The antidote to all this is reality itself. Fantasy utopias don't work, whether it is Obamacare or anything else. Net zero, equality for all, or diversity is our strength. All are based on a vision, and real life doesn't respond to visions. Real life is give and take, a series of trade offs.
To the visionaries we learn they seem to have no principle guiding them. The vision is all. They lie and cajole because they imagine they see further than us plebs.
But real life always asserts itself. The house always wins no matter how brilliant you think your grand scheme is. People like Gruber are no doubt intelligent, and probably have some interesting ideas. But no one can manage the health outcomes of tens of millions of people. And this arrogance hammers them in the end. He was at least being honest in his videos.
Behavioral Science. The entire pandemic response was BS mind-farkery. The Science (TM) is full of nifty terms. All the fear porn they call "Fear Amplification" because we *suffered* from "Optimism Bias." Masks are fear amplification BS Nonpharmaceutical intervention devices, they knew they didn't work under medical science. They just said they were supported by science, they didn't say what type of science, knowing they could hide in the ambiguity of the word and never actually be lying. Clever folks, you know, always covering their 6's. Their mind-farkery is to "fix" our "flawed perspectives." Because they know better for us than we do. And if their theories and plans don't work it's not because they're wrong, it's us, we didn't do it right.
There's another Behavioral Science term for how they're going to try to make everyone buy their shitty EV's. They call it "Choice Architecture." They'll just make ICE vehicles too expensive for all but the wealthiest. Tax older vehicles as high polluters off the road. Maybe even come and pluck them off your driveway or from parking lots, declare them contraband. They're already doing these things in Europe. Choice Architecture is how they plan on having us owning nothing and being happy about it eating bugs.
There's actually a BS guide the WEF put together in 2016 on how they will try to mind-fark us into adopting their grand designs happily:
My local hospital returned to mandating masks for patients and visitors (and staff) a couple months ago, due to the increase in COVID and RSV in the community.
Really does not give me confidence in the ability of the medical experts at that facility to give good care.
For me -- I just do my best to stay away from doctors. But too often, I have to take my elderly parents for care, and these are the tough situations where I am faced with a decision to along with the institutional delusions rather than cause my parents grief if I make a scene by refusing (parents still believe in all the COVID nonsense, which may have something to do with their frequent hospital visits -- it's a wonder they are still with us).
It's like going back to 2020/21 to go to this facility. Psychologically traumatizing, to be honest, to be in that insane environment.
The *ahem* facility where my mom spent her last couple of years operated in a similar and thoroughly inhumane way. Our pastor’s mom was there too and he last saw her through her window. Hadn’t been able to hug her for months. My mom was adjudged by… I don’t know, someone to have been “end-of-life” so she was granted a sort of dispensation and I was with her when she died on Palm Sunday of 2020. Couldn’t have a funeral. Couldn’t celebrate her life. It was surreal. I’m so sorry it’s happening again. These perfect asses who made this happen will all stand before God one fine day. If any of them has a shred of conscience they’ve started drinking too much.
Traumatizing - a feature, not a flaw of allopathic medicine since 2023. Should be enough to make us pemanently leave that system and find alternative providers of true health care, like homeopaths, Ayurvedic, herbalists, naturopaths, the holistic medicine healers. Those facilities deserve exactly zero confidence. The dilemma they force you into is shameful and should be criminal. In a just world...one day.
Indeed. But sadly, I've found the herbalist community to have a much higher percentage of vaccine and masking supporters than most of the complementary and alternative healing community. I attended both IHG and AHG conferences this year and was very surprised how many either supported the jabs and masks or didn't care enough to put up a fight or speak against them. The non vax, non masker attendees whispered their opposition with each other when they found allies lest they get looked down on. Sad.
Especially now that allopathic medicine is incorporating 'anti-racism' and other woke quackery into their mandates. I want nothing to do with getting medical advice from someone who thinks I'm a white supremacist living on stolen lands and that men can compete in women's sports. I'd rather just let whatever disease I get ravage me in my bed in peace while watching Magnum P.I. reruns.
I am aware of some of this. The very existence of the Nudge Unit is a disgrace. Some of the psychologists involved in project fear even admitted a sense of shame afterward. Not a peep from the British Psychological Society of course. All these institutions have to go for that very reason.
Agreed. There's a related and connected field that needs to be deconstructed that has failed. Ethics. Specifically Bioethics. Not ethics in totality. But the poisonous strand of ethics adopted as global and national governing ethics: Utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is ends justifies the means ethics. The we, your betters, cut from a finer cloth of man ethics that allow blue bloods, despots and dictators to believe and claim they are acting benevolently for the greater good, making the tough choices that involve sacrifices so that progress and a better society will prevail. The ethics that Stalin, Hitler and Mao practiced as they broke a few eggs (skulls) to make omelettes, cleansed the gene pool for a master race and produced a cultural revolution to cure the sick man of Asia. Utilitarian Ethics must be deligitimized, scorned, declared incompatible with free people, even criminalized. Kantian and Virtue Ethics are the only ethics compatibile with western liberal national values and constitutions. They are the ethics We, The People are indulged to believe we adhere to. As with the word 'science' the authoritarians hide in the ambiguity of the word 'ethics.' Knowing we'll assume the type of ethics we're taught to believe, honesty, respecting the individual. While they practice the ethics of deceit, lies in service to their declared collective greater good.
Anthony Fauci's wife, Christine Grady, is the Chief Bioethicist for the National Institute of Health. He admits to following his own ethics, var. Utilitarian, as she crows proudly about how ethical he and she are.
In the UK the Nuffield Bioethics Council, an arm of Wellcome Trust (Jeremy Farrar's gig before his WHO appointment) published this guide on Bioethics in 2007. It gives lip service to concern for individual liberty as it declares collective public health policies are necessary. For the greater good. Harms resulting to individuals unfortunate sacrifices. Ethical! Utilitarianism. And pat themselves on the back for being such great stewards and protectors of democracy!
Ethics. Utilitarianism. The ethics of sociopaths. As long as they believe they are acting ethically they will build a dystopian tyranny to sit atop as they direct our shared misery. What Churchill said Socialism was good at sharing equally.
I am afraid of the country I used to love, my Canada. I'm living in a tyranny and I feel far more alone than I probably am in realizing that horrible fact. I am continuing to be grateful to God and to my stubborn cussedness that I refused to submit to getting that poison jab. I fear for my friends and relatives who submitted because they have kids to support and they were made to feel afraid that they'd lose their livelihoods. Canada is a fascist dictatorship with a "liberal" happy-face. And NO! It damn well WASN'T like that before 2020!
It's been fascinating to research the field. There's a switch, a flip that's happened in the field from what constitutes good ethics and bad ethics seemingly overnight. Within the same people.
I found passages from a Bioethicist cited in a book about eugenics, the awful SCOTUS decision, Buck v. Bell raised as a defense to crimes against humanity charges in Nuremberg, "three generations of imbeciles is enough" still standing US eugenics law that has guided the decisions on vax and mask mandates along with Jacobson. The need for sound, moral ethics written about extensively by Jane Altman
Newgenics: Buck v. Bell, American Eugenics, and the Bad Man Test:
Putting Limits on Newgenics in the 21st Century
Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality, January 2020
"V. The Bad Man Test: Putting Limits on Newgenics in the 21st Century
Numerous authors have addressed the ethical issues surrounding “newgenic” practices, and, similar to bioethicist Julie Aultman, encouraged “collective moral deliberation” to address the challenges they present: “[t]o avoid unjust eugenomic practices that discriminate, segregate, disrespect and avoid issues of confidentiality and privacy, subjecting persons to unfair and intolerable treatment, we need to understand which moral principles ought to guide our decisions and actions.”
However, as Aultman points out, typically “ethics lags behind” science, and “this division creates obstacles for serious moral deliberation and critical developments in policy-making involving the social and economic implications of genetic research and technology.
Maybe we will find that there is too much profit, speed, and power in genomics to keep everyone focused on ethics and morals once someone discovers the secrets to turning humans into non human species or supermen, creating alien life, achieving immortality, or wiping out entire populations with a single genetic tweak,for example.
