this was posted before, it's a 5000 person survey by a non-profit for "finding the intersection of religion in society for clergy and the public" (hence the weird religious breakdown), which they got by just emailing people on a USPS list with a few hundred self-selected opt-ins on top. Which also inherently excludes a bunch of people, like those who've moved a lot or recently, any and all homeless, lumpenized people and people in distant or ad-hoc or delapidated communities with vague USPS lines and addresses, those who don't have internet access, those in prisons, and those who don't check their email, and those who wouldn't be arsed with these kinds of surveys by religion-in-politics non-profits, and countless other groups. Inherently. The study also has no breakdowns for class or income, if they live in rural, urban, or suburban environs, or even generation breakdowns for most of the questions including this one (but does for some others, weirdly); and the 18-29 age group is vanishingly small compared to the others; and just a bunch of god awful things. Which is shocking to be taken at face value, this trash 5000 person "christian nationalism" survey as "percent of Americans" like the survey says. And then you get such god awful trash takes like in this thread of "if only I'd organized harder" absolutely anti-marxist nonsense, nihilist trash.
anarcho_blinkenist
it literally isn't a good sample size, especially for their selection process in the breakdown of a place as diverse and varied in peoples and living conditions and environments like the US and its 350 million people. It's a religious-focused NGO for "christian nationalism in politics", has vanishingly few young people, does terrible breakdowns in the full report and tells us nothing about class or income, self-selects for those who are on consistent addresses in USPS lines with internet access who would be arsed to do these surveys (as well as has hundreds of self-selected opt-ins), the report is trash by a non-profit for "finding the intersection of religion and politics for clergy and the public"
which is always funny because United Russia exists as it does from its origins in the turn of the century as basically a big tent "quick everyone get in here so we can be bigger than the communists and keep them from winning legislative and voting-bloc majorities" party (which the communists would have won the presidency too in the 1996 post-fall elections over Yeltsin but Yanks To The Rescue!
also be careful you might be arrested or fined for insinuating poland ever collaborated with hitler on anything
bruh why does trump look like texas chainsaw's leatherface god that's upsetting, the tilted head to augahshf
I replied more viscerally in depth in another reply to one of your comment, but the assumption that it 'not being able to think' is a novel contributing problem in this case is working on a backwards assumption that those who can think will always seek to help and never seek to manipulate and reinforce harm, which we know from incel and other forums is not a thing. People who seek out this stuff will get it. It is a mental health and alienation and atomization under late capitalist dystopia problem, and the internet facilitates meeting like-minded individuals without effort. whether it's a chat bot you can manipulate the guard rails by speaking in metaphoric terms to get it to reinforce you or active sadists and misery-loves-company 'thinkers' on the other side on a forum. People in these states are not trying to be convinced otherwise when they do this kind of stuff. They want to hear this stuff reinforced in themselves, and will do what they can to get it, (like this user speaking in metaphoric terms to get around the blocks of the bot), whether a chatbot or a forum or a discord of misery or whatever it is. The ease-of-access to these phenomenon on the internet facilitating this mirroring reinforcement and not being physically able to be broken up by a local community org is the unique aspect in general, and people can get that in forums just as easily as in a chat bot
the underlying causes and issues remain the same for both.
if it wasn't this it would be an incel or "blackpill" forum or something. People who seek confirmation in their spirals will seek it, which this user was by working actively to get around the bot's blocking of these things by speaking metaphorically to get it to print a reinforcement of what they wanted to hear. the chatbot is not a new thing in this scenario, and in compared to other cases online had more protection in place than others:
cw suicide
there's been forums about offing yourself where people do this shit with and for each other since the internet, which is a continuation of less-easily-facilitated cults of the same which existed before it. There have been many news stories on them, including how there are sadist proxy-murderers who have no suicidality and no attachments and still reinforce it in these forums, some get thrills openly from the power of it, some get thrills but convincing themselves they don't have ultimate responsibility, some are morbid-curiosity freaks seeing how they can push things not respecting life, and the vast majority are just this, are misery-loves-company who tell each other what they want to hear. The internet is a recreation of existing problems and relations into new conditions; the only differences are manifestations and facilitations and how that develops. Things like even if a kid can't drive yet they can still find these forums at home and not have questions asked. Things like community orgs can't go in where these people are meeting and get help for those who want it and chase away the sadist bad actors with baseball bats. etc. But this isn't a new thing; incel forums have been sparking suicides and stochastic terror for a while even in the last decade. It is not a qualitatively different change finding a chat bot that you can manipulate the guardrails into convincing you of these things vs finding a ""community"" of suicidal depressives and psychotics to do the same or worse are eager to do it consciously from the start, with cognition and conscious manipulation behind it.
the chatbot in this context is in practicality no different than an incel forum which creates the same effects. It is a social reinforcement loop ("social" in the case of the bot, is approximating the same, which it machine-learns from the same interactions and relations from people online, presuming this is another LLM that just data-scrapes the internet, which also includes a lot of incel forums and these general social trends; and the user was actively trying to get responses to reinforce their biases in themselves as incel forums do.)
