Forestluv

He is creating all sorts of binary constructs and unable to see degrees and partial truths within in inter-connected systems. For example: The claim "Trump is the most corrupted president" is a degree along a spectrum. The youtuber makes the argument that Trump is not the only corrupted president - that is a binary construct. That is a completely different argument. . . One can say that Trump is the most corrupted president AND that every other president was corrupt as well. Of course Obama, Clinton, Reagan etc had elements of corruption!! One could say that Trump is a 8/10 on a corruption scale and other presidents ranged from 5-7 on the corruption scale. Second example: He speaks of "RussiaGate" in an either / or binary choice: That Russian interference must be 100% BS or 100% true. This is overly simplistic. There is evidence that Russia meddled in the election AND evidence that democrats played up the story for political advantages. As well, Russia interference does not mean it is the ONLY reason Trump won, it can be one of many factors that contributed to Trump's victory. The youtuber says that Trump is a manifestation of underlying dissent and problems in America. . . . both can be contributing factors. There are many dots inter-connected with a system.

Bill is full on Blue. John shows that some Blue can have a foul mouth. ead stands for "eat a dick" or as Ben Shapiro would say "Eat a D-word". So vulgar.

It's not just anger. It is also repression of personal pleasure, such as sexual repression. That is part of surrendering oneself to a higher authority. Being a red level man takes an immense amount of personal mental empowerment. I've been in red level environments and I did not have sufficient red level mental power. I couldn't handle it. Watch UFC fighter as they do their walk out. Entering that ring takes ENORMOUS mental power. You are defining what counts as "strength" based on your conscious level. I'm not saying it isn't a form of strength, I'm saying it is biased. Living Red takes strength, transitioning to Blue also takes strength - a different type of strength. Pure Red is the gangster types. There are also mixtures of red, blue, orange. White-collar con-artists are red-orange mixtures. A white-collar con artist has some sense of strategic planning, cost-benefit analysis, consequences and longer term vision.

What??!! One is not able to simply 'set aside' their emotions at Blue. One of the major fundamental features of Blue is repression of emotions through guilt, shame, punishment on earth, punishment in hell etc. There are enormous internal and blue societal forces suppressing Blue emotions. Red has enormous personal empowerment!! Go to Liberia and interact with some gang leaders to see personal empowerment. Red has immense personal courage and power. Blue is self sacrificing. Blue is pressured to surrender their personal power to serve their community and a higher authority. Ask a Mormon on a mission about his "personal power" and he'd be like "Huh?? I'm just a vessel of the Lord, doing his will". You seem to give to little credit to Red on personal empowerment, yet give to much credit to Red for strategizing. Red's 'ideology' is you f--- with me and I'll cut your arm off. Red does not have some ideology it consciously uses to strategically trick Blue. That is giving Red waaaay too much credit. Yet this is pure Red. When we mix some Red, Blue, Orange together - then we can enter these types of ideological games. And it would be fair to say the Trump is a red/blue/orange mix playing the games you describe. But pure red is more limbic system animalistic.

Yep, self-centered immediacy of the person's survival and desires without regard to the welfare of others or future consequences is red mentality. Yet I would question the idea that "the ego tricks him into genuinely believing that he does indeed believe the thing he's espousing in that specific moment.". That would suggest some from of self reflection which comes after Red. Red mentality just is without ego tricking itself. I suppose we could say a subconscious ego is tricking the conscious ego into beliefs, yet I think that enters a new realm. . . Since there is zero conscious self reflection at red, I don't see a need for an ego to trick itself.

Does Trump need to be either 100% good or 100% asshole? If a person has a flaw, does that make them 100% asshole? If the bible has an inaccuracy, does that make it 100% bullshit?

That is a great way for the media to re-frame it!! They get seven days of a sporting event!! Kinda like the playoffs or a mini-series.