Will conversations about ethics and morality be enough to protect society from its own excitement when that happens, or will a stricter approach be warranted?"
The bioethicist quoted in the Newgenics paper above, Julie Aultman, have done an about face. Today she's a member of the editorial board of the American Medical Association’s AMA Journal of Ethics. In that role she dismissed claims that hospitals were overcounting Covid deaths for the monetary incentives that came with. No ethical concerns, not even the appearance of conflict of interest, they were too altruistic and busy saving lives to be tempted by such trivial concerns. Bioethics and bioethicists: for sale to the highest bidder.
Turns out the top bioethicists are utilitarian ethicists at heart, the Kantian Virtue Ethics model just for show, to make us believe they shared our values, understanding of ethics.
I recently spoke with someone who bought a used EV and almost immediately, the battery died. The new battery cost more than the price of the used vehicle. When does the public realize this is not sustainable? I believe it is starting to happen.
The idea that health care should be run along the lines of a Starbucks or other for profit business is absolutely obscene. You Libertarians live in a fantasy world divorced from the reality of everyday existence. This is why in elections libertarians garner perhaps 1% of the vote.
Why do you think I am a Libertarian? I'd love to know. I live in a country with nationalized healthcare. That doesn't mean I am a fan, nor does it mean I think Starbucks is the model either.
Most people outside the United States aren’t clamoring to adopt our shitty corporate profit at all costs system. I also work in the health care system and see how awful this system is for many, first-hand.
Most countries don't have our crap tort system, either. Nor are a large percentage of their citizens spoiled, selfish brats voting for more free stuff. Or at least they weren't at one time.
Sometimes when I'm reading The Bible I'm absolutely blown away by the sheer audacity and brass balls of Jesus. Take your favorite passage that has to do with The Truth, and try reading it aloud to the wall. And then try to imagine delivering that speech to people who wanted to kill you. Imagine delivering the greatest rant of all time, the Woe Unto You Scribes, Pharisees, Hypocrites stream of invective in Matthew 23:23-31 right in the faces of people who were plotting your death. And yet He did it.
But it takes a special kind of audacity and malice to stand up and lie right to your face without cracking or faltering. There's only one created being who has that power, and that's why it is neither lunacy or hyperbole to think that the current leftist media is literally of the devil. Only when one has given over oneself completely to The Father of Lies Himself, could one lie, lie, lie with perfect composure and grinning malice. I'm talking about Brandy Zadrozny, Phillip Bump, Mehdi Hasan and the entire gallery of sideshow freaks who have assembled on The Left to protect and promote the current regime. The bright spot is that it cannot stand, because it is built on a mountain of garbage. We already see the huge cracks in the facade, which they attempt to cover up with ever more egregious and obvious calumny, because they know that the pendulum is swinging the other way, finally, and gaining momentum.
That's why you can tell that Chris Bray is a little shaken when confronted by the level of serial mendacity described in this piece. It's enough to drive a person to radical action as an antidote to despair, because we instinctively know that it comes from a diabolical place that wishes our humiliation, demoralization, and destruction. There's no way that the kind of lying we are exposed to on a daily basis is a natural or casual phenomenon.
It comes right out of the very pit of Hell, and the human garbage that has given themselves over to lying as standard operating procedure deserve the same punishment as murderers get. Because remember what Jesus said of Satan "He was a murderer from the beginning..." in John 8:44.
I'm old enough to remember when "liberal bias" was a problem in the media. But that's not what we're talking about today. We are talking about a complete carpet bombing assault on Truth, which we have a right to respond to as we would any other act of war by murderous scum.
You are right. We are in a spiritual battle. Those of us who actually believe that Jesus is the Son of God will win in the end but the battle will be fierce. It feels like an alternate universe but it is the veil of satan. C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity (in 1952) that "It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind that law, that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power--it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk." You and I and fellow believers must "be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." (I Peter 3:15, NIV)
Indeed. And it being a spiritual battle, we need to be careful not to try to fight it in our human strength. I often find myself getting really riled up and have to try to step back and let the Holy Spirit lead.
That is the paradox of the Christian life. God is soverignly in control and we are told do our level best to live by His principles for the benefit of our neighbor and the glory of God.
Someone once said: "Work like it's all up to you and pray like it's all up to God "
"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."
"A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."
"The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves."
"His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established."
"From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date [1946], menaced to anything like the same extent [are today]. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.
...
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.
...
But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
...
When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons.
...
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
...
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction."
...And so much more...read Orwell's piece in its entirety. It's not terribly long. And worth it. Could've been written today. Applies today as much as then.
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud
---
Could have been written yesterday. Orwell really did see through it all.
Thanks for the recommendation. I haven't read this one. But will do.
"We can either do this da easy way or da hard way. You're just too stupid to do it the easy way. Now we gotta do it the hard way. I don't get no pleasure outta doin' it like dis. But you knuckleheads just don't listen!"
Stop feeding it (mainstream media). Stop buying, subscribing, reading. When interest disappears and they lose their audience.....well, they won't exactly shut up but who wants to scream into the void? The biggest issue is getting this message over to a wider audience. Mainstream media is on its knees in the UK, physical sales of newspapers have been on the slide for decades and outlets are now in competition for clicks. Hence the constant exaggeration and sensationalisation of the most mundane stories.
Further to this, in the UK I sense the extreme capitulation of the media class is the end state. A kind of final hurrah before total elimination of most of it. We know they were handsomely awarded during Covid. The UK gov became the biggest funder of advertising in the UK during that period. Some of them are still living off that cash.
The BBC in particular seems to be genuinely dying, despite its guaranteed income. Hence the spectacle of black Paleolithic Britons and of course West Indians being the real builders of Stone Henge. What do they have to lose at this point? The benefit to us is we see them as they really are.
Next of course is the attempt to really clamp down on the interwebz which is doomed to failure.
Yes, 35million just in the first lockdown....and heaven knows how much since. I'm cheering at the demise of the vile BBC. The writing was on the wall with their cover up of Savile, if not before (don't get me started on Esther Rantzen and her part in it or David Attenborough and his hypocrisy re climate). Yeah the "black people built Stonehenge" made me laugh out loud 🤣
It was 1.8bn they spent. They used a US based PR firm so they were not paying the media directly. They were all handsomely rewarded for destroying our economy.
While it's true that "mainstream" media is on its death bed the fourth estate is most certainly not.
Defiance is indeed a matter of rejecting all of the tools the empire employs to thrust its alt-reality upon its subjects; to starve the beast at every turn of the dial. But for every boomer fox news junkie turning off his big screen there is some multiple of kids entering the black mirror.
For or years now the legacy media has been on its heels with the truth just waiting to hatch and yet in that time while we were cheering its demise our children have become almost entirely captured by the same powers using more advanced - and much more sticky and elastic tools than consuming the evening news over chicken pot pie.
The dark algo of the corporo-state has been training them while honing its ability to manufacture an increasingly sophisticated and predictive model of information and entertainment-based manipulation.
Legions of subjects now to chase dopamine in a positive feedback loop from which they have near zero awareness of such, but for the mounting psychological and physiological problems surfacing all over, which of course become fodder for that feedback loop to solve.
The natural signals of anxiety, depression, ADD, sleep and endocrine disruption, and a multitude of other problems are welcomed socially as the victim/identity culture elevates their status and the pharma industry is more than happy to provide the pills. This pattern starts when they are toddlers.
We may think we have evolved since the olden times when people were so dumb they had to read the propaganda on a big sheet of paper but the hindbrain is just the same and most people no longer have domain over their own hindbrain.
Further, the echo-chambers of information are only outmatched by the cognitive limitations that have now been hard-wired into at least half of the population. The most basic of reading comprehension and written communication, problem solving and contextualization, time-ordering and linear logic, etc. are all but atrophied or perhaps even gone.
And this doesn't begin to address the general social malaise from going on two generations raised entirely within the dominant paradigm of an alternative reality "online".
