PS

Sam J., I agree with you to the extent that "gaslighting" (in the core original meaning that is spoken of, not the loose functional meaning PeterIke offered a definition for in another comment), it's like a semi-synonym for "chutzpah."

"Chutzpah" traces to Yiddish, of course, where it marinated for centuries among those people, during their long period as guests in host-societies in parts Europe. Before its time as a word in Yiddish, "chutzpah" is said to trace to the ancient Semitic languages.

I mentioned earlier that European languages don't have such a word (definitely the Germanic languages don't), which even now in the deeply corrupted and debased condition of the English-speaking West that we have on our hands, there is still no basic word for this behavior. That is one structural reason why "gaslighting" as a word might have taken off. But its origin story and its rise to fame do seem to be more from the Left, at least going by the Steve Sailer blog occurrences.

PS

Alarmist, most of my military brothers were fond of quoting the UCMJ concerning sexual matters “penetration, no matter how slight”…

PS

"...It does seem the point I have come to is that the rise of the word "gaslighting" ought be filed under the Peak Stupidity file for examples of the rise of stupidity...."

I profoundly, virulently, emphatically disagree. Gaslighting is a perfect word to convey a very complex idea.

People tell you something when you know they are lying, and they know they are lying, and then deny it over and over. If you pay attention, most every single thing Jews say is one big gaslight. This is, I can not stress this enough, not even close, a huge part of the mental makeup of Jews. They do this constantly. Even when it's not needed, they will try to lead you astray. I believe it's genetic. Just like baby animals have spots for camouflage. This is the essence of large parts of our society now. Think about furries, trans, globalhomo, White Superiority, constant cries of racism, all the super pozzed TV, literature, on and on and on, it's all gaslighting telling you what they say is normal and any objections you have, means you are crazy. It's pervasive in most all media today and there are paid people who go online blurting out even more constantly.

Gaslighting, a perfect word for our reality today. A long string of thoughts in one word. I have no doubt that the uptick in the word gaslighting is because, they have up ticked the frequency of actual "gaslighting" to stupendous levels. I have been using this word for a very long time and with that one word can covey a big idea. Psychopaths use gaslighting constantly and if you read stuff about them the victims who out the Spaths constantly use the word to explain what they are doing to them.

Always willing to be helpful, I'll even give you a fine examole. This is art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50BiGmGhgWE

PS

Gaslit by a dog named poo

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/01/stools-to-fuels-street-lamp-runs-on-dog-poo-bio-energy-waste-

PS

Another great French gaslighting movie, PeterIke - et Bon soir á tout mes amis á Peak Stupidity! - - :

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1064932/

PS: Interesting convo on the gaslighting, guys. I had a definition in my head for a while that was fairly specific, but I agree that nowadays it's used to means about anything someone (usually) writes on-line that you don't agree with or think is lies.

Sorry, I've been really busy - may not be able to get in my AA post today -if not, it'll be tomorrow.

Mr. Rations, that very bridge collapse is what I have for a top image for the post I want to write about the "fruits of AA" or whatever the title will be.

Thanks for the comments, all!

PS When one puts the loons in charge of the asylum, this is what one gets.

PS

Whatever its origins, I think in contemporary parlance "gaslighting" means trying to fool you with lies. Like how telling you Covid vaccines were "safe and effective" over and over was a lie, hence "they were gaslighting us about the vaccines."

Like saying "there is no such thing as race" is a ridiculous and obvious lie, but there are many people who believe it. Fooled by gaslighting!

In the movie, it's specifically done to drive someone crazy. You know, do weird things like move a painting on the wall without them knowing, and then say "oh no, that painting was always there!" Now it really just means "people are lying to you about this thing."

Anyway, there's a funny French movie along these lines. A guy who's had a big mustache for years shaves it off, and nobody notices. He gets mad and everyone says "you never had a mustache!" Well, the French think it's funny.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428856/

PS

Adam Smith wrote, on "gaslighting":

"They'll tell her 'something' one day and the next day pretend like she is crazy for thinking they said 'something'..."

This sounds like immature, kid behavior. If the children are adults, as you say, at least in terms of relationship with the mother they are still leaning heavily onto their childhood roles. I guess that's not so uncommon but clearly can be a bad thing. Such is my highly amateur diagnosis.

I'm reminded of the old kid's line, "I know you are, but what am I?" --- Would that be a form of 'gaslighting'?

