The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
This user has been banned from hexbear.net
ml wiped out his whole family
How does one have a monopoly on eggs in a non-hypetindustrial country? Did grandpa invent the chicken and visit every village and start renting out hens XD
Eggs aren’t exactly hyperindustrial, but after the fall of the Qing dynasty entailed a lot of private acquisition to feed the foreign business interests flooding in.
I dunno if there ever was a monopoly on eggs for all of China, but maybe in the export industry though.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for a billionaire that made money by hoarding a basic necessity?
No you’re supposed to read this and be furious!
Not read this and think “how would a monopoly on eggs in preindustrial China exist, this story smells of bullshit”
It is a rite of passage
deleted by creator
.ml would have deleted it, and banned every account that read it.
Friendly fire included?
What an unexpected turn of events…
Russia does it too; transexual? Mental illness.
Did I forget to say they also forbid “mentally ill” people to have a driving permit?
Not just trans people— all LGBTQ+ people are regarded this way
USSR never went away. And if you dig deeper, it’s still just russian empire in a trench coat
took off the purple robes, but on a red hat.
took off the red hat, put on a capitalist neoliberal necktie.
now took off the capitalist neoliberal necktie, put on some ironheeled jackboots.
the goal is to take off the jackboots and put on the purple robe
And Soviet Socialism never went away either, it just reorganized upper management. Instead of the state owning a few mega companies, a few mega companies now own the state. In either case, it is the people controlling the human/natural resources paying off politicians to overlook all the horrible shit they do.
Communism as a theme is definitely making a comeback if you talk to Russian people in Russian. They think theirs is different from “western Communism” though.
I speak zero Russian but would love to know what “western communism” entails in the mind of a Russian person who holds these opinions. Alas.
The word communism has less to do with the original meaning than teachings of prosperity gospel church with the bible.
Russians have very different meaning for this word because of decades of Soviet indoctrination, Americans think completely different thing entirely about what it is.
However, there is a thing that is true for all of them: they don’t just believe that their version is the only one correct, they cannot fathom the reality where different definition even exists
Imperialism?
Ah so Russians believe communism is imperialism?
Wat
Also the whole idea behind Trump Derangement Syndrome. Unsurprisingly, those fuckers can’t even be original in their awfulness.
Thought crime for thee, freedom of screech for me.
I’m sure this comments section is going to be thoroughly hinged
Yeah, waiting utill guys from lemmy@ml and lemmy@hexbear come here and start protecting the USSR.
Jokes aside, is there any really independent instance? Or at least one that kinda in the middle?
Cause currently it feels like one side of lemmy on crack and support Soviets (which I can’t stand, cause I lived in post-soviet country and I know why soviet system failed = cause it’s piece of shit), while other heavily tripping on LSD, while supporting palestine (which I can’t stand, cause I’m not into killing and raping, no matter the excuse “Al Jazeera” propagandize).
From my perceptive both are in da wrong and I get shit from both sides, lmao. Do I like, get back to reddit? Or there some place that won’t ban me for my “radical opinion”?
Try sh.itjust.works. Most folks don’t notice us.
Quite, I fully intend to have civil and reasonable fact based discussions about the USSR which will not trail off into tribalistic whataboutist tirades.
A big part of Soviet propaganda is their use of whataboutism is deflect criticism against their regime. Supporters of the USSR and far left ideologies have inherited this tactic, which is why whenever you see anybody criticize someone on the far left, they always resort to using whataboutism, especially about the US. It’s recycled material from a dead regime.
I don’t consider the USSR or CCP to be far left or really any form of left. They’re just red fascists.
Wow. How did you pull all of that out of your ass?
This isn’t something new, controversial, or some hidden secret. It’s something that’s academically studied and well documented. This was literally the USSR’s go to propaganda tactic when it was still around. Literally only out of touch tankies cannot comprehend common knowledge like this.
Sure, but does all of the far left do that and did they get it from the Soviet Union?
You made a far out strawman argument. Admit it.
That’s why we are on Lemmy though, to have broader points of view without much censorship.
This sounds very familiar to the CIA’s practices with MK Ultra… although in a different way.
Goes to show, that neither system would be optimal - and that it’s better to chase the path of democratic socialist movements.
It’s crazy to me that many people think ‘this is what communism does’ when it’s actually what authoritarianism does. You can get authoritarianism all over the spectrum, in anything from communism to fascism.
This isn’t a feature of any political ideology – rather it’s a feature of letting sociopaths gain power.
The US is trying to do this now, what with declaring the bogeyman known as antifa a mental illness AND a terrorist threat.
Part of it is that the vast majority (all?) of the communist regimes of the 20th century pretty rapidly descended into authoritarian hellscapes (Democracy/Capitalism took a few decades to catch up…). So people tend to less say “Well. The horrors that unfolded in X were a result of a misapplication of the core tenets of communism” and instead “My family literally had to flee a communist regime because we were being ethnically cleansed”
Part of it is that Democracy/Capitalism won and very much built up Communism as a bogeyman for obvious political reasons.