The fourth estate has been migrating to the technofascist cloud where it is integrating into everyday tools, the value of which is almost entirely a utility of capture and control shrouded in the swipe-flitter-glitter of the cognitive conditioning that has been underway for decades.
Most people under 40y get their "news" from TikTok or similar. To a luddite like me I might say "yeah but that is not really the 'news'" and then I might suddenly realize that is entirely the point.
Now try to pry that phone from your daughters hand while being glad she ignores NBC news. That is what we are up against.
I urge people to find the few voices in education from k-university that are dealing with the destruction of the human mind on a daily basis in real time and are being honest about the experience. Most of us have seen these young people up close in schools and in the corporate setting and know that there is a great danger lurking. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to dismiss out of hand as generational and environmental shifts in simple appetites.
That most have already retired/quit is yet another harbinger of what is to come when "the media" needn't even bother with the clumsy trickery of repainting main street.
"The natural signals of anxiety, depression, ADD, sleep and endocrine disruption, and a multitude of other problems are welcomed socially as the victim/identity culture elevates their status and the pharma industry is more than happy to provide the pills."
You just shot it right in the heart. The manufactured anxiety.
Yeah man talk about the "news" or what is happening in the world with the smartphonejugend and their eyes glaze over. They are the news. A billion reporters manufacturing their truth. Generation selfie is anxious and in peril yet a trillion of their own photos prove otherwise.
"...so a mystical winged expert-creature arose from the ashes..." The headline that followed made me laugh out loud for real. Laughing to keep from crying, I suppose. You could write a book on the whole "X is true, X is true, X is true, X is true, X is not true" phenomenon. COVID would be a standalone volume. Though, I imagine you might say (after Orson Welles), "No money is WORTH THIS!"
We used to look at those airbrushed photos of Stalin and his former comrades being disappeared from history and we would laugh. How stupid those commies are. But here we are.
Saddest thing is they weren't necessarily stupid, but just terrified. Who would dare point out the airbrushing? Which is part of the point of brazen lies in totalitarian media: to demean the populace by forcing them to face daily their own terror and cowardice.
Our compatriots are different. They don't have the excuse of terror. As for the origin of their difference, I try to sketch out below in the thread.
Almost of what you've expressed so beautifully in this piece can be applied to Ukraine. Decades of lies re US involvement yes, but also the truth that Ukraine was and is one of the most corrupt on the planet and also that constant pushing by Nato would lead to war with Russia. Then literally overnight, we had St. Zelensky, prayed for in all our churches, the peace loving Ukrainian army brigades in the Donbas and evil, evil Putin🤷♀️.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, American academics spread the continental doctrine that all truth claims, even the most objectively verifiable, were ultimately projections of power: they were ideological, ultimately mythical. All truth claims are just narratives, i.e. stories being told in order to assert or maintain power or status. One of the earliest thinkers to formulate this was Nietzsche in his “truth is a mobile army of metaphors” quote.
What has happened is that the flip side of this has come to dominate as a norm. As follows: If all truth is just someone’s narrative, therefore my narrative is also truth. The Nietzschean/deconstructivist skepticism linked up with lefty progressivism and plucky American self-worship. What we get is the hybrid monster of the present. “MY truth is part of OUR truth which IS the FUTURE. And don’t ask for sources—what are you a FASCIST?”
This pathology now runs very deep. What I wonder is: How much of our demi-literate population believes it? The vast bulk of America is of course demi-literate, but how many of them in the course of their "education" have come to assume that this is how discourse and truth claims work, and have always worked? I really don’t know the answer to that. But I suspect I’d be horrified to find out.
In other words, the Right Side of History saying “X” one day and “not X” the next might really not be problematic at all for huge numbers of our citizens, and even if they’re made to see it, they might just smirk and say, “Yeah … and so what?”
An army of metaphors shifting about and regrouping and falling back, that is …. “just, like, NORMAL.”
In my view the only thing that could break this pathology is objective reality beginning to bite hard, and our keeners beginning to link the pain to their dysfunctional notion of “truth”.
I shared one of George Orwell's works in another comment on this thread, The Prevention of Literature, published in 1946. He wrote the following that addresses your point. He was already seeing it in the UK then:
"From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism."
Thanks. I need to go read the thread. I was at work when I posted my comment.
Orwell was the crucial witness to that era, and here he's pointing out re: totalitarianism a very similar dynamic to what Bray underlines today. What I'm mostly concerned with (and I only sketched it) is what makes our own monster a bit different from the Stalin and Hitler iterations. Yes, I think we may end up in totalitarianism, but I think our monster lurks a bit differently in the populace. In some ways, its talons are sunk in even more deeply. Consider: Both Hitler's and Stalin's masses still had to *pretend* a belief in both reality and that it could be represented. They knew the regimes were lying, but in their minds the regimes were lying in relation to objective facts. Regime supporters thought the lies were justified. Dissidents didn't dare protest the lies, as to do so was fatal. But for both groups, the systemic lying was recognized as something *outside the norm*.
What I'm wondering in my comment is the extent to which our public is different. In that they've come to accept systemic lying *as the norm*. "All discourse is *always already* ideology, so we'll follow the progressive ideology!" In short, *the lie* is not even recognized. Lying is understood to be the character of all discourse in any case. And I sense this everywhere.
Orwell speaks of the "friends of totalitarianism" in his milieu. These people were doubtless a minority. I suspect our own potential friends of totalitarianism are coming to be a very large population indeed. Not as hard core perhaps, but well catechized in a basic post-truth understanding of discourse. (And if that's so, it's down to what happened in academia, starting in the humanities, during the last decades of the 20th c. I was there at that time, in US academia, and saw the entrenchment of this "epistemology" and the beginning of its seepage from literary and cultural studies outward. Now it's everywhere, affecting everything from K-12 education to "journalism" to the hard sciences.)
I worry this difference makes our polities *soft targets* as it were. Bray keeps underlining the utter inanity of our public discourse, but the fact that it remains accepted by huge swaths of the public as more or less normal says to me that this public has no reserves of reality from which to stand up to anything. They could be cajoled or bullied into supporting really ANYTHING. And this is partly by academic design. Not that I believe it was all planned out starting 1970. But rather: originally niche academic movements have ended by creating an America that is willing putty in the hands of managerial elites.
Yes, I think that’s one way to put it. The “state” is roughly the same expansive system it’s been since WWII at least. But the institutions involved in ideological production (universities and media and Hollywood, etc.)—these were at some point discovered to be producing a new kind of citizen even more to the state’s liking than the old patriotic Christian sort. That seemed counterintuitive at first, but then the state basically got the memo. “Not only can we work with this—but this is potential Nirvana here.”
Media is tasked with day to day management of relations between the state and these millions of infants who imagine they’ve been “liberated”. At the same time the state’s own functionaries become media performers, diverting the “liberated” with plausible baby talk.
The media has always been this, you just didn't notice before. Advertisement is just propaganda. You don't think they were taking notes on how they could whip people into a frenzy for black friday or tickle me elmo?
Of course I do. Nudging is quite different than mockery. Bias is different than changing facts. Surreptitiously structuring wording to influence is much different than changing the meaning of words.
We are being mocked and labeled to keep us silent, for fear of the cost to speak out, so that we progressively loathe ourselves for each time we tacitly assent to the lies/absurdities we know not to be true from our own experience.
Tickle Elmo tactics are done for wallet share. If you buy a Cabbage Patch doll...you may not be able to buy Elmo (or vice versa). That is influence, but it is still an active decision on behalf of the individual.
Today's media aims to confiscate the wallet of ideas and render the available choices, per their preferences, in one wallet they control. The ideas their wallet contain , over time, leave only one option:
To accept the lies/absurdities as the "cost of doing business" to participate, penalty free, in society. But worse yet, to eventually assent to all the vileness of servitude as the only means of preferment, indeed safety, lest you be eaten alive by the scourge of power.
How long do you think that goes on before people forget they were ideas at all?
That is the point in which reality is so distorted they have effectively obliterated history, because the words, ideas and meanings no longer serve as a reference point to an individuals history or a shared history.
