The emotionally deranged, moral one-dimensionality of liberalism strikes again. They see everything along the care-harm axis, and therefore little concerns about, oh, liberty, say, or you know, truth, translate into their heads as "bad person doesn't care if others get hurt". They lack even the ability to register questions framed along other moral axes. It's not a language they speak.
Me, I'm at the place where I'm quite happy saying, no, your safety is not more important to me than my freedom.
Yes, but I don't think this was universally true of liberals even twenty years ago. Compare the generation of Paul Tsongas and Bruce Babbitt, Bob Kerrey and Jerry Brown, to this one. Something went wrong on the American left, badly.
Eisenstein's stack today is about safetyism. He suggests (i think) that it's partly a result of materialism replacing faith. The left leads that charge, no?
Prozac? I mean, seriously. Apparently SSRIs mute your emotions, and kill your empathy. Maybe anxious depressed people are getting tribal just to feel something?
Leftists mouthed the same nice sounding words 20 years ago to achieve their goal of greater power under socialist control w increased statism then as now. Imo, nothing, except some of the nice sounding wording, has changed as they continue to move to radicalize society towards a 'utopia'
That’s exactly it. This was how they thought they’d defeat Trump in 2016, “he’s a Bad Man.” He’s not NICE. HE tweets MEAN THINGS. Never mind the corruption of HRC—she CARES. It was 2015-2016 when those hated yard signs started appearing.
Diane, this is not a slam on you, because what you've described is legitimate.
But it was amazing how in April-May 2020 so many people suddenly started saying "I'm immunocompromised (so you have to dance to my tune)". Like it was the new "gluten-sensitive".
EXCELLENT COMMENTARY Diane! I was just discharged from the hospital yesterday after gyn surgery. My roommate at the hospital got the jab (I’m a Pureblood). She had a few comorbidities and was only in her 30’s! She’s having major health problems now and knows the jab caused it. I told her I’d send her detox information. Thank goodness she’s only had one shot.
Thank you so much for your input and help Diane! I’m in a VERY left leaning area and my hospital is in Sillycon Valley. Out of all the roommates I could have gotten, I was lucky enough to get a Christian Conservative-lol! Unfortunately, she doesn’t know about the great information I’ve been privy to over the last few years and all the great information on Substack. I will definitely send her the FLCC link and your link!
Fun fact: that was the original pedagogical purpose of putting playground equipment in school yards. Give them lots of iron bars and steel chains with which to damage themselves under the watchful eyes of adults. A few broken arms have a salutory effect on the rest of the students.
I remember one of my friends falling off and knocking out a tooth in 3rd grade. And when I say I remember that, I mean I will never forget it.
it also worked in my grade school when a friend fell off the monkey bars and broke his arm. i still remember his reaction to the fall and the break: he didn't want to get up, was in great pain and actually cried. and this was a kid who did not cry easily. i also remember the fact that he had to wear an arm cast for quite a while.
I guess I learned: don't land on your arm the wrong way. sometimes even tough kids cry. life is tragic and unfair. never get out of the boat.
There's one of those 'In This House We Believe' signs in my neighborhood.
At the other end of the block people are sleeping in their cars. For some mysterious reason the cars don't have 'In This Car We Believe' bumper stickers.
As Ayn Rand pointed out 70 years ago, we are where we are because of the collapse of the foundations of the philosophies & ideas that created unimaginable wealth & prosperity and the modern world. 100 years ago, the United States had immigrants streaming in from all over the world who simply wanted opportunity. No free money or housing or health care or education or EBT cards ... those who did not contribute to societal wealth starved. Harsh? Not really. Fast forward 100 years. We have a fat lazy, entitled, morally bankrupt, depraved culture that declares sick, perverted lying parasites to be the most virtuous among us. We worship at the altar of dog-crap. As the brain-dead virtue signal each other while devolving into tribalism (racism is the crudest form of collectivism), one begins to understand why the garbage piles up on the streets of New York, why 1000s of flights are cancelled every weekend and illiterate animals shoot each other nightly in the streets of every major city in our country. It sure wasn't a lack of money that caused this. Our parasite class has feasted on and looted the greatest concentration of wealth the world has ever seen. And they have wasted it or given it away while taking bribes to do so. What we see now will accelerate in both scale & severity before our system breaks down completely. After all, who is going to work to pay off the 150 trillion the idiot politicians have promised? All that matters now is what we do afterwards ... which ideas and beliefs will take hold? The ones that created the wealth, health, prosperity and good will among men? Or will we double down on death & destruction? This is real good vs. evil stuff and one for the ages.
The West is living off the fumes of past glory. We're in decline. And have been so for at least 70 years. Perhaps longer. Hugo's 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame' was a lament about the fall of architecture.
We don't even grieve our fallen civilization. In fact, we're rewriting it according to the facile wants of the zeitgeist. All must be erased and forgotten.
There's no reforming this. We have to grin and bear the collapse.