And the last part is that… Communism fundamentally requires a central source of power/truth. You can’t have a managed economy without folk managing it. Which, inherently, centralizes power which is one of the big first steps towards authoritarianism. Similar to how Democracy fundamentally enables populism and Capitalism oligarchy.
Anarchist communistic projects in Catalonia (1930s), anarchist Ukraine (around 1917), etc.: “Are we a joke to you?”
I don’t know much about Ukraine but I know the one in Catalonia had roving gangs of “law enforcers” who would execute “capitalists/fascists” without trial, so I’m not sure it’s an ideal to look up to.
It sure wasn’t perfect. But it was a libertarian socialist counter-example of revolutionary socialism to what the bolsheviks were doing.
Oh yeah, anarchists in Ukraine were doing fine until Bolsheviks decided there isn’t enough left unity
No, you don’t get it! The workers in Ukraine, who seized control of the means of production where somehow not class-conscious enough!
The workers can only
free themselvesbe freed by the most dedicated marxists!/s
The irony of the Makhnovist Movement is that it succeeded because of the Bolshevik Revolt in St. Petersburg and the subsequent splitting of Russian forces into the Red and White Armies.
But because Ukrainian agricultural production was so critical to the survival of pre-industrial Russia, the Reds weren’t inclined to let Ukraine exist independently any more than the Whites were.
The workers can only
free themselvesbe freed by the most dedicated marxists!Makhnovshchina gets to be a purist movement because it dies in infancy. Compare Ukraine to Yugoslavia, a country that embraced many of the same socialist tenants but managed to persist as an independent entity for half a century rather than half a decade, and suddenly they’re Evil Freedom-Hating Baby-Killing Communists again.
You’re never going to find half as many Tito-lovers on Lemmy as Nestor Makhno-lovers, because Tito died in his 80s while leading his country and Nestor died at 45 - alienated even from other anarchists - of tuberculosis as a penniless exile in France.
Meanwhile, the workers in all these countries vanish from view. No armchair Lemmy anarchist seems to care how Soviet-Era Ukraine prospered. Or how the Soviet collapse in 1991 brought in the corporate vultures to pick all these countries clean. We’re always and forever living in 1917, convinced a short-lived militia movement was the Secret Sauce to Real Working Anarcho-Communism, despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
You seem to make the mistake of subsuming the whole of anarchist Ukraine under Makhno. While he was vital for the civil war, he hardly was the architect of what happend in Ukraine.
The factory councils sure didn’t rely on him leading all of a sudden.
Soviet-Era Ukraine prospered
Oh yeah man, the 1930s brought some real prosperity. But I’ve already gathered that you believe Soviet Union to be a tragically lost utopia, so you needn’t bother make up another wall of text in response.
My guess is that the majority of communist regimes were killed by external countries.
Just a hunch, can’t bother to look at numbers though, but thinking about people like Sankara.
I would be interested in seeing compiled statistics of how many fell without capitalist interventions.
The CIA themselves have stated how active they were in the 20th century with corrupting, breaking down, and ultimately overthrowing communist regimes and installing dictators.
But also socialism with worker owned co-ops and only infrastructure and regulations through a central government may somewhat be a good direction to go.
The crux seems to be that all forms of government are susceptible to authoriatarians because people themselves are very susceptible to authoritarian strong men and propaganda, inherently.
Imagine not falling into the Orwellian hole, not perverting language with conflations and inversions.
Imagine “communism” was still used in the original sense as coined by anarchist political philosophers, at least 5 years before Marx ignored Bakunin and usurped it, stripped the freedom aspect, and handed it over to the tankies (and all the capitalists and imperialists gladly played along).
Imagine communism like Kropotkin and Bakunin would have meant it.
Fully decentralised. Maximally mutually freedom affirming.
Imagine people were so thoroughly availed education instead of indoctrination, and thus were immunized against such perversions of language and thought. Not confusing totalitarianism for [anarcho-]communism, nor fascism for democracy, just because some deceivers intentionally mislabeled them to usurp all power for themselves.
Imagine “democracy” really meant organised by the people, not re-presented by the oligarchs.
Imagine not falling into the Orwellian hole.
Imagine undoing generations of this deeply entrenched Orwellian corruption of language and thought.
*Dreamer*
Good thing Americans didn’t ethnically cleanse in our history… Right.
Padme face
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
But thanks for showing your tankie ass. I have increasingly been assuming the shitjustworks instance is all right wing lunatics and libertarianisms. Good to know folk like you are trying to meet in the middle.