They want the wallet. Not its content. They have no use for it. They will change the content at will for their access inside the palace gates and to subsume your agency to the point you unwittingly believe they are rightfully inside the gates because THEY provide the ONLY true reference for you to make meaning of your life; your past and future purpose are now theirs so that they are the "life" that passes you by.
They've called it "television programming" from its inception. Even designated what's airing at any given time a "program guide." I don't think that's a coincidence. Television programming minds was always the intention. They've just gotten better at it. Science!
As to what's happened in academia, the article I link to below is a good encapsulation of The Science Wars, focused on how they first came into focus in the 1990's after decades of escalating battles and had restarted in the 2010's. It is written by a Marxist with a Marxist bias that comes through. But it does a decent job of presenting the other side of the ideological divides, if only to deconstruct them. While I find the piece to be a satisfactory primer on the history of the Science Wars I find the references it cites to be the strongest part of the article. By diving into those I found very credible sources, less biased, even more history of the evolution of science in academia and the influence of social movements on what is presented as "science." Including the soft social pseudosciences like psychology, behavioral science, political science, etc. The social sciences of climate, gender, infectious disease all draw upon the obfuscation contained in the ambiguity of the word, "science," meant to convey authoritative immutable laws that are political agendas in actuality.
I also find the publication this article is contained in, "Science for the People," to be a useful roadmap for those Marxists who endeavor to use "science" to construct their utopian (dystopian) society. Take a look at the titles of other stories in the same publication the Science Wars piece comes from. A sort of "How-to" for much of what we see unfolding around us today in a world increasingly divorced from the natural world in pursuit of an imaginary world of Santa Claus's and Tooth Fairies.
Communists. Fascists. Different sides of the same totalitarian coin. Orwell knew, saw then much more clearly what was infecting the UK and US. The totalitarian support has been here much more than we suspected for much longer in the powerful monied elite. They are not our friends. No matter how many charitable foundations the fund.
I'm not so sure about those supporters of totalitarianism being as much of a minority then as we'd think. The US and UK elite of the 1920's-1940's had large numbers of supporters of Fascism. They envied Mussolini and Hitler. Industrialists, bankers, politicians, media. Even the Communists had their supporters, the NYT's Walter Duranty wrote glowing reviews of Stalin's reign. Both Fascism and Communism being totalitarian, anti-western liberal capitalism, anti-free markets and hostile to individual liberty. They funded the reconstruction of Germany, the autobahn, war machine Hitler built was funded by US investors. Including Prescott Bush, Aka "Hitler's Banker." A Fascist who was trading with the enemy, making sure Hitler had enough ammo and tanks to fight American boys drafted from the heartland. The Bush Family Dynasty is literally blood money from killing Americans. His family name rehabilitated by the Dulles brothers, OSS/CIA heads, also supporters of Fascism. George HW Bush's New World Order speech was just carrying on the family's values, 9-11 and the surveillance state it ushered in not a coincidence. The UK suffered from the same elite.
But there was too much profit in war, lives from the lower classes disposable, so the propaganda against Fascism was useful. But achieved by linguistic deception ever since. Until here we are.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
Opening sentences of: "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedley Butler – USMC 1935
It’s abundantly clear that Orwell wrote “1984” as a warning. Devotees of the Frankfurt School (today’s Leftists) took it as an instruction manual.
“It isn’t possible to live like this.” That’s the Leftists’ objective. They wish to make “thinking” so painful that we simply stop doing so in order to insulate ourselves from the chaos. A “good” citizen floats with the current, and makes no attempt to swim.
Make no mistake – this is “low intensity” warfare. My biggest fear is that when the rebellion comes, the Constitution will be altered in ways to preclude socialism in any form (not a bad objective in its own right), which will pave the way for suppression of whatever group is out of favor.
Another telling fact about the nationalization of healthcare is that Republicans ran for years on a platform of repealing Obamacare, then when they got the votes in Congress to do it, they simply didn't.
Instead of a representative form of government, the U.S. has one-party rule and is a kleptocratic oligarchy. But the good news is, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it".
Thank you for keeping track and pointing this out. It feels like I’m going crazy or incredibly angry that they lie so blatantly, and about something so easy to prove.
My big obsession has been masks during covid. At one point, they were NOT recommended for lots of really good scientific reasons. Then, they were recommended for lots of “good” scientific reasons.
I couldn’t believe they could switch back and forth so easily.
I make strong efforts every day to hang onto my sanity. I never used to have to do this, by the way. It's just that they have me surrounded (the inmates).
What I've noticed is that my decision about 15 years ago to give up television and mainstream newspapers has had two effects: 1) getting my news from the internet has protected me somewhat from hysterical propaganda and maintained -- nay, increased -- my critical thinking skills; 2) I have become more out of touch with the imposed reality surrounding me.
Everyone in my family and my job and my friends are regular partakers of koolaid. I love these people, and it's very painful to see. I lost a budding relationship due to his allegiance to Rachel Maddow's daily wisdom over what I considered to be a more questioning approach.
I have one good friend who thanked me for caring, when I warned him not to take these injections, but he took them anyway to be "on the safe side" while also telling me I was taking great risks by abstaining. Now he has cancer and has woken up. He said, "you are a hero for sticking with what you knew to be true, and I regret that I did not believe you at the time." Well, what's done is done, right?
And it continues. That's the craziest part of all. At some point, though -- surely people will have had enough of the crazy and this will all fall away?
I have long believed that the ultimate downfall and defeat of this sober insanity, will be due to the utter and complete arrogance with which it is so proudly and glibly posited by The Enlightened.
Poor things, they just can’t help themselves. They are so completely embedded in their alternate universe, peering out of the portholes at the Unclean Masses walking about, while they nod knowingly to their lie-encrusted cadre, and gladly sip their lemon koolaid.
But the Unclean Masses, they know, and they remember. And they wait their turn. And their patience grows thin.
I do not wish to witness the end of this Story. But there will be an end. All stories have beginnings and endings. I think the end of this one is not far off. It will not be a pleasant ending I fear. So be it.
'People who purport to have no idea what the difference is between reality and their mental fantasyworld are either placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold or hired by the Washington Post.' - sometimes i think it's psychological conditioning of the plebes, sometimes I think they are stacked there to keep the games going and sometimes I think they are simply hiring from their ranks.
The antidote to all this is reality itself. Fantasy utopias don't work, whether it is Obamacare or anything else. Net zero, equality for all, or diversity is our strength. All are based on a vision, and real life doesn't respond to visions. Real life is give and take, a series of trade offs.
To the visionaries we learn they seem to have no principle guiding them. The vision is all. They lie and cajole because they imagine they see further than us plebs.
But real life always asserts itself. The house always wins no matter how brilliant you think your grand scheme is. People like Gruber are no doubt intelligent, and probably have some interesting ideas. But no one can manage the health outcomes of tens of millions of people. And this arrogance hammers them in the end. He was at least being honest in his videos.
And we’re not buying their shitty EVs either.
Behavioral Science. The entire pandemic response was BS mind-farkery. The Science (TM) is full of nifty terms. All the fear porn they call "Fear Amplification" because we *suffered* from "Optimism Bias." Masks are fear amplification BS Nonpharmaceutical intervention devices, they knew they didn't work under medical science. They just said they were supported by science, they didn't say what type of science, knowing they could hide in the ambiguity of the word and never actually be lying. Clever folks, you know, always covering their 6's. Their mind-farkery is to "fix" our "flawed perspectives." Because they know better for us than we do. And if their theories and plans don't work it's not because they're wrong, it's us, we didn't do it right.
There's another Behavioral Science term for how they're going to try to make everyone buy their shitty EV's. They call it "Choice Architecture." They'll just make ICE vehicles too expensive for all but the wealthiest. Tax older vehicles as high polluters off the road. Maybe even come and pluck them off your driveway or from parking lots, declare them contraband. They're already doing these things in Europe. Choice Architecture is how they plan on having us owning nothing and being happy about it eating bugs.