What I think I see here is: even the most powerful Americans are weaker than they were in the 20th century, so, rather than preying on outsiders by economically colonizing the global poor, and bombing powerful developed foreign countries (e.g. Japan, Germany), they've turned inward on America's poor and middle class. They've started to play the same old game but this time inside the US. It's their own little playing field because other outside global powers don't give a shit if Americans are abused. In fact, China is also playing: it has already destroyed millions of American jobs.
You get it, thank you. I've listened to the audio version at least a dozen times. Importing the people to work that we're letting in won't fix the problems we have. Looking at job sites for almost every company shows the same thing. Engineers and electricians are gone and aren't coming back. You can take someone who crossed illegally yesterday and show them which button to push to run the machine that makes your Hershey chocolate but the guy who troubleshoots or repairs it is gone.
Is it too simplistic to say that this republican (small "r") form of government in the United States was meant for a religious (broad definitions apply) and virtuous (possessing virtues of self-control, of self-efficacy, of regard, of respect, of kindness) people and is no longer a viable form of governance because those people are no longer a preponderance of the governed?
The rule of law protects individual freedom against the mob. Our founding fathers predicted that the US would fail inside of 30 years, as soon as the mob realized they could vote themselves stuff. I cringe every time I hear "democracy". I don't wish to be a part of your group, but I am happy to be the free citizen of a Republic. Just stay out of my life. Our federal government should be providing for a national defense (which they do not do -- they actually make the world less safe for Americans), mediating disputes between states and delivering mail. Everything else is an overreach by parasites & rent-seekers.
Many of the founding fathers certainly believed so. I think they overestimated the upward trajectory of “the enlightenment”, and underestimated the deceitfulness of the human heart.
Reason and science are now touted as the pillars on which the divorce from reality we see all around us rest. That makes for quite a conundrum. Which is why I think that many have (correctly) distilled this battle down into good vs. evil. Facts and logical arguments will fall on deaf ears. This is a spiritual battle and will be waged in the heart and souls of mankind.
How about they had courage and we don’t? Our Constitution is made for people who are very self governing as they are very self interested, let them pray or no. The Donner party were Religious Folk - it didn’t stop them from selling each other “Food” the entire trip, including the Lake. Nor from eating each other’s kids.
Religious people are like petit bourgeoisie aka middle class, they don’t cause trouble but they don’t stop it either do they? Not presently. Pace John Adams, the Revolution was about power and MONEY. They could quite see that England having sucked in the previously self interested but self maintaining colonies in the Seven Years War would now having noticed them RUIN THEM.
There’s no a whit of religious quarrel in the Revolution. They were being ruined as their reward for rallying to the Union Jack (once given subsidies to fight the British then tried to take back) and decided they did not wish to be squeezed into being Ireland or India (I think you’ll find in history the 🇬🇧Pound Sterling was backed with India’s looted gold, lol).
No complaint of religion was lodged against the Crown in 1776, indeed never.
So no prayer ...sorry... just doesn’t matter. Pass the ammunition.
There were many religious people in the GULAG.
Stalin died of old age, they were free.
There were many devout Jews killed in the Holocaust (indeed perhaps most).
We can go on ad infinitum.
Pass the ammunition, prayer is fine, unless it enverates courage or is a Cope.
I think John Adams may have been using the term "religious" as in "definitions of religious person: a person who manifests devotion to a deity. Antonyms: nonreligious person: a person who does not manifest devotion to a deity."
Our Republic wasn't designed for use by a non-religious people, in other words. the long warred makes good points beyond that simplistic definition exercise.
I do believe courage by all, religious or non-religious will be needed. And yes, it’s very much temporal in the sense that it’s happening now and requires us to take stands now.
I hate those damn yard signs with a passion. I always feel insulted. Do they really think their neighbors are hateful racists? Why do they need to declare their exceptional “non-racistness” then?
“ The claim “I don’t think these mRNA injections are as safe as they’ve been made out to be” is a character attack that threatens to take people out at the core like dynamite under a bridge: Are you saying I’m not a good person?”
thank you for crystallizing the disconnect. no wonder some folks seem unreachable.
Exactly. Remember early on they were complaining that some people weren’t “taking covid seriously” enough? Same dynamic. The point was that you had to WANT to help everyone, and TRY you’re best to STOP COVID and not think of reasons not to TRY.
They want you to know the vax does not work. They want you to know you are doing it against your own best judgment. This creates shame, degrades moral character and makes us more susceptible to control from our weak self perspectives. They have adopted and co-opt the lord of deception’s primary game plan. “I am a shameful person. I have bad judgement. I need leadership because I am not able to be strong and make a good decision.” They connive to make us a nation of left leaning sycophants.
Some of them won't let themselves know, yet, but I think there's something to this. It's what Theodore Dalrymple said about the Soviet Union:
"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
That's how I view the newfound fervor for All Things Trans.
For literally *all* of recorded human history -- from the Book of Genesis to the Pioneer Plaques -- it was a self-evident and foundational fact about mankind that "male and female He created them."
Today? Facebook has infinity genders to choose from, and if you Tweet out the views held by literally every other person ever, you are condemned as a bigot and kicked out of the public square.
