News bits: Dark free speech rising; God's home in the brain; A brain gone woke; Etc.

The Hill reports about evidence that DJT's violence-inciting rhetoric is poisoning congress:

Trump’s violent talk shows signs of taking over Congress

Trump-allied conservatives are using more pugnacious rhetoric than ever, and in some cases, such as an incident Tuesday featuring Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), are ready to make things physical, a trend that is setting off alarm bells on Capitol Hill.

Republican and Democratic senators say former President Trump’s bombastic threats and insults, which have proved to be a winning political formula for the GOP, are catching on more broadly in Congress.

Senators in both parties say they were shocked when Mullin, a first-term senator and Trump ally, challenged the president of the Teamsters to a fistfight in the middle of a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, forcing the 82-year-old chair, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), to step in to keep blood from being spilled on his carpet.

Mullin told the Teamsters leader to “stand your butt up” and sprung out of his chair while taking off a wedding ring to prepare for melee.

The Oklahoma senator, a former mixed martial arts fighter, told CNN on Wednesday he had “full intentions” of pummeling the labor boss right there in the hearing room.

“First thing I thought of when I stood up I thought, ‘I’m going to break my hand on this guy’s face’ and will take my wedding ring off,” he said

That exemplifies how DJT’s hate speech is getting some radical right Republicans to act, imagine what might happen if DJT asked for people to make a citizen’s arrest of judges and prosecutors in his court cases. 

People like Elon Musk defend this kind of violence-inducing speech as merely free speech. DJT’s inciting rhetoric is mostly legal free speech, but all of it is dark free speech. All or nearly all American pro-tyranny elites (i) ignore or deny the existence of dark free speech, (ii) deny it causes harm to society, democracy or the rule of law, and/or (iii) cynically claim it is honest speech speaking truth to evil socialist liars and deep state pedophiles.

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A 2012 article commented about God in the brains 

"We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it's not isolated to one specific area of the brain," said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. "Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals' spiritual experiences."

A 2019 paper commented:

We conducted a systematic literature review of research on the neurobiological correlates of R/S, which resulted in 25 reports studying primarily R/S with electroencephalography, structural neuroimaging (MRI), and functional neuroimaging (fMRI, PET). These studies investigated a wide range of religions (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism, Islam) and R/S states and behaviors (e.g., resting state, prayer, judgments) and employed a wide range of methodologies, some of which (e.g., no control group, varying measures of religiosity, small sample sizes) raise concerns about the validity of the results. .... The findings implicate several brain regions potentially associated with R/S development and behavior, including the medial frontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, default mode network, and caudate.

A 2022 paper commented:

Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious, with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved. .... In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1 = 88; N2 = 105), we applied lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.

These findings suggest that spirituality and religiosity map to a common brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray, a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning, pain modulation, and altruistic behavior.  

Spirituality, or more precisely spiritual acceptance, has been defined as “a stable shift in worldview towards belief in forces that cannot be rationally comprehended or objectively proven.”  

Patients with brain disorders can provide unique insight into the neural substrate of spirituality and religiosity that can complement data from functional neuroimaging. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy can present with hyper-religious symptoms, which has been linked to hippocampal as opposed to amygdala pathology. .... Such patients can allow for causal inferences between neuroanatomy and spiritual or religious behaviors, but multiple different brain regions have been implicated.

PAG = periaqueductal gray

Well, that's clear as mud. It's good to get that straightened out.  

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The Daily Beast reported: Joe Manchin Says Trump ‘Will Destroy’ U.S. Democracy if He Wins in 2024. Another mind has gone woke. And there was much rejoicing -- yaaay. 

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Another tyranny warning from a NYT opinion by Jamelle Bouie:

But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-democratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.

This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.

Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.

It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor.

I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose the majority of votes statewide.

In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future — but the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.

Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities.  

It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice Legislature. Or so they thought.

Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”

Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators.  

To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, [Republicans] always win.

That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question.

Republican elites know that for the most part they cannot persuade and win policy arguments on the merits. That is why they have no choice but to resort to ferocious, often threatening dark free speech. Their rhetoric and propaganda Leviathan deceives, lies, slanders, crackpots, misdirects, and foments as much irrational, unwarranted reason-destroying emotion as possible, e.g., fear, hate, anger, intolerance, bigotry, racism and distrust of democracy and pro-democratic institutions, political opposition, inconvenient facts, true truths and actual history.