I'm also reminded of how a well-known anti-semite once wrote an essay all about how no Germanic language has ever had a word for 'chutzpah.' The concept was irrelevant to the society and culture. People so seldom would act like that, it never required a word. Likewise, the actions behind the hard form of "gaslighting" are psychotic. One is better off in a culture without such a word/concept. But it's here, thick and heavy, now!

PS

Adam Smith conveyed this cheery message from the woman profiled two weeks ago here in the hallowed pages of Peak Stupidity:

"Italy is an important member of the US-led alliance and anyone who disagrees with this position will be excluded from government, Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy party, pledged..."

What to make of this?

The price of doing business?

True ideological commitment?

That she is not 'principled'?

That Peak Stupidity's editorial board was right to be semi-skeptical of her?

PS

PeterIke, interesting to hear that you were long familiar with and had heard "gaslighting." I've got to say that if I'd ever heard it, before the late 2010s that is, it didn't stick with me.

Here's what I get from Ngram for "gaslighting," AmE corpus, low smoothing:

https://hailtoyou.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/gaslighting-ngram-1990-to-2019.png

A flatline, then an explosion starting in 2016/17. There is a one-year smaller spike in 2007 but that fades substantially in 2008 and then is back to the low baseline in 2009.

By 2018 and 2019, Ngram thinks the word "gaslighting" was making appearances at about 30x or 40x its former baseline rate (vs. early 2010s) or around 50x to 75x the former rate (vs. the 1990s to 2005 period).

PS: haha, accidentally hit the go button...

Then some guy wrote a book about interesting but mostly unknown places and someone gave it a catchier name...

https://unusualplaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/flamefalls.jpg

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PS: Greetings, everyone

Mr. Ike jogged my memory. Something I had not thought about in years...

When I was a kid (before I could buy beer in Fort Erie Ontario) my friends and I would often go hiking to a place we called the gaslight...

Then some guy wrote a book about interesting but ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Flame_Falls

PS

"This word, 'gaslighting,' which was not really in the vocabulary at all a few years ago though they claim it dates to a 1940s movie"

But it DOES come from a movie, called "Gaslight." A guy tries to drive his wife crazy by tricking her and making her think she's losing her mind. I've known this term forever.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036855/

According to Google NGram it takes a bump up in 2002 and that has an enormous uptick in 2011 for some reason.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gaslighting&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgaslighting%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cgaslighting%3B%2Cc0

Of course it was popular in the 1800s as well, but that was when it meant lighting with gas!

PS 2+2=5 and the maths is a construct of the white male patriarchy.
WOKE architects and doctors? A glorious future awaits.
Remember the collapsing diversity bridge in Florida?
It has been memory holed.

PS

Mr. Moderator, here’s an interesting twist on dressing as an animal....

“Childminder, 64, causes outrage on TikTok after dressing up as Peppa Pig and cooking BACON while pretending rashers are 'Mummy and Daddy Pig' from the cartoon”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11330965/Vegans-outraged-childminder-dressed-Peppa-Pig-videos-cooking-BACON.html

PS

That administrators and teachers still deny untoward things they are doing means parents still have some power. Parents should pull their kids out of public schools (and probably most private schools too) ASAP, because we are very close to the day when they won’t deny their evil agenda because they won’t have to.

The only way things are going to even have a chance to change for the better is when thirty million American children are home schooled. The biggest bulge in the US population below age twenty is around 13 to 15 years of age, so it might already be too late, as their young skulls full of mush have probably already been warped by their purple-haired, fully pierced, non-binary Libs-of-Tik-Tok exemplar teachers.

lulz ... Froggy-style. I remember my legal briefing upon joining the USAF being something along the lines of “The Air Force’s official position on sex is Missionary.” The enlisted folk were also told “Fifteen will get you twenty.”

PS: One more thing, Mr. Hail,

https://www.rt.com/news/565023-berlusconi-zelensky-nato-coalition/

"Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has reportedly claimed that Kiev triggered a conflict with Russia by reneging on a peace plan for eastern Ukraine, a tape provided to the media suggests. In an apparent response to the leak, Giorgia Meloni, who has been tasked with forming a new Italian government, stated that people who do not share a pro-NATO stance would have no place in her coalition."

"Italy is an important member of the US-led alliance and anyone who disagrees with this position will be excluded from government, Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy party, pledged on Wednesday evening, as quoted by the newspaper La Repubblica."

"She (Meloni) repeatedly pledged her support for the EU and NATO after winning the election."