There's actually a BS guide the WEF put together in 2016 on how they will try to mind-fark us into adopting their grand designs happily:
https://www.undp.org/publications/behavioural-insights-united-nations-achieving-agenda-2030
BS is truly "The Science of Totalitarianism" as authorities admited in 2021 in the UK:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210519003131/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit-totalitarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid/
The totalitarians say, "Ve haf vays aaf making you buy shitty caars - you vill follow zee science!"
My local hospital returned to mandating masks for patients and visitors (and staff) a couple months ago, due to the increase in COVID and RSV in the community.
Really does not give me confidence in the ability of the medical experts at that facility to give good care.
For me -- I just do my best to stay away from doctors. But too often, I have to take my elderly parents for care, and these are the tough situations where I am faced with a decision to along with the institutional delusions rather than cause my parents grief if I make a scene by refusing (parents still believe in all the COVID nonsense, which may have something to do with their frequent hospital visits -- it's a wonder they are still with us).
It's like going back to 2020/21 to go to this facility. Psychologically traumatizing, to be honest, to be in that insane environment.
The *ahem* facility where my mom spent her last couple of years operated in a similar and thoroughly inhumane way. Our pastor’s mom was there too and he last saw her through her window. Hadn’t been able to hug her for months. My mom was adjudged by… I don’t know, someone to have been “end-of-life” so she was granted a sort of dispensation and I was with her when she died on Palm Sunday of 2020. Couldn’t have a funeral. Couldn’t celebrate her life. It was surreal. I’m so sorry it’s happening again. These perfect asses who made this happen will all stand before God one fine day. If any of them has a shred of conscience they’ve started drinking too much.
One-hour end-of-life visits for up to two family members. Unforgivable.
They do not think enough to have a shred of conscience and I am not sure I have the patience to wait for God.
Yep. These are not good people. And there are so many of them operating with a shocking degree of moral bankruptcy.
Traumatizing - a feature, not a flaw of allopathic medicine since 2023. Should be enough to make us pemanently leave that system and find alternative providers of true health care, like homeopaths, Ayurvedic, herbalists, naturopaths, the holistic medicine healers. Those facilities deserve exactly zero confidence. The dilemma they force you into is shameful and should be criminal. In a just world...one day.
Agree. I am an herbalist. That is why it feels so especially dissonant and hard, to bump up against the brainwashing.
Indeed. But sadly, I've found the herbalist community to have a much higher percentage of vaccine and masking supporters than most of the complementary and alternative healing community. I attended both IHG and AHG conferences this year and was very surprised how many either supported the jabs and masks or didn't care enough to put up a fight or speak against them. The non vax, non masker attendees whispered their opposition with each other when they found allies lest they get looked down on. Sad.
Especially now that allopathic medicine is incorporating 'anti-racism' and other woke quackery into their mandates. I want nothing to do with getting medical advice from someone who thinks I'm a white supremacist living on stolen lands and that men can compete in women's sports. I'd rather just let whatever disease I get ravage me in my bed in peace while watching Magnum P.I. reruns.
It's 'wild AF' as the kids say.
They call you crazy for not wanting to be in their loony bin. It's epic what's happening. Epically evil.
I am aware of some of this. The very existence of the Nudge Unit is a disgrace. Some of the psychologists involved in project fear even admitted a sense of shame afterward. Not a peep from the British Psychological Society of course. All these institutions have to go for that very reason.
Agreed. There's a related and connected field that needs to be deconstructed that has failed. Ethics. Specifically Bioethics. Not ethics in totality. But the poisonous strand of ethics adopted as global and national governing ethics: Utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is ends justifies the means ethics. The we, your betters, cut from a finer cloth of man ethics that allow blue bloods, despots and dictators to believe and claim they are acting benevolently for the greater good, making the tough choices that involve sacrifices so that progress and a better society will prevail. The ethics that Stalin, Hitler and Mao practiced as they broke a few eggs (skulls) to make omelettes, cleansed the gene pool for a master race and produced a cultural revolution to cure the sick man of Asia. Utilitarian Ethics must be deligitimized, scorned, declared incompatible with free people, even criminalized. Kantian and Virtue Ethics are the only ethics compatibile with western liberal national values and constitutions. They are the ethics We, The People are indulged to believe we adhere to. As with the word 'science' the authoritarians hide in the ambiguity of the word 'ethics.' Knowing we'll assume the type of ethics we're taught to believe, honesty, respecting the individual. While they practice the ethics of deceit, lies in service to their declared collective greater good.
Anthony Fauci's wife, Christine Grady, is the Chief Bioethicist for the National Institute of Health. He admits to following his own ethics, var. Utilitarian, as she crows proudly about how ethical he and she are.
In the UK the Nuffield Bioethics Council, an arm of Wellcome Trust (Jeremy Farrar's gig before his WHO appointment) published this guide on Bioethics in 2007. It gives lip service to concern for individual liberty as it declares collective public health policies are necessary. For the greater good. Harms resulting to individuals unfortunate sacrifices. Ethical! Utilitarianism. And pat themselves on the back for being such great stewards and protectors of democracy!
https://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Public-health-ethical-issues.pdf
Ethics. Utilitarianism. The ethics of sociopaths. As long as they believe they are acting ethically they will build a dystopian tyranny to sit atop as they direct our shared misery. What Churchill said Socialism was good at sharing equally.
When they fire all the ethics experts who don't submit....
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/western-affiliated-ethics-prof-says-she-faces-imminent-dismissal-for-refusing-covid-19-vaccine-1.6168094
I am afraid of the country I used to love, my Canada. I'm living in a tyranny and I feel far more alone than I probably am in realizing that horrible fact. I am continuing to be grateful to God and to my stubborn cussedness that I refused to submit to getting that poison jab. I fear for my friends and relatives who submitted because they have kids to support and they were made to feel afraid that they'd lose their livelihoods. Canada is a fascist dictatorship with a "liberal" happy-face. And NO! It damn well WASN'T like that before 2020!
It's been fascinating to research the field. There's a switch, a flip that's happened in the field from what constitutes good ethics and bad ethics seemingly overnight. Within the same people.
I found passages from a Bioethicist cited in a book about eugenics, the awful SCOTUS decision, Buck v. Bell raised as a defense to crimes against humanity charges in Nuremberg, "three generations of imbeciles is enough" still standing US eugenics law that has guided the decisions on vax and mask mandates along with Jacobson. The need for sound, moral ethics written about extensively by Jane Altman
Newgenics: Buck v. Bell, American Eugenics, and the Bad Man Test:
Putting Limits on Newgenics in the 21st Century
Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality, January 2020
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1622&context=lawineq
"V. The Bad Man Test: Putting Limits on Newgenics in the 21st Century
Numerous authors have addressed the ethical issues surrounding “newgenic” practices, and, similar to bioethicist Julie Aultman, encouraged “collective moral deliberation” to address the challenges they present: “[t]o avoid unjust eugenomic practices that discriminate, segregate, disrespect and avoid issues of confidentiality and privacy, subjecting persons to unfair and intolerable treatment, we need to understand which moral principles ought to guide our decisions and actions.”
However, as Aultman points out, typically “ethics lags behind” science, and “this division creates obstacles for serious moral deliberation and critical developments in policy-making involving the social and economic implications of genetic research and technology.
Maybe we will find that there is too much profit, speed, and power in genomics to keep everyone focused on ethics and morals once someone discovers the secrets to turning humans into non human species or supermen, creating alien life, achieving immortality, or wiping out entire populations with a single genetic tweak,for example.
Will conversations about ethics and morality be enough to protect society from its own excitement when that happens, or will a stricter approach be warranted?"
The bioethicist quoted in the Newgenics paper above, Julie Aultman, have done an about face. Today she's a member of the editorial board of the American Medical Association’s AMA Journal of Ethics. In that role she dismissed claims that hospitals were overcounting Covid deaths for the monetary incentives that came with. No ethical concerns, not even the appearance of conflict of interest, they were too altruistic and busy saving lives to be tempted by such trivial concerns. Bioethics and bioethicists: for sale to the highest bidder.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/21/facebook-posts/Fact-check-Hospitals-COVID-19-payments/
Turns out the top bioethicists are utilitarian ethicists at heart, the Kantian Virtue Ethics model just for show, to make us believe they shared our values, understanding of ethics.