Lol I’m just saying we’re not exactly the good guys either and maybe ethnic cleansing has less to do with the governmental system in place and more to do with other aspects
Edit: Also, tankie really? Y’all motherfuckers don’t know what words mean jfc
Edit: Also, tankie really? Y’all motherfuckers don’t know what words mean jfc.
Prrrr, shhh, let them have this. It’s been a pretty good thread, and they stand out as weird. It’s fine.
Hahaha fair enough, literally was in another thread the other day talking about exactly this, people throwing around tankie in contexts it makes literally no sense haha.
I have increasingly been assuming the shitjustworks instance is all right wing lunatics and libertarianisms
Your #1 mistake is assuming that users on a decentralized social media instance are a monolith.
* Hexbear has entered the chat *
Lemmy/the fediverse is a decentralized social media platform. Each instance is actually quite centralized. And, like all message boards, different cultures emerge. Whether it is because they have boards on given subjects (and shitjustworks has a shocking amount of “conservative” boards) or because people of a particular vibe have their friends join the same board.
I would say it is still very much at the dot ml level but I have increasingly noticed that most of the “The real problem are people who don’t support the troops” and similar dog whistles end up from shitjustworks.
This isn’t a feature of any political ideology – rather it’s a feature of letting sociopaths gain power.
Now if there was some kind of political ideology that focuses a lot on not letting power accumulate into the hands of the few… /hj
Ikr?
Anarchism mentioned without mentioning anarchism?
Congratulations! You got the hint!
On the topic of the US declaring dissidents mentally ill, The Adrian Schoolcraft story is a pretty horrific account of what it looks like when a modern cop tries to whistleblow.
Also I don’t think you even need sociopaths to wreck a hierarchy. Hierarchy collects power at the top of it’s organizational structure, and power by it’s nature becomes an end to itself, so hierarchy ensures abuse of it’s power. Honestly calling every human a sociopath who gives in to that One Ring-style allure might actually be the same kind of medicalization that the state does to it’s dissidents, in the opposite direction, but equally obfuscating. Yes it’s a human failure, but the organizational structure very much sets up humans to fail.
But it’s mostly sociopaths that insist on that hierarchy. Something like 3% of any population are sociopaths, and they’re not ‘mentally ill’, they just have a diminished capacity to feel empathy. Because of that, they don’t understand altruism and think the only way society can function is if everyone is in their place – if there are strict rules governing everything, because in their worldview, they see others like themselves, and they would need those rules to keep themselves in check.
It’s very similar to people who think without laws against raping and pillaging, everyone would rape and pillage. They’re mostly telling on themselves, as most of us rape all we’d like, which is never.
Billionaires are often sociopaths. That’s how they became billionaires – because it’s all me, me, me.
Sociopathy is just vernacular for ASD, which is medically considered a disorder, and in my opinion it’s just as prescriptively hierarchy-brained, scapegoated, and invented as ODD which is in some ways it’s inverse. They’re just medicalizations of what I feel is more or less normal human behavior when encountering either extreme of a hierarchy - The boot that does the stomping gets assigned ASD when things don’t go well. The one to be stomped gets assigned ODD when they resist.
I really think that hierarchy creates these personality types. They’re not necessarily pre-existing mental types in a hypothetical blank state society. And I think that our belief in them as “natural” just serves to further legitimize the power structure that actually generates them. To add: I don’t think you have to be at the top or bottom of a hierarchy to exhibit the behaviors associated with these labels, existing anywhere in the hierarchy can get you hierarchy-brained. Like America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, you can learn these traits before you arrive at the social stations they’re associated with.
I should emphasize, as far as I’m aware this is largely my own opinion.
It’s not, though. There are extremes in all human thought patterns, and some have extreme low empathy (sociopaths), whilst others have extreme high empathy (which can also be detrimental).
All humans are somewhere on that curve, but when we give people with very low empathy a lot of power, very bad things happen.
My point was that these extremes aren’t necessarily ‘mental illness’ – they’re natural extremes, but giving them a lot of power is absolutely detrimental to society, because they can’t understand how the rest of us work, and they need to inflict their unnecessary and unconventional rules on the rest of us.
Well I suppose the fact that I disagree is entirely besides the point, as either way we can trust that a critical mass of people will abuse a power hierarchy. It doesn’t really matter if, as I think, the hierarchy created them or if, as you think, they already exist and are merely drawn to it. A hierarchy will abuse it’s power.
Chicken and egg feedback loop.
I love your opinion, it makes much more sense to me.
Wait wait wait… ASD as in “Autism Spectrum Disorder”?
You’re equating sociopathy with autism? Like it’s just another word for the same?
o_O
Double empathy problem turned malignant much?
Am I misunderstanding what you’re saying? You say this is largely your own opinion, that these are the same, or that others say they’re the same?
These are very much not the same. Dangerous to conflate.
