Wheee, more Epstein revelations » « It’s too much

I read a Chris Rufo post

And I regret it. Bet you didn’t know that Scandinavian-Americans are “over-empathetic” and that we’re a hotbed of “left-wing radicalism,” like that is a bad thing.

What explains why endemic disorder seems to plague Minneapolis? My pet theory is that if you look at the history of Minneapolis and compare it to the histories of other American cities that have similarly become hotbeds of left-wing radicalism and anarchy—say, Seattle—there are real commonalities. Both cities have a long history of powerful organized labor movements, factions of communist sympathizers, and a tradition of industrial-frontier progressivism. Each city also has a high density of Scandinavians. There’s something about Scandinavian transplant cultures that simultaneously brings an over-empathizing element—bring in as many Somalis as you can, don’t ask any rude questions about what they might be up to—and also a more militant, socialistic, progressive, and activist element.

He is such a dumbass.

Wheee, more Epstein revelations » « It’s too much

Comments

  1. chrislawson says

    It really does seem like there’s no statement too stupid or too vile to cost a right-wing editorialist their position.

  2. chrislawson says

    Also, the worst thing plaguing Minnesota right now is a masked fascist paramilitary.

  3. StevoR says

    No transcript below the fold or otherwise this time?

    Listening now.

    “Wealth, poverty and morality?” Maybe that combo is meant to note that wealth tends to result in a poverty of morality?

    As for Rufo believeing in curses – yeah, the Repugs and reichwing ar every full of magical (flawed & fallacious) thinking.

  4. Snarki, child of Loki says

    I’m so “over empathetic” that I’d really like to see Chris Rufo crucified.

  5. says

    i think there was an expression in german related to the cruelty of the swedish during reformation era sectarian violence? where did i read that? like “swedish compassion” to mean murderous cruelty?

  6. StevoR says

    So for those who want to see if not that exact scene then at least The sinking of Blücher here. from –The King’s Choice (2016) by ashton yt channel lasting 2 mins 38 secs.

    For more in depth historical info here’s the animated
    Sinking of German Heavy Cruiser Blücher: The Battle of Drøbak Sund, 1940     by House of History channel – under 15 mins.

    In addition to When a 100-Year Old Fort Sank a Brand New German Flagship running for 9 mins 23 secs by Dark Seas.

  9. rainkingsb says

    PZ, I am a longtime lurker (since around the start of gamergate) and I have always appreciated your blog and commentary. Over the years I’ve read a few of your posts about the small town in northwest Minnesota where your grandfather lived and it brings up a connection. I’m California born but my mother was a first generation Norwegian American also from Fertile, MN. My grandparents owned the local mercantile store there and probably knew your grandfather. They may even have sold him that pocket knife that you mentioned in the past.

  10. gmacs says

    Man if only this were true. Between Hegseth, Finnstad, Tinglestad, and any politician I’ve seen with a name ending in -rud, I’ve learned not to trust Norwegian names in people running for office here.

    OTOH, most of the Norwegian-American church community I grew up with is pretty thoroughly appalled by what’s happening.

  11. monad says

    Scandinavia is one of the few places the current president has said he would like immigration from, but I guess now that Denmark isn’t interested in giving him territory the racists have had to reevaluate them. :P

  12. John Morales says

    Scandinavians once were Vikings, but the historical myth Rufo needs contradicts the mythopoesis he attempts.

  13. Hemidactylus says

    I guess I should watch The King’s Choice then. I had watched Sisu where the Finnish main character does quite a bit more than punch Nazis. Has a sequel I greatly anticipate.

    Centrists say we shouldn’t punch Nazis. Sisu happily blew those fuckers up or eviscerated them. My kind of movie.

  14. macallan says

    @5 and @8

    I’m from Südschweden ( aka north-eastern Germany in local old people slang – the region was under swedish rule for a while ) and I’m not aware of any such expression. There are a few related ones though.

  15. Hemidactylus says

    Riffing on PZ at around 5:19. Rufo isn’t the only one talking smack about Haitians eating pets. The inventor of that pseudophilosophical nonsense cult Street Epistemology has taken that crap to new lows:

    Peter Boghossian everyone. The conceptual penis himself.

  16. raven says

    As a Norwegian American from near Seattle, I do have to say that I don’t want to see mass ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, and mass graves in the USA.

    Chris Rufo would call that being over-empathetic.
    Most of us would call that being a normal person with a normal personality.

  17. Hemidactylus says

    I’ve been reading Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence which is set in Minneapolis and covers COVID and George Floyd’s murder from a Native American perspective. Powerful book. Has great resonance now.

  18. Tethys says

    Lol, effective public protests = ANARCHY!!

    Judging by the reference to Somalians I assume this particular useful idiot has discovered the charity organization Lutheran Social Services, which indeed was originally founded by Swedish immigrants.