Very good point. It is all unethical. And they believe they are doing God's work, so there is no conscience to hold them back.
Buh buuh but they like dogs don’t they?
Yes. I hear Fauci loves dogs. Especially beagle puppies. https://www.peta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/nih_funded_dog_and_sand_fly_experiments.png
A more accurate term would be "Force Architecture".
Buy shitty cars and then eat the bugs off the windshield.
And those who have bought them are getting rid of them.
Only if they can afford being so upside down in their payments.
All except the most rabid eco-freaks with their "better than thou" attitude. Until it's time to fork over $30K for a new battery.
I recently spoke with someone who bought a used EV and almost immediately, the battery died. The new battery cost more than the price of the used vehicle. When does the public realize this is not sustainable? I believe it is starting to happen.
I think it is happening. Even the mainstream are running stories of people scrapping them because the battery died.
Want to add another fantasy to your list?
"Vision Zero"
The idea that health care should be run along the lines of a Starbucks or other for profit business is absolutely obscene. You Libertarians live in a fantasy world divorced from the reality of everyday existence. This is why in elections libertarians garner perhaps 1% of the vote.
Why do you think I am a Libertarian? I'd love to know. I live in a country with nationalized healthcare. That doesn't mean I am a fan, nor does it mean I think Starbucks is the model either.
Most people outside the United States aren’t clamoring to adopt our shitty corporate profit at all costs system. I also work in the health care system and see how awful this system is for many, first-hand.
Most countries don't have our crap tort system, either. Nor are a large percentage of their citizens spoiled, selfish brats voting for more free stuff. Or at least they weren't at one time.
Most health systems have their problems. America has the best healthcare but the payments side is all over the place. There is no easy answer.
Sometimes when I'm reading The Bible I'm absolutely blown away by the sheer audacity and brass balls of Jesus. Take your favorite passage that has to do with The Truth, and try reading it aloud to the wall. And then try to imagine delivering that speech to people who wanted to kill you. Imagine delivering the greatest rant of all time, the Woe Unto You Scribes, Pharisees, Hypocrites stream of invective in Matthew 23:23-31 right in the faces of people who were plotting your death. And yet He did it.
But it takes a special kind of audacity and malice to stand up and lie right to your face without cracking or faltering. There's only one created being who has that power, and that's why it is neither lunacy or hyperbole to think that the current leftist media is literally of the devil. Only when one has given over oneself completely to The Father of Lies Himself, could one lie, lie, lie with perfect composure and grinning malice. I'm talking about Brandy Zadrozny, Phillip Bump, Mehdi Hasan and the entire gallery of sideshow freaks who have assembled on The Left to protect and promote the current regime. The bright spot is that it cannot stand, because it is built on a mountain of garbage. We already see the huge cracks in the facade, which they attempt to cover up with ever more egregious and obvious calumny, because they know that the pendulum is swinging the other way, finally, and gaining momentum.
That's why you can tell that Chris Bray is a little shaken when confronted by the level of serial mendacity described in this piece. It's enough to drive a person to radical action as an antidote to despair, because we instinctively know that it comes from a diabolical place that wishes our humiliation, demoralization, and destruction. There's no way that the kind of lying we are exposed to on a daily basis is a natural or casual phenomenon.
It comes right out of the very pit of Hell, and the human garbage that has given themselves over to lying as standard operating procedure deserve the same punishment as murderers get. Because remember what Jesus said of Satan "He was a murderer from the beginning..." in John 8:44.
I'm old enough to remember when "liberal bias" was a problem in the media. But that's not what we're talking about today. We are talking about a complete carpet bombing assault on Truth, which we have a right to respond to as we would any other act of war by murderous scum.
You are right. We are in a spiritual battle. Those of us who actually believe that Jesus is the Son of God will win in the end but the battle will be fierce. It feels like an alternate universe but it is the veil of satan. C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity (in 1952) that "It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind that law, that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power--it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk." You and I and fellow believers must "be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." (I Peter 3:15, NIV)
Indeed. And it being a spiritual battle, we need to be careful not to try to fight it in our human strength. I often find myself getting really riled up and have to try to step back and let the Holy Spirit lead.
That is the paradox of the Christian life. God is soverignly in control and we are told do our level best to live by His principles for the benefit of our neighbor and the glory of God.
Someone once said: "Work like it's all up to you and pray like it's all up to God "
Amen.
George Orwell wrote of this:
"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."
"A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."
"The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves."
"His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established."
"a bought mind is a spoiled mind"
The Prevention of Literature
Polemic, January, 1946
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/
(selected excerpts)
"From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date [1946], menaced to anything like the same extent [are today]. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.
...
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.
...
But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
...
When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons.
...
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
...
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction."
...And so much more...read Orwell's piece in its entirety. It's not terribly long. And worth it. Could've been written today. Applies today as much as then.
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud
---
Could have been written yesterday. Orwell really did see through it all.
Thanks for the recommendation. I haven't read this one. But will do.
And as the fraud fails, the force must be increased.
That may be a little too blatant for people pretending they are democratic. Although they can count on their minions in the media to cover for them.
"We can either do this da easy way or da hard way. You're just too stupid to do it the easy way. Now we gotta do it the hard way. I don't get no pleasure outta doin' it like dis. But you knuckleheads just don't listen!"
Stop feeding it (mainstream media). Stop buying, subscribing, reading. When interest disappears and they lose their audience.....well, they won't exactly shut up but who wants to scream into the void? The biggest issue is getting this message over to a wider audience. Mainstream media is on its knees in the UK, physical sales of newspapers have been on the slide for decades and outlets are now in competition for clicks. Hence the constant exaggeration and sensationalisation of the most mundane stories.
Further to this, in the UK I sense the extreme capitulation of the media class is the end state. A kind of final hurrah before total elimination of most of it. We know they were handsomely awarded during Covid. The UK gov became the biggest funder of advertising in the UK during that period. Some of them are still living off that cash.
The BBC in particular seems to be genuinely dying, despite its guaranteed income. Hence the spectacle of black Paleolithic Britons and of course West Indians being the real builders of Stone Henge. What do they have to lose at this point? The benefit to us is we see them as they really are.
Next of course is the attempt to really clamp down on the interwebz which is doomed to failure.
Yes, 35million just in the first lockdown....and heaven knows how much since. I'm cheering at the demise of the vile BBC. The writing was on the wall with their cover up of Savile, if not before (don't get me started on Esther Rantzen and her part in it or David Attenborough and his hypocrisy re climate). Yeah the "black people built Stonehenge" made me laugh out loud 🤣
It was 1.8bn they spent. They used a US based PR firm so they were not paying the media directly. They were all handsomely rewarded for destroying our economy.
And the BBC is an abomination. It has to go.
While it's true that "mainstream" media is on its death bed the fourth estate is most certainly not.
Defiance is indeed a matter of rejecting all of the tools the empire employs to thrust its alt-reality upon its subjects; to starve the beast at every turn of the dial. But for every boomer fox news junkie turning off his big screen there is some multiple of kids entering the black mirror.
For or years now the legacy media has been on its heels with the truth just waiting to hatch and yet in that time while we were cheering its demise our children have become almost entirely captured by the same powers using more advanced - and much more sticky and elastic tools than consuming the evening news over chicken pot pie.
The dark algo of the corporo-state has been training them while honing its ability to manufacture an increasingly sophisticated and predictive model of information and entertainment-based manipulation.
Legions of subjects now to chase dopamine in a positive feedback loop from which they have near zero awareness of such, but for the mounting psychological and physiological problems surfacing all over, which of course become fodder for that feedback loop to solve.
The natural signals of anxiety, depression, ADD, sleep and endocrine disruption, and a multitude of other problems are welcomed socially as the victim/identity culture elevates their status and the pharma industry is more than happy to provide the pills. This pattern starts when they are toddlers.