Anyone who's willing to be convinced of our modern absurdities... Well... I have a hard time seeing much daylight between the kind of mentality that is willing to think that these trans ideologies are a good idea, and and the kind of person is happy to be taught to think that "shoot all Republicans" and "gas all Jews" are also good ideas.
No trust in the moral fiber of anyone who's willing to swallow and act on this stuff. They *want* to be duped and led by the nose in some very dark directions.
I tried social media for a few months way back in the last decade. I’m an empath so I pick up on the presence of evil, more like the absence of good, fairly quickly. I felt a knot in my gut even when I thought of logging in and definitely when I read the mainstream posts and comments. There is a cauldron of hate, shame and loneliness waiting for all to draw a cup from. There are literally paladins of evil lurking and waiting to destroy all that is good. I hear on the lame-stream media “a person on Twitter said…”. That’s no different than saying “this dude on the corner said…” It’s all a sham. Are there good people and things on social media? Of course there are. But to get to them one must log into long dark alleyway, risk an encounter with the less desirables and chance to become evil’s chew toy.
Yeah, transing 4 year olds - and bragging about it publicly and deluding yourself into thinking their game of dress up and pretend is God's honest truth - is a long long long way from trying to deal compassionately and sanely with the rare (1/10,000+) case of someone with persistent dysphoria, which continues in the face of every effort to get the sufferer to reconcile with reality.
These things are so far apart that there's really no point in mentioning the latter when the topic of discussion is the former, to be honest.
But yes, I get it: the pro-trans lobby started with a small kernel of truth (persistent gender dysphoria is technically real) and spun their madness off of that.
When I first came across this passage, it really floored me. It explains so well the completely contradictory messaging we are flooded with non-stop. It is designed to break us. Just knowing that has been helpful in retaining my sanity and firming my resolve.
So who was the local government emo-bot who did the message forwarding? See there's our biggest problem - the Left has no problem doxxing. The Right seems to think there is good manners to be had by not finger pointing. Please, finger point.
I live in a small town. I let it fly. I work in a small place. I let it fly there, too. Today I got the talk from my boss, "Your approach is not one I would take, but you do everything you're asked to do to a T. Maybe just work on your likeability." But I get results.
This is total war. You don't fight back until the enemy has been bruised as bad as you have been, or even 50% worse.
There are no Marquis of Queensbury rules here.
You keep fighting and fighting and fighting until the enemy in your sector is completely incapable of organized activity. And then you bomb the rubble one more time and watch it bounce, just to be sure.
I filed a criminal complaint. The DA's office -- George Gascon's office -- closed the file without action. So there's no possibility she'll go to jail, but I took my shot.
"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" works in both directions.
Surely this person has said or done or thought something in her long and miserable life that offends against the Current Thing... Or at least there must be some scrap of evidence that can be found to support that conclusion.
That scrap of evidence needs to be found, and all and sundry need to know that it has been found.
Heck, I'm sure she filled out some IRS form incorrectly at some point in her life... I'm sure the IRS has an anonymous tip line... You do the math.
Lol I am patient, and it’s no war it’s repression.
Your advice comes to ~ nothing.
A huge body of individuals, not even a mob all waiting another, a signal that never comes, that no one exists to send, that none would answer.
It’s nonsense.
The return of King Arthur, the second coming.
Not impossible but extremely improbable.
There’s no fight in my country men, indeed they are not men.
Americans are grub slaves determined to endure and keep what they have, all those who tried to raise them are mocked and abandoned. Those that did defend them are betrayed, left to any lawyer or media or NGO that comes for them; this is unsolvable we cannot turn our backs on you.
in my house, it's the reverse. i own three houses and try to be very frugal. my boyfriend likes to "spend money foolishly" (his words). he has always lived beyond his means and i have always lived within mine- which is why i own the houses!
It reminds me of my ex-wife and all the subtext she acquired from her abusive stepfather. When she would ask, "where's the stapler" she meant "get up and find it for me", and when I answered "I don't know" she heard "f*** you I don't care about you at all."
All the "Be Kind" crap just sounds like "dance to my tune" to my ears.
"Hate Has No Home in (insert high income municipality here)"
The signs say that the loons, pussies, dopamine junkies and snakes are all interpreting reality at such a catastrophically low resolution that the lions look like lambs to them, and the poisoned fruits like ambrosia. They will all be swallowed by the same sanguine mouth at the end of the game (or of this round of the game, if we are operating on the assumption of.Strauss-Howe cycles).
There is a great deal of tragedy to this result, even ignoring the collateral damage. Much can be learned from pussies and loons, for examples (and even from snakes, though they must be crushed underfoot at the end of class). The problem is that they are all gathered under the same manufactured signs and flags, all outfitted as regulars. I often think a key project would be to identify who *can be* saved. What is the shibboleth that can change a sign from "Black lives Matter" to "Make Your Life Matter" (or, better yet, "Eat At Joe's")?
Incredibly, despite writing the literal book on Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre hasn't detected any such shenanigans as it pertains to Covid shots. Last I checked (x-mas 2021) his twitter handle -- I shit you not -- was "Ben Get Vaccinated Goldacre".
