Echoes of Fascism

 

For me, this video had echoes of the Kapos who operated in the concentration camps under the Nazis. The young lady’s sweet and gentle manner wasn’t reassuring to me, either.

If you’re not familiar with the roles of Kapos in the camps, they were prisoners who were used to provide oversight over their fellow prisoners:

In the Nazi concentration camps, the term Kapo was first used at Dachau from which it spread to the other camps.

Regardless of the origin, Kapos played a vital role in the Nazi camp system as a large number of prisoners within the system required constant oversight. Most Kapos were put in charge of a prisoner work gang, called Kommando. It was the Kapos job to brutally force prisoners to do forced labor, despite the prisoners being sick and starving.

Facing prisoner against prisoner served two goals for the SS: it allowed them to meet a labor need while simultaneously furthering tensions between various groups of prisoners.

In case you think I’m overreacting, let me tell you about a program that has been established at several college campuses all over the country. It is called the Student Health Ambassadors program, and a “toolkit” for creating these programs is now available from the American College Health Association.

In a recent article of the Federalist, the insidious nature of these programs is described:

How much would you have to be paid to commit social suicide? What if a paycheck wasn’t the only perk, but it also entitled you to a sickening sense of self-righteousness and an air of superiority?

This appears to be the tradeoff many college students have made this semester as universities’ ‘Student Health Ambassadors,’ paid adult hall monitors whose job is to patrol their campuses and enforce mask policies and distancing regulations. Several different institutions have opened this position, each one slightly different but all giving students authority over their peers in the name of public health. 

One of the most egregious examples comes from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where student Covid commissars have been given the authority to ‘break up social gatherings” and to check students’ ‘clearance certificates.’ Students who violate COVID policies can face suspension and expulsion. The enforcers, who are paid $15 an hour, even don vests and T-shirts emblazoned with the health ambassador logo.

Later in his article, he offers this insight:

It’s all theater, but refusing to believe in this cult of paranoia makes it all the more important that people are pressured into outward displays of obedience. The more absurd the rules get the more they require frequent social reaffirmation through unquestioning obedience.

Although there are students who support vaccine mandates, others are protesting what they experience as “overreach”:

Student complaints include objections to restrictions on their travel on and off campus, increased surveillance and what they consider erosion of civil liberties. Student-led petitions have prompted some schools to drop the use of location-tracking apps and requirements to wear sensors that monitor vital signs.

At the core of their concerns is a fear that universities are constructing a bureaucracy designed to control a generation just coming of age.

There is no doubt, however, that some schools are taking their mandates seriously, and students are pushing back:

Michigan has seen its share of reprisals: Students at Oakland University near Detroit successfully pushed back against a wearable ‘bio button’ designed to monitor heart rate, temperature and respiration, and warn the school if a student was showing signs of Covid-19. At Albion College in Albion, Mich., students petitioned the school to drop an app that monitored their location—on and off campus. Last week, Western Michigan University lost a federal appeal to require student athletes to be vaccinated to play.

Montana State University instituted a policy to place students on probation who have twice been reported by a professor for not wearing a mask. A third complaint results in a semester suspension. A fourth mask offense is grounds for expulsion.

Universities who have adopted the Student Health Ambassadors program tout their success and continue to expand their efforts. UNC Asheville celebrates its success:

‘From the beginning when we first got hired, it was solely focused on COVID, but as we learned more about COVID and our campus and what we needed, we learned that so much more goes into it…. There are so many things that tie into this work. Our themes each week helped students fill in those holes to prevent COVID,’ said senior Skyler Chillson.

UNC Asheville has also created special awards for their Student Health Ambassadors. I’m sure that there are many people motivated to create new ways to permeate the university system with these kinds of efforts.

So many questions are being asked about the virus, and just as many theories are being espoused: when will the pandemic be over? Are we ready to accept Covid-19 as endemic indefinitely? How far will organizations go to enforce their requirements, even in the face of new scientific information? When will students finally decide they’ve had enough of the universities’ demands and intrusions on their life, and what actions will they take in response? When will there be sufficient understanding of Covid-19 to roll back these programs?

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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  1. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Henry Racette (View Comment):
    often go through a phase during which fairness, compliance, justice is a near-obsession.

    Justice isn’t part of it. True justice doesn’t always feel good. And a woman is more likely to define justice by what feels good. All you have to do is change the protagonist in the narrative and the proscription for justice changes.

    In fairness, I think men do it, too.