    There are many Minnesotans who are of Scandinavian descent. There are also many Minnesotans who are descended from actual German communists, though they are more commonly called anabaptists or pietists.

  20. Michelle Beissel says

    Rufo demonstrates the dark side of empathy, that is, only empathize with your group. Empathizing with the other is excessive and dangerous. Incomprehensible in fact, hence the desperate magical thinking.

  21. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Guilford Press – Handbook of cultural psychology, Cultures of Honor (2ed 2019)

    Nisbett and Cohen’s (1996) hypothesis that high levels of violence and homicide in the American South can be explained in terms of a culture of honor. They argued that cultures of honor are most commonly found in ecological contexts in which (1) resources are scarce and individuals’ possessions are easily appropriated by others, and (2) law enforcement is weak or absent and so cannot easily prevent or punish theft. These conditions are common in regions where the chief source of subsistence is herding animals; such ecologies are often ill-suited for intensive agriculture, because they are arid, rocky, or mountainous. In these regions, resources are often scarce, so raiding of herds is common; and the space needed to maintain a herd results in low population densities and thereby lower levels of police presence compared to other contexts. Ecologies that are used to graze animals are also difficult to police due to lack of access, mountainous terrain, or long distances between settlements. As a result, owners of herds must present an image of strength and a willingness to retaliate against any possible threat to their possessions. A man’s reputation for vigorous, aggressive responses to any threat, real or perceived, leads others to have second thoughts about messing with him and his possessions. The crux of the culture of honor thesis is that the values, beliefs, norms, and practices brought to the American South by the Celtic peoples of the Scots, Irish, and Welsh borderlands have persisted and account for regional differences in some forms of violence
    […]
    Nisbett and Cohen’s (1996) earliest research contrasted the culture of honor in the Southern United States with the Northern and Midwestern regions of the country, where different patterns of settlement and farming-based means of subsistence shaped a cultural logic that focused on collaboration with others (rather than competition). These regions of the United States reflect the cultural norms and values of their Northern and Western European settlers. Although honor was an important legal and social construct in much of Western Europe from the 12th–18th centuries, by the 18th century, the internal, self-respect and personal integrity component of honor began to dominate and the external, reputation-related component began to fade in importance.

    By the mid-20th century, notions of honor based on virtue, manliness, or hierarchy in Western European and Northern United States contexts had given way to ideals of equality and concerns for the dignity and rights of the individual, without respect to the person’s position in society.
    […]
    Leung and Cohen (2011) go on to characterize dignity cultures typically as having strong rule of law that protects individuals (as opposed to the bonds of reciprocity in honor cultures). Vengeance for wrongs is taken out of the hands of the individual and given to the state; thus, reciprocity and retaliation have lost their strong salience in these societies.

  23. birgerjohansson says

    Sadly, Scandinavian countries have their local MAGA analogs. But they are contained in minority parties. The system of proportional representation allows them a parliamentary presence they would be denied in Britain or USA.

    This is the downside of fair policies; you have to be equally fair to the nasty ones.
    A similarity is, their supporters are usually blue-collar people who benefit from the progressive social policies enacted by the parties they oppose.

  24. StevoR says

    @10. monad : “Scandinavia is one of the few places the current president has said he would like immigration from.. “

    Saw a meme on fb a while ago noting something like :

    Scandanavians moving from their countries to the USA would be like Tolkein’s elves moving from Rivendell to Mordor.

  25. John Morales says

    “They argued that cultures of honor are most commonly found in ecological contexts in which (1) resources are scarce and individuals’ possessions are easily appropriated by others, and (2) law enforcement is weak or absent and so cannot easily prevent or punish theft.”

    Seems rather irrelevant to the post, and it’s a bit rubbish.

    I grew up in Madrid in the 1960s, and it was pretty much an honour culture.
    Neither (1) nor (2) were applicable, it was historical.

    —

    Mind you, I looked and Wikipedia has two pages with that specific name:
    1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_culture_(Middle_East)
    2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)

    (The one I was exposed to was more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour#Family_honour )

  26. drmarcushill says

    Oh no, labour movements! How can society exist if workers have a means to fight for fair treatment?

  27. beholder says

    @14 Hemidactylus

    that pseudophilosophical nonsense cult Street Epistemology

    It’s odd that you think Street Epistemology is the problem. Boghossian’s problem is that he didn’t care to interrogate his own toxic beliefs.

  28. birgerjohansson says

    Drmarcushill @ 25

    The labour movements benefitted from having members with experience of organizing from the non-state churches and the temperance movement (Scandinavians were literally drinking themselves to death during the time of increasing emigration).