Unless also having narcissistic personality disorder or other cluster B stuff, autistics are typically more empathetic. It just doesn’t show the same way.
And yeah, as for hierarchy creating… Asperger history’s as nasty as the rest of the Nazi stuff manipulating people, in ways both intentional and unintentional. Lots of manipulations and “externalities”.
Maybe he meant ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder)?
ASPD! Haha oh my I’m sorry, I dropped the P from the abbreviation, I meant to refer to Anti-Social Personality Disorder. I must have done so because I had ASD bouncing around in my head too, abbreviations have their limitations lol. I’m so sorry for confusing you, I’ll fix the comment!
Phew!
That was very concerning.
Thanks for the correction.
Neurodivergent peeps got enough to deal with as is already.
Edit:
3 hours ago:
I’ll fix the comment!
When does that happen?
Because it still says:
Sociopathy is just vernacular for ASD
etc.
(also, not touched on yet… many who get diagnosed ODD, may be misdiagnosed, and really be PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance / Pervasive Demand for Autonomy))
Strong disagree on sociopathy being linked to a hierarchy.
The reality is that pretty much EVERY system of governance (that is meant to scale beyond five people in a field) needs a hierarchy of some form. Its the Whitest Kids U Know gag on anarchy where you quickly find out that there are people better suited to certain jobs and you need some degree of a social safety net to allow them to keep all of you alive (n that case, keeping a nuclear power plant from melting down… and then making t-shirts).
It is why there are basically no flat Democracies. You inherently end up in some form of a Democratic Republic where The People elect representatives who can then (theoretically) spend all day educating themselves on important issues and figuring out how to make an educated vote that represents the will of their constituents.
The core concept is just the reality of needing special skills and knowledge to make many decisions. There can be arguments that the people in charge of Directing The Military are still equal to the custodial staff keeping the streets clean but… moving on.
Where sociopathy comes into play is that those roles tend to inherently attract power mad people (there is a DIFFERENT WKUK gag on this…). But hierarchical systems are a natural knock on from just having to have a socioeconomic system that scales.
…so hierarchy ensures abuse of [its] power.
Very well put.
I have a discussion with my wife every so often about what our own little utopian island would be like, like how the government would be, how roads would be managed, what homes would be like, etc. I brought up the other day this exact point about how if there’s a position of wealth and power at the top controlling too much, then sociopths would gravitate towards that for the same of having power and wealth, which ruins the government system. It would have to be a heavily distributed system of government, but too distributed where it would make it difficult to implement standardizations, get stuff done, etc.
Idk how that would work exactly, because then you’d also have to make sure no greedy, power hungry Trump-likes get into a position with too much power. There has to be a way, though.
Respect to Mike C Rupert too.
And yeah, beware the overly structuralist approaches.
Yes. That is why I am staunchly liberal. Keep your hands off my fuckin rights which in turn means keep your hands off my fuckin neighbors rights. Given the most perfect benevolent leader the state will either corrupt or kill them, so we should rally against corruption AND the rich.
Edit: because words are hard
it’s actually what authoritarianism does
“Authoritarianism” is just when the government leadership disagrees with me, ideologically. Nobody who supports the current state thinks their government is authoritarian, because it isn’t asking them to do anything they wouldn’t be doing anyway.
Meanwhile, an “insurgency” is just a group of people acting against government leadership’s intended policies. So much of the modern policy state exists to confront the contradiction between an individual pursuing their own interests and a state system that insists some share of the population to suffer in order for the rest to prosper.
If you ask liberals whether they oppose “authoritarianism” you’ll get an enthusiastic “Yes!” But then you tell them “better go out there and start doing crimes” and they’ll recoil in horror, because they don’t see a benefit to violating rules they fundamentally support.
The US is trying to do this now, what with declaring the bogeyman known as antifa a mental illness AND a terrorist threat.
They did this 40 years ago, under Reagan, with the “War on Crime” bullshit. And before that under Nixon with the “War on Drugs”. And before that under Eisenhower with the… checks notes… ah, yes, “War on Illegal Immigration”. Damn that sounds familiar for some reason.
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism, no matter the flavor. If there is hierarchy in an organization, it is essentially inevitable that ultimately, one day, it will terrorize it’s members. The spectre of collected abused power is more patient than the vigilance of active membership can ever persistently be.
democratic socialism is just capitalism but now its toll is on 3rd world. A congolese would die lifelong in a mine so a war veteran in america get his medical bills paid. Its still wage slavery
“Liberalism is a mental disease!”
A phrase often said by MAGAs. It’s no distance at all saying the same thing about nationalism.
I’ve seen “conservativism is a mental disease” too. People love that shit.
To be fair, you have to have zero empathy—or extremely low intelligence—to still vote Conservative, when we’re literally living in the Information Age. Either way, I say both are in fact mental disorders.