I was reading Bad Pharma at the time and was curious what he thought about the topic of our times. Which turned out to be indistinguishable from what Fauci or Walensky or a parrot trained to loop "Safe and Effective" might spew.
That's all. The list of people who've ditched all critical faculties is a long one. Maybe he'll find his compass again some day.
I had exactly the same experience -- wondering what he thought of the mRNA shots, and feeling really confused about the answer. Didn't have the patience to get into it today, but yes.
Ditto with Vinay Prasad -- who is wonderful and principled and committed to upholding a commendable philosophy of what does/doesn’t constitute biomedical evidence -- and yet when an actual clinical trial investigator shines light on all kinds of bullshit in the RCT, they having nothing to say. Radio silence -- its unworthy of consideration.
I have been shocked by how many people with sharp critical thinking and heterodox views in other areas *completely* lost it on this issue. I work with a number of holistic MDs and NDs who have criticized pharma for decades and yet uncritically embraced the vaxx (and criticized those who didn’t). It’s one of the most baffling and confounding things I have ever witnessed.
The lies are so profound and grave that they've deceived themselves into believing they 'saved' lives using fraudulent and sophomoric studies that don't even manage to fool someone with decent critical thinking skills.
Chris, you are absolutely right. “Being a good person” is all most people care about. Fortunately, it’s very easy to be a good person these days — wear your mask, take your jab, bring your reusable bag to the grocery store, vote Democrat, drive an electric car, post happy things on Tik Tok and Instagram, and watch Netflix at night. Only bad people experience emotions like frustration and anger. Only bad people want to take control of their lives. They obviously need therapy.
Dead white philosophers used to think that *struggle* formed character. They were too racist to understand that *compliance* is the real path to virtue.
Having been primed by the quick succession of hoaxes foisted on the nation in about a decade ("hands up don't shoot", "russia russia russia", "very fine people", "me too", "impeachment", and "insurrection"), by the spring of 2021, the woke left's knee jerk reaction to the jab hoax was a foregone conclusion.
The emotionally deranged, moral one-dimensionality of liberalism strikes again. They see everything along the care-harm axis, and therefore little concerns about, oh, liberty, say, or you know, truth, translate into their heads as "bad person doesn't care if others get hurt". They lack even the ability to register questions framed along other moral axes. It's not a language they speak.
Me, I'm at the place where I'm quite happy saying, no, your safety is not more important to me than my freedom.
Yes, but I don't think this was universally true of liberals even twenty years ago. Compare the generation of Paul Tsongas and Bruce Babbitt, Bob Kerrey and Jerry Brown, to this one. Something went wrong on the American left, badly.
Eisenstein's stack today is about safetyism. He suggests (i think) that it's partly a result of materialism replacing faith. The left leads that charge, no?
Haven't read that one yet -- will later today. It sounds like a decent argument.
Yep. Something snapped in their brains over the last decade. It was not this way in the 90s.
Prozac? I mean, seriously. Apparently SSRIs mute your emotions, and kill your empathy. Maybe anxious depressed people are getting tribal just to feel something?
The derelict deviants of the sexual revolution took over colleges and governments. They are Godless freaks that hate Christian values.
They didn't control every lever of power then as they do now.
Leftists mouthed the same nice sounding words 20 years ago to achieve their goal of greater power under socialist control w increased statism then as now. Imo, nothing, except some of the nice sounding wording, has changed as they continue to move to radicalize society towards a 'utopia'
Yes, it was. But it was less overt.
That’s exactly it. This was how they thought they’d defeat Trump in 2016, “he’s a Bad Man.” He’s not NICE. HE tweets MEAN THINGS. Never mind the corruption of HRC—she CARES. It was 2015-2016 when those hated yard signs started appearing.
Or, your health is not my responsibility. Your health is your responsibility.
Do they see it that way?
Perhaps they know the truth well, the harm is the actual policy.
Diane, this is not a slam on you, because what you've described is legitimate.
But it was amazing how in April-May 2020 so many people suddenly started saying "I'm immunocompromised (so you have to dance to my tune)". Like it was the new "gluten-sensitive".
And by "amazing" I mean "perfectly predictable".
EXCELLENT COMMENTARY Diane! I was just discharged from the hospital yesterday after gyn surgery. My roommate at the hospital got the jab (I’m a Pureblood). She had a few comorbidities and was only in her 30’s! She’s having major health problems now and knows the jab caused it. I told her I’d send her detox information. Thank goodness she’s only had one shot.
Thank you so much for your input and help Diane! I’m in a VERY left leaning area and my hospital is in Sillycon Valley. Out of all the roommates I could have gotten, I was lucky enough to get a Christian Conservative-lol! Unfortunately, she doesn’t know about the great information I’ve been privy to over the last few years and all the great information on Substack. I will definitely send her the FLCC link and your link!
Don’t forget…”Trust The Science”! LOL! You got this Diane! ✝️✝️✝️💯❤️
Fun fact: that was the original pedagogical purpose of putting playground equipment in school yards. Give them lots of iron bars and steel chains with which to damage themselves under the watchful eyes of adults. A few broken arms have a salutory effect on the rest of the students.