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PS: Lol... Mr. Moderator,

I think the term you're looking for is "froggy style"...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093561-doing-it-froggy-style-kermit-sutras-seventh-position-revealed/

Mr. Hail, I too noticed this "gaslighting" word come out of nowhere. (So new that my spell check underlines it.) I think it does describe a real toxic way some people interact with others. Not healthy for a relationship.

I have a friend who has adult children who do this to her. (Perhaps there is some better term to describe the style of interaction?) They'll tell her "something" one day and the next day pretend like she is crazy for thinking they said "something". (not the only example as it can manifest in other ways too.) She's taken to saving all her texts with her girls so she can have a record to "prove it" (whatever it is), but it doesn't matter, they sort of treat her like she is mildly insane. (She's not.) It's not "scapegoating" but a bit like it in a way. It's used to manipulate someone to their detriment. Not a healthy way to deal with people.

Cheers to a great day, Messrs. Hail and Newman!

☮

PS

Michelle Malkin uses the word "gaslighting" in the first paragraph.

This word, "gaslighting," which was not really in the vocabulary at all a few years ago though they claim it dates to a 1940s movie, is used all too loosely and without specific meaning.

When some people use this word, it's meant to suggest the party being referred to is deliberately engaging in a calculated form of psychological torture of the victim for some evil purpose, something like mind-control by a shaman might be. Ironically, therefore, the very use of the trendy word "gaslighting" may be a form of the action it it meant to suggest!

I think that Malkin paragraph would be stronger if she just used the old standby word, "denial."

_________

Gaslighting origin theory

My theory is that the rise of the word "gaslighting" is not just the usual up-and-down of new words entering and exiting the language at random, but that it's an example of people yearning to create psychological diagnoses.

We know that huge numbers today, especially young women, claim some kind of specifically-named mental health problem, a much-commented-on phenomenon. This "gaslighting" as a supposed psychological-torture method is like a reverse-image of that, attributing to others the characteristic of villainous tormentor that a person with a genuine persecution complex or some other problem might conjure up. It's all self-reinforcing.

A major place you see this word used is: women who claim men (either specific men they're fallen out with, or all men) engage in this behavior during relationships, that it is a standard tool the male-abuser (which is or can be most men, they say). "Gaslighting," whatever it is, is a male method of controlling and oppressing women, if you listen or read to such women. That analysis is very squishy and won't hold much water at all before caving in in illogical and all-purpose stupidity.

It does seem the point I have come to is that the rise of the word "gaslighting" ought be filed under the Peak Stupidity file for examples of the rise of stupidity.

A search of the times "gaslighting" has appeared in the pages of the Steve Sailer blog illustrates the point well, I think.

The full Sailer record of using the term "gaslighting" in blog entries is almost always quoting other people, especially the kind of woman I allude to above:

- once in Sept. 2016 -- quoting New York Times staff writer Susan Dominus alleging that Trump uses this tactic, apparently implying he uses it as a mind-control strategy against his dupe-followers;

- once in early 2017 -- quoting Ms. Nussbaum of the New Yorker, previously mentioned, who says it wasn't "gaslighting" by Trump but his use of jokes, which as a Jew she appreciates even though she hates Trump just as much as the next person. As few had ever heard of it at the time, Ms. Nussbaum defines "gaslighting" there parenthetically as "lies that make you feel crazy";

- twice in late 2018 -- Sailer uses the word on his own for the first time, in two posts on Google's rigged search results to supposedly try to alter perceptions of reality;

- once in late 2019 -- Sailer uses it himself again, on affirmative action and how it is presented;

- twice in 2020 -- once quoting a Jewish professor who allegedly pretended for years to be Puerto Rican; the other time quoting from a notorious article by a feminist titled "The dangerous rise of white men who refuse to date Woke women";

- twice in 2021 -- once quoting Akinyemi Oni-Orisan, who holds a pharmacy-doctorate, in a supposedly academic paper on how to improve Black mental health); and once quoting a Scientific American article on the supposed existence of a 'Jedi' Religion; and

- twice in 2022 -- once quoting the prolific Jewish gatekeeper-commenter Jack D; the other time, Sailer uses it again himself for the first time since late 2019, responding to an article by Chelsea Conaboy titled "Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created" as an ironic-summary of her position.

Commenters used it sporadically as early as the late 2000s and early 2010s, but by the early 2020s it was appearing ten-plus times per month from commenters.

PS: Thanks, Adam ... I think. So they are branching out to Amphibians. The whole Furries movement has been very classist if you ask me.

BTW, when she says "frog style", was she talking about sex?

PS: Good evening, Mr. Moderator,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hQe5fjkdXE

American schools seem like a really healthy place for children.

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