A lot of it is fear, too. Those people are raised to fear anything different.
I would put their fears in the “low intelligence” category.
That’s the spirit.
also LOW information to. i saw some pseudo-leftist YTUBERS(whole drama behind them if you followed them) that are magats that are very low information. pre-pandemic they brought up an OBAMA era, oil pipline(canada-usa) and they could not even formulate sentences or words how to discredit the news. (but any trump related events they were immediately silent on, hmm seems like people figured out your allegiance to which party)everyone in the comments said you shouldnt comment on things you do not know.
fundamentalism+ actual mental illness is a dangerous mix. i once saw a video of a guy with schizo and said he fell into alt-right views, and really screwed up in the head.
How about liberalism + actual mental illness, is that dangerous?
(Or any ism for that matter.)
I think that’s far less common among the left than the saying “peer reviewed study shows conservatism highly correlates with mental disorder”.
The phrase comes from a shitpile book with the title: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by some guy trying to eclipse Rush Limbaugh in 2005.
It’s not just a thing they say - these people genuinely believe that compassion is a mental illness.
Liberalism is not as dogmatic as other ideologies, because liberalism itself encourages free thinking and going against the grain.
It’s entirely different when the government authority not only says it but takes away your freedom & subjects you to abuse. How are so many here missing that crucial distinction?
The Soviet Union at its height had the largest percentage of incarcerated individuals, more than double the USA’s percentage of the population today. These were hard labor camps, too, where millions worked until they died.
incarcerated
What an ugly word! Oh no no no they were being cured of their mental illnesses in dedicated institutions and provided with advanced education in special schools.
The school of digging frozen turf in Siberia while starving for instance or the hospital of getting beaten with a phonebook
and yet people romanticise and justify that shit
I’ve had a Tankie write me a 10 page essay comment, with citations, about how great the 1930s economy was. The middle of a famine.
Ikr I was in a similar debate. I just gave up. I was going to type this — usually said when a person just doesn’t like to find a middle ground and keeps screaming that they are right:
“ठीके बाबा. तूम्ही महान, आम्ही लहान. तुम्हाला चार पाय, आम्हाला दोन पाय. तुम्ही गाढव आम्ही माणूस.”
Translation: Ok bro. You are great, I am not. You have 4 legs, I have 2. You are a donkey, I am a human.
Link to source?
How about
“The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Translated by Vadim A. Staklo”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vkt98Or
The Encyclopedia Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/place/GulagThe book estimates 4,000,000 in gulag after the great purge in addition to another 2,000,000 corrective labor programs equaling 6,000,000 total, while the enyclopedia estimates 5,000,000 total. The 1939 USSR population historical data was 170,557,093.
This is wrong and you’re a shitbag liar. Don’t think people don’t see you out here spending your free time floating thread-to-thread just to shit on socialism.
Peak U.S. incarceration rate in 2008 (it’s highest) was about 760 per 100,000 people in the total population. The average imprisonment rate in the Soviet Union during the Gulag era was 714 per 100,000 residents. Some Soviet incarceration rates between 1934 and 1953 were likely the highest ever recorded for a modern nation. More than six million people in the U.S. are now under some form of correctional supervision—more than the number imprisoned in the Gulag at its peak.
Some sources:
-
Gopnik, Adam (30 January 2012). The Caging of America. The New Yorker.
-
Applebaum, Anne (2003). Gulag: a history. By Anne Applebaum. ISBN 978-0-7679-0056-0.
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Liptak, Adam (28 Feb 2008). 1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says. The New York Times.
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Getty, J. Arch; Rittersporn, Gabor T.; Zemskov, Viktor N. “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence”.
-
Rosefielde, Steven (2007). The Russian economy: from Lenin to Putin. By Steven Rosefielde. ISBN 978-1-4051-1337-3.
Why are you comparing the peak year of the usa numbers with an average rate over a longer period for the ussr? Insulting others also doesn’t help your credibility. Nothing you said disproves the assertion of the person that you’re calling a liar.
You here providing sources! 🥰
Estimates of the 1938 Gulag Population and other corrective labor programs, from the book
“The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Translated by Vadim A. Staklo”
Are about 6,000,000 total.That’s 3.5% of the total population of the USSR in 1939.
Encyclopedia Britannica estimates a much more conservative 5,000,000.
The USA’s 0.7% doesn’t come anywhere close. Even if you ignore the numbers after The Great Purge you’re still looking at neck and neck numbers from the two, with USSR’s 1.4M being over 0.8%.
Can yall please pretty please stop fucking supporting horrible regimes and then also trying to use them as examples of socialism? You’re not helping anyone. You’re literally only hurting the appearance of socialism.
Its like you don’t get that you actually have to sell people on the idea. You certainly won’t convince people with bashing people over the head with delusional or pedantic at best history rewritings/retellings about horrible people.