    • #61
  2. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Stina (View Comment):

    Henry Racette (View Comment):
    often go through a phase during which fairness, compliance, justice is a near-obsession.

    Justice isn’t part of it. True justice doesn’t always feel good. And a woman is more likely to define justice by what feels good. All you have to do is change the protagonist in the narrative and the proscription for justice changes.

    In fairness, I think men do it, too.

    True. But she may think she is serving true justice, even though we know she’s not. This comes out of the distortion of values and their definitions.

    • #62
  3. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Thanks for posting this. I find it frightening.  Interesting contrast with article above on court packing.  Reminds me of Nazis.  Behaved well with old folks at the top, at least, briefly, as they moved rapidly forming true believers among youth and those who just wanted power.

    • #63
  4. DrewInWisconsin, Oaf Member
    DrewInWisconsin, Oaf
    @DrewInWisconsin

    RushBabe49 (View Comment):
    Seattle police have already quit rather than be vaccinated.  The city already has a severe law-enforcement deficit, and it will only get worse.

    I think it’s deliberate.

    • #64
  5. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patriot) Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patriot)
    @ArizonaPatriot

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Skyler (View Comment):
    I think women are not more concerned with justice, I think it’s more likely that more women live in fear of most things. They demand to be protected.

    Nope

    There is empirical evidence on this.

    The first part is from the Big 5 personality model.  Women are higher in “trait neuroticism,” which is sensitivity to negative emotion.  It’s a pretty large difference in average and distribution, as these things go.  Here’s one paper on it, which reports the male-female differences measured by Cohen’s d.

    Cohen’s d is a technical measure of size of difference in statistics, also called “effect size”.  Don’t worry about the details.  The general rule is that a of 0.2 is small, 0.5 is medium, 0.8 is large.

    So here’s a rundown of the sex differences in the Big 5 traits and aspects, in order of magnitude measured by Cohen’s d (according to this one paper — there could be somewhat different results in other studies).

    • Women are higher in agreeableness, 0.48
    • Women are higher in compassion, 0.45
    • Women are higher in withdrawal, 0.40
    • Women are higher in trait neuroticism, 0.39
    • Women are higher in politeness, 0.36
    • Women are higher in volatility, 0.30
    • Women are higher in openness to experience, 0.27
    • Women are higher in enthusiasm, 0.23
    • Men are higher in openness to intellectual matters, o.22

    There are other traits and aspects with lower Cohen’s d, under 0.2, which means smaller than “small.”  For example, men are somewhat more assertive and industrious, women somewhat more orderly.

    I’d expect the result for trait neuroticism to include fear.

    I don’t know much of anything about the fear literature in psychology.  I did find this paper in a quick search, based on a pretty large surveys of social anxiety.  It also reports using Cohen’s d.

    Overall, women are higher in total social anxiety in both tests used, d=.36 and d=0.21.  The larger sub-differences in one of the tests (the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Adults) are interesting.  By Cohen’s d, women have higher anxiety from

    • Interactions with the opposite sex, 0.45
    • Speaking in public/talking to people in authority, 0.38
    • Criticism and embarrassment, 0.28
    • Assertive expressions of annoyance, 0.16
    • Interactions with strangers, 0.09

    In this particular paper, there was no tested characteristic for which men had higher anxiety than women.

    All of these results are matters of averages and distributions.  There will be some unusually fearful men, and some unusually non-fearful women.  But I think that understanding the distributions and averages of certain characteristics can help us in understanding human behavior.

    • #65
  6. Henry Racette Member
    Henry Racette
    @HenryRacette

    I’m about half way through Carole Hooven’s very interesting book about testosterone and its effect on psychology and physiology between the sexes. That females inherently tend to be more cautious seems certain. Whether or not one wishes to correlate caution with fearfulness is a matter of taste, I suppose. I would, because I think the latter is probably a mechanism nature uses to encourage the former.

    The phenomenon of young ladies becoming acutely aware of “fairness” and “justice,” and getting upset by those who fail to comply with societal expectations, is something I and other parents have observed anecdotally. I admit there could be observer bias here, but I do think that being a “Karen” is a sex-linked trait.

    While I might quibble with Skyler’s “live in fear of most things” comment, I do think that our nation suffers from an excess of cowardice, and I think the systemic emasculation of men is a major contributor to that.

    • #66
  7. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    Skyler (View Comment):

    I think women are not more concerned with justice, I think it’s more likely that more women live in fear of most things. They demand to be protected.

