Learning about and recognizing the different plants around you can be extremely beneficial too. I recommend books for identifying local plants species, so many have medicinal and nutritional value. Call it gaining your “plant vision” lol!

I prefer academic definitions to empty signifiers, and am not impressed by the outburst, it only reveals a latent authoritarian impulse.

Of course that’s a thing lol

Personally, I think it is more accurate to call him a vulgar conventionalist and para-fascist with a narcissistic personality disorder. He isn’t what one would call a “true believer” of fascism, he doesn’t have any real ideology, just whatever his limited intellect can use to gain as much wealth and power he can. However, I won’t fault anyone calling him fascist.

Vulgar conventionalism is … that the life according to nature is the preserve of a small minority, of the natural elite, of those who are truly men and not [born] to be slaves. To be more precise, the summit of happiness is the life of the tyrant, of the man who has successfully committed the greatest crime by subordinating the city as a whole to his private good and who can afford to drop the appearance of justice or legality.

Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss.

para-fascism – a form of authoritarian and ultra-nationalist conservatism which adopts the external trappings of fascism while rejecting its call for genuine social and ethical revolution (see pp. 120–4)

Nature of Fascism, R Griffin

My bad, meant to add context. The « rectification » campaign included struggle sessions as a tool of Maoist propaganda.

The purpose of the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” was to make opponents come out in the open so they could be arrested and eliminated. The subsequent “rectification” campaign could not, in Mao’s words, be “gentle as a breeze or a summer rain for the enemies of the people.”

Even a propaganda centered on education cannot do without terror. In order to arrive at full compliance with propaganda, the 7 percent “incorrigible” individualists must be eliminated. The objective of Mao’s propaganda is a double one: to integrate individuals into the new body politic as deeply as possible, and, at the same time, to detach them from the old groups, such as the family or traditional village organizations. These groups must be disintegrated, always through action from within. For this there must be maximum conformity on the part of the individual.

Propaganda, Jacques Ellul

For context, this theory is a central belief of the Dark Enlightenment oligarchs who financed Trump’s election. He is a useful tool, to be scapegoated and replaced by Vance when he has served his purpose of dismantling democracy.

I’m stealing this

I don’t know how I feel about the term dung cakes…

After repetitive exposure to this propaganda (repetition priming), the people were beginning to believe and stand up for what each respective government had been flashing before their eyes, without them even knowing it.

https://sites.psu.edu/psych256sp18003/2018/03/04/h/

The fact of being exposed to propaganda and misinformation, repeatedly and continuously, has a psychological affect over time.

The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long period, for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges.

Propaganda, Jacques Ellul

Fun quote: “We need a de-Ba’athification program … in the United States.” — JD Vance.

The Wiki article doesn’t mention it, but his nickname was “Poison” Ivy Lee.

Chapter 2 of The Nature of Fascism provides the concise definition and discusses structural weaknesses of fascism which is important to know these days.

Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interests of a class, a community, or a state, the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed.

The word “truth” itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.

The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek

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