We may think we have evolved since the olden times when people were so dumb they had to read the propaganda on a big sheet of paper but the hindbrain is just the same and most people no longer have domain over their own hindbrain.
Further, the echo-chambers of information are only outmatched by the cognitive limitations that have now been hard-wired into at least half of the population. The most basic of reading comprehension and written communication, problem solving and contextualization, time-ordering and linear logic, etc. are all but atrophied or perhaps even gone.
And this doesn't begin to address the general social malaise from going on two generations raised entirely within the dominant paradigm of an alternative reality "online".
The fourth estate has been migrating to the technofascist cloud where it is integrating into everyday tools, the value of which is almost entirely a utility of capture and control shrouded in the swipe-flitter-glitter of the cognitive conditioning that has been underway for decades.
Most people under 40y get their "news" from TikTok or similar. To a luddite like me I might say "yeah but that is not really the 'news'" and then I might suddenly realize that is entirely the point.
Now try to pry that phone from your daughters hand while being glad she ignores NBC news. That is what we are up against.
I urge people to find the few voices in education from k-university that are dealing with the destruction of the human mind on a daily basis in real time and are being honest about the experience. Most of us have seen these young people up close in schools and in the corporate setting and know that there is a great danger lurking. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to dismiss out of hand as generational and environmental shifts in simple appetites.
That most have already retired/quit is yet another harbinger of what is to come when "the media" needn't even bother with the clumsy trickery of repainting main street.
"The natural signals of anxiety, depression, ADD, sleep and endocrine disruption, and a multitude of other problems are welcomed socially as the victim/identity culture elevates their status and the pharma industry is more than happy to provide the pills."
You just shot it right in the heart. The manufactured anxiety.
Yeah man talk about the "news" or what is happening in the world with the smartphonejugend and their eyes glaze over. They are the news. A billion reporters manufacturing their truth. Generation selfie is anxious and in peril yet a trillion of their own photos prove otherwise.
"...so a mystical winged expert-creature arose from the ashes..." The headline that followed made me laugh out loud for real. Laughing to keep from crying, I suppose. You could write a book on the whole "X is true, X is true, X is true, X is true, X is not true" phenomenon. COVID would be a standalone volume. Though, I imagine you might say (after Orson Welles), "No money is WORTH THIS!"
We used to look at those airbrushed photos of Stalin and his former comrades being disappeared from history and we would laugh. How stupid those commies are. But here we are.
Saddest thing is they weren't necessarily stupid, but just terrified. Who would dare point out the airbrushing? Which is part of the point of brazen lies in totalitarian media: to demean the populace by forcing them to face daily their own terror and cowardice.
Our compatriots are different. They don't have the excuse of terror. As for the origin of their difference, I try to sketch out below in the thread.
Almost of what you've expressed so beautifully in this piece can be applied to Ukraine. Decades of lies re US involvement yes, but also the truth that Ukraine was and is one of the most corrupt on the planet and also that constant pushing by Nato would lead to war with Russia. Then literally overnight, we had St. Zelensky, prayed for in all our churches, the peace loving Ukrainian army brigades in the Donbas and evil, evil Putin🤷♀️.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, American academics spread the continental doctrine that all truth claims, even the most objectively verifiable, were ultimately projections of power: they were ideological, ultimately mythical. All truth claims are just narratives, i.e. stories being told in order to assert or maintain power or status. One of the earliest thinkers to formulate this was Nietzsche in his “truth is a mobile army of metaphors” quote.
What has happened is that the flip side of this has come to dominate as a norm. As follows: If all truth is just someone’s narrative, therefore my narrative is also truth. The Nietzschean/deconstructivist skepticism linked up with lefty progressivism and plucky American self-worship. What we get is the hybrid monster of the present. “MY truth is part of OUR truth which IS the FUTURE. And don’t ask for sources—what are you a FASCIST?”
This pathology now runs very deep. What I wonder is: How much of our demi-literate population believes it? The vast bulk of America is of course demi-literate, but how many of them in the course of their "education" have come to assume that this is how discourse and truth claims work, and have always worked? I really don’t know the answer to that. But I suspect I’d be horrified to find out.
In other words, the Right Side of History saying “X” one day and “not X” the next might really not be problematic at all for huge numbers of our citizens, and even if they’re made to see it, they might just smirk and say, “Yeah … and so what?”
An army of metaphors shifting about and regrouping and falling back, that is …. “just, like, NORMAL.”
In my view the only thing that could break this pathology is objective reality beginning to bite hard, and our keeners beginning to link the pain to their dysfunctional notion of “truth”.
I shared one of George Orwell's works in another comment on this thread, The Prevention of Literature, published in 1946. He wrote the following that addresses your point. He was already seeing it in the UK then:
"From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism."
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/
Thanks. I need to go read the thread. I was at work when I posted my comment.
Orwell was the crucial witness to that era, and here he's pointing out re: totalitarianism a very similar dynamic to what Bray underlines today. What I'm mostly concerned with (and I only sketched it) is what makes our own monster a bit different from the Stalin and Hitler iterations. Yes, I think we may end up in totalitarianism, but I think our monster lurks a bit differently in the populace. In some ways, its talons are sunk in even more deeply. Consider: Both Hitler's and Stalin's masses still had to *pretend* a belief in both reality and that it could be represented. They knew the regimes were lying, but in their minds the regimes were lying in relation to objective facts. Regime supporters thought the lies were justified. Dissidents didn't dare protest the lies, as to do so was fatal. But for both groups, the systemic lying was recognized as something *outside the norm*.
What I'm wondering in my comment is the extent to which our public is different. In that they've come to accept systemic lying *as the norm*. "All discourse is *always already* ideology, so we'll follow the progressive ideology!" In short, *the lie* is not even recognized. Lying is understood to be the character of all discourse in any case. And I sense this everywhere.
Orwell speaks of the "friends of totalitarianism" in his milieu. These people were doubtless a minority. I suspect our own potential friends of totalitarianism are coming to be a very large population indeed. Not as hard core perhaps, but well catechized in a basic post-truth understanding of discourse. (And if that's so, it's down to what happened in academia, starting in the humanities, during the last decades of the 20th c. I was there at that time, in US academia, and saw the entrenchment of this "epistemology" and the beginning of its seepage from literary and cultural studies outward. Now it's everywhere, affecting everything from K-12 education to "journalism" to the hard sciences.)
I worry this difference makes our polities *soft targets* as it were. Bray keeps underlining the utter inanity of our public discourse, but the fact that it remains accepted by huge swaths of the public as more or less normal says to me that this public has no reserves of reality from which to stand up to anything. They could be cajoled or bullied into supporting really ANYTHING. And this is partly by academic design. Not that I believe it was all planned out starting 1970. But rather: originally niche academic movements have ended by creating an America that is willing putty in the hands of managerial elites.
This monster is not going to be easily slain.
"Bray keeps underlining the utter inanity of our public discourse..."
Yes, and what a way to spend my days.
This.
One other difference (and perhaps scarier) is that the state has not captured the media so much as it has actually been the media capturing the state.
The State is just catching up.
I don't think we've seen that in history.
Which makes your point all the more sobering.
Yes, I think that’s one way to put it. The “state” is roughly the same expansive system it’s been since WWII at least. But the institutions involved in ideological production (universities and media and Hollywood, etc.)—these were at some point discovered to be producing a new kind of citizen even more to the state’s liking than the old patriotic Christian sort. That seemed counterintuitive at first, but then the state basically got the memo. “Not only can we work with this—but this is potential Nirvana here.”
Media is tasked with day to day management of relations between the state and these millions of infants who imagine they’ve been “liberated”. At the same time the state’s own functionaries become media performers, diverting the “liberated” with plausible baby talk.
The media has always been this, you just didn't notice before. Advertisement is just propaganda. You don't think they were taking notes on how they could whip people into a frenzy for black friday or tickle me elmo?
Of course I do. Nudging is quite different than mockery. Bias is different than changing facts. Surreptitiously structuring wording to influence is much different than changing the meaning of words.
We are being mocked and labeled to keep us silent, for fear of the cost to speak out, so that we progressively loathe ourselves for each time we tacitly assent to the lies/absurdities we know not to be true from our own experience.
