talk about Palestinians like that, I’m gonna call them a psychopath and I don’t need a psychology decree to do it
American media constantly pathologizes evil. These people are monsters because it benefits them, not from a psychiatric condition.
You are using the language of psychology (psychopaths, unmasking) and you are not qualified to do so. Even if you were, diagnosing someone from a tweet would be malpractice.
We cannot and should not explain these things by resorting to misusing psychiatric language. These people nearly always do these things because of their material conditions, not an underlying pathology.
Really, the media “pathologizes evil” in Obama staffers and speechwriters? And apparently worst of all, me calling this genocidal zionist ghoul a psychopath is malpractice? WTF?
That’s not mutually exclusive, did you watch the clip? Does she strike you as a person who’s filled with empathy?
What a strange thing to say, pathology absolutely plays into how expressions of power manifest and again it’s not mutually exclusive with material conditions, they both affect each other in dynamic ways and the whole clip is a good example of it
I said “media”, not “the media”. Have you ever watched American TV shows? “Media” is not typically limited to so-called journalists, but they also do it plenty when reporting on crime.
The system selects for the blandest most agreeable people, because they are more easily indoctrinated. She believes hideous shit because everyone around her believes hideous shit.
I just don’t agree with that sentiment, it’s too simplistic and a half-truth, and it underestimates both the calculating and malicious nature of so many other people in power, “blandest most agreeable people” talk in slogans and clichés because they just want their money and to be able to go back to brunch, they don’t wax demonically about how Holocaust education is making it harder to genocide other ethnic groups, no that’s a level of bloodless calculation and malicious intent that goes beyond a simple liberal attitude of “go along, to get along”
No it’s not, she truly believes the silly graphs disprove that there is a genocide, because that’s what everyone her thinks. She never even began to question things, she is entirely a product of the system. She sees herself as a champion of truth against Russian interference.
If things had been different that would be us.
These people are in power precisely because they go along. They want their money and their brunch, that’s all the motivation there is.
Nah, that’s only an evaluation you would make if you didn’t bother to watch the clip, she’s not stupid or naive, she’s genuinely fucked up and she makes it perfectly she understands the implications behind her words
I agree with you. The system was created by psychopaths and will actively seek out other psychopaths to continue on.
It was not, and this is an idealist analysis. The system is a product of specific material conditions and relations of production.
The system is still produced by people, though, and there have been some people who have been more instrumental to implementing the system than others. Sure, their actions have been guided by material forces, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t deliberately and with forethought exercise agency to bring about a desired end.
The point is that most were not psychopaths and didn’t need to be because the system was shaped by material conditions. Any analysis that rests on armchair diagnosis of “psychopathy” is not only a bad analysis, but could also easily veer into ableism (“people are bad because they have mental conditions”). Let’s leave the psychiatry to people who are qualified to do it and actually have extensive contact with the person being diagnosed.
Maybe I’m giving the original comment too much leeway, but my interpretation is that he isn’t necessarily assuming a clinical diagnosis, just observing that there are people who have an easier time discarding empathy or exhibiting other traits that we commonly associate with psychopathy and that those people tend to be the ones establishing or perpetuating the system because it’s easier for them to adapt to the system they create.
I personally waffle back and forth on this - I agree that it’s both inaccurate and damaging to the discourse to assume the capacity for cruelty (or massive or extreme cruelty) is the product of genetic abnormalities or some other traits that render the perpetrator somehow exceptional compared to the baseline human condition, but there are also observable qualitative differences between the people that fall in line and those that don’t that haven’t been fully explicated and might have underlying dispositional components. The idea that the system is purely an emergent phenomenon and that those who perpetuate it are essentially a random sample of the population also feels reductionist to me. I don’t think that we’re generally equipped with a common vocabulary to discuss the differences among the active/passive participants and the active/passive opponents, so there’s a tendency to fall back on clinical language without an explicit intent to apply a formal classification.