    I doubt Rufo would approve of a ban on alcohol. (While simultaneously disapproving of blue-collar drugs)

  31. Becca Stareyes says

    Apparently the ‘Great Again’ is going to mean bringing the old intra-European racist beliefs back to the forefront. At least in America, they seemed to decline as immigration shifted to non-European countries, and the definition of ‘White’ (aka the dominant group) expanded to cover all of Europe.

  33. cheerfulcharlie says

    Empathy is a new word coined in the late 1800’s. In the 20th century empathy was created as an English word derived from German. In 1888 another new word was coined. Psychopathy. By 1941 psychopath was defined as an official mental problem. Psychopaths had little or no empathy for others. Notoriously, Charlie Kirk announced he disliked the concept of empathy. And asked his followers to likewise reject the concept of empathy. Kirk was a psychopath.

    From Snopes. “Yes, Charlie Kirk once said, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.””

  34. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @25 John Morales:

    Madrid […] was pretty much an honour culture. […] it was historical.

    Yale Press – Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (2008)

    Early modern Spain has long been viewed as having a culture obsessed with honor, where a man resorted to violence when his or his wife’s honor was threatened, especially through sexual disgrace. This book—the first to closely examine honor and interpersonal violence in the era—overturns this idea, arguing that the way Spanish men and women actually behaved was very different from the behavior depicted in dueling manuals, law books, and “honor plays” of the period.

    Drawing on criminal and other records to assess the character of violence among non-elite Spaniards, historian Scott K. Taylor finds that appealing to honor was a rhetorical strategy, and that insults, gestures, and violence were all part of a varied repertoire that allowed both men and women to decide how to dispute issues of truth and reputation.

  35. canadiansteve says

    Sounds like you Minnesotans are too Canadian-like to me. Maybe you should join us as the next province!

  36. John Morales says

    CA7746: “Review “Taylor has removed one of the serious obstacles to seeing sixteenth-century Mediterranean societies as they really were, rather than as social scientists have supposed.”—Helen Nader, University of Arizona”

    Um, I was talking 1960s, not 1600s.

    Again; honour culture talk is not relevant to the claim about Scandinavians.

    There’s something about Scandinavian transplant cultures that simultaneously brings an over-empathizing element—bring in as many Somalis as you can, don’t ask any rude questions about what they might be up to—and also a more militant, socialistic, progressive, and activist element.

  37. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    It’s an existing hypothesis attributing ‘socialistic’ culture of the region to ecology, as opposed to Rufo’s pet theory.

    Nisbett and Cohen’s (1996) earliest research contrasted the culture of honor in the Southern United States with the Northern and Midwestern regions of the country, where different patterns of settlement and farming-based means of subsistence shaped a cultural logic that focused on collaboration with others (rather than competition).

  38. fishy says

    I’m kind of getting the feeling that Soylent Green exists and and I’m on the downsizing list.

  39. Pierce R. Butler says

    Bébé Mélange @ # 5: i think there was an expression in german related to the cruelty of the swedish during reformation era sectarian violence?

    I recall reading somewhere, possibly a novel, about a certain 30-Years-War siege, in which a German city under attack by Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus had so much gunpowder scattered around that the town all blew up, resulting in, among other things, the phrase “Mercy of Magdeburg”.

    Those Christian-on-Christian episodes created undue levels of irony.

  40. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @39 Pierce R. Butler:

    a German city under attack by Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus had so much gunpowder scattered around that the town all blew up

    Wikipedia – Sack of Magdeburg

    Whilst Magdeburg was razed by the fire, many Imperial soldiers supposedly went out of control. The invading soldiers had not received payment for their service and demanded valuables from every household they encountered. There were reports of rapes and torture.
    […]
    The devastations were so great that Magdeburgisieren (or “magdeburgization”) became a common term signifying total destruction, rape and pillaging for decades. The terms “Magdeburg justice”, “Magdeburg mercy” and “Magdeburg quarter” also arose as a result of the sack, used originally by Protestants when executing Roman Catholics who begged for quarter.

    I had to dig into the citation to find gunpowder. Sounds like the town was more of a tinderbox than a powder keg.

    The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (p468-469)

    The defenders had only 2,500 regular troops, backed by 5,000 armed citizens of whom only 2,000 were adults. The population numbered around 25,000, already reduced by a plague outbreak five years before and the city’s long-term economic decline. […] Imperialists broke in around 8 a.m. […] Defence was hindered by a shortage of ammunition, but those on the walls put up stiff resistance.
    […]
    Protestant propagandists created the myth of the Magdeburg maiden who immolated herself rather than surrender, while others simply blamed the Catholic commanders. Gronsfeld, who had no axe to grind, reported that Pappenheim told him he had ordered a house set on fire to drive out some musketeers who were preventing his men entering the city. Others present similar stories and it seems certain the conflagration was an accident, especially as the whole purpose of the siege was to capture the city intact. The fire spread quickly once it reached an apothecary’s house used to store gunpowder, and the city was fully ablaze by 10 a.m.

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