I remember one of my friends falling off and knocking out a tooth in 3rd grade. And when I say I remember that, I mean I will never forget it.
interesting. i did not know that.
it also worked in my grade school when a friend fell off the monkey bars and broke his arm. i still remember his reaction to the fall and the break: he didn't want to get up, was in great pain and actually cried. and this was a kid who did not cry easily. i also remember the fact that he had to wear an arm cast for quite a while.
I guess I learned: don't land on your arm the wrong way. sometimes even tough kids cry. life is tragic and unfair. never get out of the boat.
What gym equipment did your friend fall from? I may know you.
One of those generic wooden complexes. Can't remember which part he fell from.
Ok. I don't know you. I fell off a stand up merry-go-round in 3rd grade.
I think it was John Taylor Gatto but can't be sure.
There's one of those 'In This House We Believe' signs in my neighborhood.
At the other end of the block people are sleeping in their cars. For some mysterious reason the cars don't have 'In This Car We Believe' bumper stickers.
Same, but my neighborhood bookend is people who live under a bridge.
This is why I went Rural in 2018.
Bought then.
I can say we have no homeless in our little hamlets, not rich, Rust Belt but no one sleeps outside.
Empty vapid platitudes are used by empty vapid broken minds and souls.
There are a bunch of yard signs in my area saying "we support the neighborhood food bank." This food bank requires masking, and it's surrounded by people in RVs. On a Monday afternoon in March there was a shooting outside of it (see https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2022/03/28/man-injured-in-monday-afternoon-ballard-shooting/).
So glad I live on the fringe of quiet, peaceful White Center. :-D
(Seattle humor)
As Ayn Rand pointed out 70 years ago, we are where we are because of the collapse of the foundations of the philosophies & ideas that created unimaginable wealth & prosperity and the modern world. 100 years ago, the United States had immigrants streaming in from all over the world who simply wanted opportunity. No free money or housing or health care or education or EBT cards ... those who did not contribute to societal wealth starved. Harsh? Not really. Fast forward 100 years. We have a fat lazy, entitled, morally bankrupt, depraved culture that declares sick, perverted lying parasites to be the most virtuous among us. We worship at the altar of dog-crap. As the brain-dead virtue signal each other while devolving into tribalism (racism is the crudest form of collectivism), one begins to understand why the garbage piles up on the streets of New York, why 1000s of flights are cancelled every weekend and illiterate animals shoot each other nightly in the streets of every major city in our country. It sure wasn't a lack of money that caused this. Our parasite class has feasted on and looted the greatest concentration of wealth the world has ever seen. And they have wasted it or given it away while taking bribes to do so. What we see now will accelerate in both scale & severity before our system breaks down completely. After all, who is going to work to pay off the 150 trillion the idiot politicians have promised? All that matters now is what we do afterwards ... which ideas and beliefs will take hold? The ones that created the wealth, health, prosperity and good will among men? Or will we double down on death & destruction? This is real good vs. evil stuff and one for the ages.
I have a t-shirt that reads: “Capitalism= Work or Starve. Socialism= Work and Starve.”
I like that t-shirt!
The West is living off the fumes of past glory. We're in decline. And have been so for at least 70 years. Perhaps longer. Hugo's 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame' was a lament about the fall of architecture.
We don't even grieve our fallen civilization. In fact, we're rewriting it according to the facile wants of the zeitgeist. All must be erased and forgotten.
There's no reforming this. We have to grin and bear the collapse.
We’re not collapsing. The West is crushing internal dissent- all too easily- on its way to new heights of glory and terror.
We’re crushing uppity peasants, and may likely rise from the mound of corpses in our most terrible form yet.
Now will it be Schwab and Kamala? Well - No.
It doesn’t matter.
The Enlightenment was a rotting corpse, its over, move along.
Isn't crushing internal dissent a by-product of a decaying civilization?
Not necessarily, and from their POV no
Interesting viewpoint. IDK.
What I think I see here is: even the most powerful Americans are weaker than they were in the 20th century, so, rather than preying on outsiders by economically colonizing the global poor, and bombing powerful developed foreign countries (e.g. Japan, Germany), they've turned inward on America's poor and middle class. They've started to play the same old game but this time inside the US. It's their own little playing field because other outside global powers don't give a shit if Americans are abused. In fact, China is also playing: it has already destroyed millions of American jobs.
You get it, thank you. I've listened to the audio version at least a dozen times. Importing the people to work that we're letting in won't fix the problems we have. Looking at job sites for almost every company shows the same thing. Engineers and electricians are gone and aren't coming back. You can take someone who crossed illegally yesterday and show them which button to push to run the machine that makes your Hershey chocolate but the guy who troubleshoots or repairs it is gone.
This isn't going to end well.
There's an easy, proven solution to that problem: throw the entire chocolate factory into the garbage can and then outsource chocolate manufacturing.
Is it too simplistic to say that this republican (small "r") form of government in the United States was meant for a religious (broad definitions apply) and virtuous (possessing virtues of self-control, of self-efficacy, of regard, of respect, of kindness) people and is no longer a viable form of governance because those people are no longer a preponderance of the governed?