Those people were bad, socialism is good. Separate the ideas. Everything is better this way.
It’s because some parts of Lemmy are actually just psyops for Russia and China, just like all those facebook groups during the 2016 elections and all those foreign maga influencers outed during a recent leak.
And before you (or anyone else) nitpicks about “BuT tHaT wAS 2008”—that’s because I’m comparing peak periods.
If you want the latest estimates available, and if you really start digging, it looks much worse for the US. The total correctional population in 2022 was estimated to be 5.4 million people (according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics report). The estimated US adult population in 2022 was 260.6 million.
That’d mean that the latest numbers are about 2,072 in 100,000 people.
But sure, shitting on the USSR is a neat trick for downplaying how completely abysmal the US has become.
USA population in 2022 was about 333,287,557
-
Today it’s called ODD, “woke”, or “tankie” if an anarchist pisses off the wrong lib.
It’s fuckin insane that ODD is still in the DSM. That alone is enough for me to want to dismiss the entire text.
I think it’s more like if you’re so opposed to what any authority figure tells you to do that you will do the opposite of what your doctor tells you, for example, sometimes out of spite or vindication.
Yes but I think that perspective puts all the onus of change on the harmed individual and none on the institution that abused and broke their trust of authority, and therefore functions as a scapegoat for abuse of authority, or authority itself. “Healing” under this understanding involves getting a traumatized individual to trust their doctor, who’s authority likely chains back to the same powers who hold the reigns of their abuser, and to move on with their lives while that normalized abuser - The one creating the trauma in the first place - Continues to do untold harm. Someone labeled ODD is traumatized by authority yet the label exists not primarily to aid the victim, but to externalize blame away from the authority and onto the victim.
Furthermore I’ve at least read that more and more these days ODD “symptoms” are being reunderstood as expressions of various non-normative neurotypes that may place things like justice and ethical reciprocity at a higher priority than most. I myself have been introduced by my therapist to PDA type autism, Pathological/Persistent Demand Avoidance, which before it’s relatively recent recognition used to get a lot of people slapped with the ODD label. I don’t express my demand avoidance externally unless cornered, more it informs my entire lifestyle strategy in advance, so I escaped having a direct confrontation as a kid that would have gotten me labeled. But I identify strongly with and my heart goes out to ODD-labeled people.
Read what was linked, it’s literally only diagnosed in children. In which case, yes, if they disregard all authority (including their parents), it is a problem.
It’s a problem for a hierarchical society that requires continual compliance for next to no explanation, not a problem for the child. It’s not a medical condition internal to an individual, it’s a social illness external to them, and therefore has no place in a medical text.
It’s a problem for a hierarchical society that requires continual compliance for next to no explanation
That’s simply raising children. Yes, you should ideally explain as much as possible to children, but some things you simply can’t because they’re not mature enough to understand it, it could traumatize them or there’s simply no time.
I mean, imagine a child suddenly deciding to run into a busy road and you start explaining why they should stop instead of giving clear orders: “you know, those cars are moving very fast and…” * Splat *
And even if you to have the option to explain, if the child simply says “I don’t care” and ignores you, then how are you supposed to raise them? That’s specifically what this diagnosis is about.
It’s raising children in a hierarchical society that requires continual compliance for next to no explanation. Again, it’s not a problem internal to the child, and it’s not medical, it’s wrong to frame it as a medical condition.
Busy roads that leave no nuance between safety and instant death, no safe introductory margin for a child to explore and understand, are a product of a hierarchical society. The only reason we require unwavering compliance from our children that bleeds into labeling them with medical conditions if they do not comply is because we have built a society that is hostile to them.
To balk and protest at that state of affairs is not a disorder, it’s entirely healthy. It’s the state of affairs that is ill.
I don’t think you’re understanding the problem here. Busy roads were one example, there are plenty of others, train tracks, the mixer or blender in the kitchen, a fork in a power outlet - these have absolutely nothing to do with hierarchy. There will always be dangers. And even if there aren’t any, if you don’t have a grip on children to prevent them from injuring other children or even adults, you have a serious problem on your hands. If you don’t correct that, you get the kind of adults that make our society ill as you put it.
And again, this is not about balking and protesting at the ill state of affairs, and the diagnosing factors make that very clear.
It’s a problem for a hierarchical society that requires continual compliance for next to no explanation
That’s simply raising children.
I’m deeply concerned for the wellbeing of your children.
I’m deeply concerned for the wellbeing of a society that’s even peppered (let alone prolific) with this naive-realist rationalised irrationality.
“That’s simply” authoritarian totalitarianism, normalised.
And of course, the totalitarianised psyche does not see this. Like the fish does not see water. Does not even know its a thing. Knows no other way. “That’s simply” how it is to them.
