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Fauxcult vs. Foucault

Abusing Foucault: How Conservatives and Liberals Misunderstand "Social Construct" Sexuality
- "What he wanted to understand was how sexuality came to be the question—the one thing we believe we have to answer before we can move on to anything else."

Is virtue signalling a perversion of morality?"
- "If such virtue signalling is a central – and justifying – function of public moral discourse, then the claim that it perverts this discourse is false. What about the hypocrisy claim?"
Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions

James Spader explains Scientology in an episode of Boston Legal
How to Spot a Cult
Instead of judging the ideology of the group, let's judge the effects of the group.
The first in-road is to weigh which ideology you feel is integral to yourself and society.
To use Kant's Golden rule, Do as You Would Have Become a Universal Law (A natural law, like gravity)
- Personal freedom or government (central) control of individuals.
- Democratic Open Forums of discussion or Totalitarian Control of discussions.
- Diversity or singular sameness.
Once these are determined by you, the question of what is cult-like is no longer about whether beliefs, rituals, and customs are shared or disparate.
Two difficult aspects:
1. Some groups may use rhetoric to suggest the opposite of their actual views, or to lessen the perception of their ultimate goals.
2. Some groups may espouse some of the "good" ideals in Emma Bragdon's scale below while upholding some of the "bad" ideals.
For instance, Sweden (a very open and liberal society) has a mandatory military service.

Gordon Allport's Scale is a foundational tool for establishing what a hate group is according to the group's actions and not according to the group's ideology.
Using Allport's Scale in an absurd way can reveal how the word hate is often misapplied.
- I f*cking hate coconuts: antilocution.
- I don't want them in my food: avoidance
- I will not buy or have in my house coconuts: discrimination.
- When I'm in a store and no one can catch me, I punch or spit on the coconuts: attack.
- I'm working on a chemical poison that would wipe out coconuts from the earth: annihilate
The difficulty with this scale is suggesting when distaste for something becomes hate: at antilocution? at avoidance? at discrimination?
One solution is looking at the progression of a group from one level to the next, and not checking the "right" box/level.
Ironic Nazis Are Still Nazis: Hatred often hides behind a mask of jokiness.

Using Bragdon's scale AND Allport's scale together(and trying to avoid your own personal ideological bias) interrogate the following