Tickle Elmo tactics are done for wallet share. If you buy a Cabbage Patch doll...you may not be able to buy Elmo (or vice versa). That is influence, but it is still an active decision on behalf of the individual.
Today's media aims to confiscate the wallet of ideas and render the available choices, per their preferences, in one wallet they control. The ideas their wallet contain , over time, leave only one option:
To accept the lies/absurdities as the "cost of doing business" to participate, penalty free, in society. But worse yet, to eventually assent to all the vileness of servitude as the only means of preferment, indeed safety, lest you be eaten alive by the scourge of power.
How long do you think that goes on before people forget they were ideas at all?
That is the point in which reality is so distorted they have effectively obliterated history, because the words, ideas and meanings no longer serve as a reference point to an individuals history or a shared history.
They want the wallet. Not its content. They have no use for it. They will change the content at will for their access inside the palace gates and to subsume your agency to the point you unwittingly believe they are rightfully inside the gates because THEY provide the ONLY true reference for you to make meaning of your life; your past and future purpose are now theirs so that they are the "life" that passes you by.
They've called it "television programming" from its inception. Even designated what's airing at any given time a "program guide." I don't think that's a coincidence. Television programming minds was always the intention. They've just gotten better at it. Science!
As to what's happened in academia, the article I link to below is a good encapsulation of The Science Wars, focused on how they first came into focus in the 1990's after decades of escalating battles and had restarted in the 2010's. It is written by a Marxist with a Marxist bias that comes through. But it does a decent job of presenting the other side of the ideological divides, if only to deconstruct them. While I find the piece to be a satisfactory primer on the history of the Science Wars I find the references it cites to be the strongest part of the article. By diving into those I found very credible sources, less biased, even more history of the evolution of science in academia and the influence of social movements on what is presented as "science." Including the soft social pseudosciences like psychology, behavioral science, political science, etc. The social sciences of climate, gender, infectious disease all draw upon the obfuscation contained in the ambiguity of the word, "science," meant to convey authoritative immutable laws that are political agendas in actuality.
Science Wars: The Next Generation
Summer, 2019
https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/science-wars-the-next-generation/
I also find the publication this article is contained in, "Science for the People," to be a useful roadmap for those Marxists who endeavor to use "science" to construct their utopian (dystopian) society. Take a look at the titles of other stories in the same publication the Science Wars piece comes from. A sort of "How-to" for much of what we see unfolding around us today in a world increasingly divorced from the natural world in pursuit of an imaginary world of Santa Claus's and Tooth Fairies.
https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/
Communists. Fascists. Different sides of the same totalitarian coin. Orwell knew, saw then much more clearly what was infecting the UK and US. The totalitarian support has been here much more than we suspected for much longer in the powerful monied elite. They are not our friends. No matter how many charitable foundations the fund.
I'm not so sure about those supporters of totalitarianism being as much of a minority then as we'd think. The US and UK elite of the 1920's-1940's had large numbers of supporters of Fascism. They envied Mussolini and Hitler. Industrialists, bankers, politicians, media. Even the Communists had their supporters, the NYT's Walter Duranty wrote glowing reviews of Stalin's reign. Both Fascism and Communism being totalitarian, anti-western liberal capitalism, anti-free markets and hostile to individual liberty. They funded the reconstruction of Germany, the autobahn, war machine Hitler built was funded by US investors. Including Prescott Bush, Aka "Hitler's Banker." A Fascist who was trading with the enemy, making sure Hitler had enough ammo and tanks to fight American boys drafted from the heartland. The Bush Family Dynasty is literally blood money from killing Americans. His family name rehabilitated by the Dulles brothers, OSS/CIA heads, also supporters of Fascism. George HW Bush's New World Order speech was just carrying on the family's values, 9-11 and the surveillance state it ushered in not a coincidence. The UK suffered from the same elite.
But there was too much profit in war, lives from the lower classes disposable, so the propaganda against Fascism was useful. But achieved by linguistic deception ever since. Until here we are.
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
Opening sentences of: "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedley Butler – USMC 1935
PDF at [https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html]
Don’t forget the humiliation factor operating on the targets for the Lie of The Day. Collectivists have openly used and weaponized that.
It’s abundantly clear that Orwell wrote “1984” as a warning. Devotees of the Frankfurt School (today’s Leftists) took it as an instruction manual.
“It isn’t possible to live like this.” That’s the Leftists’ objective. They wish to make “thinking” so painful that we simply stop doing so in order to insulate ourselves from the chaos. A “good” citizen floats with the current, and makes no attempt to swim.
Make no mistake – this is “low intensity” warfare. My biggest fear is that when the rebellion comes, the Constitution will be altered in ways to preclude socialism in any form (not a bad objective in its own right), which will pave the way for suppression of whatever group is out of favor.
Another telling fact about the nationalization of healthcare is that Republicans ran for years on a platform of repealing Obamacare, then when they got the votes in Congress to do it, they simply didn't.
Instead of a representative form of government, the U.S. has one-party rule and is a kleptocratic oligarchy. But the good news is, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it".
Thank you for keeping track and pointing this out. It feels like I’m going crazy or incredibly angry that they lie so blatantly, and about something so easy to prove.
My big obsession has been masks during covid. At one point, they were NOT recommended for lots of really good scientific reasons. Then, they were recommended for lots of “good” scientific reasons.
I couldn’t believe they could switch back and forth so easily.
As easily as going to the hairdresser/vacation/the Laundry, during lockdowns.
It's easy when you are a disgusting pig of a hypocrite.
I make strong efforts every day to hang onto my sanity. I never used to have to do this, by the way. It's just that they have me surrounded (the inmates).
What I've noticed is that my decision about 15 years ago to give up television and mainstream newspapers has had two effects: 1) getting my news from the internet has protected me somewhat from hysterical propaganda and maintained -- nay, increased -- my critical thinking skills; 2) I have become more out of touch with the imposed reality surrounding me.
Everyone in my family and my job and my friends are regular partakers of koolaid. I love these people, and it's very painful to see. I lost a budding relationship due to his allegiance to Rachel Maddow's daily wisdom over what I considered to be a more questioning approach.
I have one good friend who thanked me for caring, when I warned him not to take these injections, but he took them anyway to be "on the safe side" while also telling me I was taking great risks by abstaining. Now he has cancer and has woken up. He said, "you are a hero for sticking with what you knew to be true, and I regret that I did not believe you at the time." Well, what's done is done, right?
And it continues. That's the craziest part of all. At some point, though -- surely people will have had enough of the crazy and this will all fall away?
Gruber needs to go play in traffic.
If something can't go on forever, then at some point, it will stop.
Promises that can't be kept will be broken.
America: 1776-2030.
Lionel Shriver's _The Mandibles_ continues to become nonfiction.
Had never heard of it, but just ordered it.
My wife didn’t like it at first, but she kept with it and really enjoyed it by the end. The characters are twits, but that’s kind of the point.
Insanity, masquerading as enlightenment.
Or just, Embraced Evil, for short.
I have long believed that the ultimate downfall and defeat of this sober insanity, will be due to the utter and complete arrogance with which it is so proudly and glibly posited by The Enlightened.
Poor things, they just can’t help themselves. They are so completely embedded in their alternate universe, peering out of the portholes at the Unclean Masses walking about, while they nod knowingly to their lie-encrusted cadre, and gladly sip their lemon koolaid.
But the Unclean Masses, they know, and they remember. And they wait their turn. And their patience grows thin.
I do not wish to witness the end of this Story. But there will be an end. All stories have beginnings and endings. I think the end of this one is not far off. It will not be a pleasant ending I fear. So be it.
TIKTOK videos go in only one direction. Like drinking one shot of vodka after another. It only goes in one single direction.
'People who purport to have no idea what the difference is between reality and their mental fantasyworld are either placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold or hired by the Washington Post.' - sometimes i think it's psychological conditioning of the plebes, sometimes I think they are stacked there to keep the games going and sometimes I think they are simply hiring from their ranks.