A couple other things spring to mind:
“If you’re old enough to ask the question, you’re old enough to handle the answer.” (And even before (and if not, plant the seed and they may get it later).
and
Try explanation before dismissing it out of hand. Better pedagogy. Explanation’s not even a high bar. There are better yet. Invite exploring ideas.
I’m not even remotely taking about hitting kids, jfc. But way to completely miss the point that explanation and exploring ideas sometimes simply doesn’t work and create a strawman.
Just an example of not using reasoned explanations and instead conforming to “requires continual compliance for next to no explanation” that sprang to mind.
Since I was not saying you were saying what you’re saying I was saying, that’s your own (both) strawman fallacy fallacy, and its own strawman fallacy. As I said, it’s just what also sprang to mind in that same vein of thought. At a stretch, maybe you could try claim it a slippery slope fallacy on my part, but again, I was not saying that’s the inevitable result from your line of thought(/dogma). It’s just a possibility [due consideration] within that philosophy.
Also, while we’re on the case of detecting fallacies, you’ve moved the goalposts from “That**’s** simply raising children.” to “explanation and exploring ideas sometimes simply doesn’t work”.
ODD is an excuse diagnosis. It’s literally “You rightfully criticise people for being authoritarian and us cops and fascists don’t like that, boohoo”.
It’s basically a perfect example for the sociological model of disability.
We need a diagnosis instead for people who are needlessly authoritarian and intolerant.
It’s called being a “fascist”.
(But seriously, is there no diagnosis for it?)
There’s no direct diagnosis as such, because being a fascist is more a description of the outward effect than what is happening inside the person, and other factors have a very strong influence as to if a person becomes a fascist leader or not (in other situations that person would “only” be abusive to the people around them, for instance). But there are diagnoses such as psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, which are often present in these cases.
Side note: ODD is a diagnosis that is only people under 18, so it’s explicitly not a political thing.
is more a description of the outward effect than what is happening inside the person,
Doesn’t stop behaviorists coming up with diagnoses.
Oh, but then, behaviorists are authoritarians, and so likely are not going to shoot a diagnosis for their own.
At this point I’m starting to wonder whether you’re trolling. You’re equating behaviorism with authoritarianism, which is… Holy shit. I think some reading would help.
Which is what?
Use your words.
Happy to entertain counter arguments or refutations.
Aloof ad-hominem, uncompelling.
Have you looked into ABA? Look into that, and then take a fresh look at CBT.
Happy to hear any example of a behaviorist school of thought that’s not authoritarian.
[PS, 100% not trolling.]
Side note: ODD is a diagnosis that is only people under 18, so it’s explicitly not a political thing.
Sounds explicitly political to me. Did you forget the “/s”?
It fits in the authoritarian captalist system we’re living in. The system rewards this behaviour.
Has been spiteful or vindictive at least twice within the past six months
We all have ODD on this blessed day.
ITT: A lot of people who have no clue what ODD is.
Kinda how it works in our late stage capitalist societies to be honest, except that it’s collective pressure/belief instead of state-imposed.
You have trouble accepting the shitty state the world is in? You don’t want to be exploited and end the month with not enough to pay your rent? You’re fed up with that human crushing machine that keeps on destroying the planet because There Is No Alternative?
Well, you should consult you might be a tiny bit depressed. Take antidepressants and shut the fuck up. Learn to see and focus on the beauty in life and the little things instead. Take small hobbies, a lover or a cat. How you deal with all of that is your own individual problem.
Does it seem so normal that you really can’t see any other way? Congratulations, you are well programmed. Those problems aren’t to be delt with on an individual level, they are political.
In the past, most people formed unions and parties and did strikes, political rallys, protested and burned the landowners’ manors as a way to process those kind of feelings.
Stoicism has become commoditized as a way to convince people that their lot in life is just their attitude, and the more they put their shoulder to the wheel to produce for the top of the pyramid, the more it works out for them, rather than questioning the wheel. The hustle and grind culture is just as much the goal of something like the heritage foundation as “deport the brown people.”
Which is weird because stoicism evolved out of cynicism and inherited it’s philosophical hatred of authority at least historically.
see also that nihilism’s origins were not in destructive apathy as the term is frequently used to mean though, but instead to mean that if someone finds themselves not believing in any pre-existing meaning they have the power to assign their owo meaning to life. we exist in a world that always tells us to find our purpose in life. nihilism tells us to stop waiting for meaning to find us and instead to determine one for ourselves
One must imagine sisyphuwus happy
Fucking hilarious. twanx
As someone who works as a therapist in the mental health system in America, this is not at all how it works.
It’s not what you are doing. It is how it has evolved though.
Apart from fringe activist groups, who thinks of politics as something they have to make happen on a daily basis?