    There are multiple factors in play.  This one should not be overlooked.  

    • #67
  8. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patriot) Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patriot)
    @ArizonaPatriot

    Henry Racette (View Comment):

    I’m about half way through Carole Hooven’s very interesting book about testosterone and its effect on psychology and physiology between the sexes. That females inherently tend to be more cautious seems certain. Whether or not one wishes to correlate caution with fearfulness is a matter of taste, I suppose. I would, because I think the latter is probably a mechanism nature uses to encourage the former.

    The phenomenon of young ladies becoming acutely aware of “fairness” and “justice,” and getting upset by those who fail to comply with societal expectations, is something I and other parents have observed anecdotally. I admit there could be observer bias here, but I do think that being a “Karen” is a sex-linked trait.

    While I might quibble with Skyler’s “live in fear of most things” comment, I do think that our nation suffers from an excess of cowardice, and I think the systemic emasculation of men is a major contributor to that.

    I agree, Hank.

    I think that we suffer from an excess of both fear and cowardice, which I don’t consider to be the same thing.  I don’t think that courage and fearlessness are the same thing, either.  There is such a thing as an irrational fear, but there is also plenty of rational fear.  There are dangers in the world.

    I like a line from George R.R. Martin in the Game of Thrones books, which was something like this.  Little Bran asks his father Ned, can a man be brave when he is afraid?  Ned responds, that is the only time that a man can be brave.

    • #68
  9. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    Women, after puberty, have depression at twice the rate of men.

    Without drugs at play, women don’t end up in prison.

    hormones matter

    • #69
  10. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    Henry Racette (View Comment):

    I wonder how many of these mask enforcers are female. I wonder because I believe that young women, during adolescence, often go through a phase during which fairness, compliance, justice is a near-obsession. If one believes, as I do, that adolescence is being prolonged into adulthood with the help of our infantilizing institutions, it’s entirely plausible that there’s a population of young women out there eager to make sure everyone is just complying with the rules… because it’s right.

    I could be completely wrong. And maybe young men are just as involved in this as are the young women. (Then again, young men have become awfully sissified of late.)

    The young lady in the video seems like a sweet enough kid. I called her a Karen, but she’s really not that unpleasant. Of course, it’s a PSA, not a real encounter, but she certainly comes off as someone who thinks she’s doing the right thing, rather than someone trying to curry favor with authority and bring others to heel.

    I think I’m going to go with arrested adolescence.

    (Of course, that won’t make it any easier when and if the perpetual adolescents line us up against the wall and enforce the cultural revolution / climate change policy.)

    Last year on FB, in a private group that originally had been about general health matters, a young woman took on the task of lecturing the rest of us on the benefits of all the COV restrictions.

    When she finally got our point that there were few benefits to any of the madness in lockdowns, she then stated “I am willing to stay home for two full years, even if all it saves is one life.”

    The idealism her remark demonstrated was admirable.

    The problem is that for  our fairly  decent society that has evolved since even before 1776 is to remain functioning and  in place, the consequences of idealism  must be examined before new rules of law are enacted.

    If everyone stayed home for two years, we would all be dead. (Well maybe Mormons who followed the prophet’s rule of putting aside two years of food would be okay. And of course some off the grid preppers. At least from a nutritional standpoint.)

    But I was directed to a web page the other day on a college web site detailing the absolute degradation in college life, as the students are frantic,  unhappy and clearly disturbed by everything they have lived through since March 2020.

    And it has only been 18 months.

    Idealism offered up by people who do not consider consequences is dangerous.

     

    • #70
  11. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):
    But I was directed to a web page the other day on a college web site detailing the absolute degradation in college life, as the students are frantic,  unhappy and clearly disturbed by everything they have lived through since March 2020.

    I heard that in CA, college students are rebelling against the restrictions. Good for them!

    • #71
  12. Skyler Coolidge
    Skyler
    @Skyler

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Skyler (View Comment):
    I think women are not more concerned with justice, I think it’s more likely that more women live in fear of most things. They demand to be protected.

    Nope

    I didn’t say all.  I said “more,” as in more than men.  That’s undeniable.

    • #72
  13. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Skyler (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Skyler (View Comment):
    I think women are not more concerned with justice, I think it’s more likely that more women live in fear of most things. They demand to be protected.

    Nope

    I didn’t say all. I said “more,” as in more than men. That’s undeniable.

    I objected to the words “most things” and “demand.”

    • #73
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