The rule of law protects individual freedom against the mob. Our founding fathers predicted that the US would fail inside of 30 years, as soon as the mob realized they could vote themselves stuff. I cringe every time I hear "democracy". I don't wish to be a part of your group, but I am happy to be the free citizen of a Republic. Just stay out of my life. Our federal government should be providing for a national defense (which they do not do -- they actually make the world less safe for Americans), mediating disputes between states and delivering mail. Everything else is an overreach by parasites & rent-seekers.
Many of the founding fathers certainly believed so. I think they overestimated the upward trajectory of “the enlightenment”, and underestimated the deceitfulness of the human heart.
Reason and science are now touted as the pillars on which the divorce from reality we see all around us rest. That makes for quite a conundrum. Which is why I think that many have (correctly) distilled this battle down into good vs. evil. Facts and logical arguments will fall on deaf ears. This is a spiritual battle and will be waged in the heart and souls of mankind.
How about they had courage and we don’t? Our Constitution is made for people who are very self governing as they are very self interested, let them pray or no. The Donner party were Religious Folk - it didn’t stop them from selling each other “Food” the entire trip, including the Lake. Nor from eating each other’s kids.
Religious people are like petit bourgeoisie aka middle class, they don’t cause trouble but they don’t stop it either do they? Not presently. Pace John Adams, the Revolution was about power and MONEY. They could quite see that England having sucked in the previously self interested but self maintaining colonies in the Seven Years War would now having noticed them RUIN THEM.
There’s no a whit of religious quarrel in the Revolution. They were being ruined as their reward for rallying to the Union Jack (once given subsidies to fight the British then tried to take back) and decided they did not wish to be squeezed into being Ireland or India (I think you’ll find in history the 🇬🇧Pound Sterling was backed with India’s looted gold, lol).
No complaint of religion was lodged against the Crown in 1776, indeed never.
So no prayer ...sorry... just doesn’t matter. Pass the ammunition.
There were many religious people in the GULAG.
Stalin died of old age, they were free.
There were many devout Jews killed in the Holocaust (indeed perhaps most).
We can go on ad infinitum.
Pass the ammunition, prayer is fine, unless it enverates courage or is a Cope.
This is a Temporal Matter.
I think John Adams may have been using the term "religious" as in "definitions of religious person: a person who manifests devotion to a deity. Antonyms: nonreligious person: a person who does not manifest devotion to a deity."
Our Republic wasn't designed for use by a non-religious people, in other words. the long warred makes good points beyond that simplistic definition exercise.
I do believe courage by all, religious or non-religious will be needed. And yes, it’s very much temporal in the sense that it’s happening now and requires us to take stands now.
The non-religious have ethics also. Back in Adams's day, the use of the word "religious" suggested that quality.
I hate those damn yard signs with a passion. I always feel insulted. Do they really think their neighbors are hateful racists? Why do they need to declare their exceptional “non-racistness” then?
Why do they assume I can read?!
RIGHT?
Like whenever one of my FB friends posts some stupid lefty meme, I wonder "who *exactly* are you trying to convince?"
“ The claim “I don’t think these mRNA injections are as safe as they’ve been made out to be” is a character attack that threatens to take people out at the core like dynamite under a bridge: Are you saying I’m not a good person?”
thank you for crystallizing the disconnect. no wonder some folks seem unreachable.
Exactly. Remember early on they were complaining that some people weren’t “taking covid seriously” enough? Same dynamic. The point was that you had to WANT to help everyone, and TRY you’re best to STOP COVID and not think of reasons not to TRY.
No, they have chosen.
Against the others.
They chose to follow the standard and flag of Power, and so far they’re vindicated.
We got nothing to follow.
Orange man?
If only he were bad.
He was a branding exercise.
They want you to know the vax does not work. They want you to know you are doing it against your own best judgment. This creates shame, degrades moral character and makes us more susceptible to control from our weak self perspectives. They have adopted and co-opt the lord of deception’s primary game plan. “I am a shameful person. I have bad judgement. I need leadership because I am not able to be strong and make a good decision.” They connive to make us a nation of left leaning sycophants.
Some of them won't let themselves know, yet, but I think there's something to this. It's what Theodore Dalrymple said about the Soviet Union:
"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
Yes! It’s all an illusion.
That's how I view the newfound fervor for All Things Trans.
For literally *all* of recorded human history -- from the Book of Genesis to the Pioneer Plaques -- it was a self-evident and foundational fact about mankind that "male and female He created them."
Today? Facebook has infinity genders to choose from, and if you Tweet out the views held by literally every other person ever, you are condemned as a bigot and kicked out of the public square.
Anyone who's willing to be convinced of our modern absurdities... Well... I have a hard time seeing much daylight between the kind of mentality that is willing to think that these trans ideologies are a good idea, and and the kind of person is happy to be taught to think that "shoot all Republicans" and "gas all Jews" are also good ideas.
No trust in the moral fiber of anyone who's willing to swallow and act on this stuff. They *want* to be duped and led by the nose in some very dark directions.
