The Linguistics of Hate

keep-calm-and-hate-corpus-linguisticsRight-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and Social dominance orientation (SDO) are measures of personality traits and tendencies. To measure them, you ask people to rate statements like:

Superior groups should dominate inferior groups

The withdrawal from tradition will turn out to be a fatal fault one day

People rate their opinions on these questions using a 1 to 5 scale from Definitely Disagree to Strongly Agree. These scales have their detractors but they also demonstrate some useful and stable reliability across cultures.

Note that while both of these measures tend to be higher in American self-described “conservatives,” they also can be higher for leftist authoritarians and they may even pop up for subsets of attitudes among Western social liberals about certain topics like religion. Haters abound.

I used the R packages twitterR, textminer, wordcloud, SnowballC, and a few others and grabbed a few thousand tweets that contained the #DonaldJTrump hashtag. A quick scan of them showed the standard properties of tweets like repetition through retweeting, heavy use of hashtags, and, of course, the use of the #DonaldJTrump as part of anti-Trump sentiments (something about a cocaine-use video). But, filtering them down, there were definite standouts that seemed to support a RWA/SDO orientation. Here are some examples:

The last great leader of the White Race was #trump #trump2016 #donaldjtrump #DonaldTrump2016 #donaldtrump”

Just a wuss who cant handle the defeat so he cries to GOP for brokered Convention. # Trump #DonaldJTrump

I am a PROUD Supporter of #DonaldJTrump for the Highest Office in the land. If you don’t like it, LEAVE!

#trump army it’s time, we stand up for family, they threaten trumps family they threaten us, lock and load, push the vote…

Not surprising, but the density of them shows a real aggressiveness that somewhat shocked me.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes: Section 11 (Chapter 8)

Against SuperheroesThe twin horns, the god dilemma. In retrospect, for that period and the aberrancy that flowed through my mind, there remained a small piece of me that was grounded in the sad derelicts of my moral constructions. Could I simply be moral because I was a god? Or was the moral order external to me making me irrelevant. Irrelevant or arbitrary. I reflect now, under some control, on my perverse desires during that period (really they never left me but were just suppressed and—what is the term?—sublimated into other actions). But perhaps that is the very nature of the trajectory I was on: the breakdown and atomization of my soul or personality, and the reconstruction of it like some child emerging from the jungle, biting fellow kindergartners, until the rough edges of her being are chiseled off by running the complex maze of sharp-cornered lessons. I had been reborn and was still the wolf child.

The mythologies I was trained in tell me only sometimes about the growth of gods from childhood. Endymion, Bellerophon, Baal and Anat, they all emerge without any sense of tempest in their birth or any period of maturation. Even Jesus was born, revered, and then was spreading the word of his own godliness without any explication about the transitional period. I can only imagine the difficulty of raising that boy, whether he was arrogant towards his mother and stepfather or was stinking of zen, as the Japanese would say, so holier than thou that mother and father just suppressed contempt until the little carpenter was old enough to be thrust out into the world.

There was an intensity to the feeling and beliefs during the transformation, a rising up of what might be translated as pride, but a pride that was baseless, having been sucked of all the historical content of achievements and accolades that might result in pride.… Read the rest