That comment pissed me off, the whole trend of doomerist opportunism too. this site is so often just a black hole that no one is interested in fighting against and I'm fucking myself up wasting my time trying in the tide of it. It's an active negation of revolutionary consciousness in an environment which needs it cultivated and brought into the real material world. So many people seem near universally more interested in uncritical and angry insular bias-spirals and opportunist defeatism, opportunist self-confirmation of 'nothing to be done' and 'might as well flee' (which shows a petty-bourgeois affordance), and the worst: opportunism-masquerading-as-principle then shit out onto others in a misery-loves-company kind of way, than anything else constructive. Just straight-line-segment-from-the-curve understandings, as fuel for undialectical projections of doomsaying, so do-nothing opportunists can say "SEE?!?!?!" at whatever they think gives them the opportunity and get applause from other do-nothings, which facilitates the furthering the comparative growth of reaction more than the reactionaries are capable of facilitating themselves than if people were interested in constructive active forward-moving analysis of things.
Socialists in the real world (which are exponentially growing in number every month and have been for almost a decade) I've worked with don't talk like people here, by and large engage more healthily about problems in society, and are more interested in engaging critically along lines of where the problems are and aren't in given things, and working the angles to separate them along dividing lines. This site is 75+% online ultra-leftism wearing the mask of something else. There are people who have been being tortured in US prisons for decades for their activism who have more revolutionary spirit, optimism, fluidity, criticality, and desire for and KNOWLEDGE OF whole-inclusive revolutionary change, and active political consciousness and preparedness to fight by it than the metaphysical one-sided self-satisfied petty-bourgeois-oriented shit I see here.
"iF oNlY i HaD oRgAniZeD mOrE~" People who say this shit are do-nothings. People who support and further it are do-nothings, thinking the people who turned out in the Floyd uprisings, the ever-growing militant labor and tenant movements, and even students occupying colleges at the cost of their petty bourgeois futures over Palestine (A THING WHICH DOESN'T DIRECTLY EFFECT THEM, compared to Vietnam protests where they were being DRAFTED
a MARK OF ELEVATED CONSCIOUSNESS) are nothing compared to these 5000 home-owners (or otherwise long-term tenants) who decide to partake in a shitty religious email survey? Because, and not just from this, that's what I get and what I hear, more than I get or hear anything else on this site. I wonder, where have these people been this past 10 years, if they have not been on the street seeing what I've seen in just my small part of it? They seem to be seeing less than comrades writing from inside prison walls somehow.
Yes the US, particularly in its bourgeois and petty bourgeois, is largely reactionary, we know this (without this trash 'American Academy of Religion' member survey which should be thrown in the trash); particularly in the ongoing historical inheritance of colonial relations, and that this is an avenue where false-consciousness gets pushed when alternatives are not posited and constructed due to these historical relations and its inherited contradictions. But Christ. I've seen more things and comments on this site, whose only purpose and only constructed framing is to uncritically reinforce insular and doomsaying biases as dead-end metaphysical 'truths', to spiral people into do-nothing emptiness and defeatism before any battle has even been fought by ANY of the people saying these things; than I've seen constructive forward-moving dialectical considerations. I've seen more attempts by do-nothings to self-indulgently self-satisfyingly panic-monger and doomsay about their imagined reality "out there" where they do not stand or in some dreamed-up future, to inflame destructive and opportunist impulses in people to make more do-nothings (or worse), than positive construction toward anything
or even serious Marxist criticality toward circumstances or material put forward, as long as it confirms OPPORTUNIST, ULTRA-LEFT BIASES and helps people feel like their do-nothingism is somehow 'principled analysis' and they can feel self-satisfied in saying so. Which is effectively reactionary, discouraging socialists of the possibility and reality of change being built, and passing it off as 'principled analysis' based on one's own shallow and actively-sought bias-confirmation as a metaphysical truth, rather than developing working and critical dialectical consideration in one's analysis of material circumstances and events, their internal components, and relations to other circumstances and events as a whole living reality and unfolding history in which we are all partaking in in the ways we do.
Log off and join an org