Hear, hear!
I tried social media for a few months way back in the last decade. I’m an empath so I pick up on the presence of evil, more like the absence of good, fairly quickly. I felt a knot in my gut even when I thought of logging in and definitely when I read the mainstream posts and comments. There is a cauldron of hate, shame and loneliness waiting for all to draw a cup from. There are literally paladins of evil lurking and waiting to destroy all that is good. I hear on the lame-stream media “a person on Twitter said…”. That’s no different than saying “this dude on the corner said…” It’s all a sham. Are there good people and things on social media? Of course there are. But to get to them one must log into long dark alleyway, risk an encounter with the less desirables and chance to become evil’s chew toy.
There have always been trans people. This is without a doubt.
There have always been schizophrenics, though, and nobody accuses you of being "schizophobic" if you say that they have a mental illness.
(Oh, wait, actually they did from about 1960-75, which gave us the perpetual homeless crisis. Hooray.)
But if the number of schizophrenics suddenly *quintupled* over a few years, nobody would find it illegitimate to question why.
Yeah, transing 4 year olds - and bragging about it publicly and deluding yourself into thinking their game of dress up and pretend is God's honest truth - is a long long long way from trying to deal compassionately and sanely with the rare (1/10,000+) case of someone with persistent dysphoria, which continues in the face of every effort to get the sufferer to reconcile with reality.
These things are so far apart that there's really no point in mentioning the latter when the topic of discussion is the former, to be honest.
But yes, I get it: the pro-trans lobby started with a small kernel of truth (persistent gender dysphoria is technically real) and spun their madness off of that.
“Facebook” “Twitter”
Am still amazed that these exist as things to be taken seriously.
When I first came across this passage, it really floored me. It explains so well the completely contradictory messaging we are flooded with non-stop. It is designed to break us. Just knowing that has been helpful in retaining my sanity and firming my resolve.
Just goes to show the people DO have the power.
Such a shame they give it up so readily.
You (and el gato) been truly saving my sanity lately. Perfectly describes the interactions I've had. Thank you for this elucidation.
So who was the local government emo-bot who did the message forwarding? See there's our biggest problem - the Left has no problem doxxing. The Right seems to think there is good manners to be had by not finger pointing. Please, finger point.
https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2020/08/15/south-pasadena-councilwoman-resigns-apologizes-for-fake-public-comments/
It's a small town, so I try to let it go. Small-town drama is like academic conflict –– it's so vicious because there's so little at stake.
Congratulations on the scalp.
"Live and let live" is how we got into this mess. We need to push back very aggressively on this nonsense. At the very least, we need to speak out.
I live in a small town. I let it fly. I work in a small place. I let it fly there, too. Today I got the talk from my boss, "Your approach is not one I would take, but you do everything you're asked to do to a T. Maybe just work on your likeability." But I get results.
I let it fly when she was in office, and forced her out. There's nothing to fight over anymore, at least with her.
Until she's in jail there's a fight to be fought.
Seriously.
This is total war. You don't fight back until the enemy has been bruised as bad as you have been, or even 50% worse.
There are no Marquis of Queensbury rules here.
You keep fighting and fighting and fighting until the enemy in your sector is completely incapable of organized activity. And then you bomb the rubble one more time and watch it bounce, just to be sure.
I filed a criminal complaint. The DA's office -- George Gascon's office -- closed the file without action. So there's no possibility she'll go to jail, but I took my shot.
Don't be such a linear thinker.
"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" works in both directions.
Surely this person has said or done or thought something in her long and miserable life that offends against the Current Thing... Or at least there must be some scrap of evidence that can be found to support that conclusion.
That scrap of evidence needs to be found, and all and sundry need to know that it has been found.
Heck, I'm sure she filled out some IRS form incorrectly at some point in her life... I'm sure the IRS has an anonymous tip line... You do the math.
Throw a little strategy in there and you might actually win.
Until there isn’t.
We all live small town in the end.
We're at war, and past manners.
Forgive me, I so wish we were at war. We are not, they are.
There's no such thing as a one-sided war. Just wars that are fought one-sidedly until they aren't.
Pay attention, be patient, get strong.
Lol I am patient, and it’s no war it’s repression.
Your advice comes to ~ nothing.
A huge body of individuals, not even a mob all waiting another, a signal that never comes, that no one exists to send, that none would answer.
It’s nonsense.
The return of King Arthur, the second coming.
Not impossible but extremely improbable.
There’s no fight in my country men, indeed they are not men.
Americans are grub slaves determined to endure and keep what they have, all those who tried to raise them are mocked and abandoned. Those that did defend them are betrayed, left to any lawyer or media or NGO that comes for them; this is unsolvable we cannot turn our backs on you.
You just wanted to be left alone.
You are alone.
Ta
These lawn signs have a tendency to appear in the windows of all the Yoga studios I can't patronize in my Oakland, CA neighborhood.
Yes, they're still requiring "papers" to Namaste.
You live in OAKLAND? I'm so sorry. So much beauty all around it, and it's all gone to hell.