Saying Trump "terminated flights to and from China" isn't 100% accurate and misleading imo. Of course Biden and dems deserve criticism. The problem with being a 100% loyalist to Trump is that Trump is 0% responsible. A person cannot have an objective big picture view with that mindset because it will be consumed with defending Trump 100% of the time. Trump is not 100% responsible, yet he has significant responsibility in the poor covid response. Blaming others 100% and taking 0% personal responsibility is irresponsible and playing a victim. This is related to a previous thread on systemic racism in which I see it as a combination of external and internal factors. The external factor of China's negligence is a factor and they are partially responsible. Yet Trump also has some personal responsibility that he refuses to look at, so he blames 100% on others. Trump often plays the victim.

I think this is an important point. Most of the media and public see elections as a sporting even that is decided on Election Night. This is awesome for ratings. Yet with more mail-in voting, the mindset needs to change from Election Night to Election Week - it may not be decided on Nov. 3rd.

With cognitive / social models like Spiral Dynamics, it's very easy to understand why Trump supporters keep supporting him. The behavior of Trump supporters is very accurately described and predicted with SD.

Green criticizing Orange

It's a question of proportionality. If someone has skin cancer on their finger it is a serious situation because the cancer has potential of spreading. Cutting off their entire arm is an over-reaction. However, saying the cancer is no big deal and will go away on it's own is an under-reaction - it will allow the cancer to spread throughout the body. The best action is to realize the severity of the potential threat and take proportional action to that threat. For example, we may do localized radiation to kill the tumor - rather than chemotherapy that would harm the entire body. The criticism of Trump is not just that he "downplayed" it - it's that he downplayed it from it's relative threat level. Trump explained that he saw this virus as dangerous because it spread airborne and had a relatively high death rate. Trump under-reacted based on his own assessment of the threat level. He said in private that it is much more dangerous and lethal than a bad flu and tricky to stop, yet it public he said it was simply a bad flu and will go away on its own. Then he under-cut efforts that were proportional to the threat level (such as reducing testing). This is based on Trump's own words, Trump intentionally to mislead the public and under-responded by his own assessment of the threat level. Trump himself admits this and justifies it as not wanting to scare the public. Yet if he had good communication skills, he could have educated the public without causing a panic. Someone like Elizabeth Warren would have been able to do that

I would say an individual with cancer is a different case, since the cancer is not horizontally spread. Covid is contagious, therefore the public needs to know how contagious it is to mitigate it's effects. This could have been rolled out slowly about how serious this is to acclimate the public. This takes skills of being empathetic, altruistic and honest with the population. Skills Trump lacks. Someone like Elizabeth Warren could have easily disseminated this information. As well, it's not just misleading the public - it is undercutting efforts to mitigate a pathogen Trump knew was contagious and deadly for his own gain. And to say Trump doesn't want to cause panic is laughable to me. Projecting fear is his MO. Look at the fear and panic he caused about the "caravan" before last election. He made stuff up to make them scary to project fear. After the election, we never heard about "the caravan" again. He is dong the same thing with some m3 group, antifa, terrorists and how under Biden vulnerable woman home alone will have no police to call and will get assaulted. Fear is Trump's #1 weapon. If instilling fear about coronavirus would have helped him, he would have used it to his advantage.

It is one thing to say there is a spectrum. It is another thing to contextualize one's ideas within a spectrum with distinctions. I don't think you are doing that when labeling Biden as a fascist and saying Biden and Trump are close. This is just one perspective. Personally, I see neoliberals as extremely problematic. I could literally spend a hundred hours talking about how problematic they are. Yet Trump and the alt-right are on another level of problematic. To me, it's wisest to first remove Trump and then go after Biden. For those on the left, I don't think allowing Trump another 4 years is the best strategy. There is a chance that it causes massive structural collapse that could benefit the left, yet the chance is relatively low and the cost would be extremely high, imo. This is pretty much the position of people like AOC, Nina Turner and Cornel West. I would call it pragmatic democratic socialism. There are those further to the left like Ryan Knight making the argument to vote Green and create a new Peoples Party. I agree with the goal - yet don't think it's the best strategy. During the primary, I supported Bernie and hoped for meaningful structural change. Yet when Bernie lost, I shifted toward survival, pragmatic, incremental mode.