The political way to process through the various clashing forces that make our societies has almost totally given way to the individualized injunction of dealing with the consequences. It’s in the zeitgeist, all the injunction to self-care, self-improvement and so on. If you are centered on yourself, you won’t priorize the collective.
And saying that doesn’t negate the usefulness of psychology and therapy work at the individual level. Nor does it imply a big conspiracy or something of the sort.
Apart from fringe activist groups, who thinks of politics as something they have to make happen on a daily basis?
Lots of people actually. The comparison you’re making between many people being generally uninterested in politics vs mental illness being criminalized by the state is, frankly, ridiculous.
You seem to have misinterpreted my point.
It’s not about people being uninterested in politics, it’s about most people losing the ability to even see politics as something else than some topic you could be interested in or not. To feel like they might be able to have any kind of meaningful effect on their environment. And it’s not about mental illness being criminalized it’s about mental illness being used (conscientiously or not) as a tool to fight against dissent.
And why would it be ridiculous? Culturally enforced and internalized rules are way stronger than the ones enforced by coercion. I agree that it’s worse on a personal level to risk being arrested for a thought crime and institutionalized or sent into some camp as a result of it. But as a society it’s less effective and pernicious than the collective apathy and political impotence we’re swimming in.
Under the Soviet union people saw or knew other disappeared. They knew something was happening and that they’d better shut up about it. When you were caught as an enemy of the state or of the ideology, you at least had a clear indication of what outside force is at work against you. Psychologically it’s very different.
Nowadays apart for the few percents that are actually politically active (and even some if not most of those are not spared on the inside), people feel that it’s their fault if they don’t fit in, they feel or are told by the ambient noise that they have to fix themselves, that the problem is them. That there is a disconnect from reality, from the world. The classical “what is wrong?”. And to be happy, to fix that, all they have is to consume, focus on themselves, find themselves, improve, or just look like they’re doing that. Like rats taking electrical discharge after discharge with no way to get out or even understand what’s causing it in sight.
So
a government authority takes away your freedom & subjects you to abuse
you depress yourself about having to work & pay for shit or deal with your feelings
same thing! 😊
I can’t believe everyone who buys this equivalence bullshit of illegitimate abuse & coercion in one case and lack thereof in the other. It’s like they have some submission kink to getting dominated.
You’re either not trying to understand what I’m saying or willingly chosing to misrepresent it. I have no time to discuss with people acting in bad faith.
Edit: Excuse-me I thought you were another poster. I think I answer your points here: https://lemmy.zip/comment/23154125
The rough gist I’m getting is some poorly substantiated claim of ignorance of general exploitation as worse than overt abuse of human rights, eg
Yes, comrade, I’m locking you up and abusing your fundamental rights, but think how bad you’d have it free, doing the same work with a better standard of living & lower economic inequality while whining about exploitation!
Perhaps workers could earn better without “exploitation” in liberal democracies, but historical record & economic data show the opposite:
- the Soviet system stagnated & deteriorated behind liberal democratic counterparts at living standards & economic growth while still exploiting workers & abusing their fundamental rights
- several liberal democracies continue to achieve lower economic inequality & better living standards than communist states.
The Soviet Union gave up & dismantled itself for this reason. There was no tradeoff of human rights abuses somehow yielding a better life for a less exploited, average worker. For all its rhetoric, the Soviet workers got the worst of everything.
Per the philosophy of social democracies, socialism doesn’t require human rights abuses. Authorities abusing human rights are definitely worse than authorities not doing that & letting people fail on their own terms. In the case of those liberal democracies beating the performance of communist states, those “exploited” workers are freer & doing better than the “unexploited” ones. Given the results, it’s hard to find your notion of “exploitation” credible: I think it’s full of shit & mostly in your deluded theory that’s failing to bear out.
How do you read what I’m writing and understand from it that I’m defending the USSR? Two things can be bad at once.
What I’m saying is that in our late stage capitalism societies, mental health is also instrumentalized to avoid changing how things work.
In America black people are diagnosed schizophrenic or psychotic because they talk about institutional racism to white clinicians that don’t believe them
W reporting
This is exactly what the GOP is pushing for with “Trump derangement syndrome”.
I feel like some random Austrian painter did the same thing.
This is what Republicans in the US want now. Unless a Democrat’s in power, of course.
Something like this could never happen in a civilized country like Germany… Just ask Gustl Mollath about that…
They also didn’t like genetics because it was anti Marxist-Leninist to them. They didn’t like the concept of inherent traits.
i believe they tried to have thier pseudo-science scientist explain it away with thier own.
Only considered it?
May want to check out what’s happening in USA and UK.
Fucking Trump wants to deport citizens for disagreeing with him.
I live in the UK. Being against the UK government is not considered a mental illness.
Depends who, where and how you ask.
[Edit, or more likely they just skip the pretense of mental illness, and jump straight to incarceration (or threats thereof) to silence critics.]