This is brilliant. Hits the nail on the head. Feel free to expand. It reminds me very much of the stereotypical argument between men and women:
“Sweetie wife, I don’t think we have the money to honeymoon in Fiji.”
“You’re so horrible, you don’t even love me.”
in my house, it's the reverse. i own three houses and try to be very frugal. my boyfriend likes to "spend money foolishly" (his words). he has always lived beyond his means and i have always lived within mine- which is why i own the houses!
It reminds me of my ex-wife and all the subtext she acquired from her abusive stepfather. When she would ask, "where's the stapler" she meant "get up and find it for me", and when I answered "I don't know" she heard "f*** you I don't care about you at all."
All the "Be Kind" crap just sounds like "dance to my tune" to my ears.
"Black Lives Matter"
"We Believe in Science"
"LGBTQ+ Allies"
"Bans Off Our Bodies"
"Hate Has No Home in (insert high income municipality here)"
The signs say that the loons, pussies, dopamine junkies and snakes are all interpreting reality at such a catastrophically low resolution that the lions look like lambs to them, and the poisoned fruits like ambrosia. They will all be swallowed by the same sanguine mouth at the end of the game (or of this round of the game, if we are operating on the assumption of.Strauss-Howe cycles).
There is a great deal of tragedy to this result, even ignoring the collateral damage. Much can be learned from pussies and loons, for examples (and even from snakes, though they must be crushed underfoot at the end of class). The problem is that they are all gathered under the same manufactured signs and flags, all outfitted as regulars. I often think a key project would be to identify who *can be* saved. What is the shibboleth that can change a sign from "Black lives Matter" to "Make Your Life Matter" (or, better yet, "Eat At Joe's")?
"Gender affirming care for children."
Yeah, I think you're right, Chris. It does seem to be the bridge too far. At the very least, it's a way to identity the most venomous snakes.
Incredibly, despite writing the literal book on Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre hasn't detected any such shenanigans as it pertains to Covid shots. Last I checked (x-mas 2021) his twitter handle -- I shit you not -- was "Ben Get Vaccinated Goldacre".
I was reading Bad Pharma at the time and was curious what he thought about the topic of our times. Which turned out to be indistinguishable from what Fauci or Walensky or a parrot trained to loop "Safe and Effective" might spew.
That's all. The list of people who've ditched all critical faculties is a long one. Maybe he'll find his compass again some day.
I had exactly the same experience -- wondering what he thought of the mRNA shots, and feeling really confused about the answer. Didn't have the patience to get into it today, but yes.
Ditto with Vinay Prasad -- who is wonderful and principled and committed to upholding a commendable philosophy of what does/doesn’t constitute biomedical evidence -- and yet when an actual clinical trial investigator shines light on all kinds of bullshit in the RCT, they having nothing to say. Radio silence -- its unworthy of consideration.
I have been shocked by how many people with sharp critical thinking and heterodox views in other areas *completely* lost it on this issue. I work with a number of holistic MDs and NDs who have criticized pharma for decades and yet uncritically embraced the vaxx (and criticized those who didn’t). It’s one of the most baffling and confounding things I have ever witnessed.
I think that once a person manages to become a public “influencer” they have something to sell and they receive offers, especially writers.
I detect a sense of God-complex false heroism from public and academic health officials.
To whit, Canada's version of Fauci, Theresa Tam chimed in with this charming piece of crap:
https://twitter.com/CPHO_Canada/status/1555294722301771777
The lies are so profound and grave that they've deceived themselves into believing they 'saved' lives using fraudulent and sophomoric studies that don't even manage to fool someone with decent critical thinking skills.
"God-complex false heroism"
Oh God yes. And Theresa Tam is an idiot.
Chris, you are absolutely right. “Being a good person” is all most people care about. Fortunately, it’s very easy to be a good person these days — wear your mask, take your jab, bring your reusable bag to the grocery store, vote Democrat, drive an electric car, post happy things on Tik Tok and Instagram, and watch Netflix at night. Only bad people experience emotions like frustration and anger. Only bad people want to take control of their lives. They obviously need therapy.
Dead white philosophers used to think that *struggle* formed character. They were too racist to understand that *compliance* is the real path to virtue.
Having been primed by the quick succession of hoaxes foisted on the nation in about a decade ("hands up don't shoot", "russia russia russia", "very fine people", "me too", "impeachment", and "insurrection"), by the spring of 2021, the woke left's knee jerk reaction to the jab hoax was a foregone conclusion.
I hear the virus paid Russian prostitutes to pee on it in Barack Obama's hotel bed.
And now a "toilet fbi mar-a-lago" hoax! 😳
#metoo was definitely scary. Freaked me the hell out. Mass formation female psychosis right there.
And I say that as a woman.
Aka "mass femtardation psychosis"
Bookmarking this for later. Made it 1/3 through and it’s killing my vacation vibe. Can feel my blood pressure rising
It's not my fault
This was a good chaser:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fact-check-social-media-post-shows-fabricated-story-about-biden-and-the-economy/ar-AA10rddh
Careful you don't snort scotch out your nose at that one.