You are not considering degrees

Stage Red seems incapable of even pretending to care about the welfare of others. Trump always seems disoriented, awkward and uncomfortable when he tries to act altruistic or empathetic. Self-centered Orange seem much more comfortable feigning altruism and empathy.

My top prediction manifests:

This is a great test of how the mind deals with cognitive dissonance. How will Trump supporters interpret this information? My prediction is: A) Justify it by saying Trump was being responsible by downplaying Covid to avoid a public panic; B) Avoidance / Diversion: What about Hillary, Obama, Biden, Antifa? etc and C) This is Libs playing politics during an elections year. D) The liberal reporter tried to bait Trump into saying something they could take out of context. Trump is actually the victim. The potential mental defenses for Trumpers is limited in this case, since it is Trump’s own words. Trumpers cannot discredit it as FakeNews or anonymous sources. I predict very few Trump supporters will be able to look at this objectively and give any criticism whatsoever to Trump. A red/blue mindset is either / or. Either Trump is 100% responsible for the COVID crisis or Trump is 0% responsible for the Covid crisis. A red/blue mindset has a hard time giving partial responsibility to multiple inputs. It’s a great test of the average consciousness of the U.S., those at Orange and above will be able to rationally see how Trump’s behavior made the crisis worse than it could have been. I estimate about 65% of Americans would view this as poor behavior by Trump.

@Carl-Richard I’m trying to observe where the starting and ending points are for people’s view of legalization. If there is zero regulation and restriction, that goes full on libertarian. For example, should it be legal to inject black tar heroin into a 4 year old child? Should it be legal for pilots to fly planes while tripping on 400ug of LSD? This might sound absurd, yet people are throwing around the term legal and suggesting no regulation or restriction. I’m curious about where people draw the line, if any.

This is a broad statement. Without regulation and restrictions this would open up a pandora of Libertarian-eque problems. Are you advocating for unrestricted and unregulated?

Yes, I intentionally over-simplified to highlight one dot within a more complex system of dots. How broad are you using the term “legalization”? Does that include allowing businesses to market, sell and profit off the substance? My impression is that most people use the term legalization to include businesses selling and profiting. In the United States, adderall is legal with a doctors’ prescription, yet cannot be sold by regular businesses. I view “legalization” as a spectrum dependent on the level of regulation and restrictions. Even with psychedelics - I think there should be some type of regulation and education required if they became fully accessible to everyone. As well, I would be ok with making them illegal in certain cases and requiring professional approval in some cases.

A 3hr video is a fairly large time investment. Is there a time range in which he makes his case against a hard/soft drug dichotomy, or was it pretty much the whole 3hr video?

Legalization and decriminalization are distinct. It sounds like you are making an argument for decriminalization more than legalization. I’m curious of the limits of your view. . . If there was a substance that gave the user 20min. of bliss, yet also caused the user to lose self control and kill people, would you say as a society we should allow that substance to be sold, bought and used? To me, it seem to boil down to a libertarian argument. That is helpful, yet the reality is that it would be insufficient due to the current conscious level of society. Harm is not restricted to the individual - certain substances like meth expand beyond the user and causes societal harm. A substance can be made illegal to market, sell and use - yet a user would not be charged as a criminal. They would be sent to a program to help them with their problems and addiction. The idea is that making the drug illegal, without criminality, would help reduce harm caused to society.

I acknowledge there are dangers in capitalists and scientists gaining toxic control of deciding what counts as true and healthy. There can be selfish biases and conflicts of interest. As you suggest, pharmaceuticals have a strong conflict of interest due to profit making desires. That is why I think higher order independent regulatory agencies are needed. Of course there will be grey areas, yet I think I am pointing to a clearer case. I think most people would agree that companies should not be marketing methamphetamine to people to try to get them addicted to maximize their profits. This is what happened in the opioid crisis and most people agreed it was wrong If we had a device that gave someone 10 minutes of pleasure and then the device broke their bones and set 20 homes on fire, I don't think it should be legal for companies to market that device and profit off of it.

I don't have the time to watch the video right now, yet interested in doing so later and will update